knew that she should be eternally grateful to him for these few moments
of terrified happiness he forced her to admit. But she was grateful also
for the gypsies.
She disengaged herself and stood back a pace. “They are coming this
way,” she said. “You have not given me that other promise.”
He stood before her, whipping one hand with the gloves he held in the
other. His face was so white that it would have looked dead but for the
eyes, which were black and blazing. He answered steadily enough,
however:
“I swear, since you will have it, that, as much to erect a monument to
this love of ours, as to gratify my own ambition and compensate myself
for the bleakness of my personal life, I will do what I can to make a
great and useful man of myself.”
LIV
THE CONQUEST OF LONDON
If the next twenty-five days passed quickly, it was not because they
were barren of events. It was Ordham’s idea that in the second
performance of _Die Walküre_ Styr should sing, not the vocally
interesting but dramatically unappealing rôle of Brünhilde, but that of
Sieglinde. Knowing that his race was the most remarkable compound on the
globe of respectability and sensuality, he believed that the character
of Sieglinde, portrayed with all the abandon of which Styr, alone of
living singers, was capable, and yet easefully vapourized in the alembic
of music, would give the Wagner season a fresh impetus; and the event
proved him right. Styr, with a new need to give her imprisoned passions
relief, acted the part of the faithless young wife, the incestuous
demigoddess, with an emotionalism so deep and wild that the audience
held their breath, and yet with a poignant sweetness that brought tears
to their eyes, filled them with an immense pity for the captive of the
hideous Hunding who found her mate capriciously caught in the body of a
son of Wotan. After all, demigods were not mortals, they remarked, few
besides the Germans understanding Fricka’s emphatic opinion on the
subject.
In the second act Styr portrayed tragedy, delirium, remorse, and the
mere physical weakness of woman, in a fashion that caused even herself
to wonder why she had never essayed this rôle before. When she lay
unconscious between the knees of Siegmund during the long duet between
her lover and Brünhilde, she looked so beautiful that she continued to
hold the attention of all, and Ordham stared at her until his gaze
seemed to burn her eyelids and she stirred uneasily. When Sieglinde was
finally swept off the stage by Brünhilde, the audience, almost to a man,
arose and left the house.
By this time London was “mad over her.” Women whose lives were barren,
great ladies whose passions were faded, men with far less reason but an
equal pleasure, higher types that revelled in the brain behind the
voice, the spiritual suggestion in scenes and music designed to appeal
to the most elevated of mortal ideals, the remotest and shyest of the
soul’s desires, crowded to hear the woman who would be a valuable aid to
the Almighty on the day of resurrection. Styr, exultant and happy, with
the transcendent happiness of the artist in the supreme triumph of her
genius, gave these splendid audiences, so difficult to please with
anything more serious than the wit and paradox to which Wilde was driven
not long after, the greatest that was in her, and wondered if such
intoxication of the mind, such insolence of victory, could be mortal
woman’s a second time.
It is possible that London would have reacted in sheer exhaustion after
more than five weeks of this stimulating banquet, but during that time
Styr reigned unchallenged. Society, determined to meet her personally,
took the shortest way round the scandals they had enjoyed, by professing
not to believe them, rejecting them in toto. One ambitious hostess went
so far as to announce at a large dinner party that she had taken the
trouble to investigate, had even spent a small fortune cabling, and had
learned that Styr had been an actress in New York of unimpeachable
respectability, and that the Margaret Hill of Levering’s tales was lost
in a wreck on the Pacific Coast ten or twelve years since. As a matter
of fact she had done nothing of the sort, but her story was cleverly put
together, and she was quite aware that others besides herself but wanted
an excuse to entertain the greatest artist that had visited England in
their time. The Queen held out and did not invite her to sing at
Windsor, for she thought it crime enough to have inspired such stories,
whether true or not, and more than one old-fashioned great lady,
suspicious of celebrities in any case, fully agreed with her; but they
were lost sight of in the general rush. It was impossible for Styr to
accept more than one out of ten of the invitations showered upon her, or
to show herself for more than a few minutes at a time at the various
afternoon receptions given in her honour. Rehearsals were many and time
was short. And even she, strong woman as she was, had to sleep.
