“Go away.”
As Ordham, half an hour later, strolled up the Maximilianstrasse, admiring the brown fairy-like palace on its terraces at the end of the perspective (which always looked to him as if it might have been dreamed by some homesick Italian poet), he was pricked by a sudden longing to go and call on a girl. He cared little for girls as a rule, and was well content to be approved by women of the world; but, after all, he was very young, and the mere youth in him moved restlessly now and again as if with an unappeased, if intermittent, hunger. At Princess Nachmeister’s castle he had flirted with three or four charming married women, and upon his return he had hastened to the side of the mortal he liked best on earth. But—well—he would have loved an hour of nonsense, a game of tennis, a gay meaningless flirtation with an innocent light-headed and extravagantly pretty girl. He wondered if the youth in him would last much longer. Had not Styr petted and spoilt him when the mood took her he should have felt quite forty. And he would have enjoyed that extraordinary friendship the more for the occasional relief of a shallow but charming girl. But girls in Munich were as scarce as praise from his Lutz. The thought of her was like a sudden bracing wind out of the northeast. At least he was making progress under her lash that would enable him to face the board of examiners before the end of the summer with few misgivings. He also had taken up French again, and he delved for two hours a day in the other lores prescribed by the guardians of the diplomatic service; so that after all the time left at his disposal for regrets and analysis was limited.
XXV
FRIENDSHIP AT FOUR IN THE MORNING
On the following day, Styr, who had never been more gracious, asked him if he would walk with her in the park next morning at four of the clock. For a moment he felt so blank that his mouth stood ajar; but not only had he grown accustomed to fall in with her plans, but he had an immediate vision of himself and the heroine of his romantic friendship alone in the vast solitudes of the Englischergarten, and assented with enthusiasm. Margarethe, when not out of temper (when he, too, could be very sulky and obstinate), never failed to carry him whither she listed; but this mere tantalizing of the natural romance of youth was to breed results of which Styr, far-sighted as she commonly was, had no presentiment.
He went to bed at nine o’clock, an event that had not occurred within his memory. On the following morning at three he fumbled into his clothes under the impression that he was a somnambulist, and wished between prodigious yawns that Frau von Tann had chosen to explore the mysteries of the Englischergarten by moonlight. But when his gloomy servant, who had been ordered to rouse him, brought him a cup of strong coffee, his wits quickened. Further encouraged by the waiting droschke, in whose appearance he had placed little faith, he repaