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Updated: May 15, 2025
I daresay France will give in when she sees Germany is in earnest." Mrs. Falbe pulled the shattered remnants of her mind together. In her heart of hearts she knew she did not care one atom what might happen to armies and navies and nations, provided only that she had a quantity of novels to read, and meals at regular hours.
"Oh, we are going to enjoy ourselves," he said, with an irresistible sincerity. Tristan und Isolde was given on the third day of their stay there, and Falbe, reading the morning German paper, found news. "The Kaiser has arrived," he said. "There's a truce in the army manoeuvres for a couple of days, and he has come to be present at Tristan this evening.
Michael had looked forward to this day with extraordinary pleasure, but there was mingled with it a sort of agony of apprehension that Falbe would find him a very boring companion. But the precepts of Aunt Barbara came to his mind, and he reflected that the certain and sure way of proving a bore was to be taken up with the idea that he might be. And anyhow, Falbe had proposed the plan himself.
There was justice in Falbe's dictum about the temperament that lay behind the player, which would assert itself through any faultiness of instrument, and through, so he suspected, any faultiness of execution. He struck a chord, and heard it jangle dissonantly. "Oh, it's not fair," he said. "Get on!" said Falbe.
The hall had been packed from end to end, and he had barely got to his seat, the only one vacant in the whole room, when Miss Sylvia Falbe appeared, followed at once by her accompanist, whose name occurred nowhere on the programme. Two neighbours, however, who chatted shrilly during the applause that greeted them, informed him that this was Hermann, "dear Hermann; there is no one like him!"
And yet, though till this moment he had never spoken to him, he could hardly regard Falbe as a stranger, for he had heard him say on the piano what his sister understood by the songs of Brahms and Schubert.
"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.
He guessed what she must have found there, for he had already seen the paper himself, and her silence, her distraction, and the misery of her face confirmed his conjecture. "I've brought you a little news to-night," he said. "The first draft from the regiment went off to-day." Mrs. Falbe put down her book, marking the place.
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.
Aunt Barbara stopped in the middle of her sentence; she knew Michael's old sensitiveness about these physical disabilities, and she had a moment's cold horror at the thought of Falbe having said so miserably tactless a thing to him. But the horror was of infinitesimal duration, for she heard Michael's laugh as they leaned over the top of the piano together. "I wish you had, Hermann," he said.
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