was never so manifest, nor his sublime faculty of imagining and
delineating character in the terms of music; never had singer, not even
Styr, rendered any words so unnecessary and sent the purport streaming
out from her mind, her throat, with such terrific force. More than one
in that spellbound audience half expected to see the roof of the opera
house come down, at the very least to hear the noise of thunder above
the orchestra. When she gasped: “Air! air! or my heart will choke! Open,
open there wide!” the fine ladies in the _balkon_ felt for their
smelling-salts. When Brangäne, having drawn aside the curtain, and
Isolde, with a face that looked like death set in stone, commanded her
to summon Tristan, that Germanic mass of flesh visibly trembled, and he
asserted afterward that he had hardly dared to disobey her.
“Go! Order him! And _understand it_! I, Isolde, do command it!” The
tones, growing rough and dark, expressed that the limits of endurance
had been reached in a queen holding the power of life and death in her
twitching hands, and it tried the courage of a mere actor to stand
firmly at the helm.
By this time not one in the audience—outside of Italy the most
musically receptive in the world, in spite of the sandwiches in their
petticoat pockets and their unquenchable thirst—was sitting in a
natural position. All were strained forward; all, with what power of
thought was left in them, questioning whether the Styr were giving a new
and sensational rendering of Isolde’s character, or if something had
occurred to excite her beyond bounds and she were venting her anger in
the sympathetic rôle. If so, what was it? Could she be in love with the
tenor, she, the great Styr? And had he, the good devoted husband,
trifled with and flouted her? But these speculations were barely
formulated until later, when they were feverishly discussing the
phenomenon; all were held, thrilled, half fearing that something real
and terrible was about to happen before their eyes, vaguely apprehensive
that never again would a stage performance satisfy their deep and
persistent craving for vicarious emotions.
When Isolde rushed to the back of the pavilion and flung herself against
the curtain to shriek out her curses, she almost swept Brangäne into the
wings, and left but little enthusiasm in that now terrified artist to
“throw herself upon Isolde with impetuous tenderness,” to ejaculate
admiration and consolation. She, at least, knew that Styr was not
deliberately giving an intensified rendering of the great rôle, but was
in a mood to kill somebody. She shivered for her neck; those long
working fingers looked like flexible steel.
“Curse him, the villain! Curses on his head! Vengeance! Death! Death for
both of us!” Styr might have been setting free the pent-up demons in the
hearts of all the women, good and bad, on the surface of the globe, and
perchance those in the audience that had no such blessed means of relief
gave a deep unconscious sigh of satisfaction.
When she gloated over the phial containing the death potion, Brangäne’s
apprehensions were not quelled until she had informed herself that it
was really empty, for by this time she was convinced that there was a
feud to the death between the _hochdramatische_ and the
tenor—tremblingly awaiting his cue without.
There was no subtle hypnotic suggestion of death to-night in Styr’s
gestures. Her art was no longer under the command of her will, but she
radiated death and damnation as Tristan entered, and for years after he
told of his conviction that the _Todesmotif_ in the orchestra was his
own dirge, and resigned himself to die as he lifted the fatal goblet to
his lips. He believed that she had rubbed poison on the rim, whose very
fumes would rise and slay him even although he forbore to touch it; and
his quivering nerves were untranquillized by the knowledge of his
innocence: might she not have loved him long in secret and resented his
virtuous indifference? Even when, the love potion working, she rushed
into his arms, he said that the hate in her eyes never abated for a
second and he expected her to bite or strangle him.
But at last the act, with its insupportable excitement, was over, and
the audience, almost hysterical, forgot their accustomed refreshment as
they stood by their seats or paced the foyer, discussing the
extraordinary performance and wishing their King were present. They
could arrive at no conclusion save that Styr was the greatest actress
even Germany had ever seen, whether something had happened to put her
into an awful temper or not.
In the second act, there being no opportunity to express either hatred
or fury, it would seem that Styr was bent upon demonstrating that the
artist in her could not long be submerged by any turmoil in the woman.
