time it was because she pressed down the eyelids of his drowsy passions,
his indolent senses; but as the weeks passed he vaguely understood that
he was happy, and that only her insistent spurring made him stick to his
studies and prepare for a future in which at times he quite lost
interest, so perfect was the present. Styr had resisted the demoniacal
teasings of her vanity, but she had no intention of denying it rights
both natural and harmless; and being a woman as well versed in man as
Mercator in the surfaces of Earth, she knew exactly how far to go, when
to dazzle and allure him with glimpses of the hidden treasures in both
their natures. To have been always merely the good comrade, sexless, the
artist dwelling in regions remote from the common interests of life,
would have been as fatal as to have laid down all her arms with a sigh
and confessed herself the eternal woman. There were times when they
quarrelled violently; and, indeed, being mistress of many moods, and not
sparing in the use of them, she gave him no opportunity to tire of her
and long for the wide circle in which he had hitherto fed his love of
variety. She even made him accept an occasional invitation to a castle,
and they took many little excursions into the country, where they read
and talked and fell silent under the trees of the woods, or on the
shores of some lake with a chain of Alps glittering in the distance. For
the purposes of a romantic friendship Bavaria is unexcelled!
But if Ordham, owing to his languid temperament and overdeveloped mind,
was immature in character and torpid in those recesses of his
masculinity inaccessible to any currents not sent out by the heart, he
was by no means blind. Although too indolent and too content to analyze
deeply, even as time went on, there were moments, generally as he sat by
his window at midnight, or loitered up the Isar in the small hours, when
he speculated upon the possibility of falling in love with this woman,
when his mind was even briefly lit up with the suspicion that he would
love her now, were she not so supremely indifferent to the unwilling
fascination he had exercised over some other women. But while in other
circumstances this fact alone might have piqued his vanity into storming
that citadel prisoning all the mysteries of her sex, by this time he was
quite determined to marry between his examinations and his first
diplomatic appointment; and the mere thought of a love affair with
Margarethe Styr, rousing him to his depths as it must, and absorbing
every faculty, filled him with terror. She must always be in his life;
no girl and her millions should interfere for a moment with this
wonderful relationship he had established with the most wonderful of
women; but to love her would mean hurricanes and earthquakes in his
inner life, whose mere vision not only alarmed the lotus eater in him,
but cast an ominous cloud of warning over his future. He might forget it
at times, but more and more the uneasy sense of the necessity to provide
for that future before it was too late recurred to him under the renewed
if gentle manipulation of his mother.
Once he went so far as to resolve that if he detected a disposition on
her part to deepen their intimacy, he should leave for England by the
next train. This resolution took form one Sunday afternoon when he was
returning from a visit to Princess Nachmeister, established for a few
weeks in her castle, splendidly poised above lake and woods in the Alps
of Tyrol. There had been a large house party, and he had felt frivolous
and worldly and irresponsible, in all respects much as he had felt
before he met the woman with whom he had found so many more resources
than he had dreamed existed in human intercourse. Nachmeister had made a
lion of him, had informed her guests, among whom were dignitaries of
state, that he was the cleverest young man in Europe, and certain of
wielding the baton in the diplomatic orchestra during her lifetime. He
was fancying himself mightily.
Nevertheless, he went at once to the villa by the Isar, for he never
broke an appointment with its châtelaine. He found Styr in a villanous
temper. She had received a late summons to sing in the Hof at midnight
for the King. When she unceremoniously turned him out, he was glad to
go, and wondered that he could have apprehended sentiment in this
sullen, angry, almost ugly woman, who, after a separation of nearly
three days, had scarcely a word for him. She had communicated with him
in whispers, which forced his own voice down to the same artificial
register, and made him feel as absurd as, no doubt, he looked.
“Good-by,” she had whispered in the hall, where he happened to have met
her (he had his own gate key); “come to-morrow. I am in the right frame
of mind to sing Kundry! I shall pinch Parsifal when I get him under my
mantle, and he won’t dare scream. The idea of commanding a performance
of _Parsifal_ in this weather!”
“Oh, well,” he whispered back consolingly, “you haven’t sung for a
month, and your voice might get rusty.”
“Go away.”
