If the next twenty-five days passed quickly, it was not because they were barren of events. It was Ordham’s idea that in the second performance of Die Walküre Styr should sing, not the vocally interesting but dramatically unappealing rôle of Brünhilde, but that of Sieglinde. Knowing that his race was the most remarkable compound on the globe of respectability and sensuality, he believed that the character of Sieglinde, portrayed with all the abandon of which Styr, alone of living singers, was capable, and yet easefully vapourized in the alembic of music, would give the Wagner season a fresh impetus; and the event proved him right. Styr, with a new need to give her imprisoned passions relief, acted the part of the faithless young wife, the incestuous demigoddess, with an emotionalism so deep and wild that the audience held their breath, and yet with a poignant sweetness that brought tears to their eyes, filled them with an immense pity for the captive of the hideous Hunding who found her mate capriciously caught in the body of a son of Wotan. After all, demigods were not mortals, they remarked, few besides the Germans understanding Fricka’s emphatic opinion on the subject.
In the second act Styr portrayed tragedy, delirium, remorse, and the mere physical weakness of woman, in a fashion that caused even herself to wonder why she had never essayed this rôle before. When she lay unconscious between the knees of Siegmund during the long duet between her lover and Brünhilde, she looked so beautiful that she continued to hold the attention of all, and Ordham stared at her until his gaze seemed to burn her eyelids and she stirred uneasily. When Sieglinde was finally swept off the stage by Brünhilde, the audience, almost to a man, arose and left the house.
By this time London was “mad over her.” Women whose lives were barren, great ladies whose passions were faded, men with far less reason but an equal pleasure, higher types that revelled in the brain behind the voice, the spiritual suggestion in scenes and music designed to appeal to the most elevated of mortal ideals, the remotest and shyest of the soul’s desires, crowded to hear the woman who would be a valuable aid to the Almighty on the day of resurrection. Styr, exultant and happy, with the transcendent happiness of the artist in the supreme triumph of her genius, gave these splendid audiences, so difficult to please with anything more serious than the wit and paradox to which Wilde was driven not long after, the greatest that was in her, and wondered if such intoxication of the mind, such insolence of victory, could be mortal woman’s a second time.
It is possible that London would have reacted in sheer exhaustion after more than five weeks of this stimulating banquet, but during that time Styr reigned unchallenged. Society, determined to meet her personally, took the shortest way round the scandals they had enjoyed, by professing not to believe them, rejecting them in toto. One ambitious hostess went so far as to announce at a large dinner party that she had taken the trouble to investigate, had even spent a small fortune cabling, and had learned that Styr had been an actress in New York of unimpeachable respectability, and that the Margaret Hill of Levering’s tales was lost in a wreck on the Pacific Coast ten or twelve years since. As a matter of fact she had done nothing of the sort, but her story was cleverly put together, and she was quite aware that others besides herself but wanted an excuse to entertain the greatest artist that had visited England in their time. The Queen held out and did not invite her to sing at Windsor, for she thought it crime enough to have inspired such stories, whether true or not, and more than one old-fashioned great lady, suspicious of celebrities in any case, fully agreed with her; but they were lost sight of in the general rush. It was impossible for Styr to accept more than one out of ten of the invitations showered upon her, or to show herself for more than a few minutes at a time at the various afternoon receptions given in her honour. Rehearsals were many and time was short. And even she, strong woman as she was, had to sleep. Invitations to supper she steadily refused, and on the day of a performance never spoke during the afternoon.
Naturally this left her little time for Ordham. They went sight-seeing no more, but as she rose every morning at ten he called at eleven and remained until one, although he rarely saw her for a moment alone. Others had the same privilege, and the impresario, the conductor, and various members of the company, all more or less desperate, came for advice and consultation. She practically rehearsed the company, for the impresario was not too efficient, and Richter had his hands full with the orchestra.
Reckless, by this time, of gossip, for he had by no means calculated upon a success so overwhelming as to leave him out in the cold, Ordham fell into the habit of going with her to rehearsals, and lounging in her dressing-room, where she came to him for an occasional chat. He went, when bidden, to every reception, every dinner and breakfast, given in her honour, that he might at least be in the room with her, receive an occasional glance and smile; which, beggarly satisfaction as it might be, was better than striding up and down his room in the Temple. His domestic habits were sadly out of joint. Mabel’s strained and sometimes terrified face, his mother-in-law’s speechless indignation, were unnecessary afflictions. At first he invented all the excuses which his ingenious brain could devise. “He was Wagner mad.” “As long as his family would not receive the woman who had showered hospitalities upon him when he was a harassed student in a strange city, he must do his best, not only to cover their defection, but to pour balm upon his conscience.” The secret that he had originated and financed the enterprise was well kept, but he insisted that he more than any one should work for its success, as he should owe his own career to the woman who had—yes, really, he could see it now!—so subtly compelled him to study and pass those stiff exams. He pretended to believe that Mabel would have taken a house and been the first to open her doors to his friend had she been well, for it was no part of his policy to notice her mounting jealousy. He saw her so little that he was able to be as charming as ever to her, although she was looking swollen in the face and coarse, one of the pathetic punishments of woman while fulfilling the highest of her duties. After excuses failed him he simply ignored the subject—lunching and dining at home on those alternate days when Styr was obliged to seclude herself; and after a time, impatient at the still unuttered disapproval which charged the atmosphere of Grosvenor Square, he accepted other invitations. He was by no means satisfied with himself, for he was as far as ever from any desire to make his wife unhappy; but if she was so unreasonable, so undiplomatic, as to refuse him his liberty for this short period, if she was bent upon proving herself unfit to be the wife of a man of the world, let her read her lesson and profit by it. Perhaps in the depths of his mind, buried under many layers of modernism but by no means extinct, he looked upon wives from the royal point of view: sound and vigorous transits for the next edition of the race. But he was beyond analysis, and had but one desire, one purpose: to see as much of Margarethe Styr during these racing weeks as he could manage, although he made no attempt whatever to see her alone.
Mrs. Cutting, angry, frightened, outraged, not only in her maternal passion, but in those principles which she could so gracefully ignore as long as society kept its hard bright surface closed, but to which she would in the last instance have sacrificed social position itself, shut her lips in Ordham’s presence, fearing to precipitate some unthinkable climax, and consoling Mabel with talk of the flying days and the singer’s crowded hours.
“He will follow her,” said Mabel one day.
“I am positive that he will do nothing of the sort,” said Mrs. Cutting, briskly. “Never was a man less impetuous, less disposed to sacrifice anything for the sake of a passing flirtation.”
Mabel set her lips. For the moment she looked older than her mother, so smart and fresh, so alert yet reposeful of carriage. “You have never loved, and I can tell you that love gives one more than a little joy, and pain out of all proportion; it gives terrible insights. I stirred only the youthful shallows of John Ordham. He has depths that no innocent love could reach, much less satisfy. I say nothing about brains, although God knows I am well aware how much that mind of his—it is like an octopus—reaches out for that I cannot give him. But even so, were I—well, were he my second husband, for instance, I might hold my own against even clever women.”
