extreme respect. Ordham turned his head. The King had entered his box.
He still wore a light overcoat, as if he had but just now stepped from
the carriage that brought him from one of his castles. He also did not
think it worth while to remove his hat, a large soft hat, tipped over
his heavy white face. Altogether he bore little resemblance to the
romantic and brilliant youth, probably the handsomest figure that ever
ornamented a throne, who had witnessed his first exclusive performance
from that box in 1865. He sat down heavily. The musicians took their
places. The overture began.
Ordham felt as if he had dropped gently from a fire-swept plain, haunted
by furies, into a vast warm rhythmic sea whose tides swept sense to
thought and rushed it back again to the senses, until that complete
union was effected of which all mortals dream but only the Ordhams and
Styrs can attain.
Ordham never made any attempt to follow the motives in an overture; that
was not his idea of enjoying music, which he estimated as a gift
bestowed on brains like Wagner’s that the intellect of the hearer might
be awakened and excited only so far as was necessary to liberate the
senses. Nevertheless, to-night he was aware as never before of that deep
undertone of fate below the solemn joy and halleluja of the music of
_Götterdämmerung_. And fate was personified in the first dark scene,
where the three grey Norns sat weaving their ropes and gloomily
foretelling the death of gods too confident and ambitious. But when the
hideous trio disappeared and Brünhilde and Siegfried came forth from the
cave where they had passed their long honeymoon, it needed only Styr’s
first love notes, piercingly sweet, while her eyes deliberately sought
the spot where she knew Ordham must be, to shake him from head to foot
with the reassurance that whatever she might resolve in her cooler
moments, love meant all to her that it had meant to this fallen goddess.
Styr may or may not have read the volumes of criticism devoted to the
heroine of the Niebelungenlied, but it is probable that in any case she
would have penetrated the mists of antiquity and seen the Brynhildr who
reigned there, with her own eyes. In _Die Walküre_ she made her
alternately the jubilant sexless favourite of Wotan, shadowed subtly
with her impending womanhood, and the goddess of aloof and immutable
calm, Will personified, even when moved to pity. In _Götterdämmerung_,
particularly of late, she had portrayed her as woman epitomized, arguing
that all great women had the ichor of the goddess in their veins, and
that primal woman was but the mother of a sex modified (sometimes) but
not remade. In the last act of _Siegfried_ her voice was wholly dramatic
and expressed her delight at coming into her woman’s inheritance in
ecstatic cries, almost shouts, which were never to be forgotten by any
that heard them, and stirred the primal inheritance in the veriest
butterfly of the court. In this beautiful love scene of
_Götterdämmerung_, the last of the tetralogy, her voice was lyric, rich
and round and full, as her voice must always be, but stripped of its
darker quality; and while by no means angelic, a character with which
she could invest it when portraying the virgin Elizabeth, was as sweet
and clear and triumphant as if bent upon giving the final expression to
the first love of woman alloyed with knowledge.
Ordham had heard her in the rôle many times, and he soon appreciated
that she had never made as much of this scene as she did to-night,
realized she meant to convey that Brynhildr, with some echo in her brain
of her old gift of prophecy, took advantage of this last hour of
happiness to gratify her woman’s nature to the core. She was tender,
ineffably so, doubtful, charming, full of fears, superbly passionate.
Her great tones were like golden apples filled with the sharp delicious
juices of her bridal memories; and she was the epitome of the helpmate,
the apotheosis of exalted womanhood when she bade her man go forth and
conquer new worlds, exercise his supreme gifts of strength and courage
as a man should, instead of dallying too long in these flowery meadows
of love. Ordham, watching her through his glass, wondered that even she
could be so beautiful, for her face was illuminated as he had never seen
it before. He had not the least doubt that she kept her word and sang to
him, and when she cried: “Oh, heavenly powers, holy protectors, view
with delight our devotion and love. Apart, who can divide us? Divided,
still we are one!” she bent her head from Siegfried’s neck and looked
once more full at the spot where, it may be, Ordham’s face made a white
blur on the dark.
