Apparently she had forgotten him, and was staring into the deep arbours
beyond the river. Her profile looked hard and cruel, sharpened against
the black shadow of the trees, like the fine edge of an axe. He held his
breath as the expression deepened into sullen ferocity, then stood up,
overturning his chair.
“I should like to know every bit of your history,” he said, “every
detail.”
“How you would hate me!”
“I think not. Some people might have hated you the other night when you
looked like all the furies, but I was the more interested. The usual
does not appeal to me particularly.”
“But there is a limit! If ever I want you to hate me, I will tell you
the story of my life, as they say in New York.”
“Why in New York?”
“It is a bit of slang, and New York is the factory of much of the
American slang and a sort of clearing-house for the rest. Does not our
slang appeal to you?”
“I find it utterly meaningless,” he said candidly. “Ours is bad enough,
but at least it has some point.”
“That ours has none is the whole point. It takes the sharp American wits
to understand a new bit of slang or a new joke; the cryptic quality of
both, indeed, has played its part in sharpening those same wits. If you
are not ever on the alert over there, you go under.”
“Really? What a bore!”
She laughed as naturally as a child, but even in her mirth she no longer
betrayed the nurture of the West.
“You are so delightfully genuine! The American imitation of the British
aristocrat is the funniest thing in the world. You are not unhumorous
from our crude point of view, but I doubt if you could really be
affected if you tried, and you never would try. And yet over there you
would be thought a mass of affectations.”
“I hope I’ll never go ‘over there.’ I’ve scarcely ever met an American
that I liked. The women want too much waiting on, and I always have a
feeling that the men despise me.”
“Perhaps they do, understanding no type but their own; few have had the
opportunity to study the men of other races. To an American the man with
no capacity for work, to ‘hustle,’ no desire to fight his way to the
top, simply encumbers the earth. I hope you never will go over. No
matter how good an Englishman’s manners may be at home, they become
abominable the moment he sets foot in the United States. Even yours
might not stand the test—whatever that test is.”
“I am sure they are merely terrified. We are not accustomed to
reporters, interviewers, to an avalanche of invitations from people we
don’t know. It is enough to terrify any one; and being a shy race—not
having had your liberal education!—we shrink into a sort of panoply of
war. We don’t go over meaning to be rude, but we are driven to appear so
rather than show our fright and look ridiculous. One of my cousins
visited the United States a year or two ago, just after he came into his
title, and he was so hounded by reporters and lion hunters, that after
doubling and dodging until he was worn out, he gave himself the airs of
a stage lord and succeeded in freezing them off. Then the journalists
wrote vicious articles calling him a snob—It would seem that like a
good many others, they do not know exactly what that word means. And Jim
is as decent a little chap as you could find in England.”
“Well, you misjudge us too. You are always commiserating the American
husbands left at home to coin dollars while their wives swarm over
Europe. If you only knew how delighted the American husband is to get
rid of his wife for a few months out of the year! But come, let us go
in. I know that you long for an easy chair and to see your cigarette
smoke, while I dare not sit out too late. Who is not a slave of some
sort?”
XXII
PRINCESS NACHMEISTER AS GUARDIAN ANGEL
He graduated from the easy chair to the divan by imperceptible degrees,
for he had arts of his own; and in the course of a month of well-nigh
daily intercourse he was almost as much at home in the villa by the Isar
as Styr herself. Insensibly he began to assume airs of ownership, which
made Margarethe wonder how her sense of humour had hitherto survived
with so little to feed upon. He never gave her a sentimental glance,
nor, not even when they talked till two in the morning and he left by
the tower window in Kilchberg’s boat, did he in any way manifest a
desire to make love to her. Nevertheless, it was quite evident that he
had drifted into the assumption that the great prima donna, from whom no
other man in Europe could claim more than a bow, or a few meaningless
phrases at a rout, existed for him alone; that her time, her mind, her
affections, were his; that, putting the attitude into the American
nutshell, he owned her. And yet, while his bearing was a mixture of the
husband, the friend, the lover, and the spoilt child, it was all on the
mental plane; nor did he ever lose a certain formality, which indeed was
so integral a part of his birthright that no intimacy of his would ever
descend into the too dangerous places of familiarity.
