"Look here, Michael," he said, "you're vexed with me. Now, there's nothing to be vexed at. You know quite well you were leaving out lots of notes from those jolly fat chords, and that you weren't playing cleanly. Now I'm taking you seriously, and I won't have from you anything but the best you can do. You're not doing your best when you don't even play what is written. You can't begin to work at this till you do that."Michael had a moment's severe tussle with his temper. He felt vexed and disappointed that Hermann should have sent him back like a schoolboy with his exercise torn over. Not immediately did he confess to himself that he was completely in the wrong.
"I'm doing the best I can," he said. "It's rather discouraging."He moved his big shoulders slightly, as if to indicate that Hermann's hand was not wanted there. Hermann kept it there.
"It might be discouraging," he said, "if you were doing your best."Michael's ill-temper oozed from him.
"I'm wrong," he said, turning round with the smile that made his ugly face so pleasant. "And I'm sorry both that I have been slack and that I've been sulky. Will that do?"Falbe laughed.
"Very well indeed," he said. "Now for 'Good King Wenceslas.'
Wasn't it--"
"Yes; I got awfully interested over it, Hermann. I thought I would try and work it up into a few variations.""Let's hear," said Falbe.
This was a vastly different affair. Michael had shown both ingenuity and a great sense of harmonic beauty in the arrangement of the very simple little tune that Falbe had made him exercise his ear over, and the half-dozen variations that followed showed a wonderfully mature handling. The air which he dealt with haunted them as a sort of unseen presence. It moved in a tiny gavotte, or looked on at a minuet measure; it wailed, yet without being positively heard, in a little dirge of itself; it broadened into a march, it shouted in a bravura of rapid octaves, and finally asserted itself, heard once more, over a great scale base of bells.
Falbe, as was his habit when interested, sat absolutely still, but receptive and alert, instead of jerking and fidgeting as he had done over Michael's fiasco in the Chopin prelude, and at the end he jumped up with a certain excitement.
"Do you know what you've done?" he said. "You've done something that's really good. Faults? Yes, millions; but there's a first-rate imagination at the bottom of it. How did it happen?"Michael flushed with pleasure.
"Oh, they sang themselves," he said, "and I learned them. But will it really do? Is there anything in it?""Yes, old boy, there's King Wenceslas in it, and you've dressed him up well. Play that last one again."The last one was taxing to the fingers, but Michael's big hands banged out the octave scale in the bass with wonderful ease, and Falbe gave a great guffaw of pleasure at the rollicking conclusion.
"Write them all down," he said, "and try if you can hear it singing half a dozen more. If you can, write them down also, and give me leave to play the lot at my concert in January."Michael gasped.
"You don't mean that?" he said.
"Certainly I do. It's a fine bit of stuff."It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening. The spirits of the air--whatever those melodious sprites may be--had for the last month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head. Now, as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing; their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed himself, and they haunted him no longer.
At present he had but jotted down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of his own brain, setting Falbe his task.
But he felt much more than this. He had done something. Michael, the dumb, awkward Michael, was somehow revealed on those eight pages of music. All his twenty-five years he had stood wistfully inarticulate, unable, so it had seemed to him, to show himself, to let himself out. And not till now, when he had found this means of access, did he know how passionately he had desired it, nor how immensely, in the process of so doing, his desire had grown. He must find out more ways, other channels of projecting himself. The need for that, as of a diver throwing himself into the empty air and the laughing waters below him, suddenly took hold of him.
He took a clean sheet of music paper, into which he placed his pages, and with a pleasurable sense of pomp wrote in the centre of it:
VARIATIONS ON AN AIR.
By Michael Comber.
He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.
"Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe," he wrote at the top.