Invitations to supper she steadily refused, and on the day of a
performance never spoke during the afternoon.
Naturally this left her little time for Ordham. They went sight-seeing
no more, but as she rose every morning at ten he called at eleven and
remained until one, although he rarely saw her for a moment alone.
Others had the same privilege, and the impresario, the conductor, and
various members of the company, all more or less desperate, came for
advice and consultation. She practically rehearsed the company, for the
impresario was not too efficient, and Richter had his hands full with
the orchestra.
Reckless, by this time, of gossip, for he had by no means calculated
upon a success so overwhelming as to leave him out in the cold, Ordham
fell into the habit of going with her to rehearsals, and lounging in her
dressing-room, where she came to him for an occasional chat. He went,
when bidden, to every reception, every dinner and breakfast, given in
her honour, that he might at least be in the room with her, receive an
occasional glance and smile; which, beggarly satisfaction as it might
be, was better than striding up and down his room in the Temple. His
domestic habits were sadly out of joint. Mabel’s strained and sometimes
terrified face, his mother-in-law’s speechless indignation, were
unnecessary afflictions. At first he invented all the excuses which his
ingenious brain could devise. “He was Wagner mad.” “As long as his
family would not receive the woman who had showered hospitalities upon
him when he was a harassed student in a strange city, he must do his
best, not only to cover their defection, but to pour balm upon his
conscience.” The secret that he had originated and financed the
enterprise was well kept, but he insisted that he more than any one
should work for its success, as he should owe his own career to the
woman who had—yes, really, he could see it now!—so subtly compelled
him to study and pass those stiff exams. He pretended to believe that
Mabel would have taken a house and been the first to open her doors to
his friend had she been well, for it was no part of his policy to notice
her mounting jealousy. He saw her so little that he was able to be as
charming as ever to her, although she was looking swollen in the face
and coarse, one of the pathetic punishments of woman while fulfilling
the highest of her duties. After excuses failed him he simply ignored
the subject—lunching and dining at home on those alternate days when
Styr was obliged to seclude herself; and after a time, impatient at the
still unuttered disapproval which charged the atmosphere of Grosvenor
Square, he accepted other invitations. He was by no means satisfied with
himself, for he was as far as ever from any desire to make his wife
unhappy; but if she was so unreasonable, so undiplomatic, as to refuse
him his liberty for this short period, if she was bent upon proving
herself unfit to be the wife of a man of the world, let her read her
lesson and profit by it. Perhaps in the depths of his mind, buried under
many layers of modernism but by no means extinct, he looked upon wives
from the royal point of view: sound and vigorous transits for the next
edition of the race. But he was beyond analysis, and had but one desire,
one purpose: to see as much of Margarethe Styr during these racing weeks
as he could manage, although he made no attempt whatever to see her
alone.
Mrs. Cutting, angry, frightened, outraged, not only in her maternal
passion, but in those principles which she could so gracefully ignore as
long as society kept its hard bright surface closed, but to which she
would in the last instance have sacrificed social position itself, shut
her lips in Ordham’s presence, fearing to precipitate some unthinkable
climax, and consoling Mabel with talk of the flying days and the
singer’s crowded hours.
“He will follow her,” said Mabel one day.
“I am positive that he will do nothing of the sort,” said Mrs. Cutting,
briskly. “Never was a man less impetuous, less disposed to sacrifice
anything for the sake of a passing flirtation.”
