XXXVITHE RACE
During the ensuing fortnight he looked as if a blight had passed over him. His face grew pinched and white, he lost his magnetism, his fine remote dignified assurance, even his good manners. His mother, in as superb an outburst of disdain as he had ever witnessed on the stage, told him that the very cabbies, to say nothing of the servants, must see that he was in the throes of his calf-love, and that he was even more odious than young men usually were during that last and worst of children’s diseases; thanking her stars that she was not forced to remain under the same roof with him, she flounced off to Paris with Rosamond Hayle. Ordham, could he have experienced pleasure in anything during this excruciating period, would have felt delight in being rid of her.
Alas! he could no longer flatter himself with doubts regarding his feeling for the young American beauty, indulge in mental analyses. He had forgotten Styr, his ambitions, his calm belief in himself and his star. But one woman, one object, existed on this earth for him, and he only paused to wonder that he had ever thought himself incapable of love. No man ever got sharper wounds from the archaic darts. He was sentimentally, passionately, wretchedly in love. He thought of nothing else. For the first time in his life appetite and sleep were affected. Several people from whom he had received much hospitality while in Paris paid a short visit to London and sought him out as a matter of course. He took no notice of them. Styr, at last, found time to write him a long letter. He did not even read it. He forgot the existence of the Foreign Office.
Meanwhile, he saw the young lady daily. If she had been merely indifferent before, she was now almost rude, regretting, no doubt, her girlish recrudescence. Mrs. Cutting, were it possible, was even more impressive in her attentions to him. He felt as if tossed between fire and ice, and although this torment had its fascination, he sometimes wished that the mother would gratify the daughter and turn him out. Then he could flee to the ends of the earth, and make some attempt to extinguish the flames that devoured him. He was quite aware of his changed appearance, and one morning, while brushing his hair and scowling at his nervous white face, recalled what Styr had said about young people in the ferment of first love being the mere victims of the race, reversions to type. That, no doubt, was what was the matter with him, and it was no consolation to reflect that it was so much good passion thrown away. If a man had to undergo such torments, why, in heaven’s name, didn’t the girl catch the fever? He should not in the least mind being one of Nature’s victims if he were permitted to be happy with a fellow-victim. Otherwise, there was no sense in it.
The tennis games were abandoned, as he slept late after his bad nights, and Hines, after one conscientious attempt to awaken him, declined the office of mentor a second time. But he spent a part of every day in Grosvenor Square, from which he could not keep away; although he believed that no old-time martyr boiling in a cauldron and pinched with red-hot nippers ever suffered such agonies as his. But at last pride revolted, his spirit cried out under its crushing load, and he had an attack of acute indigestion. He pointedly broke an engagement for luncheon, and presented himself at five o’clock determined to say good-by and leave England next day. He should not return to Munich, for he never wanted to see another woman; probably he should go out to India and remodel himself upon the commonplace family likeness by shooting tigers and sending home the skins.
The ladies were shopping, he was informed, and he was shown up to the small drawing-room to await them. But the small drawing-room would not hold him, and he roamed about the beautiful rooms whose furniture and decorations had once whispered to him of sweet love-tragedies, as well as of terrible dramas involving the collapse into blood or obscurity of the historic families that had loved them. But to-day they had no confidences for Ordham. He came upon a door ajar. It led into a small room that he had never seen, but he did not hesitate to enter, as Mrs. Cutting had made him feel at home long since. He saw at a glance that this must be Mabel’s boudoir, and drew back. Beyond the threshold, however, he was powerless to retreat; he stood trembling, fascinated, feeling himself in the presence of a subtle betrayal of the secrecies of maidenhood,—such as he sometimes fancied emanated from the young girl herself. He had never dreamed that a girl could be so sacred and beautiful, so mysterious a creature. He turned pale and lost his breath.
