It was on this night that he was to sup with her. The hour appointed was seven, and, not knowing his habits, she dressed early. As she arrayed herself in one of the loose Fedora tea-gowns that Bernhardt had made fashionable, she congratulated herself upon the inspiration that had bade him, as he swung down from her window, “not to dress.” After that scene in the park she resolved definitely to make him understand at once that although living alone, and an artist, about whom, no doubt, many stories were current, she was not to be confounded with the cocottes of society: she could picture the costumes in which Hélène Wass received her admirers at tête-à-tête suppers! The Fedora gown, with its curved but loosely fitting back, its straight panel in front that hung from throat to slipper, unrevealing but by no means negligée, was the golden mean betwixt the formal and the intimate in feminine attire. And no one could carry such a garment with more dignity than Countess Tann. A number of these Fedora gowns had come to her recently from Paris, and she selected one to-night of which all save the ivory-white panel of crêpe de chine was of mignonette-green velvet. The girdle, which hung low, was composed of flexible silver links and had been picked up in one of the antiquity shops of Munich. Only her beautiful throat was bare. Her hair was arranged like a coronet. She had seldom lost her interest in clothes, and once or twice a month entertained at supper Excellenz Nachmeister, Possart, Lenbach, and a number of the older authors, artists, and scientific men, who could talk, and who were content to await her summons.
To-night she smiled at the unmistakable excitement of titivating once more for a mere man, although he made no appeal whatever to her deeper feminine instincts. Those had long been dead, and she stared down for a moment at their graves, almost forgotten under the heavy mounds of loathing and hatred for the sex for which they had been implanted. She no longer hated men; she had not even the desire, common to the woman that has been deeply wronged, to wreak vengeance upon them as a sex, now that all the cards were in her hands; art had enchained every faculty and left little room in her mind for the meaner interests of life. But she was a woman still, or she would not have been the great artist she was; and she sighed a little as she clasped her girdle, and even experienced a fleeting envy of Hélène Wass, who was two years older than herself. She was very happy, she dwelt upon serene heights, and one day Wagner would conquer London and she would sing there and behold the world at her feet. But Life, Life itself, had cheated her horribly; she must die when her time came without one tender or beautiful memory. It had gorged her with its knowledge, but its lessons had been hideous; and only her strong will—perhaps the greatest of her gifts—banished their memory when they rose and flitted, phosphorescent ghosts, across her upper consciousness. She swept them aside to-night and went downstairs, grateful that with the power to love had gone the power to suffer; for she would go out that instant from the world and its music rather than descend into those buried depths of her nature again.
Although it was ten minutes past seven her guest had not arrived, and she went into the drawing-room to wait for him. She felt some vanity in displaying her salon to one who she knew instinctively possessed a cultivated and exacting taste. It was a large room on the right of the entrance, with a row of alcoves on the garden side, each furnished to represent one of the purple flowers. The woodwork was ivory-white; the silk panels of the same shade were painted with violets or lilacs, pansies, asters, orchids, or lilies, as if reflecting the alcoves. There was but one picture, a full-length portrait of Styr as Brynhildr, by Lenbach. The spindle-legged furniture was covered with pale brocades and not aggressively of any period. It was distinctly a “Styr Room,” as her admirers, who were admitted on the first Sunday of the month, had long since agreed, while sealing it with their approval.
At half-past seven Ordham was shown in, exclaiming: “I am so sorry! But my driver went to sleep. I am positive of it. I spent the entire time between Barerstrasse and Schwabing crying ‘Schnell!’?”
“They are always at least half asleep at this hour. They have reached almost the limit of their day’s allowance of beer. For that matter, I often see them asleep in the park three hours earlier, huddled down into their meridians and trusting to their patient old nags to keep the road. One drove up a tree in front of my window not long since. Shall we go in to supper?”
The dining-room was across the hall, a stately little room fitted up in brown and dull gold. The small table, with its delicate service of porcelain and crystal, was perfectly appointed, and the simple supper of omelette aux fines herbes, pigeons, salad, and American hot breads, was so refreshing to Ordham, after the heavy English cooking of the Legation, and the heavier of such of the Bavarian aristocracy as did not employ chefs, that it diverted and comforted him. But he had looked pale and harassed when he entered, and Styr bore her purpose in mind.
They talked, as Hélène had anticipated, of Wagner, and Margarethe succeeded in interesting him deeply when she spoke of her early doubts and fears, not of the difficulties of the music, but of the strange women she must portray.
“I had never heard the r?les sung, you know,” she was saying, as they entered the gallery by the river and she motioned him into the deepest of the chairs. “Please sit still. I am given to prowling. And smoke. Those are Russian cigarettes, and very good, but smoke your own, if you prefer. I had read those operas over and over,—Heavens, but how often!—imagining myself the heroine of each in turn; but when my voice was ready for interpretation, I realized that thought—brain—as well as imagination, was a prerequisite. Of course I had not long been in Bayreuth before I heard how others interpreted them, but that conveyed little to me. As soon as I had begun really to analyze and ponder upon the characters of Brünhilde and Isolde, I chose to call them from their graves into my own soul, divested of all the conventions which already clung to them like barnacles. My ardour was so great that when roaming alone in the woods of Eremetage, the old park of the Margraves on the hill outside of the town, I really persuaded myself—and for hours at a time—that I was one or other of those great women, torn with her passions, delirious with her hopes, exalted with her despair. My God! my God! What happiness! I lived the life of the imagination, the artistic imagination on fire; I gave not a thought to my personal self. Nor was there time for anything but study. Frau Cosima, regarding me as an irresponsible genius, found me a lodging with a good creature who kept me from starving—and the clothes on my back. Perhaps even The Master laughed at my intoxication,—for it was far beyond enthusiasm,—but I neither knew nor cared. I was quite mad. Of course such a time can never come again, for I have learned all the great r?les, and who shall write others? But at least I am happy while singing them, and throughout the day preceding the night of a performance I live the part to myself. I see the Rhine beneath my window, my tower is the Hall of the Gibichungs. I hear the Atlantic in the Isar and fling myself face downward on that divan and let the passions of all womankind tear my heart as they tore Isolde’s when they transformed her into a fate and the avenger of her sex.”
