channels. The secret police is always at my service. By to-morrow night
I shall have had an interview with the woman. If she has anything to
reveal I shall extract it with the promise of a position in the
Residenz; that is a bribe more potent than gold—which we will not use
unless we must. As soon as I am in possession of the facts I shall
act—you say he has vowed to do nothing rash for a week?”
“To be ill, if necessary. Fortunately she cannot storm the Legation.”
“Even so, we must act quickly. If the woman is really desperate, she
will find some way to compromise him—and what more effective than a
violent scene in the British Legation? It would be all over Munich in an
hour. But, by all the saints,” Nachmeister crossed herself devoutly,
“that scene she shall never make. We will baffle her before she has
quite lost her patience.”
When Excellenz had bidden good-by to her guest she stood for a moment
regarding the path with drawn brows. Had she engaged upon an enterprise
to deliver the lamb from the panther to the tigress? In a moment she
shook her head. She was a very wise old woman, and she recalled that
Styr had made no apologies, no explanations. She had said nothing about
disinterested friendship, taking a natural interest in a man so much
younger than herself. Nachmeister had long outlived the folly of
generalizing, of assuming that the same set of motives must govern the
most diverse individuals. For the present, at least, Ordham was in no
danger from the prima donna, who, no doubt, had lived her life, and
would hardly waste her time playing upon the weakness of young men.
“But if I should be mistaken,” she thought grimly, “she too can be
circumvented. Ordham must marry Mabel Cutting.”
XVI
THE IVORY TOWER OF STYR
Two days later Styr stood in the tower of her living room, awaiting
Excellenz, who had sent her a succession of hasty notes. As always, when
the river was full, she had the sensation of floating on the current of
the lovely light green waters. The birds were singing in her garden and
in the deep glades of the park. The Isar itself sang of the glaciers and
snow peaks that gave it birth. From the fields, beyond the heavy trees,
came the dainty uplifting scent of newly mown hay. Usually this scene of
sylvan isolation fed the poetry of her secret life, and in these morning
hours, when the park was deserted, she might people it with satyrs and
dryads, even with Valkyrs, if she wished. But to-day it seemed only the
romantic annex to the exciting drama into which she had precipitated
herself; and it required but a slight effort to conjure up the
gorgeously dressed little butterfly with her ugly old soul in her
desperate face, and the perplexed, doubtless terrified, young man,
dragging his feet beside her.
Styr was by no means in a philosophic frame of mind. She fully realized
that this license in which she had indulged for the first time in many
years, this luxury of active interest in a human being, other than a
student or a chorus girl in distress, would lead far—unless she
promptly locked the gates again. Already her brain was showing a
disposition to offer hospitality to more than one of the great interests
with which the world palpitated. Yesterday she had been on the point of
buying a newspaper. If Ordham continued to call, they would inevitably
discuss all interests under the sun; books alone would never occupy
them; one by one the atrophies in her uncommonly complete nature would
disintegrate, disappear. And she had lived the inner life so completely,
so jealously, almost as isolated in her villa by the Isar as had it been
one of those schlosses on its lonely peak that decorate the German
landscape! That sense of unviolated liberty! It had at times lifted her
spirit to that exalted pitch to which music raises the emotional
capacity of speech. There are more forms of happiness than one in this
world, and Margarethe Styr had solved the greatest problem of woman’s
existence: she was quite happy, and not because she had found the man of
her heart, but because she had eliminated man from her existence
altogether. Whether Nature, that inexorable slave-driver, would have
permitted her to dwell in peace with art and her soul had not
circumstances first made all men hateful to her, was beside the
question. But although she had found happiness, it was at the expense of
far more than the one dream to which most women cling until the last of
their days. She had denied her mind much that it naturally craved, and
she had suppressed those superficial frivolous instincts which have
their own appetites. She often longed to dress (and show herself), in
marvellous Paris frocks, and, never before having known women with whom
she cared to associate (save briefly on Atlantic steamers), she would
have derived much honest enjoyment from long gossips with these friendly
sophisticated women of Munich; she would have liked to know and discuss
all the little comedies, tragedies, diverting weaknesses, in the lives
of her new compatriots. But she had not dared, and the results she had
achieved by her fidelity to the life long since prescribed by her too
enlightened brain, encouraged her to persist. She half resolved that,
having done her obvious duty by a fellow-creature, she would withdraw
from further intercourse with him at once. Better snap this link while
her surfaces were merely rippled, not drift on until all that was
feminine in her was caught in the net of the world again, and this ideal
existence destroyed.
