wild mountain scenery, the forests and snow peaks, the upper reaches, so
beautiful that more than once she had held her breath, felt as if her
soul were full of crystal flowers. The flaming torch, high in the right
hand of the outrider, lit the vast scene in a fashion that suggested the
approach to Hell arranged in honour of distinguished visitors. The
waterfalls leaping down the opposite cliffs, the glittering peaks, the
gloomy roaring depths of the gorges, started out red and black,
disappeared, flashed in the distance, rushed forward to hurl themselves
at the flying carriage. Ordham wondered how many horses the King killed
in a year. But he was too much interested in the scene, the adventure,
to care. It was more wonderful, more satisfying, than anything he had
ever dreamed of. For a moment he had an ecstatic desire for death, if
only to avoid the anticlimax of life.
The moon came out again. The torch was extinguished. All the Alpine
world was white and silver. It seemed like a sudden ascent into the vast
quiet regions of space from the chaos of the Inferno. Both Ordham and
his companion, who had been sitting tensely, leaned back with a
sensation of contentment and peace.
In a moment she turned to him with softly shining eyes and said, “Cannot
you understand the King a little better?”
“I think so.”
“Not yet! Be thankful for that.”
“When you began to sing to-night, I was frightfully oppressed by the
thought of that tormented soul only a few feet from me. Then I forgot
him.”
“Is it possible?” She stared at him with a puzzled interest. She knew
nothing of the worldly and mental precocity of young Englishmen of
Ordham’s class, and Ordham was himself in more ways than one.
“‘Tormented soul.’ Nothing could express it more perfectly.” She
continued in a moment: “It was developed for some other planet where all
conditions are higher and more satisfying than on this, then strayed
here through some mismanagement of the Unknown Forces—and into the dark
passages of a Wittelsbach brain, of all places! If he only had been in a
position to work out his one hope of mortal salvation—to become a great
artist. Genius inflamed and smothered by the megalomania of a king—and
of a king with no part to play on the stage of Europe! No wonder there
are abysses in his brain for which this life will build no bridges.”
“Do you know him well?”
“I have never exchanged a word with him, never met him face to face.”
“No?” Ordham turned to her with a quickened interest. He had attributed
the Nachmeister’s defence to the amiable mood of the moment, but it did
not occur to him to doubt the word of Margarethe Styr. “He has shown you
so much favour—”
“He is grateful for my voice, poor soul, for it gives him a few moments’
happiness. But I shall never know him. I wish I might. I understand him
so well.”
“Then you too do not belong to this planet?”
“I wonder you did not add that I too have a tormented soul.”
“That is what I meant.”
“But I have not.” She looked at him steadily. “Perhaps—once—yes. But
that is long past. You, being a man, with a more sensitive fibre in you
than most men possess,—you may catch just a glimmer of the depths of
Ludwig, in spite of your tender years. But there is one thing of which
you know absolutely nothing, and that is the intense and absorbing joy
that an artist finds in his art.”
“‘His.’ Can a woman?”
“Oh, you are clever! But, yes—in certain conditions. There are moments
when I am happier than any one not an artist can ever dream of being.
And betweenwhiles—with my studies, my long meditations upon the
characters I portray—for I find always something new in those strange
women, that not even The Master apprehended when he resurrected them—in
my unruffled life, in my certainty of repeated triumphs—well, it is
close enough to happiness; although I am willing to confess that it
might not have been at your age. Have we really pulled up a bit?”
The horses were trotting quietly across a valley, where, unable to find
excitement, the King, no doubt, was in the habit of sparing his unhappy
beasts. But a few moments later the speed was increased again,
apparently that they might enter a village on the other side of the
valley like a hurricane. Here, as in all the other villages through
which they had flashed, was the same rattling of windows flung up, the
same flaring of lights, the same passionate cry:—
“_Heil unserem König, Heil!_”
But in this case the cheers stopped abruptly, for the faithful peasants
had time to discover their mistake; the foaming horses came to a sudden
halt before the gasthaus trembling and panting. As Ordham and Countess
Tann descended into the narrow street which flamed like a comet, there
were loud astonished cries. The outrider made a brief explanation, and
the lights were extinguished, the windows slammed. In the beloved
romantic figure of their King these humble folk took a deathless
interest, but not the least in any guest he might invite to his castles;
although for a week from this night they discussed the strange fact that
he condescended to have guests at all, much less relinquish in their
favour his midnight drive.
