Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And we are a nation of idiots?” asked Michael.

  “No; I didn’t say that. I should say you are a nation of sensualists. You value sensation above everything; you pursue the enjoyable. You are a nation of children who are always having a perpetual holiday. You go straying all over the world for fun, and annex it generally, so that you can have tiger-shooting in India, and lots of gold to pay for your tiger-shooting in Africa, and fur from Canada for your coats. But it’s all a game; not one man in a thousand in England has any idea of Empire.”

  “Oh, I think you are wrong there,” said Michael. “You believe that only because we don’t talk about it. It’s — it’s like what we agreed about Parsifal. We don’t talk about it because it is so much part of us.”

  Falbe sat up.

  “I deny it; I deny it flatly,” he said. “I know where I get my power of foolish, unthinking enjoyment from, and it’s from my English blood. I rejoice in my English blood, because you are the happiest people on the face of the earth. But you are happy because you don’t think, whereas the joy of being German is that you do think. England is lying in the shade, like us, with a cigarette and a drink — I wish I had one — and a golf ball or the world with which she has been playing her game. But Germany is sitting up all night thinking, and every morning she gives an order or two.”

  Michael supplied the cigarette.

  “Do you mean she is thinking about England’s golf ball?” asked Michael.

  “Why, of course she is! What else is there to think about?”

  “Oh, it’s impossible that there should be a European war,” said Michael, “for that is what it will mean!”

  “And why is a European war impossible?” demanded Falbe, lighting his cigarette.

  “It’s simply unthinkable!”

  “Because you don’t think,” he interrupted. “I can tell you that the thought of war is never absent for a single day from the average German mind. We are all soldiers, you see. We start with that. You start by being golfers and cricketers. But ‘der Tag’ is never quite absent from the German mind. I don’t say that all you golfers and cricketers wouldn’t make good soldiers, but you’ve got to be made. You can’t be a golfer one day and a soldier the next.”

  Michael laughed.

  “As for that,” he said, “I made an uncommonly bad soldier. But I am an even worse golfer. As for cricket—”

  Falbe again interrupted.

  “Ah, then at last I know two things about you,” he said. “You were a soldier and you can’t play golf. I have never known so little about anybody after three — four days. However, what is our proverb? ‘Live and learn.’ But it takes longer to learn than to live. Eh, what nonsense I talk.”

  He spoke with a sudden irritation, and the laugh at the end of his speech was not one of amusement, but rather of mockery. To Michael this mood was quite inexplicable, but, characteristically, he looked about in himself for the possible explanation of it.

  “But what’s the matter?” he asked. “Have I annoyed you somehow? I’m awfully sorry.”

  Falbe did not reply for a moment.

  “No, you’ve not annoyed me,” he said. “I’ve annoyed myself. But that’s the worst of living on one’s nerves, which is the penalty of Baireuth. There is no charge, so to speak, except for your ticket, but a collection is made, as happens at meetings, and you pay with your nerves. You must cancel my annoyance, please. If I showed it I did not mean to.”

  Michael pondered over this.

  “But I can’t leave it like that,” he said at length. “Was it about the possibility of war, which I said was unthinkable?”

  Falbe laughed and turned on his elbow towards Michael.

  “No, my dear chap,” he said. “You may believe it to be unthinkable, and I may believe it to be inevitable; but what does it matter what either of us believes? Che sara sara. It was quite another thing that caused me to annoy myself. It does not matter.”

  Michael lay back on the soft slope.

  “Yet I insist on knowing,” he said. “That is, I mean, if it is not private.”

  Falbe lay quietly with his long fingers in the sediment of pine-needles.