It was a very simple room to his masculine eye, with its white flowered silks and white enamelled furniture, but as unmistakably luxurious as the rest of the house. Suddenly his eye was caught by a bookcase above the writing table. This temptation was irresistible, and in a moment he was eagerly scanning the titles of the haughty beauty’s chosen literature. It was with something of a shock that he discovered the books to be the essays of Macaulay, the novels of Scott and Dickens, and a selected volume of Shakspere’s plays, as he had read all of these works and more in his earliest teens. It could not be possible that this represented the girl’s idea of erudition, her mother’s disappointment in her beauty’s untimely development of bookish tastes? But what of it? Ordham was too far gone in love and despair to be seriously affected by a minor disappointment, although it might have staggered him a month earlier. Poor ambitious child! What opportunities at a fashionable school in Paris, studying “art,” music, and three languages, to delve into literature! If she had but just begun to read, at least she had not begun with trash, and that she had begun at all was the vital point. Again he was turning away, and again he received a shock. The drawer of the desk was half open. His gaze, as it dropped from the bookcase, rested upon three letters from his mother. The ink was fresh. The postmark was conspicuously “Paris.”
He afterwards described his sensations at that moment as of a lighted torch trying to force its way from the base of his skull through the dull inert mass of his brain to his upper consciousness. But at a certain stage love is a disease analogous to death. The brain, if not disintegrated, is very nearly so, for it is worn out by implacable thought, despair, brooding on the impossible. It is, after long tension, a flabby mass, through which the angry watchers in the subconsciousness can find no avenue, force not a cry of warning. Normally with a brain so alert that the utmost caution and tact were necessary in the handling of him, even although his full share of masculine vanity made him as easy game as most men, the least slip would have roused Ordham’s suspicions and set him on his guard; but, his brain demoralized by the greensickness of love, he was as far beyond rescue as if he had been born a fool.
He was staring stupidly at the letters, mechanically striving to reach their significance, when a footstep on the polished floor of the drawing-room made him retreat hastily, trembling at the prospect of confronting the indignant Mabel and receiving summary dismissal. So great was his discomposure he did not notice that the footsteps were too heavy for a woman, and was astonished to confront a young man, an uncommonly good-looking young man, with a frank well-bred face and an athletic spare figure. Ordham divined at once that here was the handsome American cousin whose advent he had dreaded. Unconsciously he threw back his own shoulders. His eyes became excessively cold, his manner almost unbearably polite.
“No doubt you are Mr. Driscom,” he said. “Mrs. Cutting has spoken of you to me.”
“And you are Mr. Ordham, of course.” The American shook the Englishman warmly by the hand, but received no sort of pressure in response. He wondered, as he had done during previous visits to London, what American women could see in Englishmen.
“Mrs. Cutting is my second cousin,” he said. “She has often mentioned you in her letters. The butler tells me they will be back in a moment. I suppose we may smoke.”
His voice was agreeable and cultivated, his manner easy and cordial. Ordham noticed with intense annoyance that there was nothing here to ridicule and despise. Margarethe Styr had talked to him of this fine type of the young American, and Driscom reminded him of the gallant youth who had stood by her to the last on the wrecked steamer. He felt that in ordinary circumstances he should have warmed to him, but now he hated and feared him; were thought as potent as one day it may be, poor Driscom would have expired of poison in every vein.
But the American, who seemed drawn to that courteous smiling exterior, talked amiably of the yachting news in the evening telegrams, and of yachting in general, smoking steadily the while. It was manifest that he felt quite at home, was doing the honors, in fact! No doubt he would be staying in the house, these Americans were so infernally hospitable.
Fortunately the tête-à-tête was not long enough to exhaust Ordham’s falling stock of patience. Mrs. Cutting swept into the room, followed by Mabel and LaLa. Driscom sprang to his feet and kissed his second cousin warmly. Ordham held his breath, expecting to commit murder were Mabel also saluted. When the young lady merely held out her hand with a radiant smile, his apprehension increased. A kiss might have meant nothing. Were they not cousins and old friends? This formality—before him—might be portentous.
But Mrs. Cutting gave him little time for thought. She apologized for being late, dilated upon “their” disappointment at his desertion of them earlier in the day, and insisted that he remain informally for dinner. He replied with cold decision, and with a full return of his old dignity, that he must “wander along,” as he was dining with some friends and had promised to look in upon others. “People were returning to town.” He had made up his mind that he would not even tell them of his intended departure; a note posted at the station would suffice. Mrs. Cutting, who had regarded him intently, laid her hand firmly on his arm. “I shall not let you go yet awhile,” she said. “I must confer with Bobby at once, so that he may cable to-night, and meanwhile please talk to Mabel until I can come back and pour out the tea.”