Never had she sung her part in the love duet with a more poignant
sweetness, a more perishing languor, although she would not permit the
tenor to come within a foot of her. She did not rise to real greatness,
however, until the third act, when, in the last lines of the
_Liebestod_, she stood with rigid body and strained upraised face, every
line in both, every round noble vibrant tone, expressing the savage
exultation of that tormented spirit at the approach of death. As she
sank upon Tristan, who had one eye open, King Mark and his men watched
her narrowly, for everybody on the stage was uneasy, half fearing that
this terrifying creature, always an alien in their midst, but awaited
the final moment to wreak her vengeance. When the tenor reached his
stuffy ugly little flat that night he overwhelmed his Frau with
caresses, and sat until nearly morning eating and drinking, the happiest
man in Munich.
XXXIX
PEGGY HILL AND MARGARETHE STYR
Styr locked herself in her gallery and wondered if she were alive or a
walking automaton. Her passion had expended itself, the blood had left
her brain, but she was filled to the brim with a sullen, silent, deadly
rage—curiously mixed with disappointment and regret. For nearly nine
years, in a life ordered to please herself, with not an outer disturbing
force, save only an occasional tilt with the opera house cabal, or a fit
of temper after a performance, quickly forgotten, with not a disturbance
from within, for she had buried the past, trained her powerful will to
banish all such futilities as regret, she had aimed not only to lead an
ideal life but to perfect and ennoble her character. Although she had
been almost a recluse, she had helped many young people with promising
voices, and her purse was always open to the unfortunates in the chorus.
Perhaps she had deliberately kept her humanity alive by these acts of
kindness and sympathy, knowing that there was danger to art in the
drying up of the springs of human nature. Perhaps; she could not tell;
did not care. But at least she had led not only a blameless, a kindly,
an inspiring, a finely mental and nobly artistic life, but she had
achieved what she knew to be happiness, and this by the sealing up of
her inner kingdom.
It is easy to ignore the inner kingdom so long as no man enters it. It
is easy to be impersonal, mental, a consummate devotee of art so long as
the heart and soul and passions encounter no powerful disturbing force.
Nothing so astonished and shocked her in these comparatively calm
moments as the discovery that art was not all, that common primitive
instincts were stronger in the final test than the elevated choice of
the brain supported by genius and will. So profound had been her
contempt for human weakness, her loathing for men, so exalted, so
triumphant her progress in that great sphere to which her voice had
given her the golden key, that she had believed herself to be elevated
permanently to a plane high above the common. She had never closed her
eyes to the very second-rate clay of which most musicians were composed,
both mental and moral, but she had been as serenely aware of her
superior intellectual gifts, of a will stronger than any she had ever
encountered, as she had been of her voice, her dramatic genius; and she
had never even speculated upon a possible descent from that glorious
plane where she dwelt alone with her art. She was a woman, after all,
and she so abhorred herself that, had she possessed the sorceries of
Isolde’s ancestors, she would have obliterated Earth from the cosmic
scheme.
She had received Ordham’s letter a few moments before departing for the
opera house, and the same post brought a note from Princess Nachmeister,
announcing that “our _jüngling, Gott sei dank_, was really engaged to
the American heiress of forty million marks, and was the more riveted to
his bargain—that charming uncertain youth!—by being madly, nay
absurdly, in love with the ravishing beauty.” Then the blood had gone to
Styr’s head.
Even now she wondered if she really loved Ordham, for she was sensible
of none of that organic craving which once alone would have
distinguished one man from another in her imperial regard. At this
moment, indeed, she did not love him at all; she hated him with a
passion which, if stilled by exhaustion, was none the less volcanic,
eloquent of the tremendous upheaval in her nature. But she was too wise
not to suspect that it was the hatred which is merely love reversed. It
would pass, her very mental balance would see to that; and what then?
Hers had not been the experience of love in its infinite variety, and
she stared out at the dark future with the first real fear of her life.
