"I saw him first in the Englischergarten. You remember it, that wonderful imitation of a great stretch of open country, with fields where they make hay, and bits of wild woods, and crooked pathways, and bridges over a branch of the Isar, greenest and loveliest of rivers. And then the little beer-gardens, where the people are always sitting and listening to the band—and beyond the tree-tops, the spires and domes of the beautiful city.
"I was standing by the lake watching the swans when he rode by, and I am bound to say that he made no great impression. I hardly should have noticed him had it not been for his excessively English appearance, and a certain piercing quality in the glance with which he favored me. I should never have given him another thought, but a week later I met him formally. It came about oddly enough.
"That evening in looking through my trunk for a business paper I came upon a letter of introduction given me by a friend I had made in Italy. It was to a Baroness L., of Munich. I had quite forgotten it, and the sight of it inspired me with no desire for the social curiosities. I was infatuated with Munich, and its exteriors satisfied me. It has a large courteous grandly-hospitable air, as if it were the private property of a king, to which, however, all strangers are royally welcome. It is the ideal king's city: life but no bustle; neither business, as we understand the word, nor poverty; a city of infinite leisure and infinite interest, a superb living picture-book, where one is ever amused, interested, both stimulated and soothed. I had been in it three weeks and had almost made up my mind to live there, and dream away the rest of my life. Knote and Moréna, Feinhals and Bender were singing at the Hof Theatre. Mottl was conducting. Lili Marberg's Salome was something to be seen again and again. You forgot the play itself. And Bardou-Müller's Mrs. Alving! I did not sleep for two nights.
"Well, I left the letter on my table, instead of returning it to the portfolio of my trunk, and it exercised a certain insistence. What are letters of introduction for? And should I not see the social life of Europe when the opportunity offered? So I left a card on the baroness. She returned it in the course of a day or two, then wrote, asking me to drink tea with her. I went. There were perhaps fifty people there. I have not the faintest idea who they were or what they looked like. Prestage—that was only one of his names, but it will do—asked immediately to be introduced to me, and we talked in a corner for an hour. Before we had talked for ten minutes I knew that the great gates were swinging open. It is not possible for a woman to define one man's fascination to another, and I hardly know myself why this man so completely turned my head. He was not exactly good-looking, but he had remarkable eyes and a singular tensity of manner, which made me almost breathless at times. He was, moreover, brilliantly educated and accomplished, and the most finished specimen of the man of the world I had met. He was an American of inherited fortune who had spent the greater part of his life in Europe, alternating between Paris and London, although he knew the society of other cities well enough. His contempt for the vulgarity of the huge modern fortunes, and his admiration for Munich, were the first subjects to discover to us the similarity of our tastes.
"We soon discovered others. I think he fell as deeply in love with me as he was capable of doing. He was forty-one and had fairly exhausted his capacity, for he had lived the life of pleasure only; but no doubt I was something new in his experience, and penetrated the ashes like a strong western breeze. I have seen him turn quite white when I suddenly appeared at one of our trysts.
"Of course I lived in a pension. I had no private sitting-room, and he positively refused to sit in the salon a second time. So we used to take interminable walks about Munich, lingering in all the quaint old Gothic corners, along the magnificent stretches of Renaissance; lunching on the terraces of the restaurants under the shade of the green trees, or in quaint little back gardens set in the angle of buildings as mediæval as Rothenburg; the people looking down at us from the narrow windows or the little balconies. We spent hours in the Englischergarten, sitting on the banks of the Isar; often took the train to the beautiful Isarthal and spent the day in the woods; or sailed on one of the lakes with the tumbled glittering peaks of the Alps always in sight. We visited Ludwig's castles together, attended peasants' festivals in the mountains, lunching in some dilapidated old garden of a Gasthaus. And of course we went constantly to the opera. It was positive heaven for a time, and as romantic as the heart of any romantic idiot could wish. I was so happy I could not even think, even when I was alone. I simply sat like one in a trance and gazed into space, vague rose-colored dreams turning the slow wheel of my brain. No one paid any attention to us. Everybody in the pension was studying something; we avoided the American church and consulate and even the Baroness L. We were determined to have our blissful dream unvulgarized by gossip.
"There is no doubt that for a time my young enthusiasm gave him back a flicker of the romance of his own youth, but of course it couldn't last. I hardly know when it was I began to realize that the whole base of his nature was honeycombed with ennui, and that any structure reared upon it might topple at a moment's notice. I had been steeped to the eyes in the present. I had no wish to marry. Marriage was prosaic. Life was a fairy tale, why materialize it? I soon discovered that man's capacity for living on air is limited, and I had almost yielded to his entreaties to cross to England where we could marry without tiresome formalities, when one day—this was perhaps a month after we had met—he was late at a tryst. I lived a lifetime in five minutes. When he arrived he was so apologetic and so charming that if I had been an older woman I should have known that something was wrong. The next day, as it happened, I had to go to bed with influenza, and wrote him that I might not get out for a week. He wrote twice a day and sent me flowers. On the fourth morning I felt so much better that I sent him a note by a dinstmann telling him that I should lunch on the terrace of the Neue Bürse restaurant. He was not awaiting me; nor did he come at all. Later I saw him driving with an astonishingly handsome woman; who looked as if she had been born without crudities or illusions.
"There are no words to express the tortures of jealousy and disgust that I endured that afternoon. But at five came a note stating that he had been out of town on a lonely voyage of discovery, and begging me to come for a cup of chocolate at the Café Luitpold—where we had gone so often to watch the motley crowd. I went, wrath and horror struggling in my heart with the sanguineness of woman. He had never been so charming and so plausible. I let him go on, exulting in the discovery that he was a liar, for I knew that it pushed me a step towards recovery. When he had finished I told him that I had seen him in the Hofgarten. I never shall forget how white he turned. But if he had been an adventurer his mind could not have been more nimble. He recovered himself instantly, admitted the impeachment, insisted that he had just returned when I saw him, had accepted a seat in the lady's carriage as he was entering his hotel—before he had time to go to his room and find my note. I knew that he was lying, but when he changed the subject to impassioned pleading that I would cross to England at once, I was forced to believe that he loved me.
"But I was miserably undecided. Moreover, I could not leave Munich. My quarterly remittance was unaccountably delayed. I told him this. He knew that I would not move without my own money, but he sent off several cables. The reply came that the drafts had gone and must have been lost in the mails. Duplicates would be sent. There was nothing to do but wait.
"I suppose that money enters into all things. It certainly ruled my destiny. The fortnight that ensued I never think of if I can help it. He was desperately bored with Munich, but too polite to leave me alone. I saw him with the woman three or four times. She was an Austrian who did not visit the Baroness L., and she was staying at his hotel. There was no doubt that he still wished to marry me, but I was in even less doubt that his ruined nature would yield more and more to this sort of fascination when my novelty had worn thin. Before my money arrived my mind was made up. I dared not trust myself to the seduction of his manner and voice—he was a past-master in the art of making love. I wrote him that I would not marry a man I could not trust, and fled to Vienna, telling my Munich bankers to keep my letters until I sent for them. For two weeks I travelled madly through Austria and Hungary. Never for a moment was I free of torments. Never before had I actually comprehended what love meant. I hardly ate or slept. I arrived at a place only to leave it. The hotel-keepers thought I was the American tourist overtaken by that final madness they had always anticipated. When the fortnight finished I looked back upon an eternity in purgatory. I surrendered; at least he loved me in his way. He had never ceased to urge our marriage. Who could say that I might not be fascinating enough to hold him? It was worth the trial, and I despised myself for laying down my arms without a struggle.