were to breakfast, and murmured his delight, calling Styr to join him
with an imperious motion of his head. They had arrived after dark and
seen little of the long straggling village on the bank of its narrow
stream. Their lodging was at the very end of the street, where the road
branches to Ettal, and from the balcony they could see the romantic
winding village in the narrow valley, above which towered a peak
surmounted by a cross. There were mills with great wheels on the river,
dilapidated bridges, peasants in costume, the usual church with its
domed steeple high on its terrace, and surrounded by tombs. Even the
roofs of the houses were picturesque, the women working in the narrow
fields. On all sides, covering the mountains, was the forest, and over
all a peace indescribable.
As they had brought their own coffee, and fruit was abundant, they
enjoyed their breakfast even if the bread was sour and the butter
ill-made; luxuries they had dismissed from their minds. When it was
over, leaving Lutz to consult with their hostess, Margarethe and Ordham
strolled through the village. Oberammergau resembled many other Bavarian
and Tyrolean villages up to a certain point, and then its individuality
began. On the plastered façades of the pointed houses were beautiful
religious frescoes as soft and mellow as those of Ghirlandajo, and in
the church, larger and more graceful than many, were two hideous
bedizened skeletons of saints. Protected by glass, and gorgeously
arrayed, their awful skulls and hands, chemically preserved, seemed to
cry out for the last act of death, which would grant them the dust and
oblivion of the grave. The church was half full of men and women,
dropped in for a casual prayer, and all dressed in the picturesque garb
of Ober-Bayern, so rare these few years later.
Even the people of this village of the Passion Play are different from
those of other villages. Bavarian peasants are kindly, but these of
Oberammergau have an exquisite and unfailing courtesy, and every child
greets the stranger with “_Grüss Gott_,” and runs to kiss his hand.
Although it would be several years before the next performance of the
Passion Play, many of the men wore their hair long, for a religious
drama of some sort is given every year. The very expression of these
people indicated a superiority of intelligence and character. All hoped
to be chosen, or rechosen, for the next great performance; and few in
that village, where the light was as searching as ever was turned upon a
throne, but cultivated the best that was in him. It is probably the only
spot on Earth where Christianity is a working success.
Ordham and Margarethe lingered at the windows of the shops, admiring the
wood carving, and bought a number of crucifixes and religious groups for
the servants at home. Finally, they sat down at a table outside one of
the cafés, where the Christus of the last performance, who looked as
much like Christ as any mortal can, was drinking beer and eating a large
piece of black bread and Swiss cheese. Our friends listened for a few
moments to his animated discussion with a neighbour upon the utility of
damming the river, that it might do more good in summer and less harm in
winter. When he had finished his repast he rose, bowed profoundly to the
strangers, and sauntered off, followed by a troop of children that all
hoped to be Christuses in their turn.
“I should think it must be a terrible strain,” said Ordham. “Surely
human nature must break out occasionally.”
“No doubt it does. But these people are saturated with the spirit of the
Passion Play, and so have their ancestors been before them—for three
hundred years. They are not only moral but happy. The first time I came
here, one young woman, whose histrionic talent was remarkable, told me
that she had refused two offers from Berlin managers because life would
be a blank to her if she could not look out of her window every morning
and see the cross on Kochel. This is the only community in the world
which is consistent generation in and out to a high ideal.”
“I wonder if it is a haven of rest to outsiders,” said Ordham, who was
staring at her after his habit, his cigarette cold. “Could you come here
if your voice failed you; if, for any reason, you could not act—come
here and find peace?”
Margarethe shook her head. “For a week—a fortnight. Then I should fly
to the very centres of distraction. This peace is not for the outsider.
It is not sold in the shops with the crucifixes. It takes generations to
make. Even if one brought here a peaceful, even a religious, mind, one
would never feel quite the real thing. And yet I do not believe there is
a self-righteous person in Oberammergau. Alas! Our tête-à-tête is over.
Here comes your grenadier.”
