But Styr? Styr? Styr? He recalled the young heroes of Balzac and other veracious French realists, who wept as freely as women when a cruel destiny dammed up their love secretions. He envied them, but remembered also that one secret of the supremacy of the British race was that it used its emotions to feed its energies, and began to act while its more brilliant but less practical neighbours were spending half their forces in grief or rage. But this reflection did not abate one whit of his desire to be alone with this woman once more—he suddenly realized that it was growing from moment to moment, that his cold analytical temper had been displaced by throbbing pulses. He rose hastily, walked the room, lit another cigar, spent an hour reading her letters. They always translated him from the present, soothed as well as stimulated him, banished his melancholy, leaving only a pleasant sadness in its wake. He walked home toward dawn almost happy. Thirty-five days! At least they would have many talks. Thank God that “dark threshold,” as she once had phrased it, had never been crossed, would hardly obtrude itself during this the last of their intimacies. And the antechamber was very large and of an inexpressible beauty. Not to compare with it were the commonplace mansions whose every corner was free to so many men, and for life. He was an ingrate. He would accept the good the gods brought him and take devilish good care not to cry for more.
When he reached home, he found Mabel asleep on a sofa in his room, with the stains of tears on her face. He carried her into her own room and put her to bed. Then, as she inevitably awakened and wanted to talk, he considerately mixed her a sleeping draught, and saw no more of her until the luncheon hour.
LI
THE ROCKET WITHOUT A STICK
When a great audience assembles with an amiable desire to be pleased, agreeably titillated with the thought of a new interest in the wide and often barren ranges of the impersonal life, and with their vanity pluming itself upon inaugurating a new era, the object of their distinguished regard must fail ignominiously to convince them that they have made a mistake.
Covent Garden was filled from stalls to roof on the night of Styr’s London débût, and the pit and the galleries were crowded with the true music lovers, who were mainly Germans. Princess Nachmeister, as well as Ordham and the enthusiasts he had enlisted, both in the fashionable and artistic world, had pulled the wires so subtly that practically everybody present fancied himself the discoverer of Styr, and hardly a person in the stalls and boxes but bore a distinguished name, either inherited or made. Ordham sat in his box alone. Mabel was ailing and her mother remained with her. He looked as impassive as he was nervous and angry; Styr had stolen into London, no one knew when, and he had not had a glimpse of her in private, although a few moments before he left Grosvenor Square he had received an invitation to lunch with her on the following day.
The opera was Tristan und Isolde, and Styr, delighted to sing it again after her long abstinence, gave the great rendering to which Ordham was accustomed. Although the fashionable part of the audience was reduced almost to idiocy before the end of the evening, particularly during the long innings of the tenor—second-rate, of course, on such short notice, and at this season—in the last act, there was no question of Styr’s personal triumph. The most bored remained until the end, and then gave “The Great German Prima Donna” an ovation. She had been called out repeatedly after the two preceding acts, but only twenty appearances after the final curtain satisfied an audience proud of its perspicacity, and generously happy in paying tribute to genius. The Germans shouted themselves hoarse, particularly when she dragged Richter out with her. All admired Styr’s manner of receiving homage almost as much as her voice and acting. It was neither effusive like that of the Latin song birds to whom they were accustomed; she kissed no bouquets and baskets of orchids, although these tributes were many: nor was she the haughty gracious queen of fiction, after the fashion of certain actresses and prime donne, thoroughly spoilt or qualifying for social incursions. She merely walked out and showed herself, seeming to tower above them all, with the cold, calm, grave majesty of the Sphinx. She was Styr. She was theirs until the opera lights went out. They might look their full. She bent her head to the royal box only because custom demanded it; nevertheless, she throbbed with exultation, for she knew that the wires would carry her triumph that night to every capital in the world. Her fortune was made. Once she sought Ordham’s eyes, and her own flashed out the gratitude she felt, then lingered for fully half a minute. When the ovation subsided, she obeyed a summons to the royal box, repaid compliments with the suave phrases of long experience, then, ignoring the crowd gathered about her dressing room, and numerous invitations to supper, went home to her frugal meal and bed.
Ordham walked restlessly up and down the large private sitting room in one of the Dover Street hotels where a table was laid for two. The Countess Tann, he had been informed, was dressing, begged him to accept her apologies; she would join him in ten minutes.
He roamed about for half an hour, so torn with annoyance, doubt, and mortification, as well as resentment against the great and capricious Styr herself, that he was far from that mood of tremulous happiness, stung with fear, which he had achieved in imagination many times. It was abominable of Styr to steal into London when he had made up his mind to rise at four of the clock and meet her at the station. With this heroic act he had hoped to atone for certain unavoidable derelictions. It was the bitterest mortification of his life that he was unable to introduce his friend to London society under his own roof. His mother-in-law had deftly avoided a renewal of the subject. Mabel had sweetly vowed to break through that Puritan casing in which her mother dwelt like an antediluvian mammal (this was Ordham’s image, not Mabel’s); but he had chanced to overhear a scrap of conversation between the pair which convinced him that not only did she meditate nothing of the sort, but had joined forces with her mother and old Levering in acquainting London society with the variegated, manifold, and heinous iniquities of Styr’s past. The favourite story, Ordham discovered soon after, was that “Peggy Hill” had deserted her starving and consumptive mother in the native mining town to become the squaw of an Indian chieftain, and had worn paint and feathers and carried pappooses on her back until a Western millionnaire had chanced along, offered her sealskin and diamonds, fought a duel unto death with the chieftain—who, wearing only feathers, had many vulnerable points—and carried the heartless mother to New York. There she promptly deserted him for a horse jockey, and after having figured as co-respondent in innumerable divorce suits, had opened a disreputable resort, over which she had presided affluently (when not in jail) until ordered once for all out of New York by the police. Then she had cultivated her voice, and, finding it a gold mine, conserved it with a fairly consistent exercise of virtue. This richly picturesque past, in which any prima donna might rejoice, delighted London, but it was hardly one to open the portals of society. London could stand a good deal—but really! There are lines! They would applaud her in Covent Garden, talk about her over every tea cup; but extend to her the greatest of the world’s hospitalities—hardly! The information that Munich society was at her feet they treated with the contempt it deserved. Munich!
Ordham had discovered with astonishment and no little humiliation, that although with money, energy, and finesse, he might import German opera to London and induce people to hear it, although he was popular, admired, and wealthy, he had practically no power socially. He reflected bitterly that this was not to be accounted for only by his youth, his brother’s durability, the fact that he was not established under an imposing roof of his own, but that, much as he was liked, he stood for nothing, would be forgotten before he had lived out of London a month. He was a second son married to a rich American girl and living in the house of his mother-in-law. Who was he to presume to dictate to London society? Had he attempted it, he would have been put in his place as summarily as had he been an American himself.