“Mabel!” Mrs. Cutting was horrified at this sudden weed of sophistication in that fair landscape of her daughter’s mind she had so carefully laid out and tended. “You have been reading too many French novels of late; I have expressed my disapproval before.”
“It is a pity I did not read them earlier,” said Mabel, dryly. “I should recommend a course in Balzac, Maupassant, and Bourget to all girls about to marry—Europeans, at least. To be young and fresh and beautiful and good may be sufficient if you marry a business man or a scientist, but you need a good deal more than that to keep a man of the world in the toils, particularly if he has abundant leisure. That may not be a nice fact to face, but no congé will dislodge it. If I were only well!”
“Mabel!”
“Don’t look at me in that puritanical way!” cried Mabel, passionately. “What do you know about life? You scarcely ever saw father, and you didn’t love him anyhow. Besides, Americans are not so different from these Europeans when they have time enough. I got out of Bobby the other day that father kept a mistress for years, and small blame to him. You left him deliberately year after year and you would have had no excuse for righteous wrath had you known. But with us innocent young wives—it is a very different matter, with the world full of sirens like Margarethe Styr. And they are not all publicly branded, either. I could name a dozen that you are proud to know, that are barely gossiped about, who would take John off my hands in a moment if they had a chance at him, or he found them seductive. What has saved me so far is that he is odd, difficult to please, indolent, cold on the surface. But I can tell you that with a man like John Ordham matrimony is like American politics: the woman must know every trick of the game and be above employing none of them. It is horrible, but that makes it none the less true.”
“Mabel, you are outrageous! I’ll listen to no such blasphemy upon womanhood—American womanhood,” she added as an afterthought. “As for your father’s infidelity, it may be. I asked no questions, and I am not the fool you seem to think; but that is quite another matter from seeking to hold a man with the methods of the courtesan. Better let him go.”
“Not when you love him. I’d give my immortal soul, I’d trample in the slime all the girlhood innocence—”
“Mabel! At least be careful not to excite yourself.”
This admonition produced some effect; Mabel was silent for a few moments, and then resumed more calmly: “I am perfectly well aware that during the next few months I can do nothing but think and plan and try to cull wisdom from the masters that have put love under a microscope or on the dissecting table. I am sorry I have been sullen and looked as miserable as I felt. It was a mistake, as great a mistake as for us to refuse to meet Styr. We should have had her here morning, noon, and night. It is too late to alter that, and it is impossible for me to make myself charming when I look like a fright. But I am resolved to be hateful and woebegone no longer. I shall hereafter treat John exactly as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to amuse himself while I am so dull. At least he shall not have the faintest excuse to leave me. This is the critical time. When that woman is far away—and I am told she is to sing next winter in New York—and I am well again, I’ll become a coquette, I’ll make a fine art of matrimony; I wouldn’t be too proud to take hints from the very women of the trottoir if I could get at them. But win and hold him I will. I am a woman, and my eyes are wide open.”
“Have you considered that you may be obliged to give up your cherished plan of living in England? I am convinced by the remarks he drops now and again that he is more set upon diplomacy than ever.”
“If I fail to keep him in England until he has lost his chances for the service—yes, I’ll go. There is no sacrifice I won’t make. I’ll watch him like a cat, and know whether to hold out on that point or give in. Besides, there is always the chance of his growing impatient at the slow promotion. No doubt there will be more than one disgusted moment in which I can induce him to resign and come home to politics. Oh! Oh! that I were well and beautiful once more!”
Mrs. Cutting sighed deeply. She felt as sad as shocked. It was as if she saw a little crystal castle of surpassing beauty, every facet scintillating with a thousand modulated shades of the primal colours, shivered at her feet. Why had she been in such haste to marry her exquisite child? Mabel would have remained girlishly beautiful until twenty-eight; for ten years longer she might have gloried in her handiwork. As she did not care to listen to any more of Mabel’s conclusions, she merely remarked:
“You will not look as young at forty as I do, if you let emotions shake you like this.”
“I am not thinking about when I am forty. The present is all my powers are equal to. I believe John condescends to lunch at home to-day. I’ll put on a red and yellow gown that may perhaps throw into the shade my own sunset tints. Oh, that I were well! That I were well!”
This was a week before Styr’s departure. Ordham, whose mind was by no means obfuscated by the fever in his blood, began to notice that Mabel and her mother ceased to treat him to sour looks, subtly to make him feel a stone and a rake. He was vaguely grateful, for, unknown to Mabel, but prompted by Mrs. Cutting, the distinguished accoucheur, at present exercising a benevolent despotism in Grosvenor Square, had given him an emphatic warning, and he dined almost regularly at home, since he could not dine alone with Styr, and strove with what grace was in him to hide his fathomless ennui and amuse Mabel.
But the strain on his powers of self-control grew more formidable daily. A short while and Styr would have vanished out of London, leaving it as empty as Sahara. The future appalled him. If he could have obtained a post, he would have forced Mabel to release him and left London at once, although he well knew how little work is demanded of an attaché. Still there would be distractions in the new scene. But there was no vacancy, would not be for several months. Upon no other pretext could he leave her—leave London, whose very hansoms would grin at him.
Not the least of the causes which contributed to the waters of his bitterness, of his agitation and disgust, was the amusement of “the world” at his patent infatuation for a famous woman who had no time to waste on men, young or old. Styr no longer encouraged him to come to the opera house during rehearsals, no longer made the slightest effort to give him an occasional moment alone. He was unable to determine whether this final act of cruelty were due to fear or to a real pleasure in meeting so many of the distinguished and really important men of England; to whom, at all events, she gave her spare moments. Of coquetry he was sane enough to acquit her; he had faith in her honesty; but she could have taken no surer means to fan a passion now so fully recognized that he sometimes wondered grimly how much he would stake on ambition when the race came off. He was able to laugh, however, at the diabolical irony of his position. Of all the men that pursued her, he alone had been given the opportunity to look ridiculous, he alone suffered, was wounded in more than vanity. For the first time the source of the lavish expenditures which had given Styr the greatest of her triumphs occurred to him, and he reflected that did the Cuttings and “Bobby” know the truth and were permitted to turn the pages of his mind, they might justly exult. This did not mean that he felt the least compunction or even regret, merely that he was beginning to look life more squarely in the face, give more than a lofty casual glance to cause and effect.