  “Well, then, as it is not private, and as you insist,” he said, “I will certainly tell you. Does it not strike you that you are behaving like an absolute stranger to me? We have talked of me and my home and my plans all the time since we met at Victoria Station, and you have kept complete silence about yourself. I know nothing of you, not who you are, or what you are, or what your flag is. You fly no flag, you proclaim no identity. You may be a crossing-sweeper, or a grocer, or a marquis for all I know. Of course, that matters very little; but what does matter is that never for a moment have you shown me not what you happen to be, but what you are. I’ve got the impression that you are something, that there’s a real ‘you’ in your inside. But you don’t let me see it. You send a polite servant to the door when I knock. Probably this sounds very weird and un-English to you. But to my mind it is much more weird to behave as you are behaving. Come out, can’t you. Let’s look at you.”

  It was exactly that — that brusque, unsentimental appeal — that Michael needed. He saw himself at that moment, as Falbe saw him, a shelled and muffled figure, intangible and withdrawn, but observing, as it were, through eye-holes, and giving nothing in exchange for what he saw.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s quite true what you tell me. I’m like that. But it really has never struck me that anybody cared to know.”

  Falbe ceased digging his excavation in the pine-needles and looked up on Michael.

  “Good Lord, man!” he said; “people care if you’ll only allow them to. The indifference of other people is a false term for the secretiveness of oneself. How can they care, unless you let them know what there is to care for?”

  “But I’m completely uninteresting,” said Michael.

  “Yes; I’ll judge of that,” said Falbe.

  Slowly, and with diffident pauses, Michael began to speak of himself, feeling at first as if he was undressing in public. But as he went on he became conscious of the welcome that his story received, though that welcome only expressed itself in perfectly unemotional monosyllables. He might be undressing, but he was undressing in front of a fire. He knew that he uncovered himself to no icy blast or contemptuous rain, as he had felt when, so few days before, he had spoken of himself and what he was to his father. There was here the common land of music to build upon, whereas to Lord Ashbridge that same soil had been, so to speak, the territory of the enemy. And even more than that, there was the instinct, the certain conviction that he was telling his tale to sympathetic ears, to which the mere fact that he was speaking of himself presupposed a friendly hearing. Falbe, he felt, wanted to know about him, regardless of the nature of his confessions. Had he said that he was an undetected kleptomaniac, Falbe would have liked to know, have been pleased at any tidings, provided only they were authentic. This seemed to reveal itself to him even as he spoke; it had been there waiting for him to claim it, lying there as in a poste restante, only ready for its owner.

  At the end Falbe gave a long sigh.

  “And why the devil didn’t you give me any hint of it before?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think it mattered,” said Michael.

  “Well, then, you are amazingly wrong. Good Lord, it’s about the most interesting thing I’ve ever heard. I didn’t know anybody could escape from that awful sort of prison-house in which our — I’m English now — in which our upper class immures itself. Yet you’ve done it. I take it that the thing is done now?”

  “I’m not going back into the prison-house again, if you mean that,” said Michael.

  “And will your father cut you off?” asked he.

  “Oh, I haven’t the least idea,” said Michael.

  “Aren’t you going to inquire?”

  Michael hesitated.

  “No, I’m sure I’m not,” he said. “I can’t do that. It’s his business. I couldn’t
ask about what he had done, or meant to do. It’s a sort of pride, I suppose. He will do as he thinks proper, and when he has thought, perhaps he will tell me what he intends.”

  “But, then, how will you live?” asked Falbe.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you that. I’ve got some money, quite a lot, I mean, from my grandmother. In some ways I rather wish I hadn’t. It would have been a proof of sincerity to have become poor. That wouldn’t have made the smallest difference to my resolution.”

  Falbe laughed.

  “And so you are rich, and yet go second-class,” he said. “If I were rich I would make myself exceedingly comfortable. I like things that are good to eat and soft to touch. But I’m bound to say that I get on quite excellently without them. Being poor does not make the smallest difference to one’s happiness, but only to the number of one’s pleasures.”

  Michael paused a moment, and then found courage to say what for the last two days he had been longing to give utterance to.