She gave him no chance to reply. Taking “Bobby” by the arm, she swept him out the room, darting a swift look of command at her daughter.
Mabel turned pale, but she came forward with her usual girlish grace. “Do sit down,” she said. “You look as if you never intended to sit down again.”
“It is not worth while to sit down—to detain you. I really must go.”
“You don’t intend to come back!”
He looked steadily into her dilated eyes, wondering if he hated her, and betrayed himself. “No,” he said. “I shall not come back.” Then he paused abruptly, and physically braced himself. She had dropped her eyelashes, and he was quite prepared for the coquettish net that would float from those slowly uplifting orbs. But when he met them, he saw only terror and appeal. Mabel’s face looked suddenly pinched and white. Then she burst into tears, and he was swept on that flood straight through the gates of Paradise.
When they descended to earth and were seated on a little sofa in the remotest corner, he demanded an explanation of the torments imposed upon him during the past fortnight. “You say you have always loved me,” he said with automatic masculine logic. “Why, in heaven’s name, didn’t you accept me the first time?”
“I couldn’t be sure—that you really loved me—you seemed to me to be taken by surprise. Besides, I think I wanted to punish you for not having loved me all that long time. I had to be rude and horrid—it was that or betray myself. I don’t think I ever believed that you really loved me till just now. I don’t believe you knew it yourself.”
“Oh, yes, I did,” he replied grimly. “I was so far gone that I became utterly uninteresting.”
“No—but you made me believe that you were miserable because you had proposed to me impulsively and could not think of a way out of it. My only consolation was that I had refused you. But I was ashamed every time I thought of how I had led you on that day—and I had vowed never to be silly and flirt again. And then—well, it cannot be denied that mother has thrown me at your head, and that made me really hate you at times, so that it was easier to be rude.”
“Your mother was beautifully frank.” Ordham was somewhat confused by the number of apologetic reasons advanced, but wholly happy. They talked more or less wildly for an hour. Then Ordham, hearing the swish of Mrs. Cutting’s gown, stood up, flushed and nervous, but so determined not to look sheepish, that he was as formal as an aged diplomatist when his future mother-in-law took both his hands and looked at him with eyes that were really soft. “Thank heaven!” she said with the simplicity appropriate to great moments. “I know that you will both be happy. And how grateful I am that you have not put off making up your minds any longer. Bobby tells me that I must go to New York. It is imperative. But now I can leave Mabel with you, instead of drying her eyes and distracting her mind for six months, when I should be giving all my attention to business.”
Of course he remained to dinner, and before he left he had another half-hour alone with Mabel. An excellent repast, the interesting conversation of Driscom, whom he now liked as much as he had hated a few hours earlier, unruffled bliss, and the prospect of almost immediate marriage, had clarified and braced his normally acute and steady brain. They were sitting among the fragrant flowers of the balcony when he told her abruptly of his incursion into her private little domain, and added: “As it has excited my curiosity, I may as well tell you at once that I saw several letters from my mother in the drawer of your desk, and ask you to explain. I do not want to be annoyed by petty imaginings. You don’t mind?”
The hand he held had grown cold, but when he turned his head he met suffused and smiling eyes.
“I might as well confess! I wrote to Lady Bridgminster imploring her to withdraw her opposition—not to hate me—I know how great her influence over you is—”
“She has not a particle of influence over me. What did she reply? How enchanting of you!”
“Oh, she was quite nice. I believe she said that she had washed her hands of the matter of your marriage, since you would not marry Lady Rosamond. Should you like to read the letters?” She half rose.
“Of course not.” And knowing somewhat of the fecundity of the feminine pen, it did not strike him as odd that his mother should have found it worth while to write this epitome of her disgust three times.