As Ordham, half an hour later, strolled up the Maximilianstrasse,
admiring the brown fairy-like palace on its terraces at the end of the
perspective (which always looked to him as if it might have been dreamed
by some homesick Italian poet), he was pricked by a sudden longing to go
and call on a girl. He cared little for girls as a rule, and was well
content to be approved by women of the world; but, after all, he was
very young, and the mere youth in him moved restlessly now and again as
if with an unappeased, if intermittent, hunger. At Princess
Nachmeister’s castle he had flirted with three or four charming married
women, and upon his return he had hastened to the side of the mortal he
liked best on earth. But—well—he would have loved an hour of nonsense,
a game of tennis, a gay meaningless flirtation with an innocent
light-headed and extravagantly pretty girl. He wondered if the youth in
him would last much longer. Had not Styr petted and spoilt him when the
mood took her he should have felt quite forty. And he would have enjoyed
that extraordinary friendship the more for the occasional relief of a
shallow but charming girl. But girls in Munich were as scarce as praise
from his Lutz. The thought of her was like a sudden bracing wind out of
the northeast. At least he was making progress under her lash that would
enable him to face the board of examiners before the end of the summer
with few misgivings. He also had taken up French again, and he delved
for two hours a day in the other lores prescribed by the guardians of
the diplomatic service; so that after all the time left at his disposal
for regrets and analysis was limited.
XXV
FRIENDSHIP AT FOUR IN THE MORNING
On the following day, Styr, who had never been more gracious, asked him
if he would walk with her in the park next morning at four of the clock.
For a moment he felt so blank that his mouth stood ajar; but not only
had he grown accustomed to fall in with her plans, but he had an
immediate vision of himself and the heroine of his romantic friendship
alone in the vast solitudes of the Englischergarten, and assented with
enthusiasm. Margarethe, when not out of temper (when he, too, could be
very sulky and obstinate), never failed to carry him whither she listed;
but this mere tantalizing of the natural romance of youth was to breed
results of which Styr, far-sighted as she commonly was, had no
presentiment.
He went to bed at nine o’clock, an event that had not occurred within
his memory. On the following morning at three he fumbled into his
clothes under the impression that he was a somnambulist, and wished
between prodigious yawns that Frau von Tann had chosen to explore the
mysteries of the Englischergarten by moonlight. But when his gloomy
servant, who had been ordered to rouse him, brought him a cup of strong
coffee, his wits quickened. Further encouraged by the waiting
_droschke_, in whose appearance he had placed little faith, he repaired
to the Schwabing bridge in the proper frame of mind to meet a
dark-browed woman muffled in a long white cloak and with a white veil
floating about her head.
She led him with shining eyes past the lake with its sleeping swans,
past the sweetly smelling fields, through silences as of untrodden
mountain tops. The stars were crowding one another out of the deep cold
blue of the sky; from the earth rose strange subtle perfumes which made
him blush for his decadent Roman love of artificial scents; the shadows
were dark on the open reaches; distant trees stood out black and sharp;
the woods seemed huddled together; even the Isar crawled silently in its
sleep.
Suddenly Styr flung out her hands, the palms upturned to the flickering
sky. She looked like a priestess about to chant her pæan to the gods.
Off the stage she had never appealed so directly to that artistic and
sensuous side of his nature he had assiduously cultivated, and he gazed
at her, stirred by a formless but eager sense of expectation which he
did not comprehend until long after. He did not even attempt to
formulate the wish that she were a goddess and himself a god, and that
they had floated to a plane where no sound stirred but the music of
Wagner; but as she turned her head and her eyes met his, she looked so
young, and at the same time so different from all women, that
involuntarily he moved a step forward.
“Oh!” she cried. “Do you know that this is the very first time in my
life that I have known—lived—romance? Romance! The mere word is
wonderful. During all the years of my youth I did not even believe in
its existence. To think that once I was
sixteen—twenty—twenty-eight—the ideal age—and that I never once
glanced over the wall into the lovely mysterious gardens of other
women’s youth! It is incredible that I never at least dreamed
of—anticipated it.”
“But if it has come—what matter?”
“No, it does not matter. But oh, poor poets! poor psychologists! That I
can drink this full cup of romance without finding the commonplace dregs
of love at the bottom! All the other senses and appreciations are
intensified, instead of being submerged, as when one is surrendering
ignominiously to the race. I feel that I have attained heights that
other women, silly victims that most of them are, have not even the
power to imagine. My hands are in the secret caskets of life, and all
the jewels are mine! mine!”
She looked so triumphant, so wholly beautiful, so like Isolde, that the
colour mounted to his face, although she frightened him a little, and he
wished he were ten years older. But she never gave him time to feel that
he was not rising to the occasion (although this agonizing sensation
visited him occasionally in the retrospect), any more than she ever
permitted an electrified moment to prolong itself until it had kindled
fire. She came down to earth abruptly.
“Let us walk faster. I want to walk in the woods, and if we loiter we
shall take cold.”
But as they entered those dim glades which might have been the depths of
remote forests, he asked abruptly, “Am I your lover?”
“Yes—in a new fashion!” She spoke gayly. “It is a sort of mental
marriage. Are you content?” She looked at him with the humorous flash in
her eyes which always lit up the breach between their ages.
“I think it is rather odd that I am, you know. I must be as cold as a
fish—or else that woman I told you about so put me off—”
“Well, don’t put your good fortune under a microscope. Be grateful that
when you do awaken you will have preserved the freshness of youth to
give zest and charm to the energy of maturity.”
“Suppose I never do awaken.”
“You will. For long I wondered why you had so many of the qualifications
as well as something of the temperament of genius, without any one of
the creative gifts. But I have come to the conclusion that you have a
very rare gift—that of the supreme lover.”
“I?”
“It will wake up in due course, that genius of yours—oh, yes.”
“And why not for you?” He was still conscious of no desire to touch her,
but what man could resist flirtation in such surroundings?
“Because neither of us wishes it. We have a perfect thing. Why shatter
it? When you cross that dark threshold, you never know! If I were
fifteen years younger and of your own world—”
“You would not be you. I don’t know—I have a feeling—a
presentiment—that one day I shall love you. I sometimes have a vision
of myself ten years older living with you in Venice.” He spoke with
sudden energy. “I am certain it will come to pass.”
“Venice smells so dreadfully. I had no idea you were given to romantic
musings.”
“I am not. It is, as I said, a sort of fleeting vision, a presentiment.
I know that you will always be in my life; and naturally I see you where
one can command the greatest seclusion. I do not picture myself wholly
your lover, but I always see you quite alone with me—when I am older,
and, somehow, different.”
“Well, remember that I too shall be older,” she replied with mock
sadness. “By that time, no doubt, Wagner will have ground my voice to
powder, and I shall be playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, or
introducing Ibsen to London and New York.”
She had succeeded in diverting him. “Ah! you would go to America—you
intend to go there some day?”
“Long before my voice has gone, I hope. If I could create a furore in
London I should not hesitate to go to New York at once. And—after
all—it is my own city; as much mine as if I had been born there, for I
went so young. The hatred I felt for it when I left has fled—with the
memory of other things; I dream of it now sometimes, and love every
stone of it. One can never continue to hate one’s own city, which must
always stand out in the memory as one’s best friend. Besides, when you
look down upon the world—Society—from one of its own pedestals,
nothing matters; no one can hurt you.”
“Would any one try to hurt you?” he asked anxiously. “Do you fear any
one now?”
“Not here. But if I went to the land of the free to interpret an
unpopular master unprotected by personal fame,—which, in American eyes,
only London can give, and only New York set the final seal upon,—I
should be hounded into the Hudson River.”
An intonation started him upon a fresh tack. “Did you ever think of
self-destruction?”
“More than once. No doubt you have yourself. But because you are young
and temperamental. I contemplated putting an end to myself for no such
poetic reasons. There were more reasons than one, and generally it was
the intense vitality of my mind that deterred me, perhaps an insolent
sense of power that would not permit me to lose in the game with life.
Now and again, I loved too much—what I then called love; but the
reflection that no man was worth the sacrifice restored my cynicism, and
cynicism is fatal to that intensity of egoism which counsels
annihilation. Strange to think that I once was hard and cynical!”
“At least you might tell me something of your love attacks.” He
continued artfully, “I shall never feel really in your confidence until
you do.”