Ordham had forgotten Hélène Wass. He would rather have made no reply, but when she paused, he took refuge, after his habit when excited, in commonplace:
“That is perhaps your greatest acting—that first act of Tristan. But of course there is no other in which you run the gamut of the passions—although in G?tterd?mmerung—but really I am not up to criticism. You are terribly real in all of your tragic r?les. I wonder how real it all is—if you are capable of sweeping a man out into eternity with you to-day? You must have been once.”
“I am capable of nothing but acting to-day; and of getting quite wrought up in the novelty of talking to some one besides myself in this room. I receive those I receive at all in the salon, but in this I live. Let me show it to you.”
He followed her about the long room that reminded him of galleries in certain old houses in England. It must have been very bright during the day, for the side facing the river was made almost entirely of windows. The other three walls were set thick with pictures, many of them sketches laid at the feet of Die Styr by the devotees of another art; a few old prints and etchings, and an infinite number of photographs. Ordham wondered how a woman who made so few friends had managed to collect so many signed presentments, until he examined the signatures and found that they were all from celebrities or members of the royal families of Bavaria and other German states. Ludwig had sent her no less than twelve, ranging from the supreme if morbid beauty of his young manhood to the pallid corpulence of the present, in which nothing lived to remind the world of one of the most promising monarchs that ever had ascended a throne but the deathless ideality of the eyes. Other members of the royal and ducal Wittelsbachs, kindly and genuine people, who came sometimes to drink a cup of tea with the great artist (whom they admired with that true reverence for art that the centuries had bred in them) had sent their photographs handsomely framed and affectionately autographed. Ennobled though she was, the fact that she was of those that received payment for services rendered debarred her from court functions at the Residenz, but that was all. She had dined with the Queen-mother more than once, and was invited to the routs at the other palaces in common with the rest of the Bavarian aristocracy. Although that strong brain could never turn, it must have admitted an occasional wave of astonishment, perhaps exultation, at the significance of this eccentric curve in her fortunes.
Some such thought flitted through Ordham’s mind, but he made no comment, and admired the graceful crowded room in general. It looked as if the disposition of the tables and chairs were changed daily, and although the walls were of a delicate grey, there was colour somewhere, in what he could not define, so perfect was the harmony, that gave the room warmth and brightness. At one end a marble bust of Wagner stood alone on a pedestal. The books were in the tower, opposite whose arch was the divan with its many pillows.
“You should be very happy in such a room,” he said with a sigh, as he returned to the deep comfort of his chair. “I can well imagine that here you can conjure up any vision you wish. I have been here but half an hour, and already it seems more like home to me than any room in Munich. I cannot fancy anything disagreeable happening in it.”
“But there are so many beautiful rooms in Munich.” She took a chair facing him, lit a cigarette, and prepared to draw him out.
“Beautiful, but not gemütlich—wonderful word! Either they are magnificent, like Princess Nachmeister’s, or merely formal, with fine things in them, or quite awful, with stuffy ancestral furniture that should have been refilled seven generations ago. My room at the Legation is done up in chintz and is very pretty and fresh, but it is not—well, it does not shut out the world as this room does.”
“But your place is in the world. And it is very good to you.”
“Oh, sometimes.”
There being no fire to stare into, his gaze had wandered to the open window near his chair. Suddenly he realized that the dark object beyond was a bit of the Englischergarten, and the scene of the afternoon flashed back to his mind. The vague sense of dissatisfaction that had stolen over him at the last words of Countess Tann crystallized, and he turned pale and drew in his breath sharply.
“Has Fraülein Lutz been scolding you? She gave me many unhappy quart d’heures.”
“I can only be grateful to her—and to you.”
“That was a sort of gambler’s throw on my part—I am curious to see how far you will go in the diplomatic career. Very far, I venture to predict.”
“Oh!” He twisted about again and looked hard at the dark panel of the window. His languid ambition gathered a sudden vehemence as he seemed to behold a forking road in his future and a sinister pointing finger.
“What is the age limit for examinations?”
“Twenty-six.”
“That gives you two years. With Fraülein Lutz you cannot fail to pass in German. But I find those examinations rather stupid. It gives too many opportunities to the wrong class of young men, while those more naturally gifted for such a career are thinking only of amusing themselves. And after all, an under secretary can acquire one language after another in the capitals where he is attached long before he has any but a purely personal need of them. By the time he is a first secretary he will know at least four languages, no matter how limited his linguistic talents.”
“How wonderful of you to have thought about a career so far removed from your own.”
“Is it? In your case, however, I have had the benefit more than once of Princess Nachmeister’s disquisitions. She has made up her mind to live to see you an ambassador; and she is quite capable of living till ninety.”
“I could hardly be an ambassador at forty-four, unless I had had uncommon opportunities.” But his eyes kindled and he smiled. He was easily diverted, and even though his ambition might not grow fast enough to conquer his indolence and love of pleasure before it was too late, his natural sense of dignity, and a pride both personal and racial, reminded him, now and again, that it was his duty to take the place among men to which his talents and his opportunities entitled him.
“Well—you might come back as Minister Resident to Bavaria, and cheer your good old friend’s last days.”
“Oh!” He had turned pa............