He paid slight attention to the next scene, although the picturesque
hall of the Gibichungs on the Rhine, with the sinister plot hatched
there, had always delighted him; but his uneasiness recurred, for in
retrospect Styr’s voice and acting were charged with a significance he
felt but could not define. His confidence returned, however, during her
scene with Waltraute, when he could not doubt that her incredulity at
the demand of the gods to give up her bridal ring, and the magnificent
scorn with which she announced herself woman, not that pitiful
half-remembered thing, a demigoddess, were addressed, not to Valhalla,
but to the harrowing demands of an art that still fought for its rights.
“Siegfried loves me! . . . The ring bides with me. . . . get hence to
the gods. . . . Sooner to ruins Valhalla’s splendour may crash,” sang
Brünhilde, much as Styr, if too hard pressed, might have cried: “To the
devil with Art and the world!”
Ordham smiled, then sank the man in the spectator once more as the
hapless Brünhilde repulsed and struggled with the disguised and
unmemoried Siegfried, for here there could be no message; no mortal
would ever come between himself and her; and perhaps that profound
knowledge and faith, at the same time devoid of the subtle sting of
regret for the loss of a suspense always piquant, was the final proof
that, whatever his faults and lacks, as a man he was at least able to
love greatly.
As Brünhilde was driven by the fraudulent Gunther into the cave, she
looked as if the very bones had gone out of her, primitive woman beaten
and captured by the victorious male, bewildered, helpless, sick with
disgust and horror, but too broken, too conscious of the futility of
revolt even to appeal to the relentless brute force behind her. Ordham
recalled Styr’s initiation, and reflected that, although methods had
changed since the primordial era, man had not. And while there was no
resemblance whatever between himself and that prosaic seducer of an
ignorant and beautiful child, bred in a filthy mining town, save in
their common sex, still would he, impelled by that imperious call in his
blood of man for his mate, have resorted to kidnapping, strategy,
bribery, violence, any device old or new, to force this woman into an
indissoluble bond with himself.
By the King’s command, there was a pause of but three minutes between
the first act—close upon an hour and a half in length—and the second.
Ordham’s mind wandered to the morrow until the boat came down the Rhine
with Gunther and his prey. Then, once more he was ready to sink Styr in
Brünhilde, for he had never been able to decide which was the greatest
piece of acting on the world’s stage, Styr’s Isolde in the first act of
_Tristan_, or her Brünhilde in this tremendous scene, where she invoked
the supernormal birthright of the goddess to intensify the fury and
indignation of the outraged woman.
As she stepped from the boat, hanging her head before the throng
awaiting the bride Gunther had ravished from the fire-girt rock, she
looked so forlorn, so beaten, so wholly womanly that Ordham felt tears
in his eyes. Oddly enough his thoughts flew to the lonely coffin in
Brompton Cemetery. Mabel, dead in her youth, was mercifully spared the
maturer suffering of woman. Not that she ever could have reached the
heights and depths so fatally accessible to this woman, but she
symbolized youth, whose unhappiness is but a phase of its egotistical
pleasures, and was gone before she had lived long enough to suffer with
a mind stripped of illusions.
There was no controversy of doubt over Styr’s interpretation of
Brünhilde in this act. She let loose every passion of which her sex when
scorned has yet conceived. After her vain appeal to Siegfried, standing
fatuously beside the Gedrun whose magic potion has bewitched him (more
than ever Ordham wondered that Brünhilde could have given her affections
to this great child), when those long moments of staring incredulity
were over, she burst into such a madness of rage that her voice seemed
to darken visibly, to take on strange tones, as deep and crude as colour
may have been in that morning of the world when goddesses went to sleep
on rocks surrounded by fire and Siegfrieds fought dragons and walked
through flames protected by _tarnhelm_ and ring. When she screamed, her
voice pierced to the marrow, affrighting as that of a wild beast in a
jungle at night. The whole scene was almost unbearable in its intensity;
but never did those beautiful arms make an ungraceful movement, the hand
that clutched the heart as if to tear it out never rose an inch too high
or low. Her audience might be racked and unbreathed, but Styr was always
the absolute artist, vivified but never distracted by the furnace
within.
