Part 16

She looked so triumphant, so wholly beautiful, so like Isolde, that the colour mounted to his face, although she frightened him a little, and he wished he were ten years older. But she never gave him time to feel that he was not rising to the occasion (although this agonizing sensation visited him occasionally in the retrospect), any more than she ever permitted an electrified moment to prolong itself until it had kindled fire. She came down to earth abruptly.

“Let us walk faster. I want to walk in the woods, and if we loiter we shall take cold.”

But as they entered those dim glades which might have been the depths of remote forests, he asked abruptly, “Am I your lover?”

“Yes—in a new fashion!” She spoke gayly. “It is a sort of mental marriage. Are you content?” She looked at him with the humorous flash in her eyes which always lit up the breach between their ages.

“I think it is rather odd that I am, you know. I must be as cold as a fish—or else that woman I told you about so put me off—”

“Well, don’t put your good fortune under a microscope. Be grateful that when you do awaken you will have preserved the freshness of youth to give zest and charm to the energy of maturity.”

“Suppose I never do awaken.”

“You will. For long I wondered why you had so many of the qualifications as well as something of the temperament of genius, without any one of the creative gifts. But I have come to the conclusion that you have a very rare gift—that of the supreme lover.”

“I?”

“It will wake up in due course, that genius of yours—oh, yes.”

“And why not for you?” He was still conscious of no desire to touch her, but what man could resist flirtation in such surroundings?

“Because neither of us wishes it. We have a perfect thing. Why shatter it? When you cross that dark threshold, you never know! If I were fifteen years younger and of your own world—”

“You would not be you. I don’t know—I have a feeling—a presentiment—that one day I shall love you. I sometimes have a vision of myself ten years older living with you in Venice.” He spoke with sudden energy. “I am certain it will come to pass.”

“Venice smells so dreadfully. I had no idea you were given to romantic musings.”

“I am not. It is, as I said, a sort of fleeting vision, a presentiment. I know that you will always be in my life; and naturally I see you where one can command the greatest seclusion. I do not picture myself wholly your lover, but I always see you quite alone with me—when I am older, and, somehow, different.”

“Well, remember that I too shall be older,” she replied with mock sadness. “By that time, no doubt, Wagner will have ground my voice to powder, and I shall be playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, or introducing Ibsen to London and New York.”

She had succeeded in diverting him. “Ah! you would go to America—you intend to go there some day?”

“Long before my voice has gone, I hope. If I could create a furore in London I should not hesitate to go to New York at once. And—after all—it is my own city; as much mine as if I had been born there, for I went so young. The hatred I felt for it when I left has fled—with the memory of other things; I dream of it now sometimes, and love every stone of it. One can never continue to hate one’s own city, which must always stand out in the memory as one’s best friend. Besides, when you look down upon the world—Society—from one of its own pedestals, nothing matters; no one can hurt you.”

“Would any one try to hurt you?” he asked anxiously. “Do you fear any one now?”

“Not here. But if I went to the land of the free to interpret an unpopular master unprotected by personal fame,—which, in American eyes, only London can give, and only New York set the final seal upon,—I should be hounded into the Hudson River.”

An intonation started him upon a fresh tack. “Did you ever think of self-destruction?”

“More than once. No doubt you have yourself. But because you are young and temperamental. I contemplated putting an end to myself for no such poetic reasons. There were more reasons than one, and generally it was the intense vitality of my mind that deterred me, perhaps an insolent sense of power that would not permit me to lose in the game with life. Now and again, I loved too much—what I then called love; but the reflection that no man was worth the sacrifice restored my cynicism, and cynicism is fatal to that intensity of egoism which counsels annihilation. Strange to think that I once was hard and cynical!”

“At least you might tell me something of your love attacks.” He continued artfully, “I shall never feel really in your confidence until you do.”