If, as time went on, Styr was at some pains to analyze a relationship so
foreign to the usual, no such fatiguing process had ever occurred to
him. He accepted it all as a matter of course, as he did whatever good
things came his way; it was only the rare scowl of fortune that gave him
astonished pause. He sometimes threw a passing smile to an intimacy
which had all the surface appearance of so much more, and appreciated
the piquancy of this secret and unique experience. Now and again, too,
he threw a bone of gratitude to Frau von Wass for curing him of whatever
hankering for intrigue he may once have cherished, however languidly;
although he was under no delusion in regard to Styr, knowing well that
did he drop into even the usual gallantries he would be snubbed for his
pains. Commonly, however, he wasted no time on thought, not even upon
that inevitable future in which this rare and delightful companion could
have no part. But when was he inclined to invoke the future unless his
creditors were impertinent, or he dreamed vaguely of some strange
exalted happiness for which he saw no parallel in life? At present his
hopeful debtors were awaiting the sure enthusiasm of Lord Bridgminster
when his brilliant heir had passed triumphantly into the diplomatic
service; and if he sometimes dreamed, it was not of the woman he liked
best on earth: she, being always at hand, why, in heaven’s name, should
he dream of her?
Before leaving Munich, Princess Nachmeister had resolved upon a bold
move. Too astute to mention the name of Mabel Cutting, she yet confided
to the woman who, it was patent, alone possessed any real influence over
her favourite, that his mother and friends were arranging a wholly
desirable alliance for him, and only delayed bringing the two young
people together until the girl should have gained the poise and
experience of a London season, and he should have assimilated,
undistracted, the knowledge of German necessary for his examinational
ordeal.
“You are the subtlest of women,” continued the old diplomat. “Instil the
expedience of an early and wealthy marriage into the mind of this most
extravagant of princelings. Gott! One would think that my lord of
Bridgminster was eighty and living on pap, not a red-faced sportsman of
less than forty. That dear little boy! I fairly shudder when I imagine
his future without an income practically unlimited.” She pressed her
mummified old hand close upon Styr’s, a rare amenity in one that never
permitted Munich to forget that she was its social dictator and the
intimate friend of the Queen-mother. “Yes, that dear little boy! Cannot
you conjure up his unhappy fate if he flings away this great opportunity
and goes on at this pace for five years longer on the income of a
younger son?”
“I think the dear little boy will always fall on his feet, whether he
marry this particular heiress or not. It seems to be the mission of
certain of our sex to take care of him, extricate, engineer him. I have
had this greatness thrust upon me, and I seem humbly to accept it. No
doubt it is as much a part of my destiny as to cheer up the King at
midnight with that black auditorium between us!”
“Well, it is our duty to help others,” said the Nachmeister piously.
“And particularly these young things that think the world is their
footstool, and go on thinking so until too late. Two things our
_jüngling_ must do during the next two years: pass his examinations and
marry. You will not deny that he has the making of a remarkable man in
him?”
“He is astonishingly developed mentally, but a more lazy, lymphatic,
self-indulgent, supine creature I never met in my life. If he were an
American, that brain of his would be supplemented by the
‘git-up-and-git’ that would enable him to make a great man of himself
unassisted. Now, it will be others that will lead him, drive him, to the
goal. He’ll never lift a finger for himself.”
“Well, what matter?” asked the European. “I am sure he would not be half
so delicious did he have that dreadful—how do you call it?—No! He
would not be himself at all. If he becomes a great man, if his brain and
talents find their opportunity, what difference whether he or others
clear the way? And while I could wish myself thirty years younger, I am
quite resigned to accomplish my humble part behind the scenes and leave
to you the great work of giving our young friend to Europe. Will you,
dear Gräfin?”