But he had himself well in hand. He had never been more indolent of manner, more alert in conversation. When he discovered that he was pitied as an object of hopeless passion, he ceased to be seen constantly in the wake of the prima donna, deliberately devoted himself to other women. Puppy love had pinched his face, ruined his manners, bereft him of pride and self-control; but this slow and complete awakening of his masculinity matured his character, which his brain had outstripped, and substituted the sharp violent desires of the man, the arrogance of the conquering male, for the thin timid blades of spring. To two people only did he look older, his wife and Styr. From the minds of neither was he long absent. Styr understood, and for the first time in her knowledge of him was frightened. There was something portentous in his cool smiling self-control, like that of a soft-footed tiger biding his time. Mabel half understood and was terrified but resolute. She believed that he was infatuated and unfaithful, but knew the power of the wife over the mistress if able to keep her head and wait, believed that when separated from Styr he would forget like other men. Her mind was now alert; she would be amiable and tactful, and she would stand her ground and fight to the last ditch. She was in no condition to enter upon such an engagement, and had it not been for the good streak of Dutch obstinacy in her nature, she might not have proved equal even to spurts of determination to win or die. When overcome by a physical weariness which compelled her to lie down for hours instead of pacing the room revolving plans, she could only reflect bitterly upon the disabilities which made the game so pitifully uneven. Were she well and beautiful, she would not have hesitated to feign interest in the most notoriously “successful” of her admirers,—in royalty itself,—and bring Ordham to terms through his vanity, and, no doubt, through reawakened passion. Then she wept bitterly, not only at her present impotence but for her lost ideals. She might win back her husband, but her love for him would never again be quite free of that resentment and antagonism, even hatred, inevitable when the woman has been forced in one way or another to recognize the remorseless might of sex. Above all, she felt it to be monstrous that she, with youth and beauty and virtue, wealth and position, the fitness and the wish to be a good wife and an ornament to society, should be pitted in a death struggle with a waif from the streets, whose life had been unprintable, and who had left youth behind her. Such injustice terrified her, confused her standards. At first she prayed wildly, then she ceased to pray at all.
Styr and her management had been careful to give the antidote of Elsa and Elizabeth often enough to protect an exhilarated public against reaction; and by one of those curious paradoxes, known to all that have had reason to study the public taste, her portrayal of that princess among virgins, Elizabeth of Thüringen, from her joyous girlhood to that last mournful scene where she is both saint and woman and wholly lovely, was quite as popular as of those passionate and lawless heroines, Isolde and Sieglinde.
In Munich Styr had sung the part of Venus as a matter of course, leaving the more lyric rôle to the aspiring jugendlichdramatischen, but she, as well as her directors, well knew that to give Tannhäuser the mounting and accessories which made the first scene of its first act, as represented in Munich, the most suggestive on the stage, would be going a step too far even with the British public in its present state of enthusiasm. And without that rosy atmosphere like the mist of an amorous dawn, that sumptuous yet mirage-like couch in the background, the refined yet lascivious dancing of satyrs and nymphs, the visions of Leda and the swan, Europa and the bull, that first long scene, despite its delicious music, would mean to the unmusical beholder naught but an interminable duet between a forward woman in a Greek fillet and baggy gown, and a sulky man in a leathern jerkin and top-boots. Therefore was the first scene cut down to little more than a prologue, the part of Venus sung by an obese German beyond her prime, and fashion entered boxes and stalls a few moments before Elizabeth ran into the great hall of her father’s castle with a burst of song as of a bird mounting to the empyrean after long drooping behind the bars of a cage.
Perhaps Styr had never proved herself a greater actress than when she stared, incredulous and horrified, at the outbreak of the sophisticated Tannhäuser, disgusted with the provincial virtues of the knights, for she looked just sixteen; and when Mabel, who had attended the first performance, saw that dawn of sorrowful womanhood in her eyes, the impotence of maiden innocence against the subtle sweets of mature vice, she clutched her salts and nearly fainted. But when in the last act, Styr, looking as only a pure woman that has never harboured so much as a sinful thought can look, first brought tears to the eyes of old cynics by her pitiful examination of every face in the ragged procession of pilgrims returning from Rome, and then, clinging to the cross, sang her soul straight up to a waiting heaven, Mabel sniffed audibly and walked out. She could not have felt more indignant had Styr publicly been received into the bosom of the Church of Rome and advertised as a beacon light for mankind. But mental suffering had developed a species of saturnine humour in her, and when she was in bed she laughed consumedly at the fool this great actress was making of London.
Before the end of the brief season Elizabeth had won in a race long disputed, perhaps because Styr managed to convey the impression of a pure white lily growing out of a baneful swamp, in other words emphasized the sensuousness of the music, and made her audiences feel that they loved virtue the more while enjoying vicarious naughtiness none the less. Perhaps it was an unadmitted desire for vindication that caused an almost unanimous demand that Tannhäuser should end this agitating season. It was given, and Styr, eliminating the richness from her voice, sang with the sexless silvery sweetness of a boy chorister, which made the tremendous volume of her voice and its noble quality the more remarkable by contrast. The ovation began when the dead Elizabeth, looking like a marble angel, was carried in by the weeping pilgrims. It was too soon to lower the curtain, and as the audience manifested its complete indifference to the lament of Heinrich, Styr was forced to rise publicly from her coffin and respond to the plaudits of her admirers. As this absurd performance smote not only her own sense of humour but that of her audience, the great Wagner season ended in a hearty burst of laughter which put everybody in the best possible temper, and made the unavoidable speech easier to make.
Pelted with bouquets and standing up to her waist in the superb floral offerings handed over the footlights, Styr thanked London for its kindness with her usual proud aloofness considerably modified, and promised to return as soon as her engagements would permit. The audience, now on its feet, shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as eagerly as children, applauded, waved their handkerchiefs, tossed their bouquets for ten minutes longer. Ordham withdrew to the depths of his box, almost paralyzed between delight at the triumph of this woman, whom he would have given the whole round globe, were it his, and an uncontrollable agitation which made him thankful he was alone in his box. He saw his hands tremble and felt the tears on his cheeks, and scorned the heroes of French romance no more.
But he made no effort to see her after she had bowed her final adieu. There was to be a great supper on the stage, but he left the opera house with a scribbled word of apology on a card to the host, and walked until he found himself, at dawn, far out in the country. He went to bed at an inn, and returned to London when the train for the Continent was halfway to the coast. He had written Styr the day before that he should make no further attempt to see her again, that he accepted her manifest decree for the present, although he was by no means certain that he should not go to Munich as soon as he was free; the less he saw of her now the better, no doubt. Then with the utmost courtesy he thanked and congratulated her. He wrote with such cold precision that Styr was as convinced as himself that he had arrived at a worldly state of mind which he meant to be irrevocable, and it was with a grinning brain that she portrayed with even more than her usual poignance a woman shattered on the merciless rocks of love.
During the following month Ordham’s large circle of acquaintances quite forgot his apparent infatuation for the Styr, so gay and debonair was he, so devoted to their society, so punctilious in his attendance upon his wife during her daily drives—“poor dear!”—so frankly and technically did he discuss the voice and histrionics of the prima donna, still a topic of conversation, so conventionally did he express his regret that he should be scribbling in the chancery of some embassy during her next visit to London. Such youthful aberrations as a young man’s fancy for a fashionable singer are too common to burden the memory with, and it is not even passing strange that to-day London has as completely forgotten his devotion to the great Styr as if he had worn an invisible cap; but, for that matter, they had forgotten it far sooner than he in his raw abraded vanity suspected; for in the composite drama of which Styr, during that richly exciting and varied season, was the chief figure, few minor details stood out.
He was now so correct in his attitude of husband and son-in-law, so entertaining and amusing, that he rang hard and clear like some finely constructed machine full of little silver bells. Mrs. Cutting was charmed, but Mabel was often faint with fear. Her brain might be young and small and ignorant, but it was in a constant steel-blue glare of intuitions these days. She had been the bride of a young man comparatively candid and open despite his diplomatic temperament; she now felt herself the honoured consort of a man of unthinkable age, wearing a vizor of youth which might drop at any moment and reveal unknown horrors, hatreds, diabolical purposes. Ordham played his part well, but he guessed that the face of the man she married was too deeply bitten into her memory for his present mask to deceive her. He did not care. He was doing his best; more could be asked of no man.
