“Write them all down,” he said, “and try if you can hear it singing half a dozen more. If you can, write them down also, and give me leave to play the lot at my concert in January.”
Michael gasped.
“You don’t mean that?” he said.
“Certainly I do. It’s a fine bit of stuff.”
It was with these variations, now on the point of completion that Michael meant to spend his solitary and rapturous evening. The spirits of the air—whatever those melodious sprites may be—had for the last month made themselves very audible to him, and the half-dozen further variations that Hermann had demanded had rung all day in his head. Now, as they neared completion, he found that they ceased their singing; their work of dictation was done; he had to this extent expressed himself, and they haunted him no longer. At present he had but jotted down the skeleton of bars that could be filled in afterwards, and it gave him enormous pleasure to see the roles reversed and himself out of his own brain, setting Falbe his task.
But he felt much more than this. He had done something. Michael, the dumb, awkward Michael, was somehow revealed on those eight pages of music. All his twenty-five years he had stood wistfully inarticulate, unable, so it had seemed to him, to show himself, to let himself out. And not till now, when he had found this means of access, did he know how passionately he had desired it, nor how immensely, in the process of so doing, his desire had grown. He must find out more ways, other channels of projecting himself. The need for that, as of a diver throwing himself into the empty air and the laughing waters below him, suddenly took hold of him.
He took a clean sheet of music paper, into which he placed his pages, and with a pleasurable sense of pomp wrote in the centre of it:
VARIATIONS ON AN AIR.
By
Michael Comber.
He paused a moment, then took up his pen again.
“Dedicated to Sylvia Falbe,” he wrote at the top.