thirty years, and I do not believe that one of them possessed more than
ten or twelve neckties at a time.”
“O—h—h—h—”
“Don’t dare to turn up your English nose at counts and princes—princes
of the blood, let me explain. Ach Gott! Act Gott!” She looked him over.
“And socks, handkerchiefs—all match! Do you assert that you have two
hundred and eighty-four handkerchiefs, shirts, pairs of socks? Answer in
idiomatic German or I shall make you write it.”
She did make him write it. Once more he lay back exhausted. Taking out a
handkerchief, he sniffed at it, then waved it gently.
“And scent!” She almost choked. “I have noticed it before, but was too
polite to make remarks. To-day I relieve my mind. Scent is obnoxious,
demoralizing, intended only for idle fine ladies and those others whom
we never mention. Why do you use scent? Mind your idiom.”
He sank into a posture almost reclining; he half closed his eyes and
half opened his mouth. He looked very naughty indeed. “Why?” he murmured
dreamily. “Because I find in perfumes one of the exquisite sensations of
life. I should like to lie in bed all day while some one sprinkled the
crude air with distilled odours—and dream—ah!”
“I’ve a mind to box your ears!” she cried furiously and with a very red
face. “And your German is as execrable as your sentiments.”
“Dictate it to me in pure German and I will learn it.”
“I would not pollute my lips. Sit up and say after me: ‘I am a silly
young English puppy, who should be striding through the Englischergarten
reciting German verbs aloud when I am dawdling in bed like a scented
harlot—’”
“Oh! oh! I shall not. How shocking of you! Mein liebes Fräulein!” And he
stared at her so incredulously that she felt uncomfortable.
“Well, you deserve to have harsh things said to you,” she growled, “and
you would demoralize the vocabulary of a saint. Also! I shall converse
with you no more. Conjugate the verb ‘_arbeiten_,’ and then read aloud
three pages of _Wallenstein_. If you mispronounce a word, it shall be
four, and there will be two more verbs. Sit up!”
He meekly obeyed her; and when she had stalked out he hastened to the
tennis court and played until luncheon.
That evening Fräulein Lutz, sitting alone in her musty little flat, her
spectacles astride her nose, muttering aloud over the notes she had
graciously been permitted to cull from the royal archives, became the
astounded recipient of an immense bunch of violets. They were royal
purple in colour and wet with what might have been the dew of the
Riviera, whence they came. But they were quite scentless. If she
suspected the donor she made no sign, and on the following morning was
more than commonly snappish. But the wide streamers of purple satin
ribbon which held the violets together decorated her best bonnet till
the last of her days.
XX
ISOLDE
The opera house, notwithstanding its great parquet and five tiers almost
encircling the auditorium, holding some twenty-two hundred people, was
always well filled; but Ordham had never seen it as crowded as to-night.
There had been an official announcement that the King would honour the
season’s last performance of _Tristan und Isolde_, and the blue lights
were burning all over the house, softening its classic severity into the
mysterious twilight of some vast sea grotto whose surges held captive
and coloured the rays of the moon. Of course, at the last moment the
King would change his royal mind; everybody felt sure of that; yet, so
obstinate is hope, even society had turned out, satisfied to honour
Styr, at least, before departing for the country. The boxes beside the
stage, and at the back, flanking the King’s (which rose from the
_balkon_ to the last of the galleries), always reserved for royalties,
their households and guests, were generally empty. To-night they were
filled, and, with the front row of the fashionable _balkon_, gave the
house a smarter appearance than usual; the good hausfrau, genuine lover
of all the arts as she was, never thought of wearing anything but her
street frock, consisting at this time of a skirt, overskirt, and
basque—whose points stood upright, back and front. Her daughter,
perchance, enlivened the useful shade of her costume by a bit of pink or
blue tulle about the turned-in neck of her basque. The good man was
shabby and comfortable in his business suit. Had it not been for the
liberal patronage of officers, the _parkett_ would have presented a
dreary expanse, and even the fashionable women, unless the court was to
be present, seldom thought the opera worthy of full dress. To-night,
however, there were many bare necks and fine gowns, jewels and feathers,
in the _balkon_ and loges, and even in the front rows of the _parkett_,
which many, Ordham among them, preferred as affording a better view of
the performers. The orchestra, under its great conductor, Lévy, never
fretted the most sensitive eardrum.