But the landlord of the inn had expected the King’s visitors, and kept
his counsel: a groom on horseback had galloped in with orders half an
hour before. Ordham and Styr were conducted into a long dark raftered
room which had been hastily aired of its evening fumes of beer and
tobacco, and illuminated with lamps and candles. There was a fire in the
big tiled stove, and Ordham quickly threw off his overcoat and removed
the long Arabian-looking wrap in which the singer was muffled. The
supper was not ready, and he looked her over as she stood by the fire
with her back to him, a tall figure draped in severe white folds, a
finely poised head with loosened coils of heavy but rippling brown hair
that shone as if polished daily with a silk handkerchief. But although
she was engaged in the prosaic occupation of warming her hands, he
received the impression that he always did in the first act of _Tristan_
and the second of _Götterdämmerung_, of a ruthless mental force, barely
held in leash, of sullen deadly fires.
It was like a sudden vision of Aspasia in the dark tobacco-scented room
of the little Alpine gasthaus, but in a moment he forgot his fancies;
she turned to him with bright eyes and flushed cheeks that made her look
human and young.
“How odd! How odd!” she cried. “And the oddest part of it is that I like
it—talking to a human being once more. It might even seem natural to
feel young and gay again. And in spite of your preternatural insight—or
whatever it is—you are deliciously young, and, I think, stimulated all
that was still youthful in my brain the moment we made friends.”
“Are we to remain friends?”
“I do not know. I must think it over.”
“I shall call.”
“Of course. That would be mere civility. But I am not sure that you will
get in.”
He was never demonstrative in manner, although he often indulged in
certain exaggerations of speech. But he could direct a quiet smiling
appeal from his juvenile orbs which he had discovered was seldom
resisted. He was far too clever to flirt with Margarethe Styr, so upon
this occasion he merely looked like a very young man begging indulgence
of a goddess. She smiled and shook her head.
“I am not sure. It is the first step that counts, and first steps are
too often fatal. I might find myself enjoying the society of my kind
again. I want nothing less—the even tenor of my life destroyed. When
one has attained a form of happiness it is the quintessence of folly to
risk it.”
“But the first step—you have taken it. We have had an adventurous night
together and I shall refuse to be ignored.”
“To-morrow it will seem like a dream.”
“To-morrow, but not a week hence,” he retorted with his uncommon
sagacity, which fascinated her more than any trait he had yet displayed
to her. “And nothing can alter the fact that it is no dream, and that
neither of us can forget it. I shall call to-morrow.”
She laughed and they sat down to the omelette that preceded the
chickens. Like all singers she had a healthy appetite, and wondered that
she had not missed her usual replenishment even after but an hour and a
half of work.
“How do you manage it—concentrating all that tragedy in your eyes?”
asked Ordham, abruptly. “Is it that you draw your brows together in some
peculiar way—I fancy that is it; they are so low and straight. Will you
show me?”
“Do you think I am a machine?” The artist arose in her wrath. “Do you
fancy that when I am suffering the anguish of Iseult or Brynhildr I put
eyebrows on my soul?”
“But you don’t really feel it? I thought artists dared not feel too
much. I have seen would-be emotional actresses carried away to such an
extent that they were quite ridiculous.”
“You give no stage artist the credit of a brain, I suppose? Can you
imagine a born actress—born, mind you—living her part, yet never quite
shaking loose from that strong grip above? That is what is meant by
‘living a part.’ You abandon yourself deliberately—with the whole day’s
preparation—into that other personality, almost to a soul in
possession, and are not your own self for one instant; although the
purely mental part of that self never relaxes its vigilance over the
usurper. It is a curious dual experience that none but an artist can
understand. Of course that perfect duality is only possible after years
of study, work, practical experience, mastery of technique. No beginner,
no matter what her genius, should dare to abandon herself to her rôles.”
“You must have had great masters. You have harrowed me horribly.”
