Part 15

“Ah, that I cannot tell you. Personally, I do not know Lady Bridgminster; but a friend of hers writes me these things. I am assured, however, that the girl is all that we could wish. Of course he will not love her, but what of that? He will always be polite to her, and that is much! much!”

“Why do you think he will not love her?”

“Why—why—” Excellenz was quite positive that he would be quite as enamoured as any other young husband, during the honeymoon. “Oh, these young men brought up by married women—they always love women older than themselves. No doubt it will be you, _ma belle Marguerite_. That will do him no harm—but make him marry the girl.”

“He will not fall in love with me. I shall see to it that no such idea enters his head. As he will have to be engineered into love as into everything else, he is quite safe not to discover my fascinations unaided.”

“Ah, dear Gräfin, you Americans are so clever! Between us all, I feel confident that our dear young friend will have one of the most brilliant careers in Europe. Is it not so?”

“I do not worry in the least,” Styr had responded dryly.

Two days later Princess Nachmeister, satisfied, went off to drink the waters at her favourite spa; but promptly upon the first day of every week she received a letter from a member of the bureau of secret police.

XXIII ONE OF THE POTTERIES

The greater part of Ordham’s reserve melted, as was natural, when he sprawled on the divan with his coat off on a hot day, and his hostess sat in her rocking-chair fanning herself and wearing one of those white lawn wrappers that an American woman would retain in her wardrobe were she elevated to a throne. By no means frank by temperament, he indulged in frankness as a sort of luxury where his confidence had been won; and feeling more intimate with Styr than he had ever felt with anybody, he talked to her freely about himself, his family, his hopes, desires, and sentiments toward most things, until Margarethe knew him far better than either of them realized at the time.

But he was not fond of talking about himself, nor of personalities in general. Books, the theatre, life, the mysterious back-waters of human nature, interested him far more. He always brought out his London newspaper, and being too lazy to read aloud himself, made her read to him the news of the day and the editorial comment, while he explained the relationship of the present to the immediate past. Her house was littered with reviews, the works of the various masters he was obliged to study, and of the novelists and poets of the day: George Meredith, Turgénev, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning. They wrangled across the dissecting-table of Maupassant, and picked the jewelled bones of Flaubert.

She went often to the theatre with him, sitting behind the curtains of a box; and, several famous _Gasts_ from other capitals coming to Munich that summer, there were few pastimes they enjoyed more than this, the drama being the one subject upon which they were in perfect accord. Moreover, as the play was a diversion which she had never denied herself, she experienced no uneasy consciousness of knocking down outposts of old defences.

It was on the nights after the theatre that he remained until the small hours; he always returned with her for supper, as she would not go to a restaurant with him. There are no people wiser in human conduct than servants, and the comment indulged in between the old butler and the maids was upon the astonishing impeccancy of the relationship above stairs. Had it been otherwise, these good Bavarians would have taken it as a matter of course and made no comment whatever. The ingenuous morals of the Bavarians were a source of evergreen interest to Styr, who had been brought up in a country that wore silk over its rags. Upon one occasion, however, she was more embarrassed than moved to ethical musings. She was sitting with Ordham in the gallery after the evening meal, when her housemaid entered and asked permission to leave on the following morning for Leoni, her native village. Kurt withheld his consent, so she appealed to her gnädige frau.

“What is the matter that you go so suddenly, and when do you return?” asked Margarethe, who did not like her household upset.

“I think I cannot return, Frau Gräfin. One of my children is ill, and as I shall soon have another—which will make three—Heinrich and I have decided that it will now be cheaper to marry.”

Ordham, who was willing to discuss in the abstract all questions under the sun, blushed scarlet and dropped out of a window into the garden. Countess Tann remarked tartly:

“Indeed! It is a pity you did not think of it sooner, and then your other two children would have had the advantage of legal birth.”

“That matters not, gnädige frau, and we must be sure of children to support us when we are old and tired, before we marry and perchance have none. And, then, apart, we can make more money for some years, and the babies can be farmed until they become too many. Divorce is not easy with us, gnädige frau, as in America, and we find this arrangement right and just. It works well.”

Styr, who had never supposed the beer-soaked brain of a Bavarian peasant to be capable of any reasoning process whatever, looked at the girl with more interest. She was a plain heavily built creature, but nothing could be more honest, amiable, and sensible than her face.

“Very well! Tell Kurt to give you a month’s extra wages and to engage a new maid at once, I hope you will find your child better and have a merry wedding.”

The girl kissed her hand, protested gratitude, and withdrew.

“After all,” said Margarethe, when Ordham ventured to return, “who shall say? In Zulu land the biggest liar is king.”