“I have quite made up my mind to keep his lofty nose to the grindstone
until the last of August—if his mother sends in his name on the first
of June as she proposes, he must take his examinations within three
months. I do not leave Munich myself until the last week in August, and
I can make him work by threatening to get a leave of absence from the
King on the plea of ill health and to go yachting with some
acquaintances that invite me every year. Lutz promises to remain in
Munich if he will study faithfully.”
“What original phrases you have! Why did not we ever talk in English
before? Ah, yes! That will be a great work, but you will also help me in
the other matter?”
“Yes, I think he should marry, since he will not work.”
“Work?”
“The only fault I find with our charming youth is that he expects the
world to support him, and could not make ten dollars a month if he
tried. Nor would he try.”
“Gott! He cannot go out into the market-place like your Americans. He is
destined for the high places of the world. Surely you know our points of
view by this time, dear Gräfin. For portionless young men of our
aristocracies must rich young women be found, who thus buy a better
position than the one to which they were born. That is right and just.
And when a young man has the talents and prospects of our friend—Gott!
but he gives far more than he expects, even if he takes possession of
the entire fortune. And in any case, must not girls have husbands?”
“Who is the girl in question?”
“Ah, that I cannot tell you. Personally, I do not know Lady
Bridgminster; but a friend of hers writes me these things. I am assured,
however, that the girl is all that we could wish. Of course he will not
love her, but what of that? He will always be polite to her, and that is
much! much!”
“Why do you think he will not love her?”
“Why—why—” Excellenz was quite positive that he would be quite as
enamoured as any other young husband, during the honeymoon. “Oh, these
young men brought up by married women—they always love women older than
themselves. No doubt it will be you, _ma belle Marguerite_. That will do
him no harm—but make him marry the girl.”
“He will not fall in love with me. I shall see to it that no such idea
enters his head. As he will have to be engineered into love as into
everything else, he is quite safe not to discover my fascinations
unaided.”
“Ah, dear Gräfin, you Americans are so clever! Between us all, I feel
confident that our dear young friend will have one of the most brilliant
careers in Europe. Is it not so?”
“I do not worry in the least,” Styr had responded dryly.
Two days later Princess Nachmeister, satisfied, went off to drink the
waters at her favourite spa; but promptly upon the first day of every
week she received a letter from a member of the bureau of secret police.
XXIII
ONE OF THE POTTERIES
The greater part of Ordham’s reserve melted, as was natural, when he
sprawled on the divan with his coat off on a hot day, and his hostess
sat in her rocking-chair fanning herself and wearing one of those white
lawn wrappers that an American woman would retain in her wardrobe were
she elevated to a throne. By no means frank by temperament, he indulged
in frankness as a sort of luxury where his confidence had been won; and
feeling more intimate with Styr than he had ever felt with anybody, he
talked to her freely about himself, his family, his hopes, desires, and
sentiments toward most things, until Margarethe knew him far better than
either of them realized at the time.
But he was not fond of talking about himself, nor of personalities in
general. Books, the theatre, life, the mysterious back-waters of human
nature, interested him far more. He always brought out his London
newspaper, and being too lazy to read aloud himself, made her read to
him the news of the day and the editorial comment, while he explained
the relationship of the present to the immediate past. Her house was
littered with reviews, the works of the various masters he was obliged
to study, and of the novelists and poets of the day: George Meredith,
Turgénev, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning. They wrangled across the
dissecting-table of Maupassant, and picked the jewelled bones of
Flaubert.
She went often to the theatre with him, sitting behind the curtains of a
box; and, several famous _Gasts_ from other capitals coming to Munich
that summer, there were few pastimes they enjoyed more than this, the
drama being the one subject upon which they were in perfect accord.
Moreover, as the play was a diversion which she had never denied
herself, she experienced no uneasy consciousness of knocking down
outposts of old defences.