Ordham hastily lit a cigarette as his Lutz strode up, exclaiming: “Did
you think to escape your lesson? We shall have it here. It shall be
conversation and dictation.”
“The morning is so beautiful—you are going away?” Margarethe was
opening her parasol.
“But yes,” said Lutz severely. “Is her place here, to distract your
sufficiently frivolous mind? Ask me a question.”
“Do you prefer chocolate or coffee?” he asked ingratiatingly.
“Chocolate, with thanks. But we are no longer in the Ollendorff stage or
you would not be returning next month to England to face your destiny. I
have thought of ten terrible questions, than which they can construct
nothing more difficult, more ridiculous. I have brought pencil and
paper. Write, while I drink the excellent chocolate.”
And Ordham groaned and resigned himself.
If Lutz was inexorable in her own province she was an irreproachable
chaperon. They saw little of her save at meals, and wandered in the
woods, or, here in Oberammergau, sat for hours beside the cross, high on
Kochel, indulging in those long silences where ego’s wing-tips graze one
another now and again. Often Ordham went frankly to sleep, and Styr
forgot him, and dreamed of conquests in London and New York, such as
Patti herself had never wrung from those blasé publics.
They went on to Berchtesgaden, that strange tumbled mass of peaks and
ledges and rocky walls, with its bit of valley, its castle, its village
dotted all over the scenery it cannot escape. They climbed to the
glacier, explored the salt mine, and spent hours on the great green
lake, Königsee; which looks as if a mountain had been sliced through its
middle, the high walls thrust apart, and waters, from some dark and
sinister depths of Earth, depths where she prepared her demoniacal
schemes to blast surfaces dear to man, had risen and covered the floor
of the gorge. It is a wild primeval landscape, suggestive of centuries
of convulsions, perhaps that the end is not yet. But if the mountains
were terrible, the lake gloomy, the monastery in the tiny valley was
peaceful, and when they climbed into the recesses of these volcanic
masses, they found the peasants, in the little dairy huts, very
hospitable and friendly. But once, when they went out by moonlight,
quite alone on the lake, the great dark expanse between its bare and
menacing walls filled them with terror, and they took hands and ran home
like children.
XXVII
ADIEU TO THE ISAR
All things end, and the day after their return to Munich he appeared at
the villa with a very long face.
“I leave to-night for England,” he groaned, flinging himself on the
divan. “This morning I received a notice that the examinations will
begin next Monday. I did not read the reason. The fact was enough.”
“Desolation!” Styr sat down abruptly, but she kept all sentiment out of
her voice. “What in heaven’s name am I to do without you?”
“I wish I could think that you felt half as badly as I do. But while I
go to untold horrors, you go on a tour to win new laurels.”
“Yes, in hot German cities and hotter concert rooms. And my _Gastspiel_
does not begin until the 25th of August; but I find invitations from
Switzerland—Zurich, Geneva, Lucerne. I shall accept them if the King
consents. Yes,—I have work—but still! Well, you would have gone soon
in any case.”
“I shall return the moment this beastly business is over and I have seen
Bridg.”
“But as soon as you pass you are in the service—you must work in the
Foreign Office for six months, and then you will be appointed, no doubt
far from Munich.”
“I shall get a three months’ leave. Influence may not be able to get a
man into the service, but it will do much later. I shall go when and
where I wish. I am determined to spend the autumn in Munich. There will
be that much more, at least. How in heaven’s name shall I ever get on
without you?”
“Do not protest too much.” Styr had no belief that he would fly back to
her, and once more was thankful that she had remade herself. She should
miss him, but it would have been the last straw did she still retain the
capacity to miss any man too much. She added dutifully: “Besides, I want
you to marry.”
He kicked about among the cushions. “That, at least, you need not remind
me of. But if I do, I shall come here on my honeymoon.”
“You might leave her behind.”
“I wish to heaven I could. Why not perfect these commercial marriages?
