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.
Then had succeeded those three nightmare years in the Guards, where, with his more mature power of observation, he had become more actively conscious of his inability to take his place on any of the recognised platforms. And all the time, like an owl on his solitary perch, he had gazed out lonelily, while the other birds of day, too polite to mock him, had merely passed him by. One such, it is true--his cousin--had sat by him, and the poor owl's heart had gone out to him. But even Francis, so he saw now, had not understood. He had but accepted the fact of him without repugnance, had been fond of him as a queer sort of kind elder cousin.
Then there was Aunt Barbara. Aunt Barbara, Michael allowed, had understood a good deal; she had pointed out with her unerringly humourous finger the obstacles he had made for himself.
But could Aunt Barbara understand the rapture of living which this one week of liberty had given him? That Michael doubted. She had only pointed out the disabilities he made for himself. She did not know what he was capable of in the way of happiness. But he thought, though without self-consciousness, how delightful it would be to show himself, the new, unshelled self, to Aunt Barbara again.
A laughing couple went tapping down the street below his window, boy and girl, with arms and waists interlaced. They were laughing at nothing at all, except that they were boy and girl together and it was all glorious fun. But the sight of them gave Michael a sudden spasm of envy. With all this enlightenment that had come to him during this last week, there had come no gleam of what that simplest and commonest aspect of human nature meant. He had never felt towards a girl what that round-faced German boy felt. He was not sure, but he thought he disliked girls; they meant nothing to him, anyhow, and the mere thought of his arm round a girl's waist only suggested a very embarrassing attitude. He had nothing to say to them, and the knowledge of his inability filled him with an uncomfortable sense of his want of normality, just as did the consciousness of his long arms and stumpy legs.
There was a night he remembered when Francis had insisted that he should go with him to a discreet little supper party after an evening at the music-hall. There were just four of them--he, Francis, and two companions--and he played the role of sour gooseberry to his cousin, who, with the utmost gaiety, had proved himself completely equal to the inauspicious occasion, and had drank indiscriminately out of both the girls' glasses, and lit cigarettes for them; and, after seeing them both home, had looked in on Michael, and gone into fits of laughter at his general incompatibility.
The steps and conversation passed round the corner, and Michael, stretching his bare toes on to the cool balcony, resumed his researches--those joyful, unegoistic researches into himself. His liberty was bound up with his music; the first gave the key to the second. Often as he had rested, so to speak, in oases of music in London, they were but a pause from the desert of his uncongenial life into the desert again. But now the desert was vanished, and the oasis stretched illimitable to the horizon in front of him.
That was where, for the future, his life was to be passed, not idly, sitting under trees, but in the eager pursuit of its unnumbered paths. It was that aspect of it which, as he knew so well, his father, for instance, would never be able to understand.
