"That's part of the glory of it all," he said; "that art and its emotions become part of you like the food you eat and the wine you drink. Art is always making us; it enters into our character and destiny. As long as you go on growing you assimilate, and thank God one's mind or soul, or whatever you like to call it, goes on growing for a long time. I suppose the moment comes to most people when they cease to grow, when they become fixed and hard; and that is what we mean by being old. But till then you weave your destiny, or, rather, people and beauty weave it for you, as you'll see the Norns weaving, and yet you never know what you are making.
You make what you are, and you never are because you are always becoming. You must excuse me; but Germans are always metaphysicians, and they can't help it.""Go on; be German," said Michael.
"Lieber Gott! As if I could be anything else," said Falbe, laughing. "We are the only nation which makes a science of experimentalism; we try everything, just as a puppy tries everything. It tries mutton bones, and match-boxes, and soap and boots; it tries to find out what its tail is for, and bites it till it hurts, on which it draws the conclusion that it is not meant to eat. Like all metaphysicians, too, and dealers in the abstract, we are intensely practical. Our passion for experimentalism is dictated by the firm object of using the knowledge we acquire. We are tremendously thorough; we waste nothing, not even time, whereas the English have an absolute genius for wasting time. Look at all your games, your sports, your athletics--I am being quite German now, and forgetting my mother, bless her!--they are merely devices for getting rid of the hours, and so not having to think. You hate thought as a nation, and we live for it. Music is thought; all art is thought; commercial prosperity is thought; soldiering is thought.""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 Iam 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.