During her long intimacy with Ordham she had been fully conscious that
she had never liked any one half as well, never drawn as close to any
mortal spirit. When he had gone, she had had time for but a brief
reaction from her perverse feminine exultation in renewed freedom, in
the luxury of missing him, for she had left almost immediately for
Switzerland, then on her second _Gastspiel_. Even so she had missed him,
and had thought of him tenderly, hoped that he would keep his word and
return to Munich. But she had been very busy, very uncomfortable, very
much diverted, and the ovations she received had put all other wants in
her soul to sleep. It was not until she was again in Munich, in the
house which he still pervaded, where she saw him in his characteristic
attitudes, heard his mellow English voice with its languid drawl and
impatient breaks, that her vague sense of loss had grown poignant. But
even that had been tempered before long by a gentle melancholy, a new
sensation and not unpleasant, for the ego likes to run the gamut; and
the certainty that he would return to Munich from time to time had
further mitigated that deep sense of loss. She even hoped, or thought
she did, that he would marry well, be delivered of the belittling
embittering want of money; nothing could interfere with their
friendship, or whatever it was. She, too, was possessed by the uneasy
sense that it was something more, but even as the days passed and she
finally became restless, more and more disturbed, coming out of her
sleep sometimes with a sense of actual terror, she would not permit her
thought to enter the analytical zone, the word love to rise before the
judgment seat.
And had it been love? This was the question which now shook her puzzled
and tortured brain, and banished all hope of sleep. Was it but an
imperious pride outraged, a secure sense of possession shattered, that
had lashed her into a berserk rage? Vanity, perhaps, that had been fed
and watered into an abnormal growth for twenty-four years, first by the
power she wielded over men, then by the far more heady incense of the
public,—could that be it, mere vanity screaming with rage at this
defeat by a silly little American girl? She knew the type, had seen
hundreds of them in her many trips to Paris; moreover, she had seen this
Mabel Cutting several times during the conspicuous beauty’s sojourn in
Munich, she had sat almost beside her at a performance of _Fidelio_ one
night. The girl was beautiful and patrician, no doubt accomplished as
girls ran; she was the sort that the American youth was falling in love
with every hour, but she was not the girl to bewitch John Ordham, for
the type was shallow, vain, soulless, hopelessly unintellectual. If he
had fallen a victim to the race, he must have been engineered by very
clever women. She knew him well enough to be sure that, left to himself,
although he might have thought it best to marry the girl, he never would
have fallen in love with her—the real Mabel Cutting—unless something
besides gold dust had been thrown into his eyes. There had been
extraordinarily clever scheming somewhere. She could but guess its
nature, but she knew Ordham. His mind had artfully been lulled, and his
mere youth and sex manipulated with the modern sorceries of tact and
diplomacy.
And the real Ordham belonged to her. The blood rose to her head once
more as she was forced to admit that the fine flower of his awakening
would not be hers, was irretrievably given to a little fool whom he
would hate, not merely tire of, before a year was out.
And this she could have had. She knew it now as she recalled certain
moments when she had caught him looking at her with heavy eyes, or a
strange stare as of something stirring and quivering in the depths of
his being. But she had slurred over these dangerous moments, and without
so much as a flush of self-consciousness. Not only had she finished with
the masculinities, but she was not the woman to want the love she must
rouse, engineer, reveal to itself. With all her tyrannous strength of
will she was woman personified, and she must be wooed and won
imperiously, or she should prefer to love alone.
She ground her teeth and beat the floor with her foot, and reverted to
the vernacular of her youth, as she anathematized her inconsistency, her
dog-in-the-manger attitude. Had Ordham appeared before her at that
moment, she would not even have considered marriage with him, would have
hesitated long before committing herself to the less binding relation.
Not only had she no desire to wreck his career, but she was not sure
even now that she should greatly care if she went to her grave without
having touched his lips. But he was hers. Inside that charming flesh was
a John Ordham that no other woman would ever glimpse, that never would
attain full growth save in contact with the woman so jealously hidden
within her own noncommittal shell.