“Love affairs of that sort are too commonplace to remember. At first I
loved once or twice out of mere youth and racial instinct. But I soon
got over that. The great affair? Well, he was the conventional hero,
fashioned by satirical Nature for the crudity of youth. He was
handsome—but handsome!—brilliant, charming, above all, inconstant—the
sort of man that keeps a woman questioning, ‘Will he come?’ Such a man
would only incite me to amusement to-day; no type is so ingenuous. But
then—well, I tried to kill him one day. He was too quick and too strong
for me. I was spared the vulgarity of a newspaper scandal; even a
whisper of the attempt never passed my threshold; I took good care that
it should not. The mere vision of half a column of headlines with my
name in letters as black as Pluto did as much later on to extinguish my
love as my separation from the man—I never saw him after. But I had
been possessed with the lust to kill, to annihilate, to whirl him and
myself out of life. And it was long before that rage, which included
everybody and everything on earth, subsided. But at last I came to my
senses. And—who knows?—all my life seems to have been but a schooling
for my art.”
“Then you regret nothing?”
“I waste no time in futilities, and there is nothing of the Magdalene in
my composition.”
“What would you have done if you had not discovered your voice?”
“No doubt I should have discovered in time that I was an actress. Had it
not been for that smouldering mental fire in me which always seemed to
whisper, ‘Wait! wait!’ I should have become the most famous courtesan of
modern times. I had it in me! There were intervals when Cora Pearl
inspired me with envy. It was mere instinct—rather the watch-fires of
genius—that led me to shun the public eye, even when on the stage.”
“You would have been a horrible woman if you had chosen to go that
pace!” he exclaimed, with a sudden access of vision. “You had it in you
to become all bad.”
“All.”
“Was art your only hope? Suppose you had loved the right sort of man?”
“Such women don’t love the right sort of man. They are born off the key,
and they do not meet the men to inspire them with ideals. Nor women
either. Besides, after that I never wished to love again. The only good
thing about love is the getting over it. Good God!” She flung out her
hands again. “The delight of that recovery, the sense of freedom, the
intoxicating liberty! Love to women of my nature is a hideous slavery,
the sooner we become flint the better. Leave love for the conservators
of the race. But enough of such black subjects this beautiful morning.
The sun climbed the Alps while we were in the woods, and the stars have
gone out. Let us return. I have a make-up for you! After breakfast I
shall take a photograph—but it will flatter you!”
Some time before she had taught him how to use her camera, and he had
taken a series of photographs of her in the costumes and attitudes of
her various rôles. Thus it happens that to-day Bridgminster is the only
person living who can recall Styr without the aid of memory, for even in
London, when she realized the half of her supreme ambition, she would
not be photographed for the public. And as Ordham, in spite of his
laziness, could do most things well that he gave his mind to, these
photographs, some twenty in number, are not only admirable specimens of
the amateur’s art, but such approximate presentments of Styr that it is
to be hoped they will yet find their way into a public gallery.
She let him sleep for two hours after breakfast, then sending for him to
come to her in the garden, dressed him in a flowing wig, a velvet
jacket, a low soft collar, and wandering scarf. Then she stood off.
“Pout out your lips. Make your eyes heavy with sullen dreams. There! You
are Rossetti at nineteen. You look as if about to die of a rose in
aromatic pain. How have you escaped the æsthetic craze, at the very
least?”
“I don’t think that I have. Only whereas they think they can do things,
I know that I cannot, and do not propose to make myself ridiculous to no
end. Please hurry. This wig is very warm.”
He sent the photograph later to his mother, and it left her breathless
for quite a moment. As much as she could fall in love with any man, she
had fallen in love with Rossetti. At least he had haunted her girlish
dreams, and perhaps those of her early married life until the world
absorbed her. Of course she had never seen him in his beautiful youth;
and to him—then deeply in love with Elizabeth Siddal—she had been
nothing more than an interesting sitter whom her august papa had not too
graciously allowed him to paint. But stranger things than that have
happened in Nature’s workshop.
XXVI
FRIENDSHIP IN A BORROWED FRAME
The King suffered from toothache. Detesting dentists, and knowing from
bitter experience that it would endure until the nerve died, he
indifferently granted Styr’s request for a month’s leave of absence.
