disputed, perhaps because Styr managed to convey the impression of a
pure white lily growing out of a baneful swamp, in other words
emphasized the sensuousness of the music, and made her audiences feel
that they loved virtue the more while enjoying vicarious naughtiness
none the less. Perhaps it was an unadmitted desire for vindication that
caused an almost unanimous demand that _Tannhäuser_ should end this
agitating season. It was given, and Styr, eliminating the richness from
her voice, sang with the sexless silvery sweetness of a boy chorister,
which made the tremendous volume of her voice and its noble quality the
more remarkable by contrast. The ovation began when the dead Elizabeth,
looking like a marble angel, was carried in by the weeping pilgrims. It
was too soon to lower the curtain, and as the audience manifested its
complete indifference to the lament of Heinrich, Styr was forced to rise
publicly from her coffin and respond to the plaudits of her admirers. As
this absurd performance smote not only her own sense of humour but that
of her audience, the great Wagner season ended in a hearty burst of
laughter which put everybody in the best possible temper, and made the
unavoidable speech easier to make.
Pelted with bouquets and standing up to her waist in the superb floral
offerings handed over the footlights, Styr thanked London for its
kindness with her usual proud aloofness considerably modified, and
promised to return as soon as her engagements would permit. The
audience, now on its feet, shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as eagerly as
children, applauded, waved their handkerchiefs, tossed their bouquets
for ten minutes longer. Ordham withdrew to the depths of his box, almost
paralyzed between delight at the triumph of this woman, whom he would
have given the whole round globe, were it his, and an uncontrollable
agitation which made him thankful he was alone in his box. He saw his
hands tremble and felt the tears on his cheeks, and scorned the heroes
of French romance no more.
But he made no effort to see her after she had bowed her final adieu.
There was to be a great supper on the stage, but he left the opera house
with a scribbled word of apology on a card to the host, and walked until
he found himself, at dawn, far out in the country. He went to bed at an
inn, and returned to London when the train for the Continent was halfway
to the coast. He had written Styr the day before that he should make no
further attempt to see her again, that he accepted her manifest decree
for the present, although he was by no means certain that he should not
go to Munich as soon as he was free; the less he saw of her now the
better, no doubt. Then with the utmost courtesy he thanked and
congratulated her. He wrote with such cold precision that Styr was as
convinced as himself that he had arrived at a worldly state of mind
which he meant to be irrevocable, and it was with a grinning brain that
she portrayed with even more than her usual poignance a woman shattered
on the merciless rocks of love.
LVI
A DIPLOMATIST OUT OF THE SADDLE
During the following month Ordham’s large circle of acquaintances quite
forgot his apparent infatuation for the Styr, so gay and debonair was
he, so devoted to their society, so punctilious in his attendance upon
his wife during her daily drives—“poor dear!”—so frankly and
technically did he discuss the voice and histrionics of the prima donna,
still a topic of conversation, so conventionally did he express his
regret that he should be scribbling in the chancery of some embassy
during her next visit to London. Such youthful aberrations as a young
man’s fancy for a fashionable singer are too common to burden the memory
with, and it is not even passing strange that to-day London has as
completely forgotten his devotion to the great Styr as if he had worn an
invisible cap; but, for that matter, they had forgotten it far sooner
than he in his raw abraded vanity suspected; for in the composite drama
of which Styr, during that richly exciting and varied season, was the
chief figure, few minor details stood out.
He was now so correct in his attitude of husband and son-in-law, so
entertaining and amusing, that he rang hard and clear like some finely
constructed machine full of little silver bells. Mrs. Cutting was
charmed, but Mabel was often faint with fear. Her brain might be young
and small and ignorant, but it was in a constant steel-blue glare of
intuitions these days. She had been the bride of a young man
comparatively candid and open despite his diplomatic temperament; she
now felt herself the honoured consort of a man of unthinkable age,
wearing a vizor of youth which might drop at any moment and reveal
unknown horrors, hatreds, diabolical purposes. Ordham played his part
well, but he guessed that the face of the man she married was too deeply
bitten into her memory for his present mask to deceive her. He did not
care. He was doing his best; more could be asked of no man.