“Love affairs of that sort are too commonplace to remember. At first I loved once or twice out of mere youth and racial instinct. But I soon got over that. The great affair? Well, he was the conventional hero, fashioned by satirical Nature for the crudity of youth. He was handsome—but handsome!—brilliant, charming, above all, inconstant—the sort of man that keeps a woman questioning, ‘Will he come?’ Such a man would only incite me to amusement to-day; no type is so ingenuous. But then—well, I tried to kill him one day. He was too quick and too strong for me. I was spared the vulgarity of a newspaper scandal; even a whisper of the attempt never passed my threshold; I took good care that it should not. The mere vision of half a column of headlines with my name in letters as black as Pluto did as much later on to extinguish my love as my separation from the man—I never saw him after. But I had been possessed with the lust to kill, to annihilate, to whirl him and myself out of life. And it was long before that rage, which included everybody and everything on earth, subsided. But at last I came to my senses. And—who knows?—all my life seems to have been but a schooling for my art.”

“Then you regret nothing?”

“I waste no time in futilities, and there is nothing of the Magdalene in my composition.”

“What would you have done if you had not discovered your voice?”

“No doubt I should have discovered in time that I was an actress. Had it not been for that smouldering mental fire in me which always seemed to whisper, ‘Wait! wait!’ I should have become the most famous courtesan of modern times. I had it in me! There were intervals when Cora Pearl inspired me with envy. It was mere instinct—rather the watch-fires of genius—that led me to shun the public eye, even when on the stage.”

“You would have been a horrible woman if you had chosen to go that pace!” he exclaimed, with a sudden access of vision. “You had it in you to become all bad.”

“All.”

“Was art your only hope? Suppose you had loved the right sort of man?”

“Such women don’t love the right sort of man. They are born off the key, and they do not meet the men to inspire them with ideals. Nor women either. Besides, after that I never wished to love again. The only good thing about love is the getting over it. Good God!” She flung out her hands again. “The delight of that recovery, the sense of freedom, the intoxicating liberty! Love to women of my nature is a hideous slavery, the sooner we become flint the better. Leave love for the conservators of the race. But enough of such black subjects this beautiful morning. The sun climbed the Alps while we were in the woods, and the stars have gone out. Let us return. I have a make-up for you! After breakfast I shall take a photograph—but it will flatter you!”

Some time before she had taught him how to use her camera, and he had taken a series of photographs of her in the costumes and attitudes of her various rôles. Thus it happens that to-day Bridgminster is the only person living who can recall Styr without the aid of memory, for even in London, when she realized the half of her supreme ambition, she would not be photographed for the public. And as Ordham, in spite of his laziness, could do most things well that he gave his mind to, these photographs, some twenty in number, are not only admirable specimens of the amateur’s art, but such approximate presentments of Styr that it is to be hoped they will yet find their way into a public gallery.

She let him sleep for two hours after breakfast, then sending for him to come to her in the garden, dressed him in a flowing wig, a velvet jacket, a low soft collar, and wandering scarf. Then she stood off.

“Pout out your lips. Make your eyes heavy with sullen dreams. There! You are Rossetti at nineteen. You look as if about to die of a rose in aromatic pain. How have you escaped the æsthetic craze, at the very least?”

“I don’t think that I have. Only whereas they think they can do things, I know that I cannot, and do not propose to make myself ridiculous to no end. Please hurry. This wig is very warm.”

He sent the photograph later to his mother, and it left her breathless for quite a moment. As much as she could fall in love with any man, she had fallen in love with Rossetti. At least he had haunted her girlish dreams, and perhaps those of her early married life until the world absorbed her. Of course she had never seen him in his beautiful youth; and to him—then deeply in love with Elizabeth Siddal—she had been nothing more than an interesting sitter whom her august papa had not too graciously allowed him to paint. But stranger things than that have happened in Nature’s workshop.