It was on the nights after the theatre that he remained until the small
hours; he always returned with her for supper, as she would not go to a
restaurant with him. There are no people wiser in human conduct than
servants, and the comment indulged in between the old butler and the
maids was upon the astonishing impeccancy of the relationship above
stairs. Had it been otherwise, these good Bavarians would have taken it
as a matter of course and made no comment whatever. The ingenuous morals
of the Bavarians were a source of evergreen interest to Styr, who had
been brought up in a country that wore silk over its rags. Upon one
occasion, however, she was more embarrassed than moved to ethical
musings. She was sitting with Ordham in the gallery after the evening
meal, when her housemaid entered and asked permission to leave on the
following morning for Leoni, her native village. Kurt withheld his
consent, so she appealed to her gnädige frau.
“What is the matter that you go so suddenly, and when do you return?”
asked Margarethe, who did not like her household upset.
“I think I cannot return, Frau Gräfin. One of my children is ill, and as
I shall soon have another—which will make three—Heinrich and I have
decided that it will now be cheaper to marry.”
Ordham, who was willing to discuss in the abstract all questions under
the sun, blushed scarlet and dropped out of a window into the garden.
Countess Tann remarked tartly:
“Indeed! It is a pity you did not think of it sooner, and then your
other two children would have had the advantage of legal birth.”
“That matters not, gnädige frau, and we must be sure of children to
support us when we are old and tired, before we marry and perchance have
none. And, then, apart, we can make more money for some years, and the
babies can be farmed until they become too many. Divorce is not easy
with us, gnädige frau, as in America, and we find this arrangement right
and just. It works well.”
Styr, who had never supposed the beer-soaked brain of a Bavarian peasant
to be capable of any reasoning process whatever, looked at the girl with
more interest. She was a plain heavily built creature, but nothing could
be more honest, amiable, and sensible than her face.
“Very well! Tell Kurt to give you a month’s extra wages and to engage a
new maid at once, I hope you will find your child better and have a
merry wedding.”
The girl kissed her hand, protested gratitude, and withdrew.
“After all,” said Margarethe, when Ordham ventured to return, “who shall
say? In Zulu land the biggest liar is king.”
“At least they have the advantage of the support of society! Ours are no
better and are such shocking hypocrites, when no worse—you never hear
of infanticide in this country. Probably most morality could be sifted
down to utility. It is wrapped up in charming and traditional
sentiments, but the kernel is plastic. These peasants find it more
economical after the third discretion to set up an establishment of
their own. For most of us, alas! the straight and narrow way is a more
comfortable fit in the long run.”
“The simplicity and safety of your philosophy is delightful, but I fancy
your temperament has saved you from a good many disasters. And I am told
that you very nearly scorched your fingers not so long ago, and that
only a goitre saved you. Do you ever think of poor little Frau von Wass
dosing and varnishing herself in her lonely castle?”
Ordham scowled, and when he scowled he no longer looked very young. “I
do not think of things I wish to forget,” he said shortly. “What is the
use?”
“None whatever! How fortunate you are. No doubt you will forget all this
a month after the inevitable end.”
“Oh! oh! How can you say such a thing?” He shook his finger at her, his
gayety instantly restored. “Besides, I shall never be very far away. I
shall always be coming back to see you. Munich, thank heaven, is in the
middle of Europe. I shall come here often, no matter where I am sent.”
“Suppose you are sent to St. Petersburg or the United States?”
“I shall manage not to be. Great heaven! Fancy not to be able to see you
for months at a time!” He looked appalled.
“What if you marry?”
“What difference will that make?” He moved his head impatiently and
sighed, throwing himself back on the divan and biting a tassel of one of
the cushions. “I dread returning to England. Only this morning I had a
letter from my mother. She has some English girl or other picked out for
me. At first she wrote a lot about an American girl with a fortune, the
daughter of a friend of hers; but now, it seems, these dear friends have
quarrelled, or my mother no longer admires Americans. At all events she
is all for marrying me to some rich English girl of my own class that
she has found.”
“No doubt she is quite right. Please don’t eat up my cushion.”
“I am _so_ sorry!”
“Is the English girl beautiful?”
“I suppose so. My mother would not venture to recommend her otherwise.