Few sit until the last bell has rung, and Ordham stood with the rest,
his back to the stage, viewing what to him was always an interesting
sight, and feeling so blithe and happy in his regained freedom, his
mother’s promise, received that morning, to persuade his creditors to
hold their peace until after his examinations, the flutter of
anticipation which he always enjoyed when about to hear Styr sing one of
her great rôles, that long after, when he sat in this opera house for
the last time in his life, he recalled that night and his boyish
spirits, and wondered if the world had remodelled itself meanwhile.
He saw many that he knew, and bowed in his formal way, lit now and again
by his quick smile, so full of youthful brilliancy and sweetness that
tired befeathered old women shook their heads and doubted if a young man
of so many attractions would ever amount to anything. But when
Nachmeister was favoured with that smile to-night, she nodded her head
sagely and felt that she could depart for her spa in peace on the
morrow. No man in love, or nearing the border-land of tumult, could
smile like that. She was a guest in a box beside the King’s, the one
allotted to Lola Montez during her brief reign in Bavaria, when Ludwig I
was king. She too had been elevated to the Bavarian aristocracy, and no
royalty won more than a passing glance when Countess Landsfeldt sat
magnificently in this box, flashing her bold black eyes at the
patricians that feared and snubbed her; far less clever than Styr, few
doors had opened to her. Princess Nachmeister was surrounded by a bevy
of young princesses, pretty with youth, but insipid, as most young
royalties are. The Queen-mother sat alone in the great box, looking old
and sad, not a vestige of her beauty surviving, nor even of that air
which is supposed to distinguish a queen from a hausfrau. She was dowdy
and unattractive, but she cared not; to-morrow she would be in her
humble retreat, Elbingen-Alp, alone with her memories and the new
consolation she had found in the Church of Rome. She, too, hoped for the
presence of her son to-night, but she, too, knew that he would not come.
It was half-past six when word came from the palace that his Majesty,
indisposed, had left for Linderhof; the last bell rang, darkness
descended upon the house, the overture began. As Ordham sat with his
eyes closed lest they be diverted by the fat red necks and plastered
heads, which shone in the dusk, mayhap by hungry jaws munching chocolate
or peppermint, his high spirits slid down into a fathomless abyss; that
tide of sweet despair swirled round and over him, driving repose,
content, gayety from every chamber of his soul, and filling it with
unrest, vague delicious terrors, that made him move his arms restlessly
until he succumbed utterly.
Never had been and never will be so full an expression of unsatisfied
longing. Surge upon surge from the opening phrase, presaging a yearning
that is not all bliss and a torment that is not all pain, so long as
mortals may die; surge upon surge of aching passion, sweet oblivion,
mortal disappointment, infinite desire, a love that only the immortals
could satisfy and only death can quench. The imagination reels along
with this appalling betrayal of mortal love. The curse and the boon of
imagination, the indomitable pursuit of happiness, even while the mind
holds its sides like a chuckling monk, the inevitable awaking, the cry
for death, annihilation, Nirvana,—all and far more are in this mighty
tonal dirge of the human heart to lift Wagner’s masterpiece to the apex
of all the masterpieces the world has preserved.
Unsatisfied longing! Ordham never listened to this music-drama that he
did not wonder its keynote should possess him irresistibly throughout
the performance and desert him when it was over. Even in the foyer,
during the pauses, he was the cool young modern with inherited
experiences in his brain that pushed him far from the sources of nature;
but when the surges beat on his spirit once more he was the immemorial
lover.
On the stage Styr was always beautiful and never more so than as Isolde,
with her soft golden wig, her dark eyes enlarged, their natural mobility
enhanced by subtle arts which other stage women secretly studied in
vain, her ivory-white luminous skin. In the first act she wore a flowing
gown of an imperial blue shade, the perfect lines of her long arms
enticing under floating gauze, her long throat rising bare with the
plastic firmness which she might have inherited from the women that
inspired the dreams of Solomon.