XXVI FRIENDSHIP IN A BORROWED FRAME

The King suffered from toothache. Detesting dentists, and knowing from bitter experience that it would endure until the nerve died, he indifferently granted Styr’s request for a month’s leave of absence. Chaperoned by Fräulein Lutz, she and Ordham went on what they called a walking tour in the Bavarian Alps. Travelling third class, both for the picturesque companionship it afforded and to escape awkward rencounters, they took the train from village to village, and spent several hours of each day leisurely climbing, driving, wandering in the woods, or floating on the brilliant waters, as deeply toned as emerald or sapphire, of Alpine lakes. Avoiding hotels, they lodged on the outskirts of their villages, and Lutz went to market every morning. They took no servants with them, and nothing could exceed Ordham’s devotion in carrying wraps and ordering carriages. But this, they were not long discovering, was the limit of his usefulness. Either Styr or the chaperon bought the tickets, found the porters, engaged the rooms, bargained with guides, ordered the meals, made out the routes, and asked all necessary questions. On the morning after their arrival in Oberammergau, Fräulein Lutz almost burst into Styr’s bedroom.

“Mein Gott!” she exclaimed. “But I have just prepared his bath! But I, Hiobe Lutz! This is the climax. I met him wandering in the hall with his eyes half opened and seeming to look for something he could not find. He wore a pink dressing-gown with green facings, and his bare feet were not even in slippers. I asked him if he were ill. He said, No, that he had no bath. It never occurred to him to walk downstairs and ask for his tub, nor even to call out of the window. But he looked so helpless, so _young_, that I—Himmel!—I ran downstairs and found for that giant baby his tub, which had been put in the shed. Then, accompanied by the daughter of the house, I carried it up to his room—then returned again with jugs of water, hot and cold! He thanked us ‘so much.’ Oh, he has the prettiest manners. They never fail. But myself, I shall have to cross the English Channel and pass those examinations for him.”

“You know you are devoted to him.”

“What is it?” asked Lutz with sudden suspicion. “Can it be this hypnotism they talk about?”

“Charm comes from the same root, I fancy. And then he really is helpless. How can people, even the rich and great, bring up a boy like that?”

Lutz nodded in sage disgust. “The aristocracy! Ach Gott! What will become of them when the next French Revolution, so to speak, comes? How they must have suffered, those poor pampered things! It was not the fear of death. That was nothing. Race can always meet downfall and death with an air—an air that sustains them within as without. But before the scaffold! When they had to dress, to wait on themselves!—to think! Ah, that was the tragedy. I feel sorry for these poor helpless aristocrats; but no, I would not abolish the institution, because it gives to us humble bourgeois the savour that Europe furnishes for America! So, when I saw that poor helpless boy—who can talk like his grandfather—ach! I cannot understand him. He is made up of too many parts, contradictions, for my old brain. On the whole, I should like to spank him.”

Styr laughed and put the finishing touches to her costume of brown linen, which looked simple and bucolic, but had been cut in Paris, and, with a hat and veil as soft and rich in their shading as a pheasant’s wing, was no less artistic and becoming than the white frocks she put on for supper. A few moments later Ordham entered their common sitting room, fresh, smiling, unconscious of the comment he had inspired. He had quite forgotten the episode of the bath.

He shook hands with Countess Tann and Fräulein Lutz in his usual formal manner, his eyes beaming with pleasure as they always did upon entering the presence of his chosen friend, unless something had happened to put him out of temper. As he was so much more amiable and happy even than usual this morning, Styr suddenly understood how he must have missed his servant, although he had never referred to the man. He was feeling pleasantly cared for once more, even if he had ungratefully forgotten the author of his well-being. No doubt the warm water for his bath had often failed to appear, and he had none of the national mania for “cold tubs.” From this time forth, until he was safely deposited in the Legation once more, Lutz grimly made a nurse of herself. She not only saw to his bath, but she packed and unpacked his trunk, and discovering that many objects were mateless, divorced, of course, in the laundry, she wrote to Hines for a new supply. He accepted all these attentions with the most charming courtesy, but his lack of emphasis amused Styr, although poor Lutz took his polite acquiescence in her devotions as a matter of course.

