Tower of Ivory: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Ordham’s disposition was so far from frank that although while within her magnetic radius he had been more confidential and revealing than he had ever been before, he could not shed his diplomatic shell with nothing but a sheet of paper before him, headed “Dear Countess Tann.” Moreover, with all his soul he hated letter writing, and only answered these fascinating epistles with a reasonable promptness for the sake of others to come. If she had tacitly agreed to write alone, he would have been completely happy. And she, of course, wanted a running picture of his daily life at Ordham, of the companies assembled there, of trivial but always interesting personalities and incidents. But he could as easily have written a book; the bare suggestion would have appalled him; and, while making his letters as short as decency would permit, he confined himself to a brief comment upon the literary and artistic people invited to the castle, music, and books—he sent her many new ones—and devoted the last page to herself, expressing his desire to see her again, and his regret that their summer had been all too short. Sometimes she smiled at these laborious epistles, and sometimes she flung them across the room and stamped her foot. She had to read them over and over to extract any comfort out of them; then, finally, she succeeded in reading between the lines, rewrote them, in short, as women will.

There were times when she intensely disliked him for his apostasy to herself, his weakness in being blindly steered into a commonplace attack of puppy love when he should have risen superior to the follies of youth and gone unscathed till thirty, then loved some one worthy of him. She hurled him from his pedestal and rolled him in the dirt, announcing that he belonged there, delighted with the sense of emancipation that permeated to her finger tips. Not even yet did her mind dwell upon the possibility of any closer union with him; she dreamed only of the insatiable mysterious immaterial tie; she indulged herself in attacks of bitterness, of furious regret that he had not so ordered his life that she might think of him always as the exceptional man, instead of seeing, against her will, a vision of a love-sick white-faced youth, idiotically in love with a pretty girl, then as a fatuous young husband complacent to all the selfish whims of his bride; drifting with her on a river of gold that threatened to rise and suffocate what energies he had. If he must be “managed,” she was the woman for this office, for she would have steered him to greater goals. She was a thorough woman, was Margarethe Styr, but her saving grace was that she knew it. When she laughed at herself, then was Ordham forgiven, excused, dusted off, and restored to his pedestal, his sovereignty in the realm of the ideal.

When there crept into his letters—after the return of his household to London—a tinge of sadness, deepening at times into melancholy, more than a hint of impatience at enforced inertia, at passing opportunities; when his polite desire to see her again began to vibrate with something like passion, then did she understand that not only was he tiring of his wife, but that her own letters, with their insidious but unremitting spur to his ambitions, were reaping the harvest she had planned. It was after one of these letters of his, longer than usual, more personal, asserting that could he but find a decent excuse, could he but exercise his freedom at this time without brutality, he would take the next train for Munich, that a voice seemed to cry through her brain: “Let him alone! Let him alone! In silence and absence men forget.” This spasm of conscience brought her face to face with a good many possible results that she had ignored; and as she really loved him and was fairly consistent in her desire to see him happy and great, she delayed her answer to this letter, half resolving to drop the correspondence.

Then, a week later, arrived a letter charged with a curious hotchpotch of anger and jubilance, an astonished sense of semi-defeat and almost royal triumph. He had not given her a hint of his scheme to organize a season of Wagner opera at Covent Garden, for, although hopeful at the first, he had met, upon his return to London, with so many objections and difficulties, so much ignorance, prejudice, and pharisaical folly, that he had at times despaired of attaining an object which opposition fanned into a passion. But, calling to his aid older and more influential men than himself, the last barrier had finally gone down, and although he could not hire the opera house for the season, owing to other contracts, he had succeeded in capturing it for five weeks by depositing, as a guarantee against failure, twenty thousand pounds with the committee he had formed. Of this guarantee he naturally made no mention to Styr, but had he been able to conceal the fact that the enterprise was his, a letter received in the same mail from the great conductor would have enlightened her.