If I give the girl the position of a married woman, which they all
appear to be dying for, the prospect of a title, and the advantages of
my mother’s protection in London, she might at least give me my complete
liberty.”
“And her money.”
“Of course.”
“And you would come back to Munich and lie on my divan! You are fast
nibbling through the icing of what Excellenz calls the big black cake of
life, my friend, and must now look forward to an attack or two of
indigestion. I have a presentiment that you will not come back to Munich
until it has made you quite ill. Then, indeed, you will want
consolation. I wonder how different you will be?”
He turned upon her large anxious eyes. “Do you really believe I shall
have to go through the mill like other men? I should go to pieces! The
only thing I can think of that I shouldn’t funk if it came to the point
would be war. I shouldn’t hate that, although, no doubt, it would be
dirty and uncomfortable. But the trials of life, petty and big! I hate
the very thought of them, but I shall have them, of course—a few,
anyhow. But I shall always come to you for consolation—always! Promise
that no one shall take my place in the very slightest degree, that you
will never have another intimate friend.”
“That is easy to promise. Do not permit your mind to boil with
jealousy.”
“It will.” He looked as placid as a lake. “But no matter what comes, I
can always conjure up this room—this room! Oh, I cannot leave it! I
hate the Civil Service Commission! I hate the diplomatic service! I hate
my creditors! I hate matrimony! And I hate my brother most of all.”
“You will feel much better after dinner. Come, it is ready.”
He remained with her until his servant came to fetch him for the night
train. As he took her hand at parting his boyishness vanished, and his
manner was a mixture of formality and sincere regret. “Good-by,” he
said. “I wish this summer might have lasted forever. You have made it
the most wonderful experience I shall ever have, and you will always be
the most wonderful woman in the world to me.”
They were standing in the hall, before the open door. He suddenly smiled
into her eyes with an expression that was not unlike a kiss. Then he
shook hands with her once more and went out to his cab.
For the first few days she did not miss him at all; once more there was
novelty in loneliness and freedom. When she did begin to miss him, she
found a certain exhilaration in a sensation that was also a novelty.
Then the King, still nursing his tooth, and always kindly, gave her
another leave of absence, and she went to Switzerland.
XXVIII
A ROSSETTI
Nothing, save, possibly, a voluntary check from his brother, could have
surprised Ordham more than the information that he had passed his
examinations. With the optimism, not inherent, but veneered upon his
mind by a too fortunate life, he had, up to the moment of his arrival,
taken his success in this ordeal for granted; perhaps it is fairer to
state that he saw himself always, when prefiguring his future, as an
ambassador in Paris or St. Petersburg; but no sooner did he find himself
at the entrance to those forbidding straits which he must traverse to
find the sole agency for his talents, than he descended into the depths
of black despair. He would not pass. How could he? His French was good,
for he had talked it in the nursery, and it had been actively exercised
in Paris. But he had barely brushed up his Latin. He should forget every
date—of course! And how could any man remember a mass of stuff it had
taken Mill and Smith a lifetime to grind out? And German! They laid as
much stress upon it as if England meditated immediate occupation of
middle and southeastern Europe. They would treat him like a witness at a
murder trial. How he hated that hideous language—and how could he have
been so fatuous as to imagine that he could accumulate the necessary
amount in less than a year?—the greater part of which he had wasted.
For once in his life he knew remorse, repentance, wished that he had a
will of iron, and had exercised it during that delightful sojourn in
Munich. It shamed him to reflect that what little he did know he owed to
the interest of one woman and the determined pounding of another.
He appeared before the board of examiners, pale, dejected, resigned,
with no crest whatever, and impressed that formidable body as being at
least a modest youth, high-bred and dignified, who would not be rejected
for personal reasons did he survive the mental ordeal—a finale which
sometimes surprised the cock-sure aspirant for diplomatic honours.
And he had passed! Not brilliantly, but he was launched upon the
diplomatic sea, and he had no apprehension, with his immense family
influence and the talents he was beginning to appreciate, of foundering.