XXXVIIORDHAM CEASES TO BE ORIGINAL
For a day or two Ordham could hardly believe in his good fortune, so suddenly had it descended upon him. When separated from Mabel he moved as in a dream, looking preternaturally serious lest he wear a fatuous grin. But this phase passed and he settled down to the business of being supremely happy, or as happy as possible while happiness was still incomplete. He thanked the American fates for the business complications that called Mrs. Cutting to New York and hastened the wedding, which was to take place early in October. Lady Bridgminster had written two frigid letters of congratulation, which Ordham and Mabel smilingly compared; but, being in Paris, graciously offered to confer with the great milliner who had the honour of dressing the young beauty, and spare her and her mother the miseries of crossing the Channel and of French hotels.
Ordham had never felt so young. Having cared little for girls and greatly for women of the world, he had been, and in spite of his precocity and cleverness, under an unconscious strain for several years past. He had always been “playing up,” as Hélène Wass once expressed it, when she may have felt—who knows?—a moment’s pity for him. Now, he had the sensation that Life, having long cheated him, was making sudden and wondrous restitution. It was that perfect flower of youth in Mabel that called to him as potently as her beauty and her high-bred grace and charm. He no longer cared what she read; she declared herself too happy to think of books, and he replied that they were writing a great romance of their own; time enough for other men’s unlifelike vapourings later. He did not see her often alone, and these sweet brief interviews gave a romantic intensity to their engagement which London might not have offered to a pair less severely chaperoned; although, to be sure, that exotic mansion, with its imported atmosphere of vanished Bourbons and their reckless nobles, exorcised the memory of grimy London, and was a poem in itself. Even in imagination he always saw her drifting about the lovely bright rooms with her eyes full of dreams. She treated him to a bewildering variety of moods, sometimes even chattering for a few moments quite like the old Mabel, only to melt insensibly into the dignified and stately girl he longed to exhibit to every court in Europe. Not only was he fully roused from the long lethargy of his youth and alive as he had fancied he might be at thirty, but the romantic cravings born during his extraordinary experience with Margarethe Styr were eager, hungry, almost satisfied. Only that wondrous period prosaically known as the honeymoon could perfect this poem of the prince and princess of fairy lore.
It never occurred to him to wonder if he could have loved Mabel Cutting had she been a poor girl and he forced to give up his diplomatic ambitions and support her, or if he had met her only in commonplace hotel sitting-rooms. The exquisite creature’s very wealth was a part of her romantic fascination. It furnished the halo. It created, as with a magic wand, the poetic setting for her aristocratic beauty and grace. It moved her aloof from those common mortals whose gilded cages were stuffed with unpaid bills. That his life with her was to be free of those vulgar cares which his temperament held in particular abhorrence, added to the ecstasy, to the belief that they two were of the elect, chosen to dwell upon a rarefied plane, to experience a superior and perennial happiness.
It was quite ten days before he remembered Margarethe Styr. Then he sat down at once to write to her of his engagement, that she might not hear of it first through the public channels; it was to be announced as soon as the invitations were engraved. He found this letter the most difficult he had ever attempted to write. Even as he took up his pen that something he still did not wish to define stirred in the deeps of his mind, whispered that he had committed an act of infidelity. Never until that moment had he realized how close and deep his intimacy with Styr had been. It was, as she herself had called it, a mental marriage. There was no doubt that in a sense he had given himself to her, that he had intended to keep her always and first in his life, that he had vaguely looked forward to some ultimate union with her. The possibility of falling in love with the girl possessing the requisite millions had never occurred to him. But Margarethe Styr had gone out of his life. There was no possible doubt on that point. He no longer felt the slightest need of her. Henceforth he should be absorbed in his young wife and in his career. Mabel would become one of the cleverest women in Europe and give him all the inspiration he needed in that future of which she even now talked with such enthusiasm and intelligence. Friendships with other women would be superfluous and imprudent. Styr belonged to the past, and while he should cherish her memory, she must be content to reign in memory alone.