She was infinitely touched. If resentments had lingered in her mind, they were swept out, and they never returned. She knew—who better than she?—what all this had meant to that indolent nature, steeped in self-indulgence. For the first time in his life he had really exerted himself, worked to accomplish an object, and not for himself, but for her. He wrote with enthusiasm of being the means of educating his country musically with her assistance, and there was no doubt that he assumed this responsibility in all sincerity, but he dwelt upon it too emphatically, in his desire to save her from any sense of obligation. The deeper tenderness of her nature was stirred; it was the first poignant sweetness in an affair that had already given her far more joy than sorrow, pleasure than disappointment. Moreover, there was a new and a very keen delight in the gratitude she was forced to render to this noble but torpid nature, which she had revealed to itself, to be the first object of his energies.

But she hesitated some time before she accepted the formal offer to sing in London from the first of May until the seventh of June. She vowed anew to spare Ordham the certain disaster of materializing their bond, and herself as well. But this offer arrived very opportunely in her affairs. The King came no more to Munich, summoned her no more to his castles; and although, owing to her popularity with the public, and the still potent shadow of Ludwig, the opera house cabal might not dare to compass her sudden dismissal, they contrived that she sing less and less, gave her the worst support of which that admirable company was capable. Their object, of course, was to wean the public by degrees, to insinuate that the Styr had grown capricious, indifferent to her once beloved Munich, was losing health and nursing her voice; to tickle the Bavarian love of variety with as many Gasts as they could command, to press against her cold resistance until she lost control of her furious temper and flung her contract in the face of the intendant.

This she had no mind to do, and her will was as strong as theirs combined; but she was worn with the unremitting silent struggle, the countless mortifications; she knew that the death or deposition of the King would push her hard against the wall, battling for the supreme position she had held so easily. Now, through the influence of Princess Nachmeister, or the Queen-mother, she could obtain the signature necessary for a leave of absence. Then, London conquered, she knew that Munich would clamour for her return, and, with or without the support of the King, her position would be impregnable for a long time to come. For the matter of that it must be the first step in that greater career which her ambition had never ceased to picture. She had written to Damrosch several months since, but had received the reply she had expected: the artists were already engaged for the first Wagner season in New York; but it was expressed in a tone of sharp regret that she had written too late—even, perhaps, for that projected second season, were the experiment a success; but she had not the least doubt that did she create a furore in the most musically indifferent of all cities, to which, however, New York bent the knee, a place during the second season would be made for her as a matter of course.

And after London, she also would be invited to sing in every capital in Europe, with the possible exception of Paris; although to be sure she might sing to the public that still visited their hatred of Germany upon Wagner, in such rôles as Dido, Aida, Fidelio, Donna Anna, Katharine, in The Taming of the Shrew, and even the Countess, in The Marriage of Figaro; for after all these years of daily vocalization, besides her stage experience, there was little she could not do with her voice, and it would be interesting to prove that she could subdue that tremendous organ to pure melody. She was not even sure that she should not attempt Carmen, as a tour de force; and she could act it! Great God, how she could act it! She had only to conjure up Ordham’s marriage in all its details.

And how she should revel in the conquest of New York, look down with serenity or laughter from the unassailable position of the season’s idol upon the mire that had nurtured her, and upon the good respectable people that held their skirts so high, shuddering at the mere acknowledgment of the horrors upon which they danced, or lived their comfortable lives. She wanted no social recognition from that great city, where so many proud names covered secrets little less appalling than her own; but to dominate where she had once shrunk far from the limelight, to be crowned where she had been despised!—little she cared for the sleuths of the press. Their revelations would but excite the public the more, for that public almost resents the reflection of their own necessary virtues in a great prima donna, her failure to indulge the rights of genius.

But she hesitated, for John Ordham could not be shoved long from the forefront of her mind,—that young friend who would annihilate her worries, who had unrolled this glorious future. It would be a poor return to wreck his life. But was she not sure of herself? That, after all, was the whole point. She had managed him before, she could manage him again. She must live in a hotel, she would meet many people, five weeks pass very quickly. She could strengthen the bond, deepen her influence, even while she avoided the dangers inherent in mending a broken intimacy. . . .