For a few moments he felt an inclination to be wildly jubilant. But this
he sternly repressed, shrugged his shoulders, and reminded himself that
such a commonplace achievement was to be expected of any man who had
brains instead of porridge in his skull. To this succeeded an hour of
irritation and disgust that he had not distinguished himself, put his
rival competitors to the blush, made them wish he had forborne to enter
the lists. But he was generous and philosophical, and this mood also
passed. He wrote a note to Lord Bridgminster, and sent telegrams to
Countess Tann, Princess Nachmeister, Fräulein Lutz, and his mother. Then
he felt that he might dismiss the tiresome matter from his mind, as well
as the harrowing ordeal that awaited him in the north, and settle down
to the enjoyment of such plays as the month of August afforded.
He found the English drama and its interpretations tame and trite after
those highly seasoned performances of the Continent with what were
practically whole star casts, but they were better than visiting
political country houses with his mother; and he slept late, strolled up
and down Piccadilly, and wrote daily notes to Margarethe Styr, whom he
missed quite as much as he had anticipated. It would have been
interesting to abuse the play with her and drive out into the cool green
English country every afternoon. He consoled himself by reading several
new books he had not heard of while abroad, and sending them to her with
colloquial ramblings on the fly-leaves. It was very cool and pleasant in
his mother’s little house in Chesterfield Street, where hitherto he had
passed but a night or two during hasty visits from Paris. He had been
little in England since Lady Bridgminster, shorn of her power, had
departed out of Bridgminster House in St. James’s Square, and made a
nest for herself on the income of a dowager supplemented by a small
annual allowance from her tight-fisted papa, and occasional checks from
the duchess; the latter assisting her to enjoy life after a fashion and
contract new debts.
Ordham had always been vaguely sorry for his mother, and his examination
of the little house, this first time he was alone in it, deepened and
somewhat clarified his sympathy. It seemed to him that she had just
missed everything. She had almost been a great beauty, but although the
general effect she managed to achieve, still made people, particularly
in a ballroom, turn and stare at her, a closer inspection found the
face, in spite of its large blue eyes, almost insignificant. If not born
with a consuming desire for individual recognition, she had planted the
ambition early in life, and consistently cultivated it. But although a
feature in London society, she was not a personality, and there is a
vast difference. Even her position in the political world, towering as
it had been, she owed to her husband, brilliant, fascinating, and one of
the chiefs of his party, as well as to the superb entertainments his
income permitted her to give in St. James’s Square and Yorkshire. She
had facility of speech, of pen, in all _les graces_; but she was devoid
of originality, and almost stopped short of being clever. Distinguished
in manner, she was deficient in charm and made no slaves. With a sincere
love of beauty, she lacked the eye which corresponds to ear in music,
and there was always a want of harmony in the detail of both her dress
and her rooms. Worldly by birth and training, she was bohemian (of a
sort) by instinct, and even when in Bridgminster House had mixed her
parties in a fashion which society, less anxious to be amused at any
cost than it became a few years later, condemned; and although nothing
but indiscretions of which she was incapable could deprive her of the
great position to which she had been born, and had held no less through
her long period as a political hostess than her immense and powerful
connection, she was now merely the faddish daughter of one peer and
widow of another, instead of the personal force she still so ardently
desired to be.