It was at this point in her meditations that Princess Nachmeister was
shown into the gallery, and she went hastily through the arch to meet
her.
“What a picture!” exclaimed Excellenz politely, although, indeed, she
had long since reached the age when she could candidly enjoy feminine
loveliness. “Fancy being able to wear unrelieved white in the morning!
How do you like my new Paris frock? My maid says that the overskirt has
too many pleats on the hips, but for my bones, I think not.”
Princess Nachmeister looked very smart in a costume of dark brown
camel’s-hair and silk and a little bonnet of brown leaves, but Countess
Tann gave it but a perfunctory glance, and Excellenz herself was too
excited to demand more.
“Fritz arrives to-night and comes directly to me!” she announced. “I
telegraphed yesterday afternoon that I must see him at once upon a
business so important that he was not to waste time imagining it, but to
come. He replied that he would leave Berlin this morning. Lotte made a
sworn statement, and has obtained leave to visit her sick mother for two
days in order to be out of the way of Hélène’s claws when the bolt
falls. She is locked up in my house; but I do not wish her to see Fritz,
lest his questions should lead to other revelations that would induce
even him to sue for a divorce. And that would leave Hélène free to
practise on the susceptibilities of our _jüngling_. No, I shall convince
him—and present the subject in such a way that he may escape apoplexy.
Three days hence Frau Hélène will be locked up in that castle in Hungary
in good old mediæval style. I know my Fritz. His heart will never
trouble him again until it develops fatty degeneration; but in his
outraged vanity he will roar like a bull, he will be vicious,
relentless, and in the confusion of his mind will follow blindly every
suggestion I make. How he will hate her, and how he will make her pay!
He will give out that he retires to Hungary for his health, taking, of
course, his dutiful wife. Later, official matters recall him, but the
Frau Geheimrath is afflicted with a goitre and desires to remain in
seclusion. The season over, nobody thinks of her in any case. Oh, La
Belle Hélène is disposed of, and our charming young friend is free to
get himself into another scrape.”
“Not for some time, I fancy. He has had his lesson and is by no means a
human caldron. He will not suspect that she has been shut up on his
account. A young Englishman’s chivalry must be reckoned with—”
“Whatever he may suspect, he will discover nothing. Fritz will whisk her
out of Munich to-night. From Hungary he will compel her to write Ordham
a commonplace letter that will set him quite free.”
“Heavens, how old-fashioned and romantic you still are over here! The
United States might be on another planet. But there is law for women in
Europe. Will she not appeal to it? She has money of her own. Will she
not escape from his castle and flee to her villa in Italy?”
“In theory, but not in fact. Fritz will not be made ridiculous in the
eyes of Europe, no, not if he has to pour hot lead into her ear. But a
threat of extinction and the hope of his speedy demise will keep her
quiet, to say nothing of the fact that she will never escape from that
castle. It is in the mountains near the Roumanian border. His servants
are the wild creatures of that region, and will obey their master, not
only because he is their master, but a mighty sportsman, and they revere
that. I have visited there. What a romantic spot for a honeymoon! But as
a prison—Ach Gott! She will never even get a letter out. When she has
calmed down she will affect compliance, and take care of her complexion
till Fritz dies. Then she will run to Paris, where she will be very
smart and very wicked until she is fifty, when she will take to opium,
religion, or roulette—all three, no doubt. But ach, dear Gräfin, what a
tableau we shall miss in imagination! I could regret it, for I had every
detail from Lotte. Mr. Ordham, with blank rigid face supporting the
hysterical Hélène in the Pompadour boudoir, bored, vaguely apprehensive.