Possibly the fascination of the Ordhams of the old civilizations resides in those deep artificial layers which are the result of centuries of selection, rejection, experimentation. But deep in these organic edifications there may be more unbridled human nature than in the newer races; these, more or less conscious of a certain transparency, are, warily or intuitively, making and shaping their characters, always adapting themselves to their shifting conditions. Moreover, the man to whom leisure is but one more toy for his family lives on his practical surfaces. In men of Ordham’s class practical surfaces might almost be said to be nonexistent. When thrown on their own resources and scattered over an inhospitable globe, they wring a living out of it if their natural intelligence chimes with opportunity; but they are so generally failures that it is possible Darwin saw many of them during his voyages, and they, not the lower forms, suggested the immortal phrase, “survival of the fittest.” In the Ordhams, protected either by the law of primogeniture or other kindly energies of fate, those deep and multitudinous layers are not only full of charm, of delight to themselves and society, not only do they give them a sense or security which would betray itself in arrogance were they less well-bred, but, so deeply buried are such qualities as worthlessness, savagery, brutal selfishness, that only exceptional circumstances magnetize them to the surface. And even then it is only some final and terrible impetus that reveals them to their fellows in all their nakedness. No men are so protected by circumstance; in other words, by the world’s—their world’s—conventions.
Ordham, during these four weeks, when, as much from the instinct of noblesse oblige as pity for his young wife, whose very voice set his nerves on edge, whose every effort to please him served to remind that he was tied for life to a woman as transparent as a window-pane, was unable to stifle an unceasing whisper in the back of his brain that this could not last, that mortal endurance was not equal to three months more of this unnatural self-control, of a sullen defiance of desire for the woman who had made him feel as if he were a masculine Galatea and she a female Pygmalion. Had he but conceived one of those passions for her to which men are always liable, he would either have conquered it or have induced her to remain in England until tired of her. But he had given her his heart; he was filled not only with the imperious desires of the predatory male, but his brain, with pitiless logic, portrayed and reiterated every phase of the perfect union. Two powerful correlated personalities had met, and each was the helpless victim of the other.
It was still incomprehensible to him that he could fail to obtain anything he craved, much less what was beginning to seem of more value to him than life. “More than life,” indeed, was but a phrase; in his case, “more than career” represented the alternative. The forecasting of a blighting scandal held him in leash as effectively as his sense of duty to the girl he had married; married, when all was said, with his eyes open, for, whether deceived or not in the woman, he knew that he was yielding his liberty and had not hesitated a moment.
But specious arguments were not wanting half to convince him that both he and Styr were clever enough to blind the world until truth had escaped in such vagrant jets that people would have accepted the situation almost before they knew it existed. Mabel, he was now convinced, would never get a divorce, and the busy world, unless slapped in the face, is very lenient to the bearer of a great name, the dispenser of large hospitalities, and the owner of rare gifts. Nevertheless, Ordham was able to consider the possible reverse of the picture and to be thankful that circumstances kept him for the present in England. He half hoped that by the time he was free his worldly sense would wholly have conquered the primitive force of this newly realized passion, or that the latter would sink under his natural indolence and taste for procrastination. Indeed he had almost concluded that, intolerable as the strain was, he should emerge triumphant, when he met his mother entering the house in Grosvenor Square one afternoon as he was about to leave it. She told him that she had just received a telegram from Bridgminster’s servant stating that his master believed himself about to die and had expressed a wish to see her. All that had been consigned to the deepest pit in Ordham’s mind during the last few days rose instantly and quite calmly to the surface. He did not even hesitate.
“Insist that I go with you,” he said, turning to go upstairs with her. “Insist that you are not able to stand the ordeal alone.”
“But, Johnny—”
“I am going to ring for Hines to pack. Of course you start at once. When I join you in the family circle, I hope you will have impressed them with the fact that you cannot go without me.”
She recalled—perhaps it was his cool steady gaze above the sudden pallor of his face that evoked the memory—that however she may have managed this son of hers, she had never governed him; shrugging her shoulders, she went up to inform Mrs. Cutting and Mabel as volubly as a French woman of her terrible upset over the telegram, and her insistence to Johnny, whom she had providentially met as he was leaving the house, that he should go with her.
He had changed his clothes for a travelling suit and was giving his final directions to the distracted Hines when there was a tap at his door. He opened it himself, and seeing his mother-in-law, stepped out and closed it behind him. Mrs. Cutting’s face was pale and there was fear in her eyes.
“You are not really going!” she exclaimed.
“Has not my mother explained?”
“Your mother can take Stanley with her. It is not possible that you will leave Mabel now—when—almost any minute—”
“Oh, I shall be gone but a few days. Surely—”
“Mabel, poor child, is persuading herself that you ought to go, but she overrates her power of endurance. I know—I know—that after you are gone there will be a reaction—she will break down. I would not answer for the consequences.”
Ordham sighed. He was hardly aware of the woman’s presence, save in so far as she forced him to talk when he would have preferred not to open his mouth for twenty-four hours. “Surely you and the doctor—”
“Of course you know practically nothing about such things.” Mrs. Cutting actually blushed; woman of society as she was, she would be a prude until the end. “But it is dangerous to agitate—”
“Why in heaven’s name should she be agitated because I absent myself for a few days? It has struck me that she grows more sensible every day.”
“Oh, men! I repeat that I am convinced that she will break down as soon as she realizes that she cannot see you constantly,—that you have actually deserted her at a time like this!”
“Deserted! Dear Mrs. Cutting, is not that rather a strong word? I shall not be gone more than a week at most.”
“A week! Oh, how shall I make you understand?”
“Perhaps it is because there is really nothing to make clear. You are agitating yourself for nothing.” There was no nervousness, no abstraction, even, in his manner. He smiled into her eyes and stood quite at his ease, with all that blend of charm and formality that had won her approval the day she met him in Princess Nachmeister’s park. A memory struggled upward in her mind. It was ghostly, evasive; then it took form. She recalled that fleeting moment in which she had responded to the cool ruthless kernel of this young man, so elaborately endowed for public service. Her own ambitions might be dust before the week was out, but he—he would survive more than the knowledge that he had been the death of his young wife. She shook from head to foot in the first real terror and agitation she had ever known.
“You will kill her,” she stammered. “If there should be any complication—”
He ceased to smile and, taking her hand, drew it through his arm and led her to the door of her own room. “You know that no girl could be stronger than Mabel,” he said soothingly, and in so impersonal a manner that Mrs. Cutting felt as if the blood in her veins were freezing. “And there is nothing in the world as natural as this sort of thing. Think of the thousands of women that bring their children into the world, every month in the year, who are in every sort of trouble; from the Brittany women, whose husbands have gone on the grand pêche, and are more likely than not to return no more, to the poor creatures in Whitechapel, beaten and kicked up to the last minute. Women were made to bring children into the world and to survive far worse ordeals than a separation of a few days from their devoted husbands. What on earth could I do if I were here? It seems to me, for that matter, rather nicer that I should not be.”
