“I am not thinking about when I am forty. The present is all my powers are equal to. I believe John condescends to lunch at home to-day. I’ll put on a red and yellow gown that may perhaps throw into the shade my own sunset tints. Oh, that I were well! That I were well!”
This was a week before Styr’s departure. Ordham, whose mind was by no means obfuscated by the fever in his blood, began to notice that Mabel and her mother ceased to treat him to sour looks, subtly to make him feel a stone and a rake. He was vaguely grateful, for, unknown to Mabel, but prompted by Mrs. Cutting, the distinguished accoucheur, at present exercising a benevolent despotism in Grosvenor Square, had given him an emphatic warning, and he dined almost regularly at home, since he could not dine alone with Styr, and strove with what grace was in him to hide his fathomless ennui and amuse Mabel.
But the strain on his powers of self-control grew more formidable daily. A short while and Styr would have vanished out of London, leaving it as empty as Sahara. The future appalled him. If he could have obtained a post, he would have forced Mabel to release him and left London at once, although he well knew how little work is demanded of an attaché. Still there would be distractions in the new scene. But there was no vacancy, would not be for several months. Upon no other pretext could he leave her—leave London, whose very hansoms would grin at him.
Not the least of the causes which contributed to the waters of his bitterness, of his agitation and disgust, was the amusement of “the world” at his patent infatuation for a famous woman who had no time to waste on men, young or old. Styr no longer encouraged him to come to the opera house during rehearsals, no longer made the slightest effort to give him an occasional moment alone. He was unable to determine whether this final act of cruelty were due to fear or to a real pleasure in meeting so many of the distinguished and really important men of England; to whom, at all events, she gave her spare moments. Of coquetry he was sane enough to acquit her; he had faith in her honesty; but she could have taken no surer means to fan a passion now so fully recognized that he sometimes wondered grimly how much he would stake on ambition when the race came off. He was able to laugh, however, at the diabolical irony of his position. Of all the men that pursued her, he alone had been given the opportunity to look ridiculous, he alone suffered, was wounded in more than vanity. For the first time the source of the lavish expenditures which had given Styr the greatest of her triumphs occurred to him, and he reflected that did the Cuttings and “Bobby” know the truth and were permitted to turn the pages of his mind, they might justly exult. This did not mean that he felt the least compunction or even regret, merely that he was beginning to look life more squarely in the face, give more than a lofty casual glance to cause and effect.
But he had himself well in hand. He had never been more indolent of manner, more alert in conversation. When he discovered that he was pitied as an object of hopeless passion, he ceased to be seen constantly in the wake of the prima donna, deliberately devoted himself to other women. Puppy love had pinched his face, ruined his manners, bereft him of pride and self-control; but this slow and complete awakening of his masculinity matured his character, which his brain had outstripped, and substituted the sharp violent desires of the man, the arrogance of the conquering male, for the thin timid blades of spring. To two people only did he look older, his wife and Styr. From the minds of neither was he long absent. Styr understood, and for the first time in her knowledge of him was frightened. There was something portentous in his cool smiling self-control, like that of a soft-footed tiger biding his time. Mabel half understood and was terrified but resolute. She believed that he was infatuated and unfaithful, but knew the power of the wife over the mistress if able to keep her head and wait, believed that when separated from Styr he would forget like other men. Her mind was now alert; she would be amiable and tactful, and she would stand her ground and fight to the last ditch. She was in no condition to enter upon such an engagement, and had it not been for the good streak of Dutch obstinacy in her nature, she might not have proved equal even to spurts of determination to win or die. When overcome by a physical weariness which compelled her to lie down for hours instead of pacing the room revolving plans, she could only reflect bitterly upon the disabilities which made the game so pitifully uneven. Were she well and beautiful, she would not have hesitated to feign interest in the most notoriously “successful” of her admirers,—in royalty itself,—and bring Ordham to terms through his vanity, and, no doubt, through reawakened passion. Then she wept bitterly, not only at her present impotence but for her lost ideals. She might win back her husband, but her love for him would never again be quite free of that resentment and antagonism, even hatred, inevitable when the woman has been forced in one way or another to recognize the remorseless might of sex. Above all, she felt it to be monstrous that she, with youth and beauty and virtue, wealth and position, the fitness and the wish to be a good wife and an ornament to society, should be pitted in a death struggle with a waif from the streets, whose life had been unprintable, and who had left youth behind her. Such injustice terrified her, confused her standards. At first she prayed wildly, then she ceased to pray at all.