  “I know; but pleasures are very nice things,” he said. “And doesn’t it seem obvious now that you are coming to Munich with me? It’s a purely selfish suggestion on my part. After being with you it will be very stupid to be alone there. But it would be so delightful if you would come.”

  Falbe looked at him a moment without speaking, but Michael saw the light in his eyes.

  “And what if I have my pride too?” he said. “Then I shall apologise for having made the proposal,” said Michael simply.

  For just a second more Falbe hesitated. Then he held out his hand.

  “I thank you most awfully,” he said. “I accept with the greatest pleasure.”

  Michael drew a long breath of relief.

  “I am glad,” he said. “So that’s settled. It’s really nice of you.”

  The heat of the day was passing off, and over the sun-bleached plain the coolness of evening was beginning to steal. Overhead the wind stirred more resonantly in the pines, and in the bushes birds called to each other. Presently after, they rose from where they had lain all the afternoon and strolled along the needled slope to where, through a vista in the trees, they looked down on the lake and the hamlet that clustered near it. Down the road that wound through the trees towards it passed labourers going homeward from their work, with cheerful guttural cries to each other and a herd of cows sauntered by with bells melodiously chiming, taking leisurely mouthfuls from the herbage of the wayside. In the village, lying low in the clear dusk, scattered lights began to appear, the smoke of evening fires to ascend, and the aromatic odour of the burning wood strayed towards them up the wind.

  Falbe, whose hand lay in the crook of Michael’s arm, pointed downwards to the village that lay there sequestered and rural.

  “That’s Germany,” he said; “it’s that which lies at the back of every German heart. There lie the springs of the Rhine. It’s out of that originally that there came all that Germany stands for, its music, its poetry, its philosophy, its kultur. All flowed from these quiet uplands. It was here that the nation began to think and to dream. To dreamt! It’s out of dreams that all has sprung.”

  He laughed.

  “And then next week when we go to Munich, you will find me saying that this, this Athens of a town, with its museums and its galleries and its music, is Germany. I shall be right, too. Out of much dreaming comes the need to make. It is when the artist’s head and heart are full of his dreams that his hands itch for the palette or the piano. Nuremberg! Cannot we stop a few hours, at least, in Nuremberg, and see the meadow by the Pegnitz where the Meistersingers held their contest of song and the wooden, gabled house where Albrecht Durer lived? That will teach you Germany, too. The bud of their dream was opening then; and what flower, even in the magnificence of its full-blowing, is so lovely? Albrecht Durer, with his deep, patient eyes, and his patient hands with their unerring stroke; or Bach, with the fugue flowing from his brain through his quick fingers, making stars — stars fixed forever in the heaven of harmony! Don’t tell me that there is anything in the world more wonderful! We may have invented a few more instruments, we may have experimented with a few more combinations of notes, but in the B minor Mass, or in the music of the Passion, all is said. And all that came from the woods and the country and the quiet life in little towns, when the artist did his work because he loved it, and cared not one jot about what anybody else thought about it. We are a nation of thinkers and dreamers.”

  Michael hesitated a moment.

  “But you said not long ago that you were also the most practical nation,” he said. “You are a nation of soldiers, also.”

  “And who would not willingly give himself for such a Fatherland?” said Falbe. “If need be, we will lay our lives down for that, and die more willingly than we have lived. God grant that the need comes not. But should it come we are ready. We are bound to be ready; it would be a crime not to be ready — a crime against the Fatherland. We love peace, but the peace-lovers are just those who in war are most terrible. For who are the backbone of war when war comes? The women of the country, my friend, not the ministers, not the generals and the admirals. I don’t say they make war, but when war is made they are the spirit of it, because, more than men, they love their homes. There is not a woman in Germany who will not send forth brother and husband and father and child, should the day come. But it will not come from our seeking.”

  He turned to Michael, his face illuminated by the red glow of the sinking sun.

  “Germany will rise as one man if she’s told to,” he said, “for that is what her unity and her discipline mean. She is patient and peaceful, but she is obedient.”