Even the pretty little house (for which, of course, she paid an
exorbitant rent) lacked the individuality to which its rich collection
of blue china and hawthorn jars, Chippendale and old oak furniture, fine
brasses, antique vases, and Venetian mirrors, bits of Italian tapestry
and stained glass, entitled it. The drawing-room, unexpectedly large,
like so many of the drawing-rooms in those little houses in Mayfair,
should have been a memorial sonnet to Rossetti, and it looked like the
embodiment of his first incoherent dreams when groping for the formulæ
of the new art-religion. At the end of this room was the famous portrait
which Rossetti had painted at his own request. He had seen the young
girl at the opera and thought her the living embodiment of Beatrice. One
of his few patrons had been able to persuade the duke that the
fashionably obscure artist was a genius, but more because he would
disdain payment than because of any enthusiasm inspired by pictures
which the duke thought as stiff and outlandish as those ridiculous
formal gardens about Ordham Castle. He was a Briton to his marrow, was
his Grace, and he carried his detestation of all things foreign to such
an extent that he had never paid a second visit to the Continent nor to
any of those country houses which kept green the memories of Palladio
and Inigo Jones. But his daughter, who had also gone to the patron’s
house to see “the Rossettis,” had conceived an immediate passion for the
new school, and sweetly gave her father no peace until he consented to
let the artist paint her. The duke yielded with the utmost
ungraciousness, and stipulated that the man—what was his name?—was to
charge nothing for the honour, and was to present the portrait to Lady
Patricia at once—there should be no public exhibition. As Rossetti
never exhibited, and asked for nothing but the joy of painting this
Renaissance lady who might have served as the original inspiration of
the Brotherhood, he agreed to anything and eagerly awaited the day
appointed for the first sitting.
She had not entered his studio and removed her bonnet before he saw the
mistake he had made. Here was no Beata Beatrix, no mediæval saint, no
about-to-be-murdered spouse of a sixteenth-century Italian, haunting
immense and gloomy chambers, but an excessively thin narrow young
English girl almost six feet in height, with a little white face of no
particular character, immense blue eyes without a particle of
expression, and an extraordinary mass of pale golden hair, which stood
out from her head like wings. But Rossetti was an artist. If his spirits
went down to zero, it was not long before they ascended with a rush. At
least here was material to work on; that hair, that poise of head, that
aristocratic languor were no delusion, and he could conjure up his first
impression of her and the dreams of beauty which had haunted him ever
since. In short, he idealized her, and the long picture (which had been
exhibited to all London society for twenty-five years) was one of the
most characteristic things he had ever done, and, perhaps, had
contributed as much as any cause to Lady Bridgminster’s fatal desire to
express so much more than she could conceive. Against a background of
dull blue tapestry, with full throat strained, the jaw line from chin to
ear salient, with lids slowly drooping, hair that seemed to be an aura
emanating from the pure young fires of her spirit, stood this vision in
diaphanous white clasping against her angelic flatness an upright sheaf
of Annunciation lilies. The thinness was the willow grace of a reed, the
pale complexion the white symbol of maidenly exaltation; the half-opened
eyes, as blue as an Italian lake, were looking straight into paradise.
When this wonderful picture was finished and had been admired by the
artists that worshipped at his shrine, Rossetti, with his tongue in his
cheek, covered the hands and arms with tan-coloured suède gloves. In
that touch, done perhaps, in a moment of unconscious foresight, as of
deliberate sarcasm, Rossetti had epitomized the life of Lady
Bridgminster.
He had intended to make many sketches of her during these sittings, but
she inspired him no further, as much to her disappointment as to his.
Nevertheless, he liked her well enough, and went to her house after she
married Bridgminster as long as he went anywhere. He had no reason to
regret the acquaintance, for she bought several of his pictures,
patronized the entire Brotherhood, was one of the first to acknowledge
the genius of Burne-Jones, and commissioned the greatest decorator of
modern times to refurnish the state drawing-rooms of Ordham in the style
of the Italian Renaissance.
Lady Bridgminster was superstitious about this picture, and, when moving
from palace to hovel, to use her own expression, took it with her,
refusing the offer of the new millionnaire to whom her step-son had
unaccountably leased the splendid theatre of her triumphs. Not only did
it remind her, that in spite of six sons and what she regarded as a
lifetime of disappointments, she had once been young and romantic like
other women, but she had a fancy that it was her real self, and that did
she let it go out of her keeping she should become but a grey shadow
flitting amongst people who never could be quite sure whether she were
there or not. This was her one imaginative flight, and she cherished it.