She knows that I hate ugliness as she does herself—and am not fond of
English girls.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Let her amuse herself. One
thing is positive: I shall marry to please myself.”
“I wonder?”
“What do you mean by that?” Ordham had eyes capable of a great variety
of expressions. Now they looked large and cold. “Do you fancy I could be
married against my will?”
“Always remember that the cleverest of men is no match for a clever
woman, and if two or three clever women—” She halted, recalling her
compact. “Why should you object to being steered into the matrimonial
harbour by your wise mother? She is far less likely to make a mistake
than you are, for you are too indolent to give such a grave subject the
proper amount of deliberation. And you would soon tire of any girl you
married, for you have the order of mind that demands variety. You can
find that in friendships, so why miss the opportunity of an advantageous
marriage.”
Ordham set his long jaw. “My mother shall not pick out my wife. The very
fact that she insisted upon one of any two girls would make me believe
the other was the better suited to all my requirements. I and my mother
are too like and too unlike to judge for each other.”
XXIV
THE CRACK IN THE JAR
There were times when Margarethe Styr, so long a recluse, felt
embarrassed and awkward in this new and unique intimacy, little as
Ordham suspected it; and there were others when she felt an almost
irresistible longing to practise the arts of the enchantress and unwrap
the lethargy in which her singular young friend appeared to be
swaddled—fold by fold. She hated the brute in man as sullenly as ever;
but personal vanity—which once had driven her to a ferocious love of
power—had been starved for eight years, and, refusing to give up the
ghost, sometimes muttered its rights. She imagined scenes in the gallery
with the windows open to the moonlight and the warm scented vocal night,
when this brilliant but lymphatic young man, under the arts of the
accomplished siren, not one of which she had forgotten, would suddenly
find himself the passionate determined lover. But the temptation rarely
lingered, and finally passed. She indulged in no dream at any time of
response, and any such violent dislocation of their present relations
could only result in rupture. He would never forgive her, and she should
always remember him as looking very young and ridiculous. As it was, she
rarely thought of his age, and it was not long before she realized that
she had in her hands the clay with which to model the one perfect
experience of her life. When she discovered that her mind was revelling
in this new and daily companionship, she wondered it had survived that
long period of loneliness to which she had condemned it. Styr was
essentially a man’s woman. If her brain accepted a mate at all, it must
be a man’s. Had she made intimates among her own sex, they would quickly
have been reduced to satellites or enemies.
And now, for the first time, her brain had found a mate, a fact the more
wonderful and beatific because it was the one glory of which she had
never dreamed even in those days when she took refuge in dreams. She
determined to forge a deep and mysterious bond with the ego of this man,
whom, had she been fifteen years younger and unblackened by life, she
fancied she might have loved and married. She had had everything else;
now she would have only the highest.
At first she could hardly formulate her wants, for the spiritual desires
are very elusive, especially when the brain is fed. Indeed, the line
between the mental and the spiritual desires is so fine that the spirit,
the soul, is, no doubt, merely the brain raised to a higher and more
intense degree both of desire and expression; it has its most
comprehensible illustration in the exalted pitch it sometimes reaches
under the influence of music, of Nature in the major mood, the account
of some stirring and heroical deed. In other words, the soul is the
brain in its best moments, when most nearly free of the flesh. It may be
that these moments illuminate for a second the misty horizon which
obscures the walls of death.
Fortunately there were few if any homely details to dissipate the magic
halo flung around this relationship. After all, Ordham had no real
rights, no authority, save such as she tacitly granted him. Her cook was
a personage of variety and attainments; her household ran on wheels
oiled and invisible; society, with its trivial and levelling
interruptions, was away; the ugly adder of money could never rear its
head between them. If ever the opportunity was granted a woman to snatch
a poem out of the vast prose heap of life, it was Margarethe’s, and she
had never at any time been the woman to oppose a desire that assailed
her in full strength. She would have been the first to make it clear
that if she had “reformed,” it was because she had outgrown the lower
offerings of her nature and found the higher more interesting and
satisfying.