Possibly the fascination of the Ordhams of the old civilizations resides
in those deep artificial layers which are the result of centuries of
selection, rejection, experimentation. But deep in these organic
edifications there may be more unbridled human nature than in the newer
races; these, more or less conscious of a certain transparency, are,
warily or intuitively, making and shaping their characters, always
adapting themselves to their shifting conditions. Moreover, the man to
whom leisure is but one more toy for his family lives on his practical
surfaces. In men of Ordham’s class practical surfaces might almost be
said to be nonexistent. When thrown on their own resources and scattered
over an inhospitable globe, they wring a living out of it if their
natural intelligence chimes with opportunity; but they are so generally
failures that it is possible Darwin saw many of them during his voyages,
and they, not the lower forms, suggested the immortal phrase, “survival
of the fittest.” In the Ordhams, protected either by the law of
primogeniture or other kindly energies of fate, those deep and
multitudinous layers are not only full of charm, of delight to
themselves and society, not only do they give them a sense or security
which would betray itself in arrogance were they less well-bred, but, so
deeply buried are such qualities as worthlessness, savagery, brutal
selfishness, that only exceptional circumstances magnetize them to the
surface. And even then it is only some final and terrible impetus that
reveals them to their fellows in all their nakedness. No men are so
protected by circumstance; in other words, by the world’s—their
world’s—conventions.
Ordham, during these four weeks, when, as much from the instinct of
noblesse oblige as pity for his young wife, whose very voice set his
nerves on edge, whose every effort to please him served to remind that
he was tied for life to a woman as transparent as a window-pane, was
unable to stifle an unceasing whisper in the back of his brain that this
could not last, that mortal endurance was not equal to three months more
of this unnatural self-control, of a sullen defiance of desire for the
woman who had made him feel as if he were a masculine Galatea and she a
female Pygmalion. Had he but conceived one of those passions for her to
which men are always liable, he would either have conquered it or have
induced her to remain in England until tired of her. But he had given
her his heart; he was filled not only with the imperious desires of the
predatory male, but his brain, with pitiless logic, portrayed and
reiterated every phase of the perfect union. Two powerful correlated
personalities had met, and each was the helpless victim of the other.
It was still incomprehensible to him that he could fail to obtain
anything he craved, much less what was beginning to seem of more value
to him than life. “More than life,” indeed, was but a phrase; in his
case, “more than career” represented the alternative. The forecasting of
a blighting scandal held him in leash as effectively as his sense of
duty to the girl he had married; married, when all was said, with his
eyes open, for, whether deceived or not in the woman, he knew that he
was yielding his liberty and had not hesitated a moment.
But specious arguments were not wanting half to convince him that both
he and Styr were clever enough to blind the world until truth had
escaped in such vagrant jets that people would have accepted the
situation almost before they knew it existed. Mabel, he was now
convinced, would never get a divorce, and the busy world, unless slapped
in the face, is very lenient to the bearer of a great name, the
dispenser of large hospitalities, and the owner of rare gifts.
Nevertheless, Ordham was able to consider the possible reverse of the
picture and to be thankful that circumstances kept him for the present
in England. He half hoped that by the time he was free his worldly sense
would wholly have conquered the primitive force of this newly realized
passion, or that the latter would sink under his natural indolence and
taste for procrastination. Indeed he had almost concluded that,
intolerable as the strain was, he should emerge triumphant, when he met
his mother entering the house in Grosvenor Square one afternoon as he
was about to leave it. She told him that she had just received a
telegram from Bridgminster’s servant stating that his master believed
himself about to die and had expressed a wish to see her. All that had
been consigned to the deepest pit in Ordham’s mind during the last few
days rose instantly and quite calmly to the surface. He did not even
hesitate.
“Insist that I go with you,” he said, turning to go upstairs with her.
“Insist that you are not able to stand the ordeal alone.”
“But, Johnny—”
“I am going to ring for Hines to pack. Of course you start at once. When
I join you in the family circle, I hope you will have impressed them
with the fact that you cannot go without me.”
She recalled—perhaps it was his cool steady gaze above the sudden
pallor of his face that evoked the memory—that however she may have
managed this son of hers, she had never governed him; shrugging her
shoulders, she went up to inform Mrs. Cutting and Mabel as volubly as a
French woman of her terrible upset over the telegram, and her insistence
to Johnny, whom she had providentially met as he was leaving the house,
that he should go with her.