Enter Lotte, followed by Fritz in his dressing-gown and nightcap. I am
convinced he wears a mustard-yellow flannel dressing-gown like the one
in which Salvini strangles Desdemona! Behind them the other servants,
that the matter cannot be hushed up. It was a clever and a dramatic
plot! It is almost a pity that it should not make its chapter in the
unwritten history of society. And Gott! Gott! Fancy being still able to
love like that! It makes one almost envious. It is the last love that
makes a fool of the woman, and the first love that makes a man look as
foolish as he is.”
“I suppose something interesting is happening every moment in your
world?” said Styr, somewhat wistfully.
“All those little dramas are more or less alike. Only you are original,
dear Gräfin, and do, for the sake of this tired old brain, remain so. If
ever you succumb to your sex, I shall curse you. You are a great artist
in histrionics, but I am a little artist in Life, and quite as exacting.
Pay me fifty marks. I had to give that voracious Lotte a hundred,
besides the promise of a position in the Residenz.”
XVII
ROMANTIC MUNICH
For two days Ordham was really ill, or at least so uncomfortable that
his mind was quite averted from his evil fortunes. But with the quick
submission of his ailment to treatment alarm bells began to ring in his
brain once more. He wasted no time, however, cursing fate and his folly,
neither did he make any effort to consign their achievements to one of
those water-tight compartments of which he was so proud. He set his wits
to work and finally hit upon a compromise which promised to save both
his honour and his credit. Immediately upon his recovery he would go to
England, and by hook or crook get his debts paid. He would appeal to
Bridgminster first; finding him obdurate, he would confide his
predicament to his mother, and he well knew that to avert a scandal she
would raise the money if she had to sell her jewels or beg of her
relatives. Meanwhile he should have written to Frau von Wass, very
formally,—when had he ever written to her otherwise?—assuring her that
he should return to Munich within the month. If she followed him, she
could be kept out of sight in London. Otherwise, he might venture to
hope that before his return her common sense would have revived. If not,
he supposed he should be an ass, as other men had been before him; but
while his chances for the diplomatic career would be ruined, his credit
would be immaculate in the eyes of his world, and that would almost
console him.
As it was prudent to receive no visitors and as he was in no mood for
the fiction of other minds, he arrayed one of his tables with certain
books presented to him by his father long since, and whose contents he
must master before presenting himself before the Civil Service
Commission: histories of Europe, Asia, and America covering the period
between 1789 and 1880; Blackstone’s _Commentaries_, Ker’s edition, 1862;
Hallam’s _Constitutional History of England_; Mill’s _Political
Economy_; Smith’s _Wealth of Nations_. Before now, when ill or annoyed,
he had taken refuge in this austere masonry, and had found its
fascinations quite as powerful for the time as the jewelled streets of
literature where the creative minds displayed their wares. Sometimes,
too, he read them when mortified with the knowledge that he had not
“played up,” “risen to the occasion,” as an older man still gambling
with edged tools would have done; a manifestation of the quickness and
assimilative qualities of his intellect salved his wounded vanity and
induced a temporary scorn of youthful follies. But, truth to tell, it is
not likely that he would have opened one of these books for ten years to
come could he have passed his examinations without their aid.
