She stood behind him, and by a finger on his shoulder directed him in the way she would have him go. Michael found himself suddenly and inexplicably understanding this; her finger, by its pressure or its light tapping, seemed to him to speak in a language that he found himself familiar with, and he slowed down stroking the notes, or quickened with staccato touch, as she wordlessly directed him.
Out of all these things, which were but trivialities, pleasant, unthinking hours for all else concerned, several points stood out for Michael, points new and illuminating. The first was the simplicity of it all, the spontaneousness with which pleasure was born if only you took off your clothes, so to speak, and left them on the bank while you jumped in. All his life he had buttoned his jacket and crammed his hat on to his head. The second was the sense, indefinable but certain, that Hermann and Sylvia between them were the high priests of this memorable orgie.
He himself had met, at dreadful, solemn evenings when Lady Ashbridge and his father stood at the head of the stairs, the two eminent actors who had romped to-night, and found them exceedingly stately personages, just as no doubt they had found him an icy and awkward young man. But they, like him, had taken their note on those different occasions from their environment. Perhaps if his father and mother came here . . . but Michael's imagination quailed before such a supposition.
The third point, which gradually through these weeks began to haunt him more and more, was the personality of Sylvia. He had never come across a girl who in the least resembled her, probably because he had not attempted even to find in a girl, or to display in himself, the signals, winked across from one to the other, of human companionship. Always he had found a difficulty in talking to a girl, because he had, in his self-consciousness, thought about what he should say. There had been the cabalistic question of sex ever in front of him, a thing that troubled and deterred him. But Sylvia, with her hand on his shoulder, absorbed in her singing, and directing him only as she would have pressed the pedal of the piano if she had been playing to herself, was no more agitating than if she had been a man; she was just singing, just using him to help her singing. And even while Michael registered to himself this charming annihilation of sex, which allowed her to be to him no more than her brother was--less, in fact, but on the same plane--she had come to the end of her song, patted him on the back, as she would have patted anybody else, with a word of thanks, and, for him, suddenly leaped into significance. It was not only a singer who had sung, but an individual one called Sylvia Falbe. She took her place, at present a most inconspicuous one, on the back-cloth before which Michael's life was acted, towards which, when no action, so to speak, was taking place, his eyes naturally turned themselves. His father and mother were there, Francis also and Aunt Barbara, and of course, larger than the rest, Hermann. Now Sylvia was discernible, and, as the days went by and their meetings multiplied, she became bigger, walked into a nearer perspective.
It did not occur to Michael, rightly, to imagine himself at all in love with her, for he was not. Only she had asserted herself on his consciousness.
Not yet had she begun to trouble him, and there was no sign, either external or intimate, in his mind that he was sickening with the splendid malady. Indeed, the significance she held for him was rather that, though she was a girl, she presented none of the embarrassments which that sex had always held for him. She grew in comradeship; he found himself as much at ease with her as with her brother, and her charm was just that which had so quickly and strongly attracted Michael to Hermann. She was vivid in the same way as he was; she had the same warm, welcoming kindliness--the same complete absence of pose. You knew where you were with her, and hitherto, when Michael was with one of the young ladies brought down to Ashbridge to be looked at, he only wished that wherever he was he was somewhere else. But with Sylvia he had none of this self-consciousness; she was bonne camarade for him in exactly the same way as she was bonne camarade to the rest of the multitude which thronged the Sunday evenings, perfectly at ease with them, as they with her, in relationship entirely unsentimental.
But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael's most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe's principles in teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school; he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the hours.
"What is the good of them?" he asked. "They can only give you nimbleness and strength. Well, you shall acquire your nimbleness and strength by playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it aloud--which is playing--or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pass over a bar that you don't understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try."Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.