Mabel set her lips. For the moment she looked older than her mother, so
smart and fresh, so alert yet reposeful of carriage. “You have never
loved, and I can tell you that love gives one more than a little joy,
and pain out of all proportion; it gives terrible insights. I stirred
only the youthful shallows of John Ordham. He has depths that no
innocent love could reach, much less satisfy. I say nothing about
brains, although God knows I am well aware how much that mind of his—it
is like an octopus—reaches out for that I cannot give him. But even so,
were I—well, were he my second husband, for instance, I might hold my
own against even clever women.”
“Mabel!” Mrs. Cutting was horrified at this sudden weed of
sophistication in that fair landscape of her daughter’s mind she had so
carefully laid out and tended. “You have been reading too many French
novels of late; I have expressed my disapproval before.”
“It is a pity I did not read them earlier,” said Mabel, dryly. “I should
recommend a course in Balzac, Maupassant, and Bourget to all girls about
to marry—Europeans, at least. To be young and fresh and beautiful and
good may be sufficient if you marry a business man or a scientist, but
you need a good deal more than that to keep a man of the world in the
toils, particularly if he has abundant leisure. That may not be a nice
fact to face, but no _congé_ will dislodge it. If I were only well!”
“Mabel!”
“Don’t look at me in that puritanical way!” cried Mabel, passionately.
“What do you know about life? You scarcely ever saw father, and you
didn’t love him anyhow. Besides, Americans are not so different from
these Europeans when they have time enough. I got out of Bobby the other
day that father kept a mistress for years, and small blame to him. You
left him deliberately year after year and you would have had no excuse
for righteous wrath had you known. But with us innocent young wives—it
is a very different matter, with the world full of sirens like
Margarethe Styr. And they are not all publicly branded, either. I could
name a dozen that you are proud to know, that are barely gossiped about,
who would take John off my hands in a moment if they had a chance at
him, or he found them seductive. What has saved me so far is that he is
odd, difficult to please, indolent, cold on the surface. But I can tell
you that with a man like John Ordham matrimony is like American
politics: the woman must know every trick of the game and be above
employing none of them. It is horrible, but that makes it none the less
true.”
“Mabel, you are outrageous! I’ll listen to no such blasphemy upon
womanhood—American womanhood,” she added as an afterthought. “As for
your father’s infidelity, it may be. I asked no questions, and I am not
the fool you seem to think; but that is quite another matter from
seeking to hold a man with the methods of the courtesan. Better let him
go.”
“Not when you love him. I’d give my immortal soul, I’d trample in the
slime all the girlhood innocence—”
“Mabel! At least be careful not to excite yourself.”
This admonition produced some effect; Mabel was silent for a few
moments, and then resumed more calmly: “I am perfectly well aware that
during the next few months I can do nothing but think and plan and try
to cull wisdom from the masters that have put love under a microscope or
on the dissecting table. I am sorry I have been sullen and looked as
miserable as I felt. It was a mistake, as great a mistake as for us to
refuse to meet Styr. We should have had her here morning, noon, and
night. It is too late to alter that, and it is impossible for me to make
myself charming when I look like a fright. But I am resolved to be
hateful and woebegone no longer. I shall hereafter treat John exactly as
if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to amuse himself
while I am so dull. At least he shall not have the faintest excuse to
leave me. This is the critical time. When that woman is far away—and I
am told she is to sing next winter in New York—and I am well again,
I’ll become a coquette, I’ll make a fine art of matrimony; I wouldn’t be
too proud to take hints from the very women of the _trottoir_ if I could
get at them. But win and hold him I will. I am a woman, and my eyes are
wide open.”
“Have you considered that you may be obliged to give up your cherished
plan of living in England? I am convinced by the remarks he drops now
and again that he is more set upon diplomacy than ever.”
“If I fail to keep him in England until he has lost his chances for the
service—yes, I’ll go. There is no sacrifice I won’t make. I’ll watch
him like a cat, and know whether to hold out on that point or give in.
Besides, there is always the chance of his growing impatient at the slow
promotion. No doubt there will be more than one disgusted moment in
which I can induce him to resign and come home to politics. Oh! Oh! that
I were well and beautiful once more!”