It was her first definite experience of the sovereign demands of the
soul, of the recognition of the ego, that invisible entity which makes
itself so uncomfortable in its earthly home until released by disease or
decay. Were the needs of this God-in-little more lasting and determined
than those of the affections, the body? Infinite, perhaps? In that case
what should she do? what should she do?
She paced up and down the room as a new thought tormented her. This
girl? What were most girls at that age but little fools, particularly if
pretty and rich? Had not all women once been silly girls? Suppose this
lovely creature, under the tutelage of John Ordham and the brilliant
society in which she was to spend her most plastic years, should develop
into a clever, intellectual, subtle woman? Then, what of her, Margarethe
Styr, a fixture in Munich, an outcast from the circles of which this
girl would become a component part? She stretched out her arms and
opened and shut her long flexible hands. If Mabel Cutting had chanced to
sing the part of Brangäne to-night she would have been strangled in view
of all Munich. Oh, no doubt of that! It was as well indeed that the
young lady was in London.
All these years of proud mental development, of devotion to her art, the
abrupt but uninterrupted sequence to those terrible forty hours in the
bony clutch of death,—all, then, were as naught? The evil, the
appalling passions of her nature, were but the stronger for their long
sleep. All her new life had done for her was to develop a new sort of
love capacity with terrors and torments to which the old were but the
brief aberrations of a superior beast. Love! Love! She had never even
guessed the meaning of the word before. She hated Ordham so desperately
that she would have liked to twist her fingers about his own neck; but
again she realized, with a sharp expulsion of the breath, that this was
but the upheaval of the volcano’s mud and poisonous gases preceding the
liberation of the incandescent fires. But while possibly she might not
fall into rage again, she must pass through other phases whose mere
faint cries for liberty, for birth, terrified her. She was face to face
with the greatest of all the mysteries in the always nebulous region of
love, an experience known to few, either because they are not developed
enough or because they have never met their peer.
She and Ordham were one. He would not appreciate his loss, for he was
young, there was too much life before him, too many phases, the prospect
of greatness which would finally rouse his energies and fill his time.
But she, who was close to the summit of her career, for whom art had no
mysteries, fame no more surprises, what should she do? what should she
do?
But if the woman is sometimes stronger than the artist, the artist never
sits long on the dust heap. Already it was whispering that she would act
better than ever, she would descend into deeper and more intricate
recesses of human nature when pondering upon her heroines, give the
world more complete revelations. Even new forces of expression must be
hers. She had never felt so creative as at that moment when she stopped
short in her tigerish pacing and laughed aloud at the power of art to
make itself heard at such a crisis in the human heart. At that moment,
had art possessed a corporeal body, it too might have been throttled.
But it went on whispering: “Cultivate this berserk mood. Do not forget
it, do not permit the will to stifle it if it fires the brain again.
Continue to love this man, the more hopelessly the better. What is mere
human passion to art; what, indeed, but its necessary but inferior
partner? It is the stimulant, the drink, the food, the fertilizer. Nurse
this! Nurse this!”
And her ambition? Would it not spur that as well? She had been too
luxuriously, too artistically content, in this beautiful city, waiting
for the world to come to her, content to dream of triumphs in its
greater capitals. She had needed a shock, an imperative need of change
of scene, of conquest of Earth itself to mend her riven soul; she might
have idled here until her high notes had turned from gold to brass.
Her long fingers still twitched and curved, her face was as fearful as
that of some dark creature of the Middle Ages poisoning a husband or
rival; but her clearing brain argued pro and con, rejected personal
happiness in favour of her art, finally announced that she still would
have rejected it had the choice been hers. Ordham might have wrought
extraordinary changes in her, but of the two passions that controlled
her, that for him was not the stronger.
When she realized this, she went over to the dining room and disposed of
the cold supper awaiting her. She had little appetite, but she ate
abundantly, nevertheless, even warming the bouillon over the spirit
lamp, for she knew that nothing would so certainly drain the blood from
her head. When she had finished she returned to the gallery, and
lighting a cigarette, sat down to think connectedly.
