Thus it happened that Margarethe Styr, seated in the curtained depths of her tower, that she might amuse herself with glimpses of the world she so seldom cared to enter, sat up suddenly and gazed hard at a voluble white reckless woman dressed like a butterfly, and a dejected young cavalier in flannels. She had heard no gossip of these two, but this vision, linked with his similar appearance when leaving the house of the same woman a few days before and his careless nod on the night of the Nachmeister concert, told the story. Countess Tann concerned herself not in the least with the affairs of others, and it is probable that if she had not met Ordham a second time, she merely would have smiled half in pity, half in scorn, at the eternal folly of young men, as manifested in this moving tableau. But she had unbent to him even at Neuschwanstein, far more on that night when he had leaped through this window to her rescue. And to no one else in eight years had she given the least of herself. That alone entitled him to a unique place in her regard; and to refrain from some degree of personal interest in so sympathetic a creature she had discovered to be impossible. Moreover, in spite of the remodelling of character effected by that strong brain and will, there was no lack of plain female in Margarethe Styr. She determined then and there, not only to save this charming young man from the toils of an unscrupulous siren, but to indulge in the pleasure of outwitting another woman. She knew enough of Hélène Wass to conclude that her life had reached a desperate climax which threatened danger to the man that had magnetized the remnant of her youth. As she rose and went upstairs to dress for supper, she felt even more stimulated than when about to engage in a round with the opera-house cabal.
XIII
STYR, THE POTTER
It was on this night that he was to sup with her. The hour appointed was seven, and, not knowing his habits, she dressed early. As she arrayed herself in one of the loose Fedora tea-gowns that Bernhardt had made fashionable, she congratulated herself upon the inspiration that had bade him, as he swung down from her window, “not to dress.” After that scene in the park she resolved definitely to make him understand at once that although living alone, and an artist, about whom, no doubt, many stories were current, she was not to be confounded with the cocottes of society: she could picture the costumes in which Hélène Wass received her admirers at tête-à-tête suppers! The Fedora gown, with its curved but loosely fitting back, its straight panel in front that hung from throat to slipper, unrevealing but by no means negligée, was the golden mean betwixt the formal and the intimate in feminine attire. And no one could carry such a garment with more dignity than Countess Tann. A number of these Fedora gowns had come to her recently from Paris, and she selected one to-night of which all save the ivory-white panel of crêpe de chine was of mignonette-green velvet. The girdle, which hung low, was composed of flexible silver links and had been picked up in one of the antiquity shops of Munich. Only her beautiful throat was bare. Her hair was arranged like a coronet. She had seldom lost her interest in clothes, and once or twice a month entertained at supper Excellenz Nachmeister, Possart, Lenbach, and a number of the older authors, artists, and scientific men, who could talk, and who were content to await her summons.
To-night she smiled at the unmistakable excitement of titivating once more for a mere man, although he made no appeal whatever to her deeper feminine instincts. Those had long been dead, and she stared down for a moment at their graves, almost forgotten under the heavy mounds of loathing and hatred for the sex for which they had been implanted. She no longer hated men; she had not even the desire, common to the woman that has been deeply wronged, to wreak vengeance upon them as a sex, now that all the cards were in her hands; art had enchained every faculty and left little room in her mind for the meaner interests of life. But she was a woman still, or she would not have been the great artist she was; and she sighed a little as she clasped her girdle, and even experienced a fleeting envy of Hélène Wass, who was two years older than herself. She was very happy, she dwelt upon serene heights, and one day Wagner would conquer London and she would sing there and behold the world at her feet. But Life, Life itself, had cheated her horribly; she must die when her time came without one tender or beautiful memory. It had gorged her with its knowledge, but its lessons had been hideous; and only her strong will—perhaps the greatest of her gifts—banished their memory when they rose and flitted, phosphorescent ghosts, across her upper consciousness. She swept them aside to-night and went downstairs, grateful that with the power to love had gone the power to suffer; for she would go out that instant from the world and its music rather than descend into those buried depths of her nature again.
Although it was ten minutes past seven her guest had not arrived, and she went into the drawing-room to wait for him. She felt some vanity in displaying her salon to one who she knew instinctively possessed a cultivated and exacting taste. It was a large room on the right of the entrance, with a row of alcoves on the garden side, each furnished to represent one of the purple flowers. The woodwork was ivory-white; the silk panels of the same shade were painted with violets or lilacs, pansies, asters, orchids, or lilies, as if reflecting the alcoves. There was but one picture, a full-length portrait of Styr as Brynhildr, by Lenbach. The spindle-legged furniture was covered with pale brocades and not aggressively of any period. It was distinctly a “Styr Room,” as her admirers, who were admitted on the first Sunday of the month, had long since agreed, while sealing it with their approval.
At half-past seven Ordham was shown in, exclaiming: “I am so sorry! But my driver went to sleep. I am positive of it. I spent the entire time between Barerstrasse and Schwabing crying ‘Schnell!’ ”
“They are always at least half asleep at this hour. They have reached almost the limit of their day’s allowance of beer. For that matter, I often see them asleep in the park three hours earlier, huddled down into their meridians and trusting to their patient old nags to keep the road. One drove up a tree in front of my window not long since. Shall we go in to supper?”
The dining-room was across the hall, a stately little room fitted up in brown and dull gold. The small table, with its delicate service of porcelain and crystal, was perfectly appointed, and the simple supper of omelette aux fines herbes, pigeons, salad, and American hot breads, was so refreshing to Ordham, after the heavy English cooking of the Legation, and the heavier of such of the Bavarian aristocracy as did not employ chefs, that it diverted and comforted him. But he had looked pale and harassed when he entered, and Styr bore her purpose in mind.
They talked, as Hélène had anticipated, of Wagner, and Margarethe succeeded in interesting him deeply when she spoke of her early doubts and fears, not of the difficulties of the music, but of the strange women she must portray.
“I had never heard the rôles sung, you know,” she was saying, as they entered the gallery by the river and she motioned him into the deepest of the chairs. “Please sit still. I am given to prowling. And smoke. Those are Russian cigarettes, and very good, but smoke your own, if you prefer. I had read those operas over and over,—Heavens, but how often!—imagining myself the heroine of each in turn; but when my voice was ready for interpretation, I realized that thought—brain—as well as imagination, was a prerequisite. Of course I had not long been in Bayreuth before I heard how others interpreted them, but that conveyed little to me. As soon as I had begun really to analyze and ponder upon the characters of Brünhilde and Isolde, I chose to call them from their graves into my own soul, divested of all the conventions which already clung to them like barnacles. My ardour was so great that when roaming alone in the woods of Eremetage, the old park of the Margraves on the hill outside of the town, I really persuaded myself—and for hours at a time—that I was one or other of those great women, torn with her passions, delirious with her hopes, exalted with her despair. My God! my God! What happiness! I lived the life of the imagination, the artistic imagination on fire; I gave not a thought to my personal self. Nor was there time for anything but study. Frau Cosima, regarding me as an irresponsible genius, found me a lodging with a good creature who kept me from starving—and the clothes on my back. Perhaps even The Master laughed at my intoxication,—for it was far beyond enthusiasm,—but I neither knew nor cared. I was quite mad. Of course such a time can never come again, for I have learned all the great rôles, and who shall write others? But at least I am happy while singing them, and throughout the day preceding the night of a performance I live the part to myself. I see the Rhine beneath my window, my tower is the Hall of the Gibichungs. I hear the Atlantic in the Isar and fling myself face downward on that divan and let the passions of all womankind tear my heart as they tore Isolde’s when they transformed her into a fate and the avenger of her sex.”