Upon this morning he went at once out upon the little balcony where they were to breakfast, and murmured his delight, calling Styr to join him with an imperious motion of his head. They had arrived after dark and seen little of the long straggling village on the bank of its narrow stream. Their lodging was at the very end of the street, where the road branches to Ettal, and from the balcony they could see the romantic winding village in the narrow valley, above which towered a peak surmounted by a cross. There were mills with great wheels on the river, dilapidated bridges, peasants in costume, the usual church with its domed steeple high on its terrace, and surrounded by tombs. Even the roofs of the houses were picturesque, the women working in the narrow fields. On all sides, covering the mountains, was the forest, and over all a peace indescribable.

As they had brought their own coffee, and fruit was abundant, they enjoyed their breakfast even if the bread was sour and the butter ill-made; luxuries they had dismissed from their minds. When it was over, leaving Lutz to consult with their hostess, Margarethe and Ordham strolled through the village. Oberammergau resembled many other Bavarian and Tyrolean villages up to a certain point, and then its individuality began. On the plastered façades of the pointed houses were beautiful religious frescoes as soft and mellow as those of Ghirlandajo, and in the church, larger and more graceful than many, were two hideous bedizened skeletons of saints. Protected by glass, and gorgeously arrayed, their awful skulls and hands, chemically preserved, seemed to cry out for the last act of death, which would grant them the dust and oblivion of the grave. The church was half full of men and women, dropped in for a casual prayer, and all dressed in the picturesque garb of Ober-Bayern, so rare these few years later.

Even the people of this village of the Passion Play are different from those of other villages. Bavarian peasants are kindly, but these of Oberammergau have an exquisite and unfailing courtesy, and every child greets the stranger with “_Grüss Gott_,” and runs to kiss his hand. Although it would be several years before the next performance of the Passion Play, many of the men wore their hair long, for a religious drama of some sort is given every year. The very expression of these people indicated a superiority of intelligence and character. All hoped to be chosen, or rechosen, for the next great performance; and few in that village, where the light was as searching as ever was turned upon a throne, but cultivated the best that was in him. It is probably the only spot on Earth where Christianity is a working success.

Ordham and Margarethe lingered at the windows of the shops, admiring the wood carving, and bought a number of crucifixes and religious groups for the servants at home. Finally, they sat down at a table outside one of the cafés, where the Christus of the last performance, who looked as much like Christ as any mortal can, was drinking beer and eating a large piece of black bread and Swiss cheese. Our friends listened for a few moments to his animated discussion with a neighbour upon the utility of damming the river, that it might do more good in summer and less harm in winter. When he had finished his repast he rose, bowed profoundly to the strangers, and sauntered off, followed by a troop of children that all hoped to be Christuses in their turn.

“I should think it must be a terrible strain,” said Ordham. “Surely human nature must break out occasionally.”

“No doubt it does. But these people are saturated with the spirit of the Passion Play, and so have their ancestors been before them—for three hundred years. They are not only moral but happy. The first time I came here, one young woman, whose histrionic talent was remarkable, told me that she had refused two offers from Berlin managers because life would be a blank to her if she could not look out of her window every morning and see the cross on Kochel. This is the only community in the world which is consistent generation in and out to a high ideal.”

“I wonder if it is a haven of rest to outsiders,” said Ordham, who was staring at her after his habit, his cigarette cold. “Could you come here if your voice failed you; if, for any reason, you could not act—come here and find peace?”

Margarethe shook her head. “For a week—a fortnight. Then I should fly to the very centres of distraction. This peace is not for the outsider. It is not sold in the shops with the crucifixes. It takes generations to make. Even if one brought here a peaceful, even a religious, mind, one would never feel quite the real thing. And yet I do not believe there is a self-righteous person in Oberammergau. Alas! Our tête-à-tête is over. Here comes your grenadier.”

