There was no subtle hypnotic suggestion of death to-night in Styr’s gestures. Her art was no longer under the command of her will, but she radiated death and damnation as Tristan entered, and for years after he told of his conviction that the Todesmotif in the orchestra was his own dirge, and resigned himself to die as he lifted the fatal goblet to his lips. He believed that she had rubbed poison on the rim, whose very fumes would rise and slay him even although he forbore to touch it; and his quivering nerves were untranquillized by the knowledge of his innocence: might she not have loved him long in secret and resented his virtuous indifference? Even when, the love potion working, she rushed into his arms, he said that the hate in her eyes never abated for a second and he expected her to bite or strangle him.
But at last the act, with its insupportable excitement, was over, and the audience, almost hysterical, forgot their accustomed refreshment as they stood by their seats or paced the foyer, discussing the extraordinary performance and wishing their King were present. They could arrive at no conclusion save that Styr was the greatest actress even Germany had ever seen, whether something had happened to put her into an awful temper or not.
In the second act, there being no opportunity to express either hatred or fury, it would seem that Styr was bent upon demonstrating that the artist in her could not long be submerged by any turmoil in the woman. Never had she sung her part in the love duet with a more poignant sweetness, a more perishing languor, although she would not permit the tenor to come within a foot of her. She did not rise to real greatness, however, until the third act, when, in the last lines of the Liebestod, she stood with rigid body and strained upraised face, every line in both, every round noble vibrant tone, expressing the savage exultation of that tormented spirit at the approach of death. As she sank upon Tristan, who had one eye open, King Mark and his men watched her narrowly, for everybody on the stage was uneasy, half fearing that this terrifying creature, always an alien in their midst, but awaited the final moment to wreak her vengeance. When the tenor reached his stuffy ugly little flat that night he overwhelmed his Frau with caresses, and sat until nearly morning eating and drinking, the happiest man in Munich.
XXXIX
PEGGY HILL AND MARGARETHE STYR
Styr locked herself in her gallery and wondered if she were alive or a walking automaton. Her passion had expended itself, the blood had left her brain, but she was filled to the brim with a sullen, silent, deadly rage—curiously mixed with disappointment and regret. For nearly nine years, in a life ordered to please herself, with not an outer disturbing force, save only an occasional tilt with the opera house cabal, or a fit of temper after a performance, quickly forgotten, with not a disturbance from within, for she had buried the past, trained her powerful will to banish all such futilities as regret, she had aimed not only to lead an ideal life but to perfect and ennoble her character. Although she had been almost a recluse, she had helped many young people with promising voices, and her purse was always open to the unfortunates in the chorus. Perhaps she had deliberately kept her humanity alive by these acts of kindness and sympathy, knowing that there was danger to art in the drying up of the springs of human nature. Perhaps; she could not tell; did not care. But at least she had led not only a blameless, a kindly, an inspiring, a finely mental and nobly artistic life, but she had achieved what she knew to be happiness, and this by the sealing up of her inner kingdom.
It is easy to ignore the inner kingdom so long as no man enters it. It is easy to be impersonal, mental, a consummate devotee of art so long as the heart and soul and passions encounter no powerful disturbing force. Nothing so astonished and shocked her in these comparatively calm moments as the discovery that art was not all, that common primitive instincts were stronger in the final test than the elevated choice of the brain supported by genius and will. So profound had been her contempt for human weakness, her loathing for men, so exalted, so triumphant her progress in that great sphere to which her voice had given her the golden key, that she had believed herself to be elevated permanently to a plane high above the common. She had never closed her eyes to the very second-rate clay of which most musicians were composed, both mental and moral, but she had been as serenely aware of her superior intellectual gifts, of a will stronger than any she had ever encountered, as she had been of her voice, her dramatic genius; and she had never even speculated upon a possible descent from that glorious plane where she dwelt alone with her art. She was a woman, after all, and she so abhorred herself that, had she possessed the sorceries of Isolde’s ancestors, she would have obliterated Earth from the cosmic scheme.
She had received Ordham’s letter a few moments before departing for the opera house, and the same post brought a note from Princess Nachmeister, announcing that “our jüngling, Gott sei dank, was really engaged to the American heiress of forty million marks, and was the more riveted to his bargain—that charming uncertain youth!—by being madly, nay absurdly, in love with the ravishing beauty.” Then the blood had gone to Styr’s head.
Even now she wondered if she really loved Ordham, for she was sensible of none of that organic craving which once alone would have distinguished one man from another in her imperial regard. At this moment, indeed, she did not love him at all; she hated him with a passion which, if stilled by exhaustion, was none the less volcanic, eloquent of the tremendous upheaval in her nature. But she was too wise not to suspect that it was the hatred which is merely love reversed. It would pass, her very mental balance would see to that; and what then? Hers had not been the experience of love in its infinite variety, and she stared out at the dark future with the first real fear of her life. During her long intimacy with Ordham she had been fully conscious that she had never liked any one half as well, never drawn as close to any mortal spirit. When he had gone, she had had time for but a brief reaction from her perverse feminine exultation in renewed freedom, in the luxury of missing him, for she had left almost immediately for Switzerland, then on her second Gastspiel. Even so she had missed him, and had thought of him tenderly, hoped that he would keep his word and return to Munich. But she had been very busy, very uncomfortable, very much diverted, and the ovations she received had put all other wants in her soul to sleep. It was not until she was again in Munich, in the house which he still pervaded, where she saw him in his characteristic attitudes, heard his mellow English voice with its languid drawl and impatient breaks, that her vague sense of loss had grown poignant. But even that had been tempered before long by a gentle melancholy, a new sensation and not unpleasant, for the ego likes to run the gamut; and the certainty that he would return to Munich from time to time had further mitigated that deep sense of loss. She even hoped, or thought she did, that he would marry well, be delivered of the belittling embittering want of money; nothing could interfere with their friendship, or whatever it was. She, too, was possessed by the uneasy sense that it was something more, but even as the days passed and she finally became restless, more and more disturbed, coming out of her sleep sometimes with a sense of actual terror, she would not permit her thought to enter the analytical zone, the word love to rise before the judgment seat.
And had it been love? This was the question which now shook her puzzled and tortured brain, and banished all hope of sleep. Was it but an imperious pride outraged, a secure sense of possession shattered, that had lashed her into a berserk rage? Vanity, perhaps, that had been fed and watered into an abnormal growth for twenty-four years, first by the power she wielded over men, then by the far more heady incense of the public,—could that be it, mere vanity screaming with rage at this defeat by a silly little American girl? She knew the type, had seen hundreds of them in her many trips to Paris; moreover, she had seen this Mabel Cutting several times during the conspicuous beauty’s sojourn in Munich, she had sat almost beside her at a performance of Fidelio one night. The girl was beautiful and patrician, no doubt accomplished as girls ran; she was the sort that the American youth was falling in love with every hour, but she was not the girl to bewitch John Ordham, for the type was shallow, vain, soulless, hopelessly unintellectual. 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.
And the real Ordham belonged to her. The blood rose to her head once more as she was forced to admit that the fine flower of his awakening would not be hers, was irretrievably given to a little fool whom he would hate, not merely tire of, before a year was out.