“At least they have the advantage of the support of society! Ours are no better and are such shocking hypocrites, when no worse—you never hear of infanticide in this country. Probably most morality could be sifted down to utility. It is wrapped up in charming and traditional sentiments, but the kernel is plastic. These peasants find it more economical after the third discretion to set up an establishment of their own. For most of us, alas! the straight and narrow way is a more comfortable fit in the long run.”

“The simplicity and safety of your philosophy is delightful, but I fancy your temperament has saved you from a good many disasters. And I am told that you very nearly scorched your fingers not so long ago, and that only a goitre saved you. Do you ever think of poor little Frau von Wass dosing and varnishing herself in her lonely castle?”

Ordham scowled, and when he scowled he no longer looked very young. “I do not think of things I wish to forget,” he said shortly. “What is the use?”

“None whatever! How fortunate you are. No doubt you will forget all this a month after the inevitable end.”

“Oh! oh! How can you say such a thing?” He shook his finger at her, his gayety instantly restored. “Besides, I shall never be very far away. I shall always be coming back to see you. Munich, thank heaven, is in the middle of Europe. I shall come here often, no matter where I am sent.”

“Suppose you are sent to St. Petersburg or the United States?”

“I shall manage not to be. Great heaven! Fancy not to be able to see you for months at a time!” He looked appalled.

“What if you marry?”

“What difference will that make?” He moved his head impatiently and sighed, throwing himself back on the divan and biting a tassel of one of the cushions. “I dread returning to England. Only this morning I had a letter from my mother. She has some English girl or other picked out for me. At first she wrote a lot about an American girl with a fortune, the daughter of a friend of hers; but now, it seems, these dear friends have quarrelled, or my mother no longer admires Americans. At all events she is all for marrying me to some rich English girl of my own class that she has found.”

“No doubt she is quite right. Please don’t eat up my cushion.”

“I am _so_ sorry!”

“Is the English girl beautiful?”

“I suppose so. My mother would not venture to recommend her otherwise. She knows that I hate ugliness as she does herself—and am not fond of English girls.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Let her amuse herself. One thing is positive: I shall marry to please myself.”

“I wonder?”

“What do you mean by that?” Ordham had eyes capable of a great variety of expressions. Now they looked large and cold. “Do you fancy I could be married against my will?”

“Always remember that the cleverest of men is no match for a clever woman, and if two or three clever women—” She halted, recalling her compact. “Why should you object to being steered into the matrimonial harbour by your wise mother? She is far less likely to make a mistake than you are, for you are too indolent to give such a grave subject the proper amount of deliberation. And you would soon tire of any girl you married, for you have the order of mind that demands variety. You can find that in friendships, so why miss the opportunity of an advantageous marriage.”

Ordham set his long jaw. “My mother shall not pick out my wife. The very fact that she insisted upon one of any two girls would make me believe the other was the better suited to all my requirements. I and my mother are too like and too unlike to judge for each other.”

XXIV THE CRACK IN THE JAR

There were times when Margarethe Styr, so long a recluse, felt embarrassed and awkward in this new and unique intimacy, little as Ordham suspected it; and there were others when she felt an almost irresistible longing to practise the arts of the enchantress and unwrap the lethargy in which her singular young friend appeared to be swaddled—fold by fold. She hated the brute in man as sullenly as ever; but personal vanity—which once had driven her to a ferocious love of power—had been starved for eight years, and, refusing to give up the ghost, sometimes muttered its rights. She imagined scenes in the gallery with the windows open to the moonlight and the warm scented vocal night, when this brilliant but lymphatic young man, under the arts of the accomplished siren, not one of which she had forgotten, would suddenly find himself the passionate determined lover. But the temptation rarely lingered, and finally passed. She indulged in no dream at any time of response, and any such violent dislocation of their present relations could only result in rupture. He would never forgive her, and she should always remember him as looking very young and ridiculous. As it was, she rarely thought of his age, and it was not long before she realized that she had in her hands the clay with which to model the one perfect experience of her life. When she discovered that her mind was revelling in this new and daily companionship, she wondered it had survived that long period of loneliness to which she had condemned it. Styr was essentially a man’s woman. If her brain accepted a mate at all, it must be a man’s. Had she made intimates among her own sex, they would quickly have been reduced to satellites or enemies.

And now, for the first time, her brain had found a mate, a fact the more wonderful and beatific because it was the one glory of which she had never dreamed even in those days when she took refuge in dreams. She determined to forge a deep and mysterious bond with the ego of this man, whom, had she been fifteen years younger and unblackened by life, she fancied she might have loved and married. She had had everything else; now she would have only the highest.