LV
THE WORLD AND THE CROSS
Styr and her management had been careful to give the antidote of Elsa and Elizabeth often enough to protect an exhilarated public against reaction; and by one of those curious paradoxes, known to all that have had reason to study the public taste, her portrayal of that princess among virgins, Elizabeth of Thüringen, from her joyous girlhood to that last mournful scene where she is both saint and woman and wholly lovely, was quite as popular as of those passionate and lawless heroines, Isolde and Sieglinde.
In Munich Styr had sung the part of Venus as a matter of course, leaving the more lyric rôle to the aspiring jugendlichdramatischen, but she, as well as her directors, well knew that to give Tannhäuser the mounting and accessories which made the first scene of its first act, as represented in Munich, the most suggestive on the stage, would be going a step too far even with the British public in its present state of enthusiasm. And without that rosy atmosphere like the mist of an amorous dawn, that sumptuous yet mirage-like couch in the background, the refined yet lascivious dancing of satyrs and nymphs, the visions of Leda and the swan, Europa and the bull, that first long scene, despite its delicious music, would mean to the unmusical beholder naught but an interminable duet between a forward woman in a Greek fillet and baggy gown, and a sulky man in a leathern jerkin and top-boots. Therefore was the first scene cut down to little more than a prologue, the part of Venus sung by an obese German beyond her prime, and fashion entered boxes and stalls a few moments before Elizabeth ran into the great hall of her father’s castle with a burst of song as of a bird mounting to the empyrean after long drooping behind the bars of a cage.
Perhaps Styr had never proved herself a greater actress than when she stared, incredulous and horrified, at the outbreak of the sophisticated Tannhäuser, disgusted with the provincial virtues of the knights, for she looked just sixteen; and when Mabel, who had attended the first performance, saw that dawn of sorrowful womanhood in her eyes, the impotence of maiden innocence against the subtle sweets of mature vice, she clutched her salts and nearly fainted. But when in the last act, Styr, looking as only a pure woman that has never harboured so much as a sinful thought can look, first brought tears to the eyes of old cynics by her pitiful examination of every face in the ragged procession of pilgrims returning from Rome, and then, clinging to the cross, sang her soul straight up to a waiting heaven, Mabel sniffed audibly and walked out. She could not have felt more indignant had Styr publicly been received into the bosom of the Church of Rome and advertised as a beacon light for mankind. But mental suffering had developed a species of saturnine humour in her, and when she was in bed she laughed consumedly at the fool this great actress was making of London.
Before the end of the brief season Elizabeth had won in a race long disputed, perhaps because Styr managed to convey the impression of a pure white lily growing out of a baneful swamp, in other words emphasized the sensuousness of the music, and made her audiences feel that they loved virtue the more while enjoying vicarious naughtiness none the less. Perhaps it was an unadmitted desire for vindication that caused an almost unanimous demand that Tannhäuser should end this agitating season. It was given, and Styr, eliminating the richness from her voice, sang with the sexless silvery sweetness of a boy chorister, which made the tremendous volume of her voice and its noble quality the more remarkable by contrast. The ovation began when the dead Elizabeth, looking like a marble angel, was carried in by the weeping pilgrims. It was too soon to lower the curtain, and as the audience manifested its complete indifference to the lament of Heinrich, Styr was forced to rise publicly from her coffin and respond to the plaudits of her admirers. As this absurd performance smote not only her own sense of humour but that of her audience, the great Wagner season ended in a hearty burst of laughter which put everybody in the best possible temper, and made the unavoidable speech easier to make.