When Isolde raised herself slowly from the cushions of the couch in the
pavilion of the ship which was bearing her to the old king of Cornwall
she had consented to marry, abandoning something of her first attitude
of utter despair, and lifting her head toward the joyous singing of the
sailors, her eyes in one long look expressed everything. The dullest
could not entertain the delusion that here was merely an unhappy young
princess of “Irenland,” speeding against her will to fulfil a detestable
marriage, but a woman of the maturest passions, who had already drunk
deep of the cup of love, scornful of every law that might exist for
princess or peasant, and who had watched and waited, and accepted the
fact of betrayal.
And the audience felt itself, not in the presence merely of a woman
eaten with hatred, fury, desire for vengeance, but of a primeval force,
passion incarnate, such as Earth unlooses in convulsions that have
annihilated millions and buried continents. No other Isolde has ever
been as great as Styr, for no other has been able to suggest this
ferocious approach of a devastating force, this hurricane sweeping
across the mind’s invisible plain, tearing at the very foundations of
life. And all this she expressed before singing a note, with her staring
moving eyes, her eloquent body, still and concealed as it was, a gesture
of the hand. It was a concentration of the mental faculties, such as
gives weak women superhuman physical strength in moments of terror or
anger; in her own case they were whipped up like a whirlwind by the
released horrors in her soul, and used with a supreme exercise of art
that made her the risen Isolde.
When she started up, crying out to the wind and waves to shatter the
ship, the passion in her voice hardly expressed the rage consuming her
in plainer terms than that first long silent moment had done.
Styr’s transitions from wildness to gloom, to bitter wildness again,
then to a regal imperiousness, when she ordered Brängane to summon
Tristan (which must have made the royal women present envy the majesty
of soul that could inform poor commonplace flesh with so dread a mien),
were all done with that complete abandonment to her rôle of the great
artist who never for a moment addresses her audience. Then, once more,
she betrayed in her strained eyes and body her outraged womanhood as
Brängane was courteously repulsed by Tristan (alas! very fat), standing
with folded arms at the helm, and taunted by Kurwenal and the sailors.
Upon the tirewoman’s return, after a moment’s futile attempt at
self-control, she broke forth into a furious denunciation of the false
lover, mingling it with bitter reminiscences of a time so fatal to
herself when he was ill and at her mercy, and she healed and loved him.
The anger gradually faded from her voice, which softened into the most
exquisite tenderness and sweetness. “His eyes on mine were
fastened. . . . the sword dropped from my fingers!” In that brooding
moment every woman in the audience recalled the unforgettable, the eyes
of the young widened with terror and hope.
But that moment was brief. Her wrongs beat upon her brain again. With
their recital to the trembling Brängane she worked herself up to that
tremendous climax where, flinging her back against the drawn curtains,
with arms outstretched, she screamed out her curses, invoking vengeance
and death.
Never theatrical, and conveying the impression throughout the greater
part of that act, in which she ran the gamut of the passions, that she
let escape but the smoke of the terrible fires below, when she did give
way to ungovernable fury, she gashed the hidden rivers of blood before
the footlights to such a pitch that it is no wonder the Germans keep on
calling for more sensation, more thrill, with an insatiety which will
work the ruin of music and drama in their nation unless some genius
totally different from Wagner rises and diverts them into safer
channels. Beyond Wagner in his own domain there is nothing but
sensationalism. Rather, he took all the gold out of the mine he
discovered and left but base alloy for the misguided disciple.
Not the least impressive moment in this terrible act was when Styr,
after staring at the phials in the casket while the idea of death
matured in her desperate brain,—death for herself as well as for the
man that betrayed her,—raised her head slowly, her body to its full
height. She looked the very genius of death, a malign fate awaiting its
moment to settle upon the ripest fruit, the blithest hopes. A subtle
gesture of her hand seemed to deprive it of its flesh, leave it a talon
which held a scythe; by the same token one saw the skeleton under the
blue robe; her mouth twisted into a grin, her eyes sank. It was all over
in half a minute, it was but a fleeting suggestion, but it flashed out
upon every sensitive soul present a picture of the charnel house, the
worm, death robbed of its poetry, stripped to the bones by the hot
blasts from that caldron of hate.