Ordham hastily lit a cigarette as his Lutz strode up, exclaiming: “Did you think to escape your lesson? We shall have it here. It shall be conversation and dictation.”

“The morning is so beautiful—you are going away?” Margarethe was opening her parasol.

“But yes,” said Lutz severely. “Is her place here, to distract your sufficiently frivolous mind? Ask me a question.”

“Do you prefer chocolate or coffee?” he asked ingratiatingly.

“Chocolate, with thanks. But we are no longer in the Ollendorff stage or you would not be returning next month to England to face your destiny. I have thought of ten terrible questions, than which they can construct nothing more difficult, more ridiculous. I have brought pencil and paper. Write, while I drink the excellent chocolate.”

And Ordham groaned and resigned himself.

If Lutz was inexorable in her own province she was an irreproachable chaperon. They saw little of her save at meals, and wandered in the woods, or, here in Oberammergau, sat for hours beside the cross, high on Kochel, indulging in those long silences where ego’s wing-tips graze one another now and again. Often Ordham went frankly to sleep, and Styr forgot him, and dreamed of conquests in London and New York, such as Patti herself had never wrung from those blasé publics.

They went on to Berchtesgaden, that strange tumbled mass of peaks and ledges and rocky walls, with its bit of valley, its castle, its village dotted all over the scenery it cannot escape. They climbed to the glacier, explored the salt mine, and spent hours on the great green lake, Königsee; which looks as if a mountain had been sliced through its middle, the high walls thrust apart, and waters, from some dark and sinister depths of Earth, depths where she prepared her demoniacal schemes to blast surfaces dear to man, had risen and covered the floor of the gorge. It is a wild primeval landscape, suggestive of centuries of convulsions, perhaps that the end is not yet. But if the mountains were terrible, the lake gloomy, the monastery in the tiny valley was peaceful, and when they climbed into the recesses of these volcanic masses, they found the peasants, in the little dairy huts, very hospitable and friendly. But once, when they went out by moonlight, quite alone on the lake, the great dark expanse between its bare and menacing walls filled them with terror, and they took hands and ran home like children.

XXVII ADIEU TO THE ISAR

All things end, and the day after their return to Munich he appeared at the villa with a very long face.

“I leave to-night for England,” he groaned, flinging himself on the divan. “This morning I received a notice that the examinations will begin next Monday. I did not read the reason. The fact was enough.”

“Desolation!” Styr sat down abruptly, but she kept all sentiment out of her voice. “What in heaven’s name am I to do without you?”

“I wish I could think that you felt half as badly as I do. But while I go to untold horrors, you go on a tour to win new laurels.”

“Yes, in hot German cities and hotter concert rooms. And my _Gastspiel_ does not begin until the 25th of August; but I find invitations from Switzerland—Zurich, Geneva, Lucerne. I shall accept them if the King consents. Yes,—I have work—but still! Well, you would have gone soon in any case.”

“I shall return the moment this beastly business is over and I have seen Bridg.”

“But as soon as you pass you are in the service—you must work in the Foreign Office for six months, and then you will be appointed, no doubt far from Munich.”

“I shall get a three months’ leave. Influence may not be able to get a man into the service, but it will do much later. I shall go when and where I wish. I am determined to spend the autumn in Munich. There will be that much more, at least. How in heaven’s name shall I ever get on without you?”

“Do not protest too much.” Styr had no belief that he would fly back to her, and once more was thankful that she had remade herself. She should miss him, but it would have been the last straw did she still retain the capacity to miss any man too much. She added dutifully: “Besides, I want you to marry.”

He kicked about among the cushions. “That, at least, you need not remind me of. But if I do, I shall come here on my honeymoon.”

“You might leave her behind.”

“I wish to heaven I could. Why not perfect these commercial marriages? If I give the girl the position of a married woman, which they all appear to be dying for, the prospect of a title, and the advantages of my mother’s protection in London, she might at least give me my complete liberty.”

“And her money.”

“Of course.”