“I have had none, except Wagner. Five years of stage experience in the
United States were of a certain value, for although I never had an
important part—I was too tall, I was not interested, my talent barely
stirred—still I observed, I studied in an abstract mental fashion, I
gained poise. It is an achievement alone to feel at home on the stage.”
He was burning with impatience. “How in heaven’s name could they have
failed over there to discover that you were a great actress, whether or
not you chose to cultivate your genius—and why not? why not? I hope you
do not think me merely curious. I am trying to speak as one of the
public that adores you—quite impersonally. There are so few great
actresses. I feel that you had no right, for any private reasons
whatever, to build a bushel over your talent. No genius belongs to
himself alone.”
The colour left her face, but she replied composedly: “Perhaps not, but
that is not the way that women, at least, reason when they are young. I
went on the stage, not because I was stage-struck, nor in poverty, but
for a reason that I cannot give you. When I found that the big heavy
voice that even singing teachers had laughed at could be minted into
pure gold for the new music,—which only one of the many instructors I
sought knew anything about, or at least believed in,—then I felt
resigned even to the causes which had driven me to the stage. I have
become inordinately ambitious; I often wonder what life can mean to
those that have no excuse for ambition—it is one of the reasons which
enabled me to begin life all over again. I was indeed another being
after my first triumph at Bayreuth, and not only because half the
crowned heads in Europe rushed to hear me the second time I sang; when I
stood on the greatest stage in the world with all my being set to the
music soaring from my throat, not a nerve out of tune, I knew that I no
longer was of common clay, that nothing that had ever happened to me
before mattered in the least. Ah, what matter the charnel rooms in the
soul when such memories blaze forever above? Poor women! Poor
women!—that have no such blinding moments—that must sit and think—and
think—”
Her eyes, dilated, horror-struck, gazed beyond Ordham, who felt
intolerably excited. He drew a short breath of relief when she recovered
herself abruptly, and said with a laugh: “But the world is very
ungrateful to its stage artists. Think of Mallinger, Josephine Schefzky,
Malwina Schnoor von Caroldsfeld. Less than twenty years ago all Germany
rang with their fame. Have you ever heard their names?”
“I have heard of Schefzky! It was she that overturned the swan boat in
the winter garden of the Residenz when sailing with the King—dressed up
as Lohengrin!—and he ran off, dripping, and calling to a lackey to pull
her out. I love that story.”
“It is all that keeps poor Josephine’s name alive. However—what matter
so long as we have our little day? Only the chosen few have that. What
have you made up your mind to do with your own life?”
She put the question so abruptly that he almost dropped his fork. “If I
have interested you sufficiently to inspire that question, then the last
six or eight years have not atrophied everything but the artist. Unless
you asked it for the sake of saying something,” he added anxiously.
“Not altogether. I suddenly wondered. Excellenz Nachmeister and the few
people I meet often mention you. I have had the impression that you were
badly spoilt, but your head does not seem to be turned.”
“Why should it be? No one has ever spoilt me—thought of such a thing”
(and he really meant it). “I am going into the diplomatic service, if
you care to know. I am here to get my German—not that I get much,
between rushing about and four teachers that practise their English on
me.”
“Why four teachers?”
“I take every new one that is recommended, and am too weak-minded to
dismiss the others. They all seem to be so horribly poor.”
“I must find you a good teacher.” She spoke impulsively, feeling an
uncommon interest in a promising young creature, quite thirteen years
her junior. She had never had a child, but as she regarded Ordham, who
in the mellow light looked his youngest, and was eating his abundant
supper as daintily as a girl, she moved toward him with an instinct of
protection. He still had the soft bloom of lip and cheek and eye that
the most innocent of women lose so early, and she knew the world he
lived in. What a pity it must go, that he too must change! Between his
inherited impressions and exceeding opportunities, he might know his
world, and his brain might be all that admiring Munich acclaimed, but he
was young, divinely young. No girl had ever given her such an impression
of youth—fleeting youth! His contacts with the emotional side of life
had made no impression on him beyond satisfying his curiosity and saving
his mind from morbidity. She divined, indeed, that, his heart still
being untouched, his nature was practically unawakened, that his casual
experiences, when they had not disgusted him, had affected him no more
than some story he had read and forgotten. Other phases of life meant so
much more.