Nevertheless, those that knew nothing of acting would have vowed that
Styr’s brain was suffocated by Brynhildr’s. To-night when Siegfried and
Gedrun had gone, and, alone with Gunther and Hagen, she stood staring
before her, an immense horror in her eyes, her lips slightly parted, her
arms limp, as if on the edge of the world watching it sink into the
black void of space, Ordham involuntarily glanced behind him at the
King. He had hitched his chair forward, his arms were pressing the rail,
his hat was on the back of his head, his eyes flamed with light. He
looked like a lost immortal, long straying from star to star, who at
last sees the distant gates of Valhalla open, and awaiting him. Ordham
wondered why this poor idealist had never sought out Styr, hoping to
find in her the embodiment of his unearthly dreams; wondered again if it
were because of the knowledge that his mortal career had made it
impossible for him to find the goddess in any woman. His eyes were
filmed with more than common weakness, his senses drugged, dead; he
could but dream of some tier of heaven reserved for great souls like
his, which came to their own only when free of the flesh. But there was
no doubt that Styr in such scenes as this gave him immortal moments.
Brünhilde came out of her stupor, and after a fruitless lament for the
lost arts of her godhood, with which, woman-like, she fancied she might
have held Siegfried against the wiles of a younger woman, deliberately
sentenced him to death. As she described the only vulnerable part of the
mighty Siegfried, that fearless back which he would never show to any
foe, her calm was far more awful than her wrath had been. During her
long meditation, she had divined the trick which had been played upon
the warrior, but that light by no means mitigated the evil; if she could
not possess him neither should Gedrun. It was the primitive woman’s
method of revenge that modern woman has not disdained to follow, but so
grand was her portrayal of a woman conscious that she had once been the
mighty daughter of Wotan, that never for a second did she descend to the
level of Earthians. She was Brünhilde acting according to her lights,
and the lights of her day must have been as blinding as an electric
storm caught in an underground cavern.
The scene shifted. Siegfried drank from the horn into which the ever
malignant Hagen had squeezed the restorative herb, and sang of
Brünhilde, forgetting Gedrun and all that had happened since he left the
rock. With the enchanting strains of the love music of the last act of
the third opera of the tetralogy embracing him—tender and
ecstatic—followed by the slowly unwinding Brünhilde motif, coming as it
did after so much misery, wickedness, and violence, and preceding crime
and the final disaster, Ordham dropped his face into his hands and gave
up his thoughts to the bliss he anticipated. He was recalled by the
deepest sigh he had ever heard. It came down upon him like a gust of
death, dulling the almost excruciating sweetness of the music. He raised
his head and thanked God that he was not Ludwig, King of Bavaria. For
him there was a future on Earth.
The _Trauermarsch_, in which all the dead of not only Earth, but of the
Universe, seem to rise and tramp across the bridge of oblivion, was
finished. Brünhilde entered the hall of the Gibichungs to find Gedrun
wailing over Siegfried’s body, Gunther slain by Hagen. Of late Styr had
played the character consistently through to the end as a woman. But
to-night she appeared to defer once more to Wagner—possibly to the
King—and to be about to symbolize the “negation of the will to live,”
the eternal sacrifice of woman, the immolation of self; although she had
contended, and for that reason sang no more at Bayreuth, that such an
interpretation was absurd as a finale for Brünhilde, no matter what its
beauty and truth in the abstract. The gods were doomed, her renouncement
of life did not save them, and as for the sacrifice of woman to man,
that she had accomplished twice over. Brünhilde died as other women had
died since, and doubtless before, in the hope of uniting with the spirit
of her man, and because life was become abhorrent.
To-night, as she entered the hall, she was so still, so majestic, that
she no longer looked a woman at all, save in so far as her slain
womanhood may have risen to feed the purpose of the daughter of
Wotan—calm, inexorable, the personification of Will. As she stood by
the bier and ordered the funeral pyre built and began that great dirge
which expresses the end of all things mortal, her face was
expressionless, as fixed as that of the beautiful Medusa in the
Glyptothek of Munich. Her head, her body, might have been an organ out
of which rolled such notes as no other audience had ever heard. Ordham
almost stood up, the voice was so sublime, so unearthly; he wondered if
his brain, his senses, had been so unmercifully beaten upon during the
long hours of the opera that he was suffering from delusion. He had not
known that even Styr could sing like that. So must the heroines of the
old Sagas have sung when Europe was still the battleground of gods and
men, so may Brynhildr’s voice have gone up in its mighty swan song
before Valhalla flamed and fell to ashes.