“Mabel is not inured to suffering like those women,” Mrs. Cutting began, but Ordham opened her door and gently pushed her in. He went on to the drawing-room. Mabel, although perhaps a shade sallower than common, was quite alert and cheerful. He understood her tactics, but if the time was past when she could deceive him in any way, he was not only grateful to her now but moved to admiration; for after all she was very young. No doubt in time she would make a clever woman of sorts. And although he believed his mother-in-law’s fears to be sheer nonsense, he was quite aware that Mabel (like all women, of course!) would fancy herself unhappy during his absence.
“It is too dreadful to think that I must part with you, even for a few days,” she said brightly. “You keep me up so! But of course if Lady Pat feels that you are necessary, I gracefully yield. But do make it as short as possible. You will, won’t you?”
“Of course!” He stooped and kissed her with more warmth than usual. “Lady Pat is quite right. I don’t fancy Bridg will make a pathetic death-bed scene and try her nerves; that is not in his line; but there may be other details—she is quite right. For the matter of that, this may be but a false alarm—in any case we need not be away too long.”
“No, indeed!” Lady Bridgminster rose. “I shall return in less than a week. But go I must, and Johnny owes me a filial duty once in a while. Has your four-wheeler come? Mine was to follow me here.”
“I am quite ready.”
They drove to Paddington station, followed by two four-wheelers with luggage atop and servant within. “What is your game, Johnny?” asked Lady Bridgminster, with lively curiosity. “Why inflict yourself with Bridg if you had to take a holiday? No doubt Mabel, who is a model wife, if she is a fright at present, would have given you a few days at Ordham. You never wanted for excuses.”
“I had no intention until you came in of making any excuse.”
“But why Bridg? I doubt if he will be glad to see you.”
“That is not of the slightest consequence.”
Her curiosity was not relieved until she was in her reserved compartment, and the maid, having arranged her pillows, had gone to her second-class carriage. Then Ordham closed the door and shook hands through the window with his mother.
“Good-by for the present,” he said. “I have just time to catch my train at Victoria.”
“John Ordham!”
“If you write to Mabel or her mother, you might comment upon my hatred of letter writing. I am going to the Continent and shall remain away exactly a week. If I think best, I shall write or telegraph Mabel from there, but it hardly matters. I shall have returned before she will have had time to think much about it.”
Lady Bridgminster was given no opportunity to remonstrate, for he walked swiftly to his waiting hansom and drove off. But considering that she was a lady too philosophical to cut wrinkles in her complexion by worrying over the inevitable, she looked almost blanched and thoughtful as she settled herself with a magazine and recalled all she had heard of her son’s friendship this year and last for Margarethe Styr.
“Johnny!” she thought. “Of all men! It must be serious indeed.”
Ordham, having felt himself expelled from those orderly conditions in which so many men dwell for a lifetime with only an occasional abortive protest, shot out by the dynamic power of angry human forces too long accumulating, had no mind to indulge in futile regrets. He did not pretend to assert that his will was too weak to continue its inhibitions had he chosen, but he had suddenly realized that he did not choose, and that was the end of it. Accordingly, he banished the very memory of Mabel, declared war on menacing fingers shaking over the ramparts still erect to protect his future, and untormented for the first time in many weeks, inveigled sleep the moment his head touched the pillow of his berth. The passage was quiet and he slept until the boat reached Flushing. He slept again in the train, and, upon being informed in Cologne that the Munich express was an hour late, he sensibly went to a hotel and took a bath. The rest of the journey seemed interminable. It was the season for tourists, the dust and heat were insufferable. But as the train ambled into the great dépôt of Munich, he forgot discomforts, and, all his being quivering, he suddenly felt that this beautiful city of beautiful memories would give him back his youth; he had even a whimsical idea that he had left it there and she was holding it for him intact; he had but to ask for it.
He sprang from the carriage almost before the train halted, and without waiting for Hines to do all the work, walked rapidly up the platform to secure a cab. He actually had his ticket ready as he passed through the gate, instead of keeping the mob cursing behind him after his usual fashion. His head was in the air, he saw no one in the waiting crowd, until he almost ran over a tall footman who planted himself directly in his path.
“Sir,” began this person. “I beg your pardon—” He almost fell back, for the eyes he encountered were like those of a wild beast at bay. Ordham had recognized the man at once as one of the servants of the British Legation, and for the first time in his life was possessed with the lust to slay. But he recovered himself instantly, and although he felt as if the sudden fire in his veins were falling to ashes with youth and hope and life itself, he asked the man calmly enough what he wanted.
“Mr. Trowbridge sent three of us, sir, to stand at different points. Six telegrams have come for you to-day. Thomas has them. He is outside by the cabs, sir.”
Ordham followed the man, half resolving to tear up the telegrams and scatter them over the stones of Munich. There was neither pity nor sympathy in him. He felt pure flint, and had he been suddenly translated into Mabel’s presence, she would have been welcome to the discovery that he hated her. But, automatically, noblesse oblige did its work. When the telegrams were handed to him, he arranged them methodically in the order of their dates, and read them through. From them he learned that Mabel’s self-control had deserted her even in the moment of his departure. She had sent a servant to follow his cab and had discovered that he had taken the train for the Continent. She had governed her agitation in a degree until her suspicions were confirmed, but it then had become uncontrollable, and a somewhat premature confinement was the result. Then he read that the child was dead, and that, her excitement resisting all attempts to alleviate it, there was practically no question of her death unless she could be assured that he would return at once. In the final telegram Mrs. Cutting humbled herself to the dust. The doctor also had telegraphed.
Ordham, still acting under the compulsion of that little engine which civilization has attached to the modern brain, and which so often, automatically, gets up steam and keeps the track no matter how palsied the hand or blinding the mists, turned to Hines and told him to send a telegram to London and reserve a compartment for the train that left at eleven o’clock. Then he went to a hotel and took another bath and changed his linen, almost grateful to the grime of the hot and dusty day which forced him to observe these commonplace formalities. Resolving to walk to Schwabing, as much to settle his nerves as to avoid Styr’s supper hour, he left his hotel, which was in the Dinerstrasse, and strolled along endeavouring to adjust himself to the present. He had enough to agitate him, aside from the fact that he must leave Munich that night. As Styr had not sent him a line since her departure, he was convinced that her frame of mind had been no more enviable than his. He had subscribed for the principal daily newspapers of Munich and knew that she had, as ever, compelled the admiration of those critics not in league with the cabal; but since the first of July the opera house had been closed and he could appreciate how the sudden idleness must afflict her. He was not even sure that she was in Munich. She might already have gone on a Gastspiel. If that were the case, he must wait another month at least—he wondered if he should!
He sauntered along, pausing deliberately to look at the beautiful opera house, a wing of the Residenz, but dominating the square before it with its noble proportions, its brilliant blue and gold fresco of Apollo among the Muses above the portico. His heart beat thickly, and not alone for Margarethe Styr. How many times had his cab passed the mounted guard, rolled up the steep incline to the entrance where he was ever obsequiously received by the tall doorkeeper in livery (with his palm out)—and then the wide lobby full of late comers, the crush at the garde robes, the big chief of all the important little officials, in his gorgeous white and blue uniform, his cocked hat and mace, the gay foyer, and then, and then,—he came to the present abruptly. He wondered at the fluidity of youth that lingered in him, and walked more quickly down Perusastrasse.