She reached these conclusions by aid of her deep instincts rather than
through any conscious mental process, for her own contacts had been
almost entirely with American men who were either ingenuously fast or
uncompromisingly puritanical, generally the former, circumstances having
limited her experience. She had met, as all handsome actresses must,
young Americans of Ordham’s age; and when they had not been precocious
and impertinent, they had belonged to that gallant, clean-minded,
well-bred type the universities turn out in such abundance—the type
that has every attribute to win the girl and not one to interest the
woman. Ordham’s inherited complexities, intensified by growing up among
men of affairs in a country always consciously making history, added to
his own uncommon individuality, fascinated her. She would have liked to
cultivate him, but she relinquished that idea, and said practically:
“These are precious years if you really mean to make a career. I know an
excellent teacher, and will send her to you to-morrow. But you must not
waste her time. Will you promise me to study?”
“Of course.” Ordham was always willing to promise anything. “I’ll
dismiss all four and take her for as many hours as she will give me. You
inspire me with a desire to work. Did you begin to study German when you
were very young that your accent is so perfect?”
“I did not study anything when I was very young.” She hesitated,
reflected that in all probability she would never see this young man
again, and might as well drop a good seed when the opportunity was given
her; it did not occur often. “I did not know even the English alphabet
until I was fifteen. Nor did any other child in the wretched coal-mining
district where I first saw light. It was peopled wholly by the poorest
class of immigrants from eastern Europe—brought over wholesale by
enterprising and not too honest mine owners. My clothes were made of
hop-sacking. I had not the faintest idea that I was good-looking, for
the simple reason that I was never clean or half fed. My mind was as
tightly closed as an oyster. I recall no desires beyond want of more
food and the night that brought rest. My mother died at my birth, and I
was taken in by a family of fellow-immigrants to whom one more child
meant one more future bread-winner.
“Suddenly, I went to New York. Almost immediately I began to attend a
public school—a free school, not a public school in your sense. Later I
had tutors, masters. I learned well from the first. My intellect, that
is to say my interest in books, awakened early—novels, at first, of
course; gradually heavier works. In them I soon learned to forget; that
is to say, I found in them a separate and particular happiness. I made a
special study of the language and the literature of Germany. Whence I
inherit my tendencies and talents I have no idea. From nowhere, most
likely. Some mysterious disarrangement of particles, of which science,
so far, knows nothing. You are an exotic yourself, or I am much
mistaken. To return—that rushing of the awakened mind over dam after
dam, barrier after barrier,—there is nothing under heaven like it,
except the discovery that one was born to be a great artist, which, of
course, is the supreme happiness. There were times, even then, when I
was as happy as I ever shall be; that is to say, my mental exaltation
was as great, for I suppose that is what mortal happiness really means,
what gives us our most precise distinction from the lower order of
animals, and makes us feel our relationship to that omnipotent force
which we personify as God. At all events it was a life apart, a secret
life, a life in which no one—no one—” her voice rose on an accent
almost furious—“could enter. And of course those years of study played
their part in making me what I am to-day. Most singers have no brain, no
mental life; they must be taught their rôles like parrots, they put on a
simulation of art with their costumes which deceives the great stupid
public and touches no one. Mere emotionalism, animal robustness, they
call temperament. I strengthened and developed my brain during those
terrible years to such an extent that I now act out of it, think myself
into every part, relying not at all upon the instructions of the
uninspired, nor upon chance.”
Ordham had forgotten his dessert and was staring at her, fascinated,
almost bewildered. Again she had lifted a corner of the veil. If she
would but fling it aside! And pity overwhelmed him, for he saw far
behind her words. But his face betrayed little of his emotions, and when
she paused abruptly, he said: “You have an object in telling me this.
What is it?”
“To show what obstacles can be overcome by the power of the will and by
ceaseless mental activity rightly directed. You have no obstacle to
overcome but your indolence, which may, nevertheless, balk your languid
desire for a career. Therefore, if you fail; if ten years hence you are
a mere society butterfly, a drone, which, I infer, Munich is doing its
best to make of you; if twenty years hence you are an old beau, with no
object but to be invited out every night that you may escape death by
ennui,—you need curse no one but yourself. Had I failed, I should have
been justified in throwing myself into the river, cursing life, fate,
your entire sex. I have conquered in spite of every millstone that could
be hung about a woman’s neck. But you!”