During the six days of his convalescence he read steadily, and if the
severe diet did not elevate his spirits, it diverted his mind. From the
third day of his incarceration he wrote Frau von Wass a series of
pleasant little notes to keep her quiet, and, receiving no answer,
inferred that she was sulking. As she crossed her letters (she never
wrote him notes), he was thankful for the additional respite until the
eighth day of his seclusion; then he began to feel uneasy and to wonder
if she really meditated an attack on the Legation. He was on the point
of cutting his convalescence short and hastening to London, when he was
astounded to receive the following note from Hungary:
“DEAR MR. ORDHAM: The most dreadful thing has happened to me! I
am threatened with a goitre!! I spent a part of last summer in
the Bavarian Alps—I remember certain villages where every other
person had one—and the young men on Sundays with their arm
round the waist of some hideous disfigured girl, as if that
awful growth were a sort of heirloom! The sight made me quite
ill; and now I—who am always so particular about water—I am in
the wildest rage with myself for being so careless. The doctors
say that it will yield to treatment, but meanwhile I prefer to
keep out of sight. And you were to dine with me next week!
Please don’t think me rude. One of these days you will visit
Munich again and then I shall give a great dinner in your
honour.
“Yours sincerely,
“HÉLÈNE V. WASS.”
Then for the first time did Ordham fairly appreciate the load that had
weighed his spirits to earth, delaying his recovery, driving him to
pound his brain into a state of stupefaction before night. In a moment
he felt entirely well. Flinging his dressing-gown off and Blackstone
into a corner, he began to dress hastily that he might go out of doors,
take a drive, call on Countess Tann. He even felt an affectionate
impulse toward Princess Nachmeister and other friends that had given
much and asked little. He whistled, wondering that he had ever lost
faith in his star; he felt young,—“but young!” as these foreigners
would say, gay, insolent. His imagination took leaps and bounds: he saw
himself an ambassador; Bridg long since retired from a world in which he
had no place, leaving behind him an income which delivered his
illustrious heir from the fatiguing obligation of marrying one;
returning to Munich every year to hear Styr sing, and to sit for hours
in that delightful gallery—no doubt in time she would let him lie on
the divan while she sat in that odd American rocking-chair looking like
a friendly goddess—
But his jubilance came to a violent halt. His mind had tossed up
mechanically her avowed intention to save him. He had not given it a
second thought, so manifest was her inability to play any part in this
intensely personal crisis of his life. He recalled her eager insistence
that he grant her a week, the strength that had pulled him toward her
like a magnet, remembered that she had attempted greater things than
foiling a silly woman and failed in none of them.
The blood mounted to his hair, he pressed his lips together until their
soft boyish curves were obliterated. A wave of shame, anger, rebellion,
rose and choked him.
In a few moments it receded, left him quite cold. He was a wise young
man, in spite of follies. Whatever had been done—assuming that
vivacious note from Hungary to have been written under coercion—had
been carried to a finish. The episode was over. Frau von Wass announced
that fact herself. If mystery were here, it were a mystery best
unsolved. A water-tight compartment opened, closed. He refused even to
harbour a natural curiosity.
He returned to the pleasant occupation of arraying himself, one in which
he still took as much pleasure as any girl. Hines, his man, was ill, but
he was too happy to resent the trifling exertion involved in a lonely
toilet. It was a brilliant morning in late spring and he selected socks,
necktie, and handkerchief of a delicate sage green, and a dull grey suit
cut in a fashion that often tempted even the officers to turn and look
at him. Much to his chagrin, no part of his morning was ever wasted at
the barber’s. When he played tennis he exposed an arm with a proper
filamentous surface, and on the top of his head his hair, a light
burnished brown, grew as thickly as sprouting corn; but never a blade
had appeared on his face. For this he should have been grateful, as his
chief claim to regular beauty was the perfect oval of his face and the
clean yet rounded outline of the long jaw; but he yearned for a beard to
shave as a girl yearns for her first adorer to maltreat.
He finished his toilet in the course of time, sauntered out of the
Legation, and, entering the cab that had awaited him forty minutes,
concluded to drive for an hour, as it was too early to call. The
_kutscher_, whose vast expanse looked as if about to burst through its
rusty old livery, hunched down into himself after the fashion of his
kind, and, with his high battered hat tilted on one side of his red
face, his eyes half closed, and apparently in momentary danger of
rolling from his perch, gave the Munich _droschke_ that final touch of
style which is the despair of Paris and Berlin.