He had changed his clothes for a travelling suit and was giving his
final directions to the distracted Hines when there was a tap at his
door. He opened it himself, and seeing his mother-in-law, stepped out
and closed it behind him. Mrs. Cutting’s face was pale and there was
fear in her eyes.
“You are not really going!” she exclaimed.
“Has not my mother explained?”
“Your mother can take Stanley with her. It is not possible that you will
leave Mabel now—when—almost any minute—”
“Oh, I shall be gone but a few days. Surely—”
“Mabel, poor child, is persuading herself that you ought to go, but she
overrates her power of endurance. I know—I _know_—that after you are
gone there will be a reaction—she will break down. I would not answer
for the consequences.”
Ordham sighed. He was hardly aware of the woman’s presence, save in so
far as she forced him to talk when he would have preferred not to open
his mouth for twenty-four hours. “Surely you and the doctor—”
“Of course you know practically nothing about such things.” Mrs. Cutting
actually blushed; woman of society as she was, she would be a prude
until the end. “But it is dangerous to agitate—”
“Why in heaven’s name should she be agitated because I absent myself for
a few days? It has struck me that she grows more sensible every day.”
“Oh, men! I repeat that I am convinced that she will break down as soon
as she realizes that she cannot see you constantly,—that you have
actually deserted her at a time like this!”
“Deserted! Dear Mrs. Cutting, is not that rather a strong word? I shall
not be gone more than a week at most.”
“A week! Oh, how shall I make you understand?”
“Perhaps it is because there is really nothing to make clear. You are
agitating yourself for nothing.” There was no nervousness, no
abstraction, even, in his manner. He smiled into her eyes and stood
quite at his ease, with all that blend of charm and formality that had
won her approval the day she met him in Princess Nachmeister’s park. A
memory struggled upward in her mind. It was ghostly, evasive; then it
took form. She recalled that fleeting moment in which she had responded
to the cool ruthless kernel of this young man, so elaborately endowed
for public service. Her own ambitions might be dust before the week was
out, but he—he would survive more than the knowledge that he had been
the death of his young wife. She shook from head to foot in the first
real terror and agitation she had ever known.
“You will kill her,” she stammered. “If there should be any
complication—”
He ceased to smile and, taking her hand, drew it through his arm and led
her to the door of her own room. “You know that no girl could be
stronger than Mabel,” he said soothingly, and in so impersonal a manner
that Mrs. Cutting felt as if the blood in her veins were freezing. “And
there is nothing in the world as natural as this sort of thing. Think of
the thousands of women that bring their children into the world, every
month in the year, who are in every sort of trouble; from the Brittany
women, whose husbands have gone on the _grand pêche_, and are more
likely than not to return no more, to the poor creatures in Whitechapel,
beaten and kicked up to the last minute. Women were made to bring
children into the world and to survive far worse ordeals than a
separation of a few days from their devoted husbands. What on earth
could I do if I were here? It seems to me, for that matter, rather nicer
that I should not be.”
“Mabel is not inured to suffering like those women,” Mrs. Cutting began,
but Ordham opened her door and gently pushed her in. He went on to the
drawing-room. Mabel, although perhaps a shade sallower than common, was
quite alert and cheerful. He understood her tactics, but if the time was
past when she could deceive him in any way, he was not only grateful to
her now but moved to admiration; for after all she was very young. No
doubt in time she would make a clever woman of sorts. And although he
believed his mother-in-law’s fears to be sheer nonsense, he was quite
aware that Mabel (like all women, of course!) would fancy herself
unhappy during his absence.
“It is too dreadful to think that I must part with you, even for a few
days,” she said brightly. “You keep me up so! But of course if Lady Pat
feels that you are necessary, I gracefully yield. But do make it as
short as possible. You will, won’t you?”
“Of course!” He stooped and kissed her with more warmth than usual.
“Lady Pat is quite right. I don’t fancy Bridg will make a pathetic
death-bed scene and try her nerves; that is not in his line; but there
may be other details—she is quite right. For the matter of that, this
may be but a false alarm—in any case we need not be away too long.”
“No, indeed!” Lady Bridgminster rose. “I shall return in less than a
week. But go I must, and Johnny owes me a filial duty once in a while.
Has your four-wheeler come? Mine was to follow me here.”
“I am quite ready.”