He had flushed, and looked frightened. The vision she had evoked was not
pleasant. He answered steadily, however: “Thank you for telling me all
this. I know that no one, not even Princess Nachmeister, has ever heard
one-tenth as much from you. What shall I do to show my gratitude?”
“Make a great man of yourself and study with Fräulein Lutz,” she said
gayly, as they rose from the table. “I think they are bringing those
poor horses round.”
They started by the light of the torch, but on the return journey the
horses were spared, save on the more dangerous parts of the road. Then
they galloped as if bent on destruction. While the carriage rocked and
bounded through a gorge with the thunder of waters below and the narrow
pass reeling in the red flame, Ordham regaled his companion with the
story of the wild black night when the outrider, overcome by panic, had
flung the torch into the depths, and fled shrieking, leaving the King to
his fate. But she only laughed and shrugged her shoulders, and would not
talk until they entered the valley of the Pöllat. The moon had sailed
high above the thick Bavarian clouds, and the great white pile of
Neuschwanstein seemed to be poised in the black void. Margarethe pointed
to a solitary figure standing on the balcony before the throne room.
“The King,” she said softly. “He has his consolations. Who can say he is
not happier in his mystic communion with nature, in his freedom to dwell
amidst such scenes as this, than the mere mortals that pity him and
think him mad? He is looking out now on the three snow peaks. Who knows?
He may be their offspring. Mountains are no mere masses of rock, and he
is no mere mortal. When his adumbrated spirit sheds that gross mass of
flesh, who can say what glorious destiny awaits it? I should like to
meet him out there in space. I feel sure he will reign over a noble
kingdom, where he will no longer be alone, but where only the rarest
spirits may enter.”
“Are you in love with Ludwig—with his soul?”
“Not even that. But I should be glad to know that he, above all
men,—for he has suffered most,—had found what we all seek and never
find—I mean all of us who are worthy of loneliness.”
“You do not believe in mortal companionship, then?”
“No.”
“I wonder.”
As he handed her out of the carriage in the courtyard they were
surrounded by lackeys, and her anxious maid awaited her. But he said, as
they shook hands:
“Thank you so much—again and again. And I shall call to-morrow.”
VI
CERTAIN INEVITABLE PHASES
Somewhat to his surprise, but vastly to his gratification, Ordham, on
the following afternoon, was handed a card inscribed “Hiobe Lutz,”
accompanied by a line of introduction on one of Gräfin von Tann’s. He
had just risen from luncheon in the Legation, and received the rather
formidable looking female in the anteroom. She addressed him in such
German as he had seldom heard in Bavaria, announced that she should
never utter a word of English during his lessons, that he must dismiss
his other teachers and study with her every morning, Sundays excepted,
from ten until twelve. The last was a harrowing prospect, for he hated
early rising; but he had the wit to perceive that here was the force to
control his indolence and furnish his brain, that he would never
fascinate this grenadier with his wiles and be permitted to entertain
her in English. Moreover, he realized that she had received instructions
from Margarethe Styr, and this flattered him deeply. The arrangement was
quickly made and Fräulein Lutz departed, announcing that upon his second
failure to appear promptly at ten o’clock she should consider herself
dismissed. She would not waste her time,—she was assisting a historian
upon a great work,—no, not for anybody.
Several hours later Ordham left a card on Countess Tann, and with it a
note of thanks. But he did not ask for admittance. It cost him an
unaccustomed effort of self-denial to turn from her door when there was
a bare possibility of crossing its threshold, but he had reflected that
he had no right to take advantage of his chance intimacy with a recluse,
nor even of her very marked kindness; moreover, that, having done his
duty, it was her privilege to ask him to come another day and drink a
cup of tea.
But the days passed and it waxed evident that she had no intention of
embracing her opportunity. In ordinary conditions he might have been
piqued, for he was more spoilt than he knew; certainly disappointed. But
even he had his worries, and two descended upon him the day after his
return from Neuschwanstein.