Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“ Ho—yo—to—ho!’ I was Brünhilde on her rock. The waves were fire. Ah!” Styr flung her arms upward, her body backward, swaying from side to side. “I shall never have such exquisite delusions again. Never! Never! For one hour—or was it one moment?—I was a goddess. It was no delusion! I was Brünhilde, awaking from a sleep, not of a generation, but of the centuries that had gone since she rode into the funeral pyre. I try to recall that ecstasy on the stage. Some of it comes back, but not all! Not all! I have a fancy that Death will bring it in his hand when he comes again.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ His mouth, which of late had often been consciously firm, was as soft and boyish as when they had met at Neuschwanstein, and his eyes, always luminous, were sparkling with anticipation. Not the least of his attractions to Styr was his perfect grooming, for being artist as well as woman, she hated the sight of “artistic” men. She herself looked very smart, as he immediately told her, in an entire costume of tan-coloured cloth. As the day was warm and she could not wear a wrap, and as her tailor was the best in Paris, her frock followed every line and curve of her perfect figure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The second act, greatest of all love scenes as it is, is far less of a strain on the audience than the first. When Tristan and Isolde, having expressed their joy in meeting in that succession of ecstatic love cries which makes the words feeble and superfluous, sank down upon the bench (that astigmatic couch!) and the love duet began, Ordham once more closed his eyes and listened, with his soul detached from his body, to that voice of fluid gold, melting, fainting, fiery, dreaming, despairing, expressing every phase of the phenomenon of love. ”

“ Do you think I have thought of anything else since my return to Munich? I have been tempted to scald my flesh to relieve the torments of my mind. And I tell you there is no way out, there is nothing for us in this life but what we have had already, nothing! We must part, and part to-night, before it is too late, and as there is no other way to bring you to your senses, I shall tell you that hideous history, not only to blast your love out of existence, but to inspire you with a vision of the enthusiasm with which London would receive me as a peeress, should you ever be free. ”

“ Ordham let himself out of the house looking as hard as he felt, but in a few moments the pagan beauty of the morning and the gay face of London in her springtime laughed his ill humor away and banished the memory of his wife. No city is more beautiful than London during her brief season of sunshine, with the flower boxes set like little Italian balconies on her grim old houses, the vivid close green of parks and squares, the endless processions of open carriages filled with smartly dressed folk from all parts of the world ”

“ Not only was she the artist best beloved in Munich, but surprise shattered the languor appropriate to so fashionable an occasion.
Ordham saw his lilies. They were in her hair, on her breast, on the front of her skirt. But what diverted his attention from this expected compliment was the surprise afforded by her evening gown. He had seen her only in the heavy white draperies affected by the heroines of Wagnerian romance, and in the still more classic costume she had worn at Neuschwanstein; he had supposed her to be a massive woman built for such rôles, and the more untuned to private life. ”

“ Mabel had listened to this conversation appalled, almost breathless. “Surely, you would not go away and leave me?”
“Not for a while yet, darling—certainly not! But I feel that the time will come when we shall have to satisfy ourselves with a yearly interchange of visits.” She looked at Ordham as if bracing herself again. “Let us have it out. We like each other too well to quarrel, and it is better to come to a complete understanding now than to be continually bringing up unpleasant subjects. Nothing disgusts me more than this English worship of what you call personality. ”

“ Marriage—it was a portentous thing; no mere similarity of tastes due to breeding and experience, but, for highly organized beings, a thousand points of contact, mental, physical, spiritual, which compassed an unimaginable union; mystery and discovery; the quick response to half utterances, the same enthusiasms in beauties and pleasures forever hidden from the mass upon whose fertile surfaces grew the exotics of life; passions of soul and body such as only Styr could suggest when the music of Wagner set her free; immortality this side of the grave,—that was union in love as Ordham conceived it. ”

“ The more insistently and unequivocally love spoke, the more determined she grew that descend to that buried plane set thick with awful corpses she would not, those dead foul memories that must forever make the materializing of love mean but one more carnal experience. Once she could have idealized this bond, even had she known Ordham in her ignorant youth, a thousand times more had she met him with a mature mind and a past of even comparative ignorance; but now, the moment she gave herself, all power of idealism would be slain, and she believed that she should kill herself—perhaps him as well. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ordham,—I am grateful. Just so often as a woman loves does she die. She comes to life again in the course of time, but with less and less of energy, illusion, her original power to love and be happy. I sometimes think that love is a congestion of a spot in the brain round the image of the man, which stares at her waking and sleeping, never to be banished from the tortured consciousness till Time has drained the blood from that little spot. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ One of Ordham’s charms for this blasée woman of plebeian origin was the atmosphere of intellectual remoteness in which he seemed to dwell, and which, combined with his dignity and fine manners, made him the most finished type of the traditional aristocrat she had ever met. It was when she realized that she might never penetrate those outer envelopes of gayety and candour with which he concealed the intense reserve of his nature, that she had fallen genuinely in love with him; and the love of a woman of that sort is far more dangerous than her mere passion. ”

“ As Ordham did not like this particular tenor, he remained in the foyer until Tristan had finished his bleating and ranting in the last act—that vicious test of a tenor’s histrionic powers, as of his vocal endurance—and bribed the doorkeeper to let him enter later and stand while Styr sang the Liebestod. Sometimes she rose to her feet as if impelled upward by the intensity of her vision; but to-night she chose to exhibit the physical weakness of delirium as the soul struggled free of the relaxing flesh, the ecstasy of death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ordham stood up again. The more or less vague apprehensions that had haunted him for several hours took form and substance.
“Yes,” he said; “I am afraid that is it.”
“Good God!” Styr stood up, her face expressing a horror that lashed his own brain. “That means ruin, no career—being a social outcast—for several valuable years, at all events. No opportunity to marry a decent girl of fortune. Nothing! And you—all the delightful freshness of your young good looks faded, your enjoyment of life dulled, embittered,—your splendid pride broken. ”

“ Here the narrow zigzag streets, the rural lanes, the riverside, the little beer gardens, were as thronged as the city, while opposite, in the Englischergarten, there were glimpses of another crowd which completed the impression that every house in Munich must be deserted.
Few villages in the high Alps are more picturesque than Schwabing, which still has its old mill, and the tower of whose white church, perched high, swells into one of those graceful spheres that form links in an invisible chain through the blue of Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary to the land of the Turk. ”

“ Styr passed from opera to songs, all, no doubt, selected by the King. Some were sonorous with deep religious feeling, others a long-sustained chaunt of sadness and despair; one alone was insolent with triumph and power. It seemed to Ordham that he was swept upward to the stars, those golden voices of dead singers once as great as this virile creature below him. His body was cold, his pulses were still, his brain was on fire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Therefore, if you fail; if ten years hence you are a mere society butterfly, a drone, which, I infer, Munich is doing its best to make of you; if twenty years hence you are an old beau, with no object but to be invited out every night that you may escape death by ennui,—you need curse no one but yourself. Had I failed, I should have been justified in throwing myself into the river, cursing life, fate, your entire sex. I have conquered in spite of every millstone that could be hung about a woman’s neck. ”

“ He sat down, and his nervousness, even his horror, fled. He looked at the shrunken pallid remnant of the beautiful girl he had married and was filled with an immense pity, which induced one of those rare moments in life, like tiny islands, that have no space for self. He was also awed, as one must ever be in the presence of death, but those little green isles in the ocean of egoism have their atmosphere of unreality; and he felt throughout this interview, which he has never tried to forget, like a man who dreams yet believes himself to be awake.
Mabel spoke in a small distant voice. ”