Chaperoned by Fräulein Lutz, she and Ordham went on what they called a
walking tour in the Bavarian Alps. Travelling third class, both for the
picturesque companionship it afforded and to escape awkward rencounters,
they took the train from village to village, and spent several hours of
each day leisurely climbing, driving, wandering in the woods, or
floating on the brilliant waters, as deeply toned as emerald or
sapphire, of Alpine lakes. Avoiding hotels, they lodged on the outskirts
of their villages, and Lutz went to market every morning. They took no
servants with them, and nothing could exceed Ordham’s devotion in
carrying wraps and ordering carriages. But this, they were not long
discovering, was the limit of his usefulness. Either Styr or the
chaperon bought the tickets, found the porters, engaged the rooms,
bargained with guides, ordered the meals, made out the routes, and asked
all necessary questions. On the morning after their arrival in
Oberammergau, Fräulein Lutz almost burst into Styr’s bedroom.
“Mein Gott!” she exclaimed. “But I have just prepared his bath! But I,
Hiobe Lutz! This is the climax. I met him wandering in the hall with his
eyes half opened and seeming to look for something he could not find. He
wore a pink dressing-gown with green facings, and his bare feet were not
even in slippers. I asked him if he were ill. He said, No, that he had
no bath. It never occurred to him to walk downstairs and ask for his
tub, nor even to call out of the window. But he looked so helpless, so
_young_, that I—Himmel!—I ran downstairs and found for that giant baby
his tub, which had been put in the shed. Then, accompanied by the
daughter of the house, I carried it up to his room—then returned again
with jugs of water, hot and cold! He thanked us ‘so much.’ Oh, he has
the prettiest manners. They never fail. But myself, I shall have to
cross the English Channel and pass those examinations for him.”
“You know you are devoted to him.”
“What is it?” asked Lutz with sudden suspicion. “Can it be this
hypnotism they talk about?”
“Charm comes from the same root, I fancy. And then he really is
helpless. How can people, even the rich and great, bring up a boy like
that?”
Lutz nodded in sage disgust. “The aristocracy! Ach Gott! What will
become of them when the next French Revolution, so to speak, comes? How
they must have suffered, those poor pampered things! It was not the fear
of death. That was nothing. Race can always meet downfall and death with
an air—an air that sustains them within as without. But before the
scaffold! When they had to dress, to wait on themselves!—to think! Ah,
that was the tragedy. I feel sorry for these poor helpless aristocrats;
but no, I would not abolish the institution, because it gives to us
humble bourgeois the savour that Europe furnishes for America! So, when
I saw that poor helpless boy—who can talk like his grandfather—ach! I
cannot understand him. He is made up of too many parts, contradictions,
for my old brain. On the whole, I should like to spank him.”
Styr laughed and put the finishing touches to her costume of brown
linen, which looked simple and bucolic, but had been cut in Paris, and,
with a hat and veil as soft and rich in their shading as a pheasant’s
wing, was no less artistic and becoming than the white frocks she put on
for supper. A few moments later Ordham entered their common sitting
room, fresh, smiling, unconscious of the comment he had inspired. He had
quite forgotten the episode of the bath.
He shook hands with Countess Tann and Fräulein Lutz in his usual formal
manner, his eyes beaming with pleasure as they always did upon entering
the presence of his chosen friend, unless something had happened to put
him out of temper. As he was so much more amiable and happy even than
usual this morning, Styr suddenly understood how he must have missed his
servant, although he had never referred to the man. He was feeling
pleasantly cared for once more, even if he had ungratefully forgotten
the author of his well-being. No doubt the warm water for his bath had
often failed to appear, and he had none of the national mania for “cold
tubs.” From this time forth, until he was safely deposited in the
Legation once more, Lutz grimly made a nurse of herself. She not only
saw to his bath, but she packed and unpacked his trunk, and discovering
that many objects were mateless, divorced, of course, in the laundry,
she wrote to Hines for a new supply. He accepted all these attentions
with the most charming courtesy, but his lack of emphasis amused Styr,
although poor Lutz took his polite acquiescence in her devotions as a
matter of course.