He saw that the narrow pavements of Theatinerstrasse were crowded, as was usual at this hour, many, indeed, walking in the street itself. From five to seven was the fashionable hour for shopping and displaying one’s best frocks, and although most of the smart people were away, many remained in that salubrious city the year round, save for brief visits to Italy or neighbouring points of interest. He, too, had been accustomed to stroll in Theatinerstrasse at this hour, and he approached it with some eagerness, hoping that it would banish the present for another moment. But as he reached the corner he came to an abrupt halt and nearly lost his breath. Sailing toward him, her plump figure sheathed and swaddled in crêpe, her head, nay her nose, in the air, her crêpe veil trailing on the pavement behind her, handsome, insolent, radiant, was Frau von Wass. Ordham fled into the English drug-store, and even although he could not be sure that he had escaped the manubial eye of a lady who looked more bent upon game and conquest than ever before,—refreshed, rejuvenated, and hungry, after her long seclusion,—he could not, at a safe distance, resist staring through the glass of the door. But Frau Hélène had not seen him. She crossed Theatinerstrasse, not deigning to lift the train of skirt or veil, and entered a milliner’s shop. Ordham hastily retreated up Perusastrasse, and took a cab at the post-office. He had no desire to meet and exchange words with any chance acquaintance, however harmless, and as the cab sauntered up the Ludwigstrasse he kept his eyes averted from the pavements and reflected upon the banalities of life, its merciless anti-climaxes. Apparently there was no such thing as pure tragedy.
He looked at his watch. It was but seven o’clock, Styr’s supper hour. He told the kutscher to drive in the Englischergarten. Half an hour’s further respite—he was not averse! He felt dull, hard, nervous. His head was hot, his hands cold. In the deserted driveway of the park he took off his hat and leaned back with closed eyes. But the telegrams in his pocket did not burn him; his mind was on the approaching interview. He was quite aware that if Styr were in the villa the next hour would be far more portentous than that of his marriage, and although it never occurred to him to turn back, he faltered a bit.
But at half-past seven he presented himself at the gate of the villa. Old Kurt answered his ring and kissed his hand effusively. When told that the Frau Gräfin was in the gallery, Ordham motioned the man aside and went rapidly down the hall and opened the door. As he saw the familiar room in the lamplight, with Styr seated at the farther end before a table, writing, his head swam, and he hardly noticed that she almost stumbled to her feet and stood staring at him.
But all she said was, “Oh!”
He cast his hat on one chair, his gloves on another, almost revolved on his heel, and then went slowly forward. But she held a cold hand across the table and motioned him to a chair. “Sit down—please. You might have telegraphed.”
She almost fell into her own chair, and he saw that her face was thin, her skin dull, her eyes in dark orbits. He had never seen her look less handsome or more alluring. But he took the chair, as she desired it. He had known that many things must be said before the last barrier went down, that she would never rush into his arms even if taken by surprise. But he was far from guessing the new barrier she had been educating her courage to erect in case he came, although she had no mind for it save as a last resource.
She realized, however, that it would be a waste of time to beat about the bush, and said, “I fancied that you would either come within a month or two or not at all.” She spoke coldly, while they eyed each other like enemies, but he observed that her breath was short.
“I came on a sudden impulse, having quite made up my mind to wait until Mabel was well again. I must return—very shortly. I arranged matters so that she would think I had gone north with my mother. But although I mechanically took every precaution to spare her, no doubt I should have come if I had been obliged to walk over her dead body.”
“What have you come for?”
“To claim you. To bind you to me forever. I have no longer the least intention of attempting to live without you. Some way it must be arranged.”
“It cannot be arranged.”
“It shall be.”
“Do you remember the promise you made me on Stanmore Heath?”
“I remember every word that has passed between us.”
“You cannot have me and your career too.”
“I shall make the attempt. If I fail, the career will have to go.”
“Do you hope for satiety before the end of the period during which a love affair may, with due precautions, be kept secret—”
“No!” he said violently. “I neither hope nor wish for anything of the sort. If I could have put you out of my mind, as I have always been able to banish other memories, I am free to confess that I should have done so. But I could as easily cease to breathe, and live. I refuse to contemplate life without you, and have come here sooner than I intended, because I cannot—will not—wait any longer to enter upon a complete understanding with you. It took me a long time to wake up; I hesitated longer than many men would have done. I am almost ashamed that I hesitated at all. It makes me seem to myself a monster of calculation. But you stood me off in the first place, and in the second,—well, aside from my career, I recognized that I had voluntarily assumed responsibilities that must bind me to a certain extent. With those I shall compromise as far as possible, but my career, I fancy, will take care of itself. If you have useful gifts and are willing to exercise them, life is only too ready to wring the last drop of blood out of your brain.”
“And do you fancy,” she cried harshly, “that I shall renounce my own career in order to follow you about and hide in back streets to be always at your beck and call? The egoism of man passes comprehension!”
But he neither coloured nor turned pale. He looked at her steadily. “Of course I expect you to do nothing of the sort. As I am not, thanks to my stupidity, in a position to marry you, as we are both too proud and ambitious deliberately to renounce the world after the fashion of those that have nothing worth speaking of to sacrifice, and as a possibly long life on this planet apart is unthinkable, we must resort to compromise. Europe is a small place and I shall see that I am not sent out of it. We can meet constantly. An attaché has little to do—it will be several years before I shall be anything more. I have much influence, I can obtain many leaves of absence. You can gast where I am accredited. I understand that I am to go to Paris. It is not a day’s journey from Munich. You could spend at least one week in every month there, and no one would think of asking what took a prima donna to Paris—any woman, for that matter!”
“And my New York season?”
“I hope you will go to New York only once. Three months will be an eternity, but I should be the last to deprive you of that supreme triumph. I wish it were over—but—well, there will be the long summers which we shall manage to spend together somewhere.”
“We should be the scandal of Europe in six months. Lord Bridgminster will not live long. Your inheritance will make you more conspicuous than ever. All the bishops in England would be writing to the Times protesting against your employment by a virtuous government. A love affair here, and every servant in Munich would know it. In great cities I should be watched by more than servants. American correspondents would sit on my doorstep. Your wife—”
“My wife, when she is well, will, in any case, learn that I shall never live with her again. She will also learn that to criticise any act of mine would be as great an impertinence as if she were one of my relations. She will have everything else that she married me for. In time she must cease to care for a man that will have none of her.”
“Poor thing!” The pity was involuntary and sincere. “How she will suffer!”
“Who does not suffer? Let her be thankful that she is made of thistle-down that any strong wind may blow about, but only from one pleasant place to another.”
“Thistle-down has been known to scatter in winds too strong. You might kill her.”
“The fit survive.”
“Oh, you are hard! You are man epitomized.”
“I have put a temporary lid on a devil’s brew. Who has not iron and steel in his nature if he amounts to anything? It comes out in one fashion and another. I am showing you my naked soul. I shall never do that to the child I married—to any one else on earth, for that matter. Mabel will be let down as easily as possible. I have every wish to spare her, and she gains in acuteness. Possibly she will let me alone at first in the hope of slowly winning me back, and meanwhile learn to do without me.”