At first she could hardly formulate her wants, for the spiritual desires are very elusive, especially when the brain is fed. Indeed, the line between the mental and the spiritual desires is so fine that the spirit, the soul, is, no doubt, merely the brain raised to a higher and more intense degree both of desire and expression; it has its most comprehensible illustration in the exalted pitch it sometimes reaches under the influence of music, of Nature in the major mood, the account of some stirring and heroical deed. In other words, the soul is the brain in its best moments, when most nearly free of the flesh. It may be that these moments illuminate for a second the misty horizon which obscures the walls of death.

Fortunately there were few if any homely details to dissipate the magic halo flung around this relationship. After all, Ordham had no real rights, no authority, save such as she tacitly granted him. Her cook was a personage of variety and attainments; her household ran on wheels oiled and invisible; society, with its trivial and levelling interruptions, was away; the ugly adder of money could never rear its head between them. If ever the opportunity was granted a woman to snatch a poem out of the vast prose heap of life, it was Margarethe’s, and she had never at any time been the woman to oppose a desire that assailed her in full strength. She would have been the first to make it clear that if she had “reformed,” it was because she had outgrown the lower offerings of her nature and found the higher more interesting and satisfying.

Ordham realized sharply enough later that if he did not love her at this time it was because she pressed down the eyelids of his drowsy passions, his indolent senses; but as the weeks passed he vaguely understood that he was happy, and that only her insistent spurring made him stick to his studies and prepare for a future in which at times he quite lost interest, so perfect was the present. Styr had resisted the demoniacal teasings of her vanity, but she had no intention of denying it rights both natural and harmless; and being a woman as well versed in man as Mercator in the surfaces of Earth, she knew exactly how far to go, when to dazzle and allure him with glimpses of the hidden treasures in both their natures. To have been always merely the good comrade, sexless, the artist dwelling in regions remote from the common interests of life, would have been as fatal as to have laid down all her arms with a sigh and confessed herself the eternal woman. There were times when they quarrelled violently; and, indeed, being mistress of many moods, and not sparing in the use of them, she gave him no opportunity to tire of her and long for the wide circle in which he had hitherto fed his love of variety. She even made him accept an occasional invitation to a castle, and they took many little excursions into the country, where they read and talked and fell silent under the trees of the woods, or on the shores of some lake with a chain of Alps glittering in the distance. For the purposes of a romantic friendship Bavaria is unexcelled!

But if Ordham, owing to his languid temperament and overdeveloped mind, was immature in character and torpid in those recesses of his masculinity inaccessible to any currents not sent out by the heart, he was by no means blind. Although too indolent and too content to analyze deeply, even as time went on, there were moments, generally as he sat by his window at midnight, or loitered up the Isar in the small hours, when he speculated upon the possibility of falling in love with this woman, when his mind was even briefly lit up with the suspicion that he would love her now, were she not so supremely indifferent to the unwilling fascination he had exercised over some other women. But while in other circumstances this fact alone might have piqued his vanity into storming that citadel prisoning all the mysteries of her sex, by this time he was quite determined to marry between his examinations and his first diplomatic appointment; and the mere thought of a love affair with Margarethe Styr, rousing him to his depths as it must, and absorbing every faculty, filled him with terror. She must always be in his life; no girl and her millions should interfere for a moment with this wonderful relationship he had established with the most wonderful of women; but to love her would mean hurricanes and earthquakes in his inner life, whose mere vision not only alarmed the lotus eater in him, but cast an ominous cloud of warning over his future. He might forget it at times, but more and more the uneasy sense of the necessity to provide for that future before it was too late recurred to him under the renewed if gentle manipulation of his mother.

Once he went so far as to resolve that if he detected a disposition on her part to deepen their intimacy, he should leave for England by the next train. This resolution took form one Sunday afternoon when he was returning from a visit to Princess Nachmeister, established for a few weeks in her castle, splendidly poised above lake and woods in the Alps of Tyrol. There had been a large house party, and he had felt frivolous and worldly and irresponsible, in all respects much as he had felt before he met the woman with whom he had found so many more resources than he had dreamed existed in human intercourse. Nachmeister had made a lion of him, had informed her guests, among whom were dignitaries of state, that he was the cleverest young man in Europe, and certain of wielding the baton in the diplomatic orchestra during her lifetime. He was fancying himself mightily.

Nevertheless, he went at once to the villa by the Isar, for he never broke an appointment with its châtelaine. He found Styr in a villanous temper. She had received a late summons to sing in the Hof at midnight for the King. When she unceremoniously turned him out, he was glad to go, and wondered that he could have apprehended sentiment in this sullen, angry, almost ugly woman, who, after a separation of nearly three days, had scarcely a word for him. She had communicated with him in whispers, which forced his own voice down to the same artificial register, and made him feel as absurd as, no doubt, he looked.