They drove to Paddington station, followed by two four-wheelers with
luggage atop and servant within. “What is your game, Johnny?” asked Lady
Bridgminster, with lively curiosity. “Why inflict yourself with Bridg if
you had to take a holiday? No doubt Mabel, who is a model wife, if she
is a fright at present, would have given you a few days at Ordham. You
never wanted for excuses.”
“I had no intention until you came in of making any excuse.”
“But why Bridg? I doubt if he will be glad to see you.”
“That is not of the slightest consequence.”
Her curiosity was not relieved until she was in her reserved
compartment, and the maid, having arranged her pillows, had gone to her
second-class carriage. Then Ordham closed the door and shook hands
through the window with his mother.
“Good-by for the present,” he said. “I have just time to catch my train
at Victoria.”
“John Ordham!”
“If you write to Mabel or her mother, you might comment upon my hatred
of letter writing. I am going to the Continent and shall remain away
exactly a week. If I think best, I shall write or telegraph Mabel from
there, but it hardly matters. I shall have returned before she will have
had time to think much about it.”
Lady Bridgminster was given no opportunity to remonstrate, for he walked
swiftly to his waiting hansom and drove off. But considering that she
was a lady too philosophical to cut wrinkles in her complexion by
worrying over the inevitable, she looked almost blanched and thoughtful
as she settled herself with a magazine and recalled all she had heard of
her son’s friendship this year and last for Margarethe Styr.
“Johnny!” she thought. “Of all men! It must be serious indeed.”
LVII
THE LAST CARD
Ordham, having felt himself expelled from those orderly conditions in
which so many men dwell for a lifetime with only an occasional abortive
protest, shot out by the dynamic power of angry human forces too long
accumulating, had no mind to indulge in futile regrets. He did not
pretend to assert that his will was too weak to continue its inhibitions
had he chosen, but he had suddenly realized that he did not choose, and
that was the end of it. Accordingly, he banished the very memory of
Mabel, declared war on menacing fingers shaking over the ramparts still
erect to protect his future, and untormented for the first time in many
weeks, inveigled sleep the moment his head touched the pillow of his
berth. The passage was quiet and he slept until the boat reached
Flushing. He slept again in the train, and, upon being informed in
Cologne that the Munich express was an hour late, he sensibly went to a
hotel and took a bath. The rest of the journey seemed interminable. It
was the season for tourists, the dust and heat were insufferable. But as
the train ambled into the great dépôt of Munich, he forgot discomforts,
and, all his being quivering, he suddenly felt that this beautiful city
of beautiful memories would give him back his youth; he had even a
whimsical idea that he had left it there and she was holding it for him
intact; he had but to ask for it.
He sprang from the carriage almost before the train halted, and without
waiting for Hines to do all the work, walked rapidly up the platform to
secure a cab. He actually had his ticket ready as he passed through the
gate, instead of keeping the mob cursing behind him after his usual
fashion. His head was in the air, he saw no one in the waiting crowd,
until he almost ran over a tall footman who planted himself directly in
his path.
“Sir,” began this person. “I beg your pardon—” He almost fell back, for
the eyes he encountered were like those of a wild beast at bay. Ordham
had recognized the man at once as one of the servants of the British
Legation, and for the first time in his life was possessed with the lust
to slay. But he recovered himself instantly, and although he felt as if
the sudden fire in his veins were falling to ashes with youth and hope
and life itself, he asked the man calmly enough what he wanted.
“Mr. Trowbridge sent three of us, sir, to stand at different points. Six
telegrams have come for you to-day. Thomas has them. He is outside by
the cabs, sir.”
Ordham followed the man, half resolving to tear up the telegrams and
scatter them over the stones of Munich. There was neither pity nor
sympathy in him. He felt pure flint, and had he been suddenly translated
into Mabel’s presence, she would have been welcome to the discovery that
he hated her. But, automatically, noblesse oblige did its work. When the
telegrams were handed to him, he arranged them methodically in the order
of their dates, and read them through. From them he learned that Mabel’s
self-control had deserted her even in the moment of his departure. She
had sent a servant to follow his cab and had discovered that he had
taken the train for the Continent. She had governed her agitation in a
degree until her suspicions were confirmed, but it then had become
uncontrollable, and a somewhat premature confinement was the result.