“You should not have left her now. There is always the possibility of death in childbirth.”
She saw him turn a shade paler and stir uneasily, but his gaze did not soften nor waver. She said abruptly:
“How can you tell that were you suddenly free, I should not expect you to marry me?”
“I should certainly marry you.”
“And what compromise then? Not a woman in diplomatic society would receive me. I can see them! To shake hands with a famous artist at a reception and go away and talk about it is one thing; to receive her as an equal, to forget her scandalous history as well as her public career—why discuss the obvious? Even were I willing to renounce my career, you never could stand the position. Loyalty to me and your own pride would force you to give up the service.”
“Not now. You forget your conquest of London; its conclusion to believe none of those stories.”
“London felt quite safe in permitting itself to be captivated by the celebrity of the moment; I asked nothing further of it, encouraged none of its marriageable men, my stay was brief. If I invaded one of those Londons in petto, a British embassy, demanding to be received as an equal, do you believe that they would guilelessly accept me? They would immediately investigate and learn the truth.”
“Anything can be lived down—”
“Not a past like mine.”
“I don’t believe that there would be any investigation, if only because London first believed those outrageous stories of Levering’s, and then reacted from them. He overreached himself—”
“Levering was extraordinarily moderate. No doubt it would be as you say, as long as I remained a mere prima donna, for people are only too anxious there should be no obstacle between their conscience and the pleasure of lionizing: but the moment I gave up the stage, married one of their own—I should be stoned out of the gates and you with me.”
Ordham sprang to his feet, overturning his chair. “Enough of improbabilities. Mabel has no intention of dying. We have only the present to consider and we have wasted too many words already. You and I exist in a void. We have been driven straight toward each other for the last fourteen months. As well try to escape the morrow’s sun—”
She too had risen and pushed back her chair, but she kept the table between them. Her face flushed almost black, then turned so white that he thought her about to faint. But something in her eyes arrested him. He held his breath. Once more he almost turned on his heel.
“Then listen to the whole story,” she cried, with that hoarse muddle of accents that banished the very memory of her gift of song. “God! how am I to say it all? And is it for your sake alone? I wonder? I have vowed to save you from yourself, give you to public life; but I doubt if I could bring myself to rip the grave-clothes and show the corpse, if my own career were not so dear to me, the delight in song, in art, in holding great publics spellbound, in reigning a queen of sorts—and a singer’s time is brief enough! I have asked—oh, many times—whether I loved you or my art most, and the answer has not always been the same, not by any means. I don’t know! I don’t know!
“But not for a moment do I believe that we could compromise with the world as you have arranged in your royal manner. It would mean that one of us would have to go into obscurity, be forgotten by the world, and that would be my part. You would never give way, and I should hate you if you did. Good God! 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.”
She hurried on as if she feared he might protest, or her own courage ebb. “I have told you that I was bred in a coal-mining district, where I never saw a clean face, where I do not recall a fugitive instinct for cleanliness in myself, where human beings were merely brutes that walked on two legs instead of four. We threw our dead out into the snow to lie there until the ground thawed—until a reporter chanced along, wrote a sensational story for his newspaper, and put our overseer to shame. I did not know the alphabet; perhaps I did not know there was such a thing—I forget.
“I was not fifteen when a drummer came to the hamlet, an alert flashy young man. I think I told you that I wore hopsacking—if your imagination can picture that material. But in spite of hopsacking, in spite of a dirty face, the man saw the promise of beauty, and to do the creature justice he thought me several years older than I was, for I was already very tall. He made no impression upon me whatever during that visit, but on his return some months later he brought me candy, ribbons, many small trinkets which I could hide, and promised me unlimited silk and diamonds if I would go with him. The men of the district had not been unkind to me, except that I was made to do double the usual woman’s work on account of my physique and strength; the father of the family I lived with had no doubt given me the benefit of his protection, as I was able to earn almost as much as a boy. As for myself, I was always too busy or too tired to get into mischief. I do not fancy that the silks and jewels would have tempted me particularly, for I had never seen any, and he had some trouble making his meaning clear. But when he promised me a life of ease, a comfortable home, and a servant, I did not hesitate a moment. I stole off one night and met him at a flag station where he gave me a suit of decent clothes to put on, and the train came along half an hour later. He took me to New York. I ran away from him three times in the first month. I not only hated him, but I was made to do all the work in his dingy little flat. But the streets terrified me and I went back to him. I lived with him a year, and he was often away. During that year I learned many things. I saw children going to school and knew what it meant, for he had amused himself teaching me to read and write. I saw the outside of luxury and pleasure. He gave me good sensible clothes and took me to the theatre, where we sat in the gallery and gazed down upon a bewildering world of wealth and fashion. All the women looked to me like goddesses or angels. So did the actresses!
“The days were very long. No one in the big cheap apartment house ever spoke to me, and one day the janitress slapped me for spilling milk in the entrance and called me a name one does not forget. My man was coarse and violent. I hated him increasingly. There was but one way of escape. I had often been out with him late at night. I went out one night alone. By this time I was conscious of my looks, and from some remote recess in my slowly awakening brain the instinct for dress had crept forth. I did not return to the flat. I lived the life of the streets with complete unconcern until I finally picked up an easy-going man of middle age with a leaning toward benevolence, whom I asked to educate me, and who consented, much pleased with the element of variety thus introduced into a somewhat humdrum existence. He put me in a little flat not far from his own modest brownstone mansion, found me a respectable-looking harridan to act as chaperon and sent me to a school as his ward. I disliked him as much as my original protector, but I tolerated him until I was eighteen, and as well educated as the ordinary girl of a year or two younger. By this time he had fallen into the habit of bringing men to the flat to dinner. He was proud of his discovery, I was pert and sharp and bad-tempered, and amused him and his friends. These evenings were not very hilarious, but they must have been an immense relief to the respectable man with a sneaking blackguard in him—a common enough type—after the dull order of his family circle. They were not even fashionable; he was a merchant of some standing and a fair income, but far from being a high liver in any way.
“He looked upon me as a child, a bright waif who naturally desired to educate herself against the time when beauty should have fled, and she might aspire to some means of support above service. I made my deliberate choice of the youngest and least ill-favoured of his friends, a bachelor with a gay temper and good manners. That was my first exercise of the art of fascination. Heretofore, hardly dreaming of anything higher, I had been a mere creature of commerce. I vanquished him in a week, and transferred my belongings to another retreat. I liked this man well enough. He surrounded me with luxuries, provided me with private teachers, and gave me a liberal allowance.
“A year passed. I was bursting with life, with the desire to live. I was sick of being hidden away. My intellect forged steadily ahead in its persistent cravings, but other cravings kept pace. I wanted gayety, society, brilliancy. I wanted admiration. This man brought no other men to my apartment, took me nowhere. I fancied him in love with me and asked him to marry me. I shall never forget the expression of his face. I left him for a man who had followed me about for some time. He was what is loosely known as a man about town, with no affiliations, nothing to lose, only too delighted to spend money on a pretty woman and show her off. I drank the cup of pleasure daily. I met other women of the same sort, turned night into day, revelled in gorgeous raiment, choice food, fine wines, and a reasonable number of jewels. The man was coarse, but good-natured and generous.