Mrs. Cutting sighed deeply. She felt as sad as shocked. It was as if she
saw a little crystal castle of surpassing beauty, every facet
scintillating with a thousand modulated shades of the primal colours,
shivered at her feet. Why had she been in such haste to marry her
exquisite child? Mabel would have remained girlishly beautiful until
twenty-eight; for ten years longer she might have gloried in her
handiwork. As she did not care to listen to any more of Mabel’s
conclusions, she merely remarked:
“You will not look as young at forty as I do, if you let emotions shake
you like this.”
“I am not thinking about when I am forty. The present is all my powers
are equal to. I believe John condescends to lunch at home to-day. I’ll
put on a red and yellow gown that may perhaps throw into the shade my
own sunset tints. Oh, that I were well! That I were well!”
This was a week before Styr’s departure. Ordham, whose mind was by no
means obfuscated by the fever in his blood, began to notice that Mabel
and her mother ceased to treat him to sour looks, subtly to make him
feel a stone and a rake. He was vaguely grateful, for, unknown to Mabel,
but prompted by Mrs. Cutting, the distinguished accoucheur, at present
exercising a benevolent despotism in Grosvenor Square, had given him an
emphatic warning, and he dined almost regularly at home, since he could
not dine alone with Styr, and strove with what grace was in him to hide
his fathomless ennui and amuse Mabel.
But the strain on his powers of self-control grew more formidable daily.
A short while and Styr would have vanished out of London, leaving it as
empty as Sahara. The future appalled him. If he could have obtained a
post, he would have forced Mabel to release him and left London at once,
although he well knew how little work is demanded of an attaché. Still
there would be distractions in the new scene. But there was no vacancy,
would not be for several months. Upon no other pretext could he leave
her—leave London, whose very hansoms would grin at him.
Not the least of the causes which contributed to the waters of his
bitterness, of his agitation and disgust, was the amusement of “the
world” at his patent infatuation for a famous woman who had no time to
waste on men, young or old. Styr no longer encouraged him to come to the
opera house during rehearsals, no longer made the slightest effort to
give him an occasional moment alone. He was unable to determine whether
this final act of cruelty were due to fear or to a real pleasure in
meeting so many of the distinguished and really important men of
England; to whom, at all events, she gave her spare moments. Of coquetry
he was sane enough to acquit her; he had faith in her honesty; but she
could have taken no surer means to fan a passion now so fully recognized
that he sometimes wondered grimly how much he would stake on ambition
when the race came off. He was able to laugh, however, at the diabolical
irony of his position. Of all the men that pursued her, he alone had
been given the opportunity to look ridiculous, he alone suffered, was
wounded in more than vanity. For the first time the source of the lavish
expenditures which had given Styr the greatest of her triumphs occurred
to him, and he reflected that did the Cuttings and “Bobby” know the
truth and were permitted to turn the pages of his mind, they might
justly exult. This did not mean that he felt the least compunction or
even regret, merely that he was beginning to look life more squarely in
the face, give more than a lofty casual glance to cause and effect.