Then he read that the child was dead, and that, her excitement resisting
all attempts to alleviate it, there was practically no question of her
death unless she could be assured that he would return at once. In the
final telegram Mrs. Cutting humbled herself to the dust. The doctor also
had telegraphed.
Ordham, still acting under the compulsion of that little engine which
civilization has attached to the modern brain, and which so often,
automatically, gets up steam and keeps the track no matter how palsied
the hand or blinding the mists, turned to Hines and told him to send a
telegram to London and reserve a compartment for the train that left at
eleven o’clock. Then he went to a hotel and took another bath and
changed his linen, almost grateful to the grime of the hot and dusty day
which forced him to observe these commonplace formalities. Resolving to
walk to Schwabing, as much to settle his nerves as to avoid Styr’s
supper hour, he left his hotel, which was in the Dinerstrasse, and
strolled along endeavouring to adjust himself to the present. He had
enough to agitate him, aside from the fact that he must leave Munich
that night. As Styr had not sent him a line since her departure, he was
convinced that her frame of mind had been no more enviable than his. He
had subscribed for the principal daily newspapers of Munich and knew
that she had, as ever, compelled the admiration of those critics not in
league with the cabal; but since the first of July the opera house had
been closed and he could appreciate how the sudden idleness must afflict
her. He was not even sure that she was in Munich. She might already have
gone on a _Gastspiel_. If that were the case, he must wait another month
at least—he wondered if he should!
He sauntered along, pausing deliberately to look at the beautiful opera
house, a wing of the Residenz, but dominating the square before it with
its noble proportions, its brilliant blue and gold fresco of Apollo
among the Muses above the portico. His heart beat thickly, and not alone
for Margarethe Styr. How many times had his cab passed the mounted
guard, rolled up the steep incline to the entrance where he was ever
obsequiously received by the tall doorkeeper in livery (with his palm
out)—and then the wide lobby full of late comers, the crush at the
_garde robes_, the big chief of all the important little officials, in
his gorgeous white and blue uniform, his cocked hat and mace, the gay
foyer, and then, and then,—he came to the present abruptly. He wondered
at the fluidity of youth that lingered in him, and walked more quickly
down Perusastrasse.
He saw that the narrow pavements of Theatinerstrasse were crowded, as
was usual at this hour, many, indeed, walking in the street itself. From
five to seven was the fashionable hour for shopping and displaying one’s
best frocks, and although most of the smart people were away, many
remained in that salubrious city the year round, save for brief visits
to Italy or neighbouring points of interest. He, too, had been
accustomed to stroll in Theatinerstrasse at this hour, and he approached
it with some eagerness, hoping that it would banish the present for
another moment. But as he reached the corner he came to an abrupt halt
and nearly lost his breath. Sailing toward him, her plump figure
sheathed and swaddled in crêpe, her head, nay her nose, in the air, her
crêpe veil trailing on the pavement behind her, handsome, insolent,
radiant, was Frau von Wass. Ordham fled into the English drug-store, and
even although he could not be sure that he had escaped the manubial eye
of a lady who looked more bent upon game and conquest than ever
before,—refreshed, rejuvenated, and hungry, after her long
seclusion,—he could not, at a safe distance, resist staring through the
glass of the door. But Frau Hélène had not seen him. She crossed
Theatinerstrasse, not deigning to lift the train of skirt or veil, and
entered a milliner’s shop. Ordham hastily retreated up Perusastrasse,
and took a cab at the post-office. He had no desire to meet and exchange
words with any chance acquaintance, however harmless, and as the cab
sauntered up the Ludwigstrasse he kept his eyes averted from the
pavements and reflected upon the banalities of life, its merciless
anti-climaxes. Apparently there was no such thing as pure tragedy.
He looked at his watch. It was but seven o’clock, Styr’s supper hour. He
told the _kutscher_ to drive in the Englischergarten. Half an hour’s
further respite—he was not averse! He felt dull, hard, nervous. His
head was hot, his hands cold. In the deserted driveway of the park he
took off his hat and leaned back with closed eyes. But the telegrams in
his pocket did not burn him; his mind was on the approaching interview.
He was quite aware that if Styr were in the villa the next hour would be
far more portentous than that of his marriage, and although it never
occurred to him to turn back, he faltered a bit.