Never on any stage has there been such a picture as Styr always made,
when, standing before the funeral pyre on whose summit lay the body of
Siegfried, with her flaming torch held high in her right hand and her
hair streaming behind her, looking even taller than her own majestic
height, she sang:
“_Flieght heim, ihr Raben_
_raun’t es euren Herrn_
_was hier am Rhein irh gehört!_”
and to-night, as she sang that magnificent pæan to death, she fairly
filled the stage, as if some power of the soul literally permitted her
body to grow to the heroic proportions of that old daughter of the gods.
But all the time the immobility of her face never broke; it was fate
itself. She thrust her torch into the pyre, greeted and unbridled her
horse still with the same awful calm. It was only when the fire was
roaring from floor to ceiling and she was about to mount Grane that her
voice abruptly lost its solemnity and pealed out in the wildest ecstasy:
“_Fühl’ meine Brust auch,_
_wie sie entbrennt;_
_helles Feuer_
_das Hertz mir erfasst,_
_ihn zu umschlingen,_
_umschlossen von ihm,_
_in mächtigster Minne_
_vermählt ihm zu sein!_
_Heiaho! Grane!_
_grüsse deinem Herrn!_
_Siegfried! Siegfried! Sieh!_
_Selig grüsst dich dein Weib!_”
The last line was flung straight into Ordham’s ear, but he did not pause
to reflect upon its significance, holding his breath for this final
moment of Styr’s stupendous acting, Brynhildr’s immolation. She leaped
on her horse, and with head erect and arms uplifted to the smouldering
body on the pyre, dashed straight into the flames. It was over in a
second, but its realism was so intense and affrighting, that, as ever,
Ordham gasped and nearly sprang from his seat, while the King gave a
loud shout of rapture.
Ordham sank back with a deep sigh of amused relief. He knew that those
flames produced by spirits did not really meet, and that Styr’s horse
was too well trained to make a misstep or linger. Still no one else save
Vogel had ever essayed this feat, which could be simulated on the
darkened stage, and overlooked in the simultaneous conflagration of the
castle, the rise of the waters of the Rhine, the vision in the sky of
Valhalla in flames.
The walls began to fall, Hagen and the Rhine maidens to search furiously
for the ring, retainers to fly about in distraction. Ordham had never
seen the confusion as well represented as to-night. The shrieks sounded
genuine, the faces of the survivors were distraught. No doubt these born
artists and loyal Bavarians were always afire when performing for their
King alone. The curtain went down amidst the crash of orchestration.
Ordham, seeing that the King’s box was empty, slipped out, meditating
upon those last words of Brünhilde. “Thy wife!” She had made her final
decision, then, bade her farewell to the stage in that long dirge. It
was indeed her swan song! For the first time he wholly realized the
enormity of the sacrifice, the egoism of love. But he did not care. He
exulted, as inexorably the male as Siegfried or Gunther.
He had half made up his mind to ignore Styr’s injunctions and go to her
dressing-room; but when he reached the open air, he suddenly realized
that he was very tired. The long unbroken strain of an opera which, even
with pauses, makes a severer drain on the nervous system than any opera
ever written, following a sleepless night of travel and many hours of
mental excitement, left him suddenly exhausted, devitalized; he was glad
to fall into the cab which his friend the doorkeeper had had the
forethought to order, and drive to his hotel. The dawn was cold and
grey, a bleak and disheartening contrast to the scene of mysterious
splendour from which he seemed to have been shot straight into the
chilliest stratum of a dismal inhospitable Earth. He shivered, wondered
had it all been a dream, longed for sleep. He did not even glance down
Maximilianstrasse, to the stage door, out of which the performers were
streaming, gesticulating, weeping.
LXI
THEIR MARRIAGE
When Ordham reached his hotel he found old Kurt awaiting him with the
promised letter. He dismissed him sleepily and when in his room laid it
on the table beside his bed, intending to read it in the morning when he
was in a more appreciative condition. But the preparations for bed
roused him somewhat, and he suddenly opened the letter with the purpose
of glancing at the first page, believing this message was designed to
console him for the taciturn note she had sent to the station. But when
he had read three lines he read on; and when he had finished the letter
he read it again; and then once more.
“After all, I find that I love you more than I love myself.