But he drove his fare safely and slowly about a city, which after a
week’s tormented seclusion seemed quite the most beautiful in the world.
The stately Renaissance capital with its Gothic corners; its old palaces
and modern public buildings, the former severe, the new ornate but
dignified and magnificent: its churches representing the vagaries of all
architectures; its oblongs and squares of green, set with statues of
public men and gushing fountains—torrents of sparkling water as free
and crystal as Alpine torrents; its classic Königplatz, as severe and
beautiful as Rome in the days of the Cæsars; its superb statues to the
Bavarian rulers that had transformed a mediæval stronghold into the most
artistic city in Europe; its innumerable terraces for beer drinking and
coffee; its winding river of many branches and massive bridges, poetical
name, and strange colour like melted ice reflecting pale green jewels;
and then the fields and woods, the stately drives and winding ways, of
the Englischergarten, where naught of Munich save its irregular but fine
and soaring sky-line can be seen,—all go to the making of a city whose
like is to be found nowhere on earth, and in which one can linger
longest alone.
The Ludwigstrasse, one of the most imposing streets in Europe, lined
from end to end with the high flat façades of the Italian Renaissance,
starts from the Feldherrnhalle, a copy of the famous Loggia in Florence,
and terminates far down in the perspective with the Siegesthor, a
triumphal arch in the fashion of Constantine’s, but surmounted by a
colossal “Bavaria” driving her lions in the direction of Prussia!
As Ordham’s cab turned into this street to-day, he found it crowded with
people, for it was one of those saints’ days, so numerous in the
Bavarian calendar, when every Münchener closes his shop, and, if the
weather be fine, walks the streets and fills the churches and cafés with
his brood. The students too were celebrating, either the saint or some
private deity of their own, for open _fiakers_ were full of them: blue
caps, green caps, red caps, according to their clubs, but all with the
same slashed faces, the same supreme approval of themselves and the
institution of universities, which gave so many of them their only
chance in life to play. Here and there among the throng were the more
impressive figures of officials in brass headgear and gala uniform,
white or the dazzling light Bavarian blue. Royal blue carriages, with
coachmen and footmen in blue and white livery, were leaving the Residenz
gardens, evidently bound for a family reunion at another palace.
Everywhere was life, movement, gayety, except, to be sure, in the
figures of the sentries standing before the palaces. These were as
wooden as only a German soldier on duty can be, but, although they
looked as stupid as no doubt they were, their eyes followed the throng.
Overhead, in the rich blue sky (the royal shade!) hung those low soft
foam-white masses of clouds composed by Nature for Bavaria alone; the
air was warm and light; not a breeze brought down the chill of Alpine
snows; although from highest windows the sharp tumbling crowded peaks
might be seen glittering through the haze that promised fine weather.
Ordham, as happy as if care had never approached him, lounged in the
corner of his uncomfortable _droschke_ and wondered why people went to
Italy: here there was so much of Italy, so much more besides. The old
Saxon at the base of his centuplicated self always stirred amiably at
the sight of the good-natured German crowd (unless it jostled him), and
nowhere was that crowd so good-natured as in Bavaria. It was too
accustomed to its liberal allowance of daily beer ever to overdrink or
crave the excitement of spirits; and although the students occasionally
took pride in spurring on their seasoned constitutions to a point which
enabled them to sing in the streets all night, even they found it too
much of an effort, and transgressed but seldom. It is only the American
student in these German universities and art schools who, unfamiliar in
his home with alcohol in any form, often becomes a sot; and is a
despicable object to behold, where the European is merely absurd.
There was scarcely a factory in the neighbourhood of Munich, little
business outside of its shops, which opened late and closed early, no
poverty, a prevailing belief that life was made to enjoy, not to take
with the fatiguing seriousness of northern climes. The Bavarian
understands Italy far better than he will ever understand Prussia.