When, having compelled Tristan to drink the love potion which Brängane,
who has no taste for crime, mixed instead of the draught of death, when,
from the dark abysses of suicide and murder, her soul rose slowly and
dazedly, but free, to the heights of the mightiest of all the passions,
Styr was so superb in her abandonment, so sweet in her surrender, she
carried this act of many emotions to a climax so acute and so
satisfying, that few in her audience but felt the sequel should be given
on the following night.
The curtain went down as Isolde was torn from Tristan’s arms by her
tirewomen and old King Mark boarded the ship. Styr appeared again and
again in response to loud cries, clapping, and stamping, which lasted
for nearly ten minutes. But at last the audience went forth to refresh
itself at the buffet. Ordham did not rise at once. He sat next to the
central rope and was undisturbed. He was holding fast to that last
picture of Isolde with her dazed yet illuminated eyes in which the love
allowance of Earth seemed to be concentrated, when his own eyes
unwittingly fell upon the woman that occupied the seat in front of him.
She had neatly turned back her overskirt and skirt, and from the
capacious pocket of her petticoat was extracting two large sandwiches, a
slab of chocolate, and an apple. He gave an almost audible groan and
went out into the foyer to exchange “_Wunderschöns_” with his friends.
The second act, greatest of all love scenes as it is, is far less of a
strain on the audience than the first. When Tristan and Isolde, having
expressed their joy in meeting in that succession of ecstatic love cries
which makes the words feeble and superfluous, sank down upon the bench
(that astigmatic couch!) and the love duet began, Ordham once more
closed his eyes and listened, with his soul detached from his body, to
that voice of fluid gold, melting, fainting, fiery, dreaming,
despairing, expressing every phase of the phenomenon of love. Never has
the ecstasy and the futility of love been expressed as here, and when
Styr, her voice returning from those starry voids where Isolde’s soul
had borne Tristan’s, passionately demanded death as the only relief for
the insupportable tension of body and spirit, although she did not move,
she conveyed the impression of a still more complete abandon. The tenor,
being of immense proportions, and with his eyes seldom roving from the
baton of the conductor, conveyed no such impression, or the scene might
have been unbearably descriptive. But in Germany either the tenor or the
soprano, by the entire respectability of their earthly mediums, can be
relied upon to modify the most licentious opera ever written.
As Ordham did not like this particular tenor, he remained in the foyer
until Tristan had finished his bleating and ranting in the last
act—that vicious test of a tenor’s histrionic powers, as of his vocal
endurance—and bribed the doorkeeper to let him enter later and stand
while Styr sang the _Liebestod_. Sometimes she rose to her feet as if
impelled upward by the intensity of her vision; but to-night she chose
to exhibit the physical weakness of delirium as the soul struggled free
of the relaxing flesh, the ecstasy of death. Styr always triumphed anew
in that supreme effort of Wagner, and on this night when the curtain
fell the audience “went quite mad.” While the house was ringing with
“Styr!” “Styr!” “Styr!” Ordham conceived a sudden resolution. He had
invited Princess Nachmeister, Mr. Trowbridge, and several other friends
to sup with him at Maximilia; and although nothing was better known in
Munich than that Styr never accepted invitations to supper after one of
her performances, was never to be seen, for that matter, he determined
to persuade her to join his party. It would gratify his vanity hugely to
succeed where all had failed, and he craved the new experience of
talking with her immediately after she had created the greatest of her
illusions.
He had been behind the scenes with Kilchberg, who loved a maiden in the
chorus, and he knew the location of Styr’s dressing room, although he
had never caught a glimpse of her in or near it. He was determined to
see her to-night; and he did!