“Good-by,” she had whispered in the hall, where he happened to have met her (he had his own gate key); “come to-morrow. I am in the right frame of mind to sing Kundry! I shall pinch Parsifal when I get him under my mantle, and he won’t dare scream. The idea of commanding a performance of _Parsifal_ in this weather!”

“Oh, well,” he whispered back consolingly, “you haven’t sung for a month, and your voice might get rusty.”

“Go away.”

As Ordham, half an hour later, strolled up the Maximilianstrasse, admiring the brown fairy-like palace on its terraces at the end of the perspective (which always looked to him as if it might have been dreamed by some homesick Italian poet), he was pricked by a sudden longing to go and call on a girl. He cared little for girls as a rule, and was well content to be approved by women of the world; but, after all, he was very young, and the mere youth in him moved restlessly now and again as if with an unappeased, if intermittent, hunger. At Princess Nachmeister’s castle he had flirted with three or four charming married women, and upon his return he had hastened to the side of the mortal he liked best on earth. But—well—he would have loved an hour of nonsense, a game of tennis, a gay meaningless flirtation with an innocent light-headed and extravagantly pretty girl. He wondered if the youth in him would last much longer. Had not Styr petted and spoilt him when the mood took her he should have felt quite forty. And he would have enjoyed that extraordinary friendship the more for the occasional relief of a shallow but charming girl. But girls in Munich were as scarce as praise from his Lutz. The thought of her was like a sudden bracing wind out of the northeast. At least he was making progress under her lash that would enable him to face the board of examiners before the end of the summer with few misgivings. He also had taken up French again, and he delved for two hours a day in the other lores prescribed by the guardians of the diplomatic service; so that after all the time left at his disposal for regrets and analysis was limited.

XXV FRIENDSHIP AT FOUR IN THE MORNING

On the following day, Styr, who had never been more gracious, asked him if he would walk with her in the park next morning at four of the clock. For a moment he felt so blank that his mouth stood ajar; but not only had he grown accustomed to fall in with her plans, but he had an immediate vision of himself and the heroine of his romantic friendship alone in the vast solitudes of the Englischergarten, and assented with enthusiasm. Margarethe, when not out of temper (when he, too, could be very sulky and obstinate), never failed to carry him whither she listed; but this mere tantalizing of the natural romance of youth was to breed results of which Styr, far-sighted as she commonly was, had no presentiment.

He went to bed at nine o’clock, an event that had not occurred within his memory. On the following morning at three he fumbled into his clothes under the impression that he was a somnambulist, and wished between prodigious yawns that Frau von Tann had chosen to explore the mysteries of the Englischergarten by moonlight. But when his gloomy servant, who had been ordered to rouse him, brought him a cup of strong coffee, his wits quickened. Further encouraged by the waiting _droschke_, in whose appearance he had placed little faith, he repaired to the Schwabing bridge in the proper frame of mind to meet a dark-browed woman muffled in a long white cloak and with a white veil floating about her head.

She led him with shining eyes past the lake with its sleeping swans, past the sweetly smelling fields, through silences as of untrodden mountain tops. The stars were crowding one another out of the deep cold blue of the sky; from the earth rose strange subtle perfumes which made him blush for his decadent Roman love of artificial scents; the shadows were dark on the open reaches; distant trees stood out black and sharp; the woods seemed huddled together; even the Isar crawled silently in its sleep.

Suddenly Styr flung out her hands, the palms upturned to the flickering sky. She looked like a priestess about to chant her pæan to the gods. Off the stage she had never appealed so directly to that artistic and sensuous side of his nature he had assiduously cultivated, and he gazed at her, stirred by a formless but eager sense of expectation which he did not comprehend until long after. He did not even attempt to formulate the wish that she were a goddess and himself a god, and that they had floated to a plane where no sound stirred but the music of Wagner; but as she turned her head and her eyes met his, she looked so young, and at the same time so different from all women, that involuntarily he moved a step forward.

“Oh!” she cried. “Do you know that this is the very first time in my life that I have known—lived—romance? Romance! The mere word is wonderful. During all the years of my youth I did not even believe in its existence. To think that once I was sixteen—twenty—twenty-eight—the ideal age—and that I never once glanced over the wall into the lovely mysterious gardens of other women’s youth! It is incredible that I never at least dreamed of—anticipated it.”

“But if it has come—what matter?”

“No, it does not matter. But oh, poor poets! poor psychologists! That I can drink this full cup of romance without finding the commonplace dregs of love at the bottom! All the other senses and appreciations are intensified, instead of being submerged, as when one is surrendering ignominiously to the race. I feel that I have attained heights that other women, silly victims that most of them are, have not even the power to imagine. My hands are in the secret caskets of life, and all the jewels are mine! mine!”