  He pointed northwards.

  “It is from there, from Prussia, from Berlin,” he said, “that the word will come, if they who rule and govern us, and in whose hands are all organisation and equipment, tell us that our national existence compels us to fight. They rule. The Prussians rule; there is no doubt of that. From Germany have come the arts, the sciences, the philosophies of the world, and not from there. But they guard our national life. It is they who watch by the Rhine for us, patient and awake. Should they beckon us one night, on some peaceful August night like this, when all seems so tranquil, so secure, we shall go. The silent beckoning finger will be obeyed from one end of the land to the other, from Poland on the east to France on the west.”

  He turned away quickly.

  “It does not bear thinking of,” he said; “and yet there are many, oh, so many, who night and day concern themselves with nothing else. Let us be English again, and not think of anything serious or unpleasant. Already, as you know, I am half English; there is something to build upon. Ah, and this is the sentimental hour, just when the sun begins to touch the horizon line of the stale, weary old earth and turns it into rosy gold and heals its troubles and its weariness. Schon, Schon!”

  He stood for a moment bareheaded to the breeze, and made a great florid salutation to the sun, now only half-disk above the horizon.

  “There! I have said my evensong,” he remarked, “like a good German, who always and always is ridiculous to the whole world, except those who are German also. Oh, I can see how we look to the rest of the world so well. Beer mug in one hand, and mouth full of sausage and song, and with the other hand, perhaps, fingering a revolver. How unreal it must seem to you, how affected, and yet how, in truth, you miss it all. Scratch a Russian, they say, and you find a Tartar; but scratch a German and you find two things — a sentimentalist and a soldier. Lieber Gott! No, I will say, Good God! I am English again, and if you scratch me you will find a golf ball.”

  He took Michael’s arm again.

  “Well, we’ve spent one day together,” he said, “and now we know something of who we are. I put this day in the bank; it’s mine or yours or both of ours. I won’t tell you how I’ve enjoyed it, or you will say that I have enjoyed it because I have talked almost all the time. But since it’s the sentimental hour I will tell you that you mistake. I have enjoyed it because I believe I have fo
und a friend.”

  CHAPTER V

  Hermann Falbe had just gone back to his lodgings at the end of the Richard Wagner Strasse late on the night of their last day at Baireuth, and Michael, who had leaned out of his window to remind him of the hour of their train’s departure the next morning, turned back into the room to begin his packing. That was not an affair that would take much time, but since, on this sweltering August night, it would certainly be a process that involved the production of much heat, he made ready for bed first, and went about his preparations in pyjamas. The work of dropping things into a bag was soon over, and finding it impossible to entertain the idea of sleep, he drew one of the stiff, plush-covered arm-chairs to the window and slipped the rein from his thoughts, letting them gallop where they pleased.

  In all his life he had never experienced so much sheer emotion as the last week had held for him. He had enjoyed his first taste of liberty; he had stripped himself naked to music; he had found a friend. Any one of these would have been sufficient to saturate him, and they had all, in the decrees of Fate, come together. His life hitherto had been like some dry sponge, dusty and crackling; now it was plunged in the waters of three seas, all incomparably sweet.

  He had gained his liberty, and in that process he had forgotten about himself, the self which up till now had been so intolerable a burden. At school, and even before, when first the age of self-consciousness dawned upon him, he had seen himself as he believed others saw him — a queer, awkward, ill-made boy, slow at his work, shy with his fellows, incapable at games. Walled up in this fortress of himself, this gloomy and forbidding fastness, he had altogether failed to find the means of access to others, both to the normal English boys among whom his path lay, and also to his teachers, who, not unnaturally, found him sullen and unresponsive. There was no key among the rather limited bunches at their command which unlocked him, nor at home had anything been found which could fit his wards. It had been the business of school to turn out boys of certain received types. There was the clever boy, the athletic boy, the merely pleasant boy; these and the combinations arrived at from these types were the output. There was no use for others.