He had made his way across the back of the stage, passed open doors of
supers who were frankly disrobing, too hungry to observe the minor
formalities, and was approaching the room of the prima donna, when its
door was suddenly flung open, a little man was rushed out by the collar,
twirled round, and hurled almost at his feet. The Styr, her own hair
down, her face livid, her eyes blazing, shouted hoarsely at the object
of her wrath, who took to his heels. The _intendant_ rushed upon the
scene. Styr screamed out that the minor official had dared to come to
her dressing-room with a criticism upon the set of her wig, and that if
ever she were spoken to again at the close of a performance by any
member of the staff, from the _intendant_ down, she would leave Munich
the same night. The great functionary fled, for she threatened to box
his own ears unless he took himself out of her sight, and the Styr
stormed up and down, beat the scenery with her hands, stamped, hissed,
her pallor deepening every second, until it was like white fire. Ordham,
half fascinated, half convulsed, at this glimpse of the artistic
temperament in full blast, stared at her with his mouth open. She looked
like some fury of the coal-pit, flying up from the sooty galleries on
the wings of her voice. Her words had been delivered with a strange
broad burring accent, which Ordham found more puzzling than her tantrum.
Suddenly she caught sight of him. If possible her fury waxed.
“You! You!” she screamed. “Go! Get out of here! How dare you come near
me? I hate you! I hate the whole world when I have finished an opera!
They ought to give me somebody to kill! Go! I don’t care whether you
ever speak to me again or not—”
Ordham, not knowing whether he should feel insulted or philosophical,
beat a hasty retreat; and, remaining late at Maximilia, had no time to
ponder upon the matter that night. He had barely awakened in the morning
when he received the following note:
“DEAR MR. ORDHAM: You will recall that I told you it would be
better to think of me as a stage woman only?—although at that
time I did not include the greenroom among your possible
experiences. If I cannot make you understand the fearful state
of excitement which an opera like _Isolde_ induces, then indeed
I hope you will not forgive me, never come near me again. But I
fancy that you have already forgiven me. I was a wild beast. The
actress born with the power to portray Isolde has it in her to
be the worst woman in the world—much simpler than to reach
those heights (her heights) toward which, alas! there is little
pulsion. It is all over a few hours later, after I have taken a
long walk in the Englischergarten, then eaten a prosaic supper
of cold ham and fowl, eggs perchance, and salad! But for an hour
after those triumphs I pay! I pay!
“Do not reply to this, but come on Thursday to supper or not, as
you will.
“MARGARETHE STYR.”
XXI
THE WOMAN BY THE ISAR
Ordham had no intention of ignoring the impromptu to which he had been
treated, whether she expected it of him or not, and on the following
Thursday evening, as they were drinking coffee in the garden after
supper, he said abruptly:
“I should not have recognized your voice the other night if I had not
seen you—ah—when you demolished that poor little man. Is—is it the
native American?”
“One variety.” Her present tones were dry, but without displeasure. “It
was the voice of the Middle West. When I was Peggy Hill, working in the
coal-mines—and for several years after—the burrs on my voice were as
thick as a chestnut tree’s. Insensibly, in New York, they began to peel
off, and soon after I went on the stage I fell in love with purity of
diction and studied with an English teacher of elocution until I
retained not a trace of even the generic American. But when I lose my
temper it bursts out of its little dungeon exactly as other bad
characteristics do when we are off guard. I used to flatter myself that
I had uprooted certain qualities I resented having been born with, but I
have discovered that they occupy remote chambers of my brain, biding
their time. Perhaps I was one of the viragoes of the French Revolution!”
“Did you—once let it go rather often? Somehow you seemed so wonderfully
natural.”
“I let it go pretty often down in that opera house. Men have such tact!
Fancy telling a singer at the end of a performance, when every nerve in
her body is a red-hot humming wire, that her wig was not on straight!
The _intendant_ came to me one night after the first act of _Isolde_ and
presumed to criticise my tempo. I threw a hand mirror at him, and he has
never visited my dressing-room since. I would have treated the King in
the same fashion, but he is the one man that would never make such a
mistake. Wagner has a good deal to answer for! The lyrics are excitable
enough, but the music of The Master creates a madness; it sets up a
vibration in the nervous system, which, added to the obsession of the
characters, lifts us bodily from the plane of the normal, and no doubt
works permanent changes. I am talking, of course, of singers that have
temperament as well as voice.” She lit a cigarette and leaned back in
her rustic chair. “Before?—Oh, yes. But less and less as time went on.
Tantrums do not hurt a prima donna; in fact they are of use in inspiring
the authorities with awe. But in the private life—well, the price I
sometimes had to pay was too high. I soon stopped throwing things about
like a fishwife; and all the rest of it.”