Tower of Ivory: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

And this she could have had. She knew it now as she recalled certain moments when she had caught him looking at her with heavy eyes, or a strange stare as of something stirring and quivering in the depths of his being. But she had slurred over these dangerous moments, and without so much as a flush of self-consciousness. Not only had she finished with the masculinities, but she was not the woman to want the love she must rouse, engineer, reveal to itself. With all her tyrannous strength of will she was woman personified, and she must be wooed and won imperiously, or she should prefer to love alone.

She ground her teeth and beat the floor with her foot, and reverted to the vernacular of her youth, as she anathematized her inconsistency, her dog-in-the-manger attitude. Had Ordham appeared before her at that moment, she would not even have considered marriage with him, would have hesitated long before committing herself to the less binding relation. Not only had she no desire to wreck his career, but she was not sure even now that she should greatly care if she went to her grave without having touched his lips. But he was hers. Inside that charming flesh was a John Ordham that no other woman would ever glimpse, that never would attain full growth save in contact with the woman so jealously hidden within her own noncommittal shell.

It was her first definite experience of the sovereign demands of the soul, of the recognition of the ego, that invisible entity which makes itself so uncomfortable in its earthly home until released by disease or decay. Were the needs of this God-in-little more lasting and determined than those of the affections, the body? Infinite, perhaps? In that case what should she do? what should she do?

She paced up and down the room as a new thought tormented her. This girl? What were most girls at that age but little fools, particularly if pretty and rich? Had not all women once been silly girls? Suppose this lovely creature, under the tutelage of John Ordham and the brilliant society in which she was to spend her most plastic years, should develop into a clever, intellectual, subtle woman? Then, what of her, Margarethe Styr, a fixture in Munich, an outcast from the circles of which this girl would become a component part? She stretched out her arms and opened and shut her long flexible hands. If Mabel Cutting had chanced to sing the part of Brangäne to-night she would have been strangled in view of all Munich. Oh, no doubt of that! It was as well indeed that the young lady was in London.

All these years of proud mental development, of devotion to her art, the abrupt but uninterrupted sequence to those terrible forty hours in the bony clutch of death,—all, then, were as naught? The evil, the appalling passions of her nature, were but the stronger for their long sleep. All her new life had done for her was to develop a new sort of love capacity with terrors and torments to which the old were but the brief aberrations of a superior beast. Love! Love! She had never even guessed the meaning of the word before. She hated Ordham so desperately that she would have liked to twist her fingers about his own neck; but again she realized, with a sharp expulsion of the breath, that this was but the upheaval of the volcano’s mud and poisonous gases preceding the liberation of the incandescent fires. But while possibly she might not fall into rage again, she must pass through other phases whose mere faint cries for liberty, for birth, terrified her. She was face to face with the greatest of all the mysteries in the always nebulous region of love, an experience known to few, either because they are not developed enough or because they have never met their peer.

She and Ordham were one. He would not appreciate his loss, for he was young, there was too much life before him, too many phases, the prospect of greatness which would finally rouse his energies and fill his time. But she, who was close to the summit of her career, for whom art had no mysteries, fame no more surprises, what should she do? what should she do?

But if the woman is sometimes stronger than the artist, the artist never sits long on the dust heap. Already it was whispering that she would act better than ever, she would descend into deeper and more intricate recesses of human nature when pondering upon her heroines, give the world more complete revelations. Even new forces of expression must be hers. She had never felt so creative as at that moment when she stopped short in her tigerish pacing and laughed aloud at the power of art to make itself heard at such a crisis in the human heart. At that moment, had art possessed a corporeal body, it too might have been throttled.

But it went on whispering: “Cultivate this berserk mood. Do not forget it, do not permit the will to stifle it if it fires the brain again. Continue to love this man, the more hopelessly the better. What is mere human passion to art; what, indeed, but its necessary but inferior partner? It is the stimulant, the drink, the food, the fertilizer. Nurse this! Nurse this!”

And her ambition? Would it not spur that as well? She had been too luxuriously, too artistically content, in this beautiful city, waiting for the world to come to her, content to dream of triumphs in its greater capitals. She had needed a shock, an imperative need of change of scene, of conquest of Earth itself to mend her riven soul; she might have idled here until her high notes had turned from gold to brass.

Her long fingers still twitched and curved, her face was as fearful as that of some dark creature of the Middle Ages poisoning a husband or rival; but her clearing brain argued pro and con, rejected personal happiness in favour of her art, finally announced that she still would have rejected it had the choice been hers. Ordham might have wrought extraordinary changes in her, but of the two passions that controlled her, that for him was not the stronger.