He spent the entire morning groaning at his desk, but finally concocted a letter that he dared to send to Munich. Far too astute to indulge in rhapsodies, and at the same time too much in love to be dishonest, he hedged between an avowal and a denial of his affection for the great heiress whom he shortly was to have the honour of leading to the altar. But although it was a very creditable performance, that letter, he was all youth and love and fire when he wrote it, and his pen conducted more than one flash from his electrified being. A woman far less keen than Styr would hardly have been persuaded that he was reluctantly steering into matrimony through the golden gate, barely conscious of his partner in the sordid transaction.
XXXVIIIISOLDA FURIOSA
From the instant that Isolde raised herself slowly from the couch on the ship’s deck the great audience that Styr’s performances always called forth knew that some unusual influence was at work upon the impersonation. Not even in that first silent moment was there the reading of a princess whose tormented spirit had not permitted her to sleep since she had left her father’s shores. At once there was such an expression of fury, of murderous hate, in those immense pregnant eyes, such an aura of primal devastating force emanated from the strained body, the fixed features, that hardly a person in the house but stirred uncomfortably. This was no indignant princess weary with night-watches, whose wrongs would gradually set her brain on fire; here was the infuriated woman out of leash, a woman that might have been suckled by a tigress and forgotten what little she had ever known of civilization. “Brangäne” said afterward that she was afraid to approach her; and had not the audience focussed their attention wholly upon Styr, they might have noticed that the poor little mezzo sang off the key twice.
When Isolde—who had even lifted herself and shown her face sooner than was customary, had stared for long insupportable moments while the sailors sang the careless satirical words of their song, “Oh, Irish maid! My winsome Irish maid!”—sprang to her feet, crying, “What wight dares insult me?” her great voice seemed to ring through all Munich. “Brangäne, ho!” she shouted. “Where sail we?”
Brangäne articulated that bluish stripes were visible in the west, that the ship fast approached the land. When Isolde bore down upon her, demanding in a still more terrible voice, “What land?” neither she nor the audience ever knew whether or not she managed to warble, “Cornwall’s verdant strand,” for Styr, barely waiting for the line to finish, towered in the centre of the stage and shrieked in tones of loosed fury and prophecy, that not even the golden quality of her voice could soften:
“Nevermore! To-day nor to-morrow!”
Then the minion, having given the necessary cue, Isolde hurled forth, in tones which seemed to express the gnashing of teeth, her wild regret for those lost arts that would have enabled her to annihilate the earth and every hated mortal on it. Discarding the cultivated gestures with which she so subtly suggested repressed power, growing passion, she tossed her arms aloft, and with eyes burning and face convulsed, declaimed in a voice that was strangely like a roar:
“Oh, subtle art of sorcery, awake in me once more power of will! Hark to my bidding, fluttering breezes! Arise and storm in boisterous strife! With furious rage and hurricane’s hurtle, awaken the sea from its calm! Rouse up the deep to its devilish deeds. Fling it the prey I gladly offer!”
The poverty of Wagner’s literary gift, apart from mere word jugglery, 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 thebalkonfelt 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! Andunderstand 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 thehochdramatischeand 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 theTodesmotifin 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 theLiebestod, 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.
XXXIXPEGGY 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 “ourjüngling, 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 secondGastspiel. 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 ofFidelioone 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 apendantto 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 inThe Trojan. All would afford her fine dramatic opportunities and fill her time with work.
She went to her desk to write to Ordham. The temptation was strong to betray something of what she felt. He deserved that! And a sentimental letter, that last indulgence, was a woman’s right. But she did nothing of the sort, reflecting in time that a man is not open to sentiment from two sources at once, particularly when in the throes of his puppy love. She did not even address the man she knew so well, and whom Mabel Cutting did not know at all, for she felt quite positive that he was sound asleep. She wrote him a dignified friendly note, telling him that she had long been prepared for the news, and was sure that he had chosen wisely. She did not even insert a blunt sting here and there, for she knew him so well that she could write exactly what, in his present mood, he most would wish to receive from her. When it was finished, she found her first real consolation in visualizing it as an impenetrable bulwark about her pride. She thanked her stars that he had not come in person to tell her of his engagement, permitting her to divine his passion for the little fool. No doubt she would have beaten him, and he would have been too polite to beat her in return! Heaven! what a mess she would have made of it. She devoutly hoped she had buried Peggy Hill five fathoms deep at last.