“Not altogether. I suddenly wondered. Excellenz Nachmeister and the few people I meet often mention you. I have had the impression that you were badly spoilt, but your head does not seem to be turned.”
“Why should it be? No one has ever spoilt me—thought of such a thing” (and he really meant it). “I am going into the diplomatic service, if you care to know. I am here to get my German—not that I get much, between rushing about and four teachers that practise their English on me.”
“Why four teachers?”
“I take every new one that is recommended, and am too weak-minded to dismiss the others. They all seem to be so horribly poor.”
“I must find you a good teacher.” She spoke impulsively, feeling an uncommon interest in a promising young creature, quite thirteen years her junior. She had never had a child, but as she regarded Ordham, who in the mellow light looked his youngest, and was eating his abundant supper as daintily as a girl, she moved toward him with an instinct of protection. He still had the soft bloom of lip and cheek and eye that the most innocent of women lose so early, and she knew the world he lived in. What a pity it must go, that he too must change! Between his inherited impressions and exceeding opportunities, he might know his world, and his brain might be all that admiring Munich acclaimed, but he was young, divinely young. No girl had ever given her such an impression of youth—fleeting youth! His contacts with the emotional side of life had made no impression on him beyond satisfying his curiosity and saving his mind from morbidity. She divined, indeed, that, his heart still being untouched, his nature was practically unawakened, that his casual experiences, when they had not disgusted him, had affected him no more than some story he had read and forgotten. Other phases of life meant so much more.
She reached these conclusions by aid of her deep instincts rather than through any conscious mental process, for her own contacts had been almost entirely with American men who were either ingenuously fast or uncompromisingly puritanical, generally the former, circumstances having limited her experience. She had met, as all handsome actresses must, young Americans of Ordham’s age; and when they had not been precocious and impertinent, they had belonged to that gallant, clean-minded, well-bred type the universities turn out in such abundance—the type that has every attribute to win the girl and not one to interest the woman. Ordham’s inherited complexities, intensified by growing up among men of affairs in a country always consciously making history, added to his own uncommon individuality, fascinated her. She would have liked to cultivate him, but she relinquished that idea, and said practically:
“These are precious years if you really mean to make a career. I know an excellent teacher, and will send her to you to-morrow. But you must not waste her time. Will you promise me to study?”
“Of course.” Ordham was always willing to promise anything. “I’ll dismiss all four and take her for as many hours as she will give me. You inspire me with a desire to work. Did you begin to study German when you were very young that your accent is so perfect?”
“I did not study anything when I was very young.” She hesitated, reflected that in all probability she would never see this young man again, and might as well drop a good seed when the opportunity was given her; it did not occur often. “I did not know even the English alphabet until I was fifteen. Nor did any other child in the wretched coal-mining district where I first saw light. It was peopled wholly by the poorest class of immigrants from eastern Europe—brought over wholesale by enterprising and not too honest mine owners. My clothes were made of hop-sacking. I had not the faintest idea that I was good-looking, for the simple reason that I was never clean or half fed. My mind was as tightly closed as an oyster. I recall no desires beyond want of more food and the night that brought rest. My mother died at my birth, and I was taken in by a family of fellow-immigrants to whom one more child meant one more future bread-winner.
“Suddenly, I went to New York. Almost immediately I began to attend a public school—a free school, not a public school in your sense. Later I had tutors, masters. I learned well from the first. My intellect, that is to say my interest in books, awakened early—novels, at first, of course; gradually heavier works. In them I soon learned to forget; that is to say, I found in them a separate and particular happiness. I made a special study of the language and the literature of Germany. Whence I inherit my tendencies and talents I have no idea. From nowhere, most likely. Some mysterious disarrangement of particles, of which science, so far, knows nothing. You are an exotic yourself, or I am much mistaken. To return—that rushing of the awakened mind over dam after dam, barrier after barrier,—there is nothing under heaven like it, except the discovery that one was born to be a great artist, which, of course, is the supreme happiness. There were times, even then, when I was as happy as I ever shall be; that is to say, my mental exaltation was as great, for I suppose that is what mortal happiness really means, what gives us our most precise distinction from the lower order of animals, and makes us feel our relationship to that omnipotent force which we personify as God. At all events it was a life apart, a secret life, a life in which no one—no one—” her voice rose on an accent almost furious—“could enter. And of course those years of study played their part in making me what I am to-day. Most singers have no brain, no mental life; they must be taught their rôles like parrots, they put on a simulation of art with their costumes which deceives the great stupid public and touches no one. Mere emotionalism, animal robustness, they call temperament. I strengthened and developed my brain during those terrible years to such an extent that I now act out of it, think myself into every part, relying not at all upon the instructions of the uninspired, nor upon chance.”