“Long before this I had begun to read—literature. I now knew exactly what I was about, what I was. But the only effect of thought was to create a disgust for the particular form of vice in which I lived. Its vulgarity, its obviousness, became hateful to me. Meanwhile I had met, now and again, men of a far higher social caste, of education, polish. There was no question in my mind that my preference for men of this sort was pronounced, but to live with any one of them meant being hidden away again, and for this I had no taste. I dreaded the ennui, and I loved excitement, although I wanted it in the society of gentlemen. Suddenly I conceived the idea of going on the stage. This would give me a raison d’être, as well as a measure of independence. I did so, and soon transferred myself to a man of fashion and wealth, and a wife who was one of the handsomest, and, to judge by appearances, one of the sweetest women in New York society. I found him rather a brute, selfish, capricious, and extraordinarily mean. But I made a desperate effort to love this man, for by this time my mating instinct had developed and I wanted to love. I might as well have tried to love a brownstone front. I left him for another man of his class, and this man I did love. I tried to kill him. I once told you. For a time I forswore all men. I sold my jewels and went to Europe. But everywhere some man recognized me, and I found that I could make no friends save books, and I was too young for those to suffice. I returned to New York with a friend of the two last men that had protected me. I became quite reckless; and as by this time I was extraordinarily handsome, in a vital splendid way, and with something like genius in the matter of dress, I was more sought after among fast men than any woman of my class. I tormented many men to whom I yielded nothing. That was my revenge.
“Still I read and studied. I had not an illusion about myself. I did not pretend to excuse myself. I made money in stocks. I could have lived alone with my books. But I alternately hated and loved the excitement, the luxury, the senseless extravagance in which I indulged whenever I found a man weak enough to squander his all upon me. At that time I had but a glimmer of a belief in my histrionic talent, and even had I believed in it and been consumed with ambition, I should have met with but one reply from every manager—I was too tall. True, I might have got some man to put up the money for a starring tour and acted Lady Macbeth or some other classic rôle, but I knew that to succeed I must have practice first, and this I could not get. I was condemned to small parts in the background, and often would have lost my position altogether but for influence. Moreover, curiously enough, I avoided the notice of the public as much as possible. I kept out of the newspapers.
“I had no suspicion that anything could be made of my voice until I had lived this sort of life for some ten years. Meanwhile, as I told you, I had fits of horrible disgust, intolerable ennui. All societies save those peopled with the fast and frivolous were closed to me. Such unspeakably frivolous women! Many of them, too, were ladies born, but déclassée.
“I shut myself up once or twice again with my books, but I always went back. Life without men was no life at all. My brain seemed to be cut in half with a straight line of cleavage. One-half might contain something like a real intellect, inherited,—well, that is of no consequence,—the other was that of the courtesan pure and simple.
“Sometimes the intellectual side went to sleep altogether, especially when the men I happened to know were more interesting than commonly. Men, as a whole, are not very interesting. In the abstract, perhaps, but not to their wives or mistresses. But I was a woman of splendid lustiness, of insolent determination to cram youth to the lid with all that life offered to outcasts like myself. Circumstances had made me a waif. I would make the best of it. Several times good women came and tried to reclaim me. I argued them out of the house. What had they to offer in exchange? Would they receive me in their set, find me a husband, obliterate my reputation? One, I remember, had a sense of humour, and confessed that plain uncompanioned virtue would seem somewhat barren to herself after the luxury and beauty, the society of clever men, which at that moment I enjoyed: as a rule fast men have no taste for clever men, and they are themselves dull beyond all power of words to describe; but at this time I was protected by and half loved a Western millionnaire with a weakness for the arts and a desire to play the patron; which I encouraged. But he was shot—To return to the lady who would have reclaimed me; she added astutely that I had better take the cue from the wise prime donne and retire of my own accord. And she added, as she left the house, ‘There is always Europe, you know. And you have a brain.’
“But I had been to Europe; alone and companioned. It was soon after this that I ceased to blow hot and cold. By imperceptible degrees I came wholly to hate my life, to loathe it, to grow sick, sick, sick of men. Compositely they were brutes, the best of them. Life with such women, no doubt, brings out the worst in them. Perhaps their wives should thank us. Man in mental and spiritual undress are as disillusionizing as a certain President of the United States must have been to his household when hanging over the banisters of the White House in his red flannels and shouting for hot water.
“But I had lost the money I had made, for I had the stock-gambling fever. I thought of suicide more than once, for I not only knew of no way in which I could support myself decently, but I dreaded solitude, ennui. Suddenly I discovered my voice. That interested me for a time, although I had no idea it would ever be of any use to me. But my old teacher was enthusiastic and often inspired me with ambitious dreams, for he dangled Bayreuth before me, and at times I believed that he knew what he was talking about; at others it seemed too much like a fairy story, and I despaired.
“I made money again, this time a considerable sum, and I determined to gamble no more. I had a good friend in a banker whom I could trust, and he invested my money. I went West with that travelling company in order to break with my old connection. In time I should return and devote myself to music, even if I never went on the operatic stage. My musical tastes had been developed for several years, and at least I could live in some German or Italian city and study and enjoy music, no doubt find companionship in the society of artists.
“Then came the wreck. You know the rest. Whether you now know all, whether your imagination has carried you into all the dark corners, into every chamber of horrors—I can tell you the story in outline, but the details are beyond my strength—I do not know. I hope so. I can only reiterate that I have lived with more men than I pretend to remember, whose very names would be unfamiliar should I hear them; that for years I lived this life with my intelligence wide awake,—for I never drank, never took a drug in my life,—my literary tastes of the best, my refinement of mind growing daily; that when I finally abandoned this existence it was from no desire for reform, to be a good woman; it was without one atom of remorse. It was simply and only because I hated men, because that wreck gave me the unique opportunity to begin life over again, and my voice pointed the way. I have squeezed my character dry of the woman I was in those days—she is like an old book; I have hardly thought about her until lately. I do not even now, in this minute, think upon that time with regret. It is simply not in me to worry over what is past and done; nor could I appreciate the beauty of life as I do: no good woman has the profound appreciations that I have. But I recognize the justice of the retribution. The first departure from principles, or shall I say the social code, that I never had heard of, was inevitable. So were the next two or three years. Had I then broken away, gone to some other city before I became conspicuous, and supported myself respectably, as, with my varied cleverness, I could have done, no doubt you would forgive me that childish misstep and love me the more. Nor could that brief past ever be raked up; at all events it would be next to impossible. But I persisted in that life for thirteen years: until I was bored and satiated, until something more satisfactory offered. Were I penitent now, I might inspire your sympathy, be worthy of it; but I would not give up one of those years of misery, of vice, of horrors, if I believed that—as I do—they played their part with the coincidently progressing brain in developing that depth and intensity of genius which makes me the greatest Isolde the world will ever see. I regret nothing—nothing! And for that reason I hold myself to be the worst woman alive, and am prepared to see you turn your back and walk out without comment. I shall not ask you to stay!”