But he had himself well in hand. He had never been more indolent of
manner, more alert in conversation. When he discovered that he was
pitied as an object of hopeless passion, he ceased to be seen constantly
in the wake of the prima donna, deliberately devoted himself to other
women. Puppy love had pinched his face, ruined his manners, bereft him
of pride and self-control; but this slow and complete awakening of his
masculinity matured his character, which his brain had outstripped, and
substituted the sharp violent desires of the man, the arrogance of the
conquering male, for the thin timid blades of spring. To two people only
did he look older, his wife and Styr. From the minds of neither was he
long absent. Styr understood, and for the first time in her knowledge of
him was frightened. There was something portentous in his cool smiling
self-control, like that of a soft-footed tiger biding his time. Mabel
half understood and was terrified but resolute. She believed that he was
infatuated and unfaithful, but knew the power of the wife over the
mistress if able to keep her head and wait, believed that when separated
from Styr he would forget like other men. Her mind was now alert; she
would be amiable and tactful, and she would stand her ground and fight
to the last ditch. She was in no condition to enter upon such an
engagement, and had it not been for the good streak of Dutch obstinacy
in her nature, she might not have proved equal even to spurts of
determination to win or die. When overcome by a physical weariness which
compelled her to lie down for hours instead of pacing the room revolving
plans, she could only reflect bitterly upon the disabilities which made
the game so pitifully uneven. Were she well and beautiful, she would not
have hesitated to feign interest in the most notoriously “successful” of
her admirers,—in royalty itself,—and bring Ordham to terms through his
vanity, and, no doubt, through reawakened passion. Then she wept
bitterly, not only at her present impotence but for her lost ideals. She
might win back her husband, but her love for him would never again be
quite free of that resentment and antagonism, even hatred, inevitable
when the woman has been forced in one way or another to recognize the
remorseless might of sex. Above all, she felt it to be monstrous that
she, with youth and beauty and virtue, wealth and position, the fitness
and the wish to be a good wife and an ornament to society, should be
pitted in a death struggle with a waif from the streets, whose life had
been unprintable, and who had left youth behind her. Such injustice
terrified her, confused her standards. At first she prayed wildly, then
she ceased to pray at all.
LV
THE WORLD AND THE CROSS
Styr and her management had been careful to give the antidote of Elsa
and Elizabeth often enough to protect an exhilarated public against
reaction; and by one of those curious paradoxes, known to all that have
had reason to study the public taste, her portrayal of that princess
among virgins, Elizabeth of Thüringen, from her joyous girlhood to that
last mournful scene where she is both saint and woman and wholly lovely,
was quite as popular as of those passionate and lawless heroines, Isolde
and Sieglinde.
In Munich Styr had sung the part of Venus as a matter of course, leaving
the more lyric rôle to the aspiring _jugendlichdramatischen_, but she,
as well as her directors, well knew that to give _Tannhäuser_ the
mounting and accessories which made the first scene of its first act, as
represented in Munich, the most suggestive on the stage, would be going
a step too far even with the British public in its present state of
enthusiasm. And without that rosy atmosphere like the mist of an amorous
dawn, that sumptuous yet mirage-like couch in the background, the
refined yet lascivious dancing of satyrs and nymphs, the visions of Leda
and the swan, Europa and the bull, that first long scene, despite its
delicious music, would mean to the unmusical beholder naught but an
interminable duet between a forward woman in a Greek fillet and baggy
gown, and a sulky man in a leathern jerkin and top-boots. Therefore was
the first scene cut down to little more than a prologue, the part of
Venus sung by an obese German beyond her prime, and fashion entered
boxes and stalls a few moments before Elizabeth ran into the great hall
of her father’s castle with a burst of song as of a bird mounting to the
empyrean after long drooping behind the bars of a cage.
Perhaps Styr had never proved herself a greater actress than when she
stared, incredulous and horrified, at the outbreak of the sophisticated
_Tannhäuser_, disgusted with the provincial virtues of the knights, for
she looked just sixteen; and when Mabel, who had attended the first
performance, saw that dawn of sorrowful womanhood in her eyes, the
impotence of maiden innocence against the subtle sweets of mature vice,
she clutched her salts and nearly fainted. But when in the last act,
Styr, looking as only a pure woman that has never harboured so much as a
sinful thought can look, first brought tears to the eyes of old cynics
by her pitiful examination of every face in the ragged procession of
pilgrims returning from Rome, and then, clinging to the cross, sang her
soul straight up to a waiting heaven, Mabel sniffed audibly and walked
out. She could not have felt more indignant had Styr publicly been
received into the bosom of the Church of Rome and advertised as a beacon
light for mankind. But mental suffering had developed a species of
saturnine humour in her, and when she was in bed she laughed consumedly
at the fool this great actress was making of London.