“Even could I exercise that power of will which has transformed me from
one sort of woman into another during these last nine years of my life,
and forced you to consent to see me no more, and even were I able to
convince you for the moment that I acted in your interest alone, the
time would come when you would resent the strength that enabled me to
annihilate my happiness as well as your own; furthermore, the suspicion
would be irresistible that art was the stronger passion after all. In
time you would hate me, then grow indifferent, then forget. Now, you
will love me always.
“In one’s last hour one must be entirely truthful; it is possible that,
if I renounced my beloved art, my great career, the time would come when
I should regret; when I might, indeed, raven for that lost world of
illusions of which those that never have entered it have no conception
whatever. And this might come to pass even did the world inconceivably
ignore my life as Margaret Hill and I found myself a prop in your
career—instead of assuring that career to you by eradicating myself. In
that case could we continue to be happy? If Love is the Cæsar among the
passions, Art is an imperious atom of God himself. It sits on the mind’s
throne, and although the golden mists of passion may, for a time, hang
like a curtain before it, Art never abdicates. It bides its time, and
that time inevitably comes.
“On the other hand, I find myself forced to believe that I am not the
born artist, deep and inexorable as is the grasp of art on my mind and
soul. The phenomenon of my temperament—its emotional part—can be
explained, no doubt, by the fact that the natural passions of an
uncommonly lusty and highly organized woman were turned back upon
themselves by the accumulated disgust and horrors of those thirteen
years, with all their vitalities unimpaired; rather were they
recuperated, and rushed into the channels of art the moment the sluices
were opened. I profoundly believe that no born artist would sacrifice
her career—which is merely the insatiable activities of the gift
resident in her brain—for any man, give him anything more than the
temporary effervescence of her woman’s nature. To some accident of
organism I owe the purely mechanical gift of a voice; my brain, my will,
the peculiar circumstances of my life, have made me a great actress, a
great artist. That I do not hate you for shattering the dearest delusion
that can possess the human mind, is the final proof of my all-embracing
love for you. For, alas! I am Brynhildr, not that Margarethe Styr
deliberately manufactured upon the ruins of Margaret Hill.
“But if Brynhildr—who, however victimized by the fates, would at any
moment have given her life for Siegfried—is in my soul, a more
irresistible tyrant than the dazzling counterfeit of art in my brain,
still does the fact remain that in this world I have played, and on its
public stage, the horrid and unpardonable rôle of Margaret Hill. For
every infringement of law (on this planet at least), we sooner or later
pay the price. The bill has been presented to me later than I
deserve—possibly because I had something to give the world—but at the
precise moment when my all could be exacted in payment. Still, who shall
say that I am not more fortunate than most?—I have my choice of
retributions: to live and be your ruin, or to die while I can still live
on in your heart, your unappalled imagination, forever. If I am not the
absolute and inalienable artist I so fondly believed, at least I have
not cultivated my soul and my brain to no purpose, and I do not believe
that I really have hesitated a moment.
“Putting all other considerations aside, could I, after the life I led
for thirteen long vile years, continue to exalt you above your sex?
Those numberless ghosts would rise, sit at the banquet, claim you as
their brother. And, alas that it should be so, it is only in dreams that
men are not fatally alike!
“If when you read this you should conceive the mad thought of following
me, please stop and reflect that by that act of cruelty you would make
this sacrifice of mine—for I shall not pretend that I wish to leave
this world—both foolish and useless. Therefore do you owe it to me to
practise as your religion that promise you made me on Stanmore Heath, to
live for the single purpose of developing to the utmost those great
gifts for which I extinguish my own. And believe me when I assure you
that in the constant exercise of great abilities, particularly when
their performances are accompanied by the world’s orchestra, there is
much to console. It is, indeed, the next best thing to the heart’s
happiness; perhaps it should be given the first place, for as long as we
are willing to exercise our gifts and our usefulness, so long are we
masters of our fate. It is only the immortal happiness of mortal love
that Life fears to give us lest we grow stronger than she.
“If I elect to die on the stage, it is not merely because I believe the
stage to be the proper place for the final exit of those artists that
have truly loved her, but because the stage of the Hof has been my best
friend; on it I have known the most triumphant, the most exalted,
moments of my life. Bayreuth was my school, the London experience was an
anti-climax, a tour de force; on this stage alone have I been really
alive, profoundly happy. Therefore do I give her my last breath.