“Go on!” said Michael.

“That’s just the devil with the piano,” said Falbe.  “It’s the easiest instrument of all to make a show on, and it is the rarest sort of person who can play on it.  That’s why, all those years, I have hated giving lessons.  If one has to, as I have had to, one must take any awful miss with a pigtail, and make a sham pianist of her.  One can always do that.  But it would be waste of time for you and me; you wouldn’t want to be made a sham pianist, and simply I wouldn’t make you one.”

Michael turned round.

“Good Lord!” he said, “the suspense is worse than I can bear.  Isn’t there a piano in your room?  Can’t we go down there, and have it over?”

“Yes, if you wish.  I can tell at once if you are capable of playing—­at least, whether I think you are capable of playing—­whether I can teach you.”

“But I haven’t touched a piano for a week,” said Michael.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’ve touched a piano for a year.”

Michael had not been prevented by the economy that made him travel second-class from engaging a carriage by the day at Baireuth, since that clearly was worth while, and they found it waiting for them by the theatre.  There was still time to drive to Falbe’s lodging and get through this crucial ordeal before the opera, and they went straight there.  A very venerable instrument, which Falbe had not yet opened, stood against the wall, and he struck a few notes on it.

“Completely out of tune,” he said; “but that doesn’t matter.  Now then!”

“But what am I to play?” asked Michael.

“Anything you like.”

He sat down at the far end of the room, put his long legs up on to another chair and waited.  Michael sent a despairing glance at that gay face, suddenly grown grim, and took his seat.  He felt a paralysing conviction that Falbe’s judgment, whatever that might turn out to be, would be right, and the knowledge turned his fingers stiff.  From the few notes that Falbe had struck he guessed on what sort of instrument his ordeal was to take place, and yet he knew that Falbe himself would have been able to convey to him the sense that he could play, though the piano was all out of tune, and there might be dumb, disconcerting notes in it.  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.

In spite of Germany there occurred to Michael a Chopin prelude, at which he had worked a little during the last two months in London.  The notes he knew perfectly; he had believed also that he had found a certain conception of it as a whole, so that he could make something coherent out of it, not merely adding bar to correct bar.  And he began the soft repetition of chord-quavers with which it opened.