Part 14 (1/2)

Not yet had she begun to trouble him, and there was no sign, either external or intimate, in his mind that he was sickening with the splendid malady. Indeed, the significance she held for him was rather that, though she was a girl, she presented none of the embarra.s.sments which that s.e.x had always held for him. She grew in comrades.h.i.+p; he found himself as much at ease with her as with her brother, and her charm was just that which had so quickly and strongly attracted Michael to Hermann. She was vivid in the same way as he was; she had the same warm, welcoming kindliness--the same complete absence of pose. You knew where you were with her, and hitherto, when Michael was with one of the young ladies brought down to Ashbridge to be looked at, he only wished that wherever he was he was somewhere else. But with Sylvia he had none of this self-consciousness; she was bonne camarade for him in exactly the same way as she was bonne camarade to the rest of the mult.i.tude which thronged the Sunday evenings, perfectly at ease with them, as they with her, in relations.h.i.+p entirely unsentimental.

But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael's most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe's principles in teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school; he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the hours.

”What is the good of them?” he asked. ”They can only give you nimbleness and strength. Well, you shall acquire your nimbleness and strength by playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it aloud--which is playing--or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pa.s.s over a bar that you don't understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try.”

Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.

”There,” he said, ”begin at the top of the page.”

”But I can't,” said Michael. ”I shall have to spell it out.”

”That's just what you mustn't do. Go ahead, and don't pause till you get to the bottom of the page. Count; start each bar when it comes to its turn, and play as many notes as you can in it.”

This was a dismal experience. Michael hitherto had gone on the painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious care. Now Falbe's inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in inextinguishable laughter.

”Go on, go on!” he shouted. ”I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly Strauss's Don Quixote.”

Michael, flushed and determined, with grave, set mouth, ploughed his way through amazing dissonances, and at the end joined Falbe's laughter.

”Oh dear,” he said. ”Very funny. But don't laugh so at me, Hermann.”

Falbe dried his eyes.

”And what was it?” he said. ”I declare it was the fourth fugue. An entirely different conception of it! A thoroughly original view! Now, what you've got to do, is to repeat that--not the same murder I mean, but other murders--for a couple of hours a day. . . . By degrees--you won't believe it--you will find you are not murdering any longer, but only mortally wounding. After six months I dare say you won't even be hurting your victims. All the same, you can begin with less muscular ones.”

In this way Michael's musical horizons were infinitely extended. Not only did this system of Falbe's of flying at new music, and going recklessly and regardlessly on, give quickness to his brain and finger, make his wits alert to pick up the new language he was learning, but it gloriously extended his vision and his range of country. He ran joyfully, though with a thousand falls and tumbles, through these new and wonderful vistas; he wors.h.i.+pped at the grave, Gothic sanctuaries of Beethoven, he roamed through the enchanted garden of Chopin, he felt the icy and eternal frosts of Russia, and saw in the northern sky the great auroras spread themselves in spear and sword of fire; he listened to the wisdom of Brahms, and pa.s.sed through the n.o.ble and smiling country of Bach. All this, so to speak, was holiday travel, and between his journeys he applied himself with the same eager industry to the learning of his art, so that he might reproduce for himself and others true pictures of the scenes through which he scampered. Here Falbe was not so easily moved to laughter; he was as severe with Michael as he was with himself, when it was the question of learning some piece with a view to really playing it. There was no light-hearted hurrying on through blurred runs and false notes, slurred phrases and incomplete chords.

Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was played again on Falbe's great Steinway, as a professed performance, a very different standard was required.

Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.

”This won't do, Michael,” he said. ”You played it before for me to see whether you could play. You can. But it won't do to sketch it. Every note has got to be there; Chopin didn't write them by accident. He knew quite well what he was about. Begin again, please.”

This time Michael got not quite so far, when he was stopped again. He was playing without notes, and Falbe got up from his chair where he had the book open, and put it on the piano.

”Do you find difficulty in memorising?” he asked.

This was discouraging; Michael believed that he remembered easily; he also believed that he had long known this by heart.

”No; I thought I knew it,” he said.

”Try again.”

This time Falbe stood by him, and suddenly put his finger down into the middle of Michael's hands, striking a note.

”You left out that F sharp,” he said. ”Go on. . . . Now you are leaving out that E natural. Try to get it better by Thursday, and remember this, that playing, and all that differentiates playing from strumming, only begins when you can play all the notes that are put down for you to play without fail. You're beginning at the wrong end; you have admirable feeling about that prelude, but you needn't think about feeling till you've got all the notes at your fingers' ends. Then and not till then, you may begin to remember that you want to be a pianist. Now, what's the next thing?”

Michael felt somewhat squashed and discouraged. He had thought he had really worked successfully at the thing he knew so well by sight. His heavy eyebrows drew together.

”You told me to harmonise that Christmas carol,” he remarked, rather shortly.