That she had no impulse to go to London and exert her fascinations upon
Ordham, bring him to his senses, proved to her, that however she might
resent his desertion, regret his loss, love him, in short, her mind
would never permit her to wreck his career or her own. She had no taste
for love in an Italian villa, idle herself, with an idle man on her
hands; she was a worker, an artist; such a life would bore her to
extinction, wither those tender and beautiful shoots that had not been
blasted by the rain of hot ashes in her mind to-night. What she really
wanted was a return of the old conditions, their permanence; and this
she had known all along she could not have, known that it was an
episode, from every moment of which she had deliberately extracted the
full flavour. Did Ordham love and seek her, there were no mortal
conditions in which they could unite. Her past life, which would be
unearthed to the last detail did she seek to enter society as an equal;
her present position, so public as to relegate a husband to the position
of a superior lackey; that insatiable artistic nine-tenths of her
nature,—all precluded marriage with any man that respected himself; any
permanent tie, in fact. She had exulted for eight years in her
aloneness, her aloofness; now was the time to decide that this condition
must exist as long as she did. There was nothing for her but art, art,
art. She uttered the word aloud in her round sonorous voice; she no
longer had the least desire to throttle it. On the contrary it induced
the profoundest sensation of gratitude she had ever known. Without it
where should she be to-night? Where, indeed?
It occurred to her to wonder that after her life of the past eight years
there was any of the original woman left. What a poor half-born thing
was civilization, with its educations, its spiritual developments, its
thousand magnets for the higher and highly specialized centres of the
brain, when a really great woman could be overwhelmed by passion like
those confidential agents of Nature that swarmed the earth. If she still
was unconscious of any elemental ache for this man, the fact remained
that she had acted for an hour or two to-night with the blind primitive
fury of a jungle beast deprived of its mate. And—it might be—if she
was to continue to love the inner hidden man alone,—that product of the
centuries charged with the electrical fascination of an uncommon
personality which had charmed her out of her happy solitude,—she must
see as little of him as possible. It was on the cards, that once roused,
his progress would be very rapid, his character would overtake his mind.
Then, were they thrown together, the real danger would begin. No doubt,
one thing that had protected her was that the visible man was too young.
She should have felt embarrassed had they taken to love making. But
twenty-five is not young for an Englishman, and she might find him very
wide awake indeed a year hence.
She made up her mind to correspond with him intermittently for a time,
then drop him out of her life. She should miss him, ache for him, be
forced to plod through all the pros and cons again and again, for it is
long before the reiterative heart runs down; but her will had carried
her through great crises before; she could always rely upon it. And
there were worse things than memories to live upon, particularly if
radiant enough to put out the ghastly flickers of others.
She should overlook no opportunity that would lead her to a broader
stage, replete with distraction. There was talk of organizing a Wagner
season in New York as a _pendant_ to the regular season of Italian and
French opera, for the fame of The Master, thanks to Theodore Thomas,
Leopold Damrosch, and other enthusiasts, was steadily growing. She had
met Walter Damrosch in Bayreuth; he had heard her sing many times, and
no doubt would have approached her for this innovation had it not been
for the ten years’ contract she was known to have signed with the
Hof-und-National-Theatre in Munich, and the King’s personal objection
that she should leave Munich for more than a few weeks at a time. If
this coming season of German opera was successful, she should write to
Damrosch and announce her willingness to break her contract if unable to
obtain a leave of absence. It was probable that by that time the King
would be wholly mad; in that case her enemies in the Hof would be her
allies for once. The only shadow on this brilliant future was the
possible confiscation of her villa did she summarily leave without
permission. That would substitute one unhappiness for another, for she
passionately loved the only home she had ever had, and believed that the
acuteness of its later associations would mellow with time. Well, she
had her friends, Princess Nachmeister among others. Let the future take
care of itself. Meanwhile she should demand other rôles here: the
revival of the great operas of Glück—_Alceste_, _Ifigénie en Tauride_,
_Orfeo ed Euridice_. She would sing the great rôle of Dido in _The
Trojan_. All would afford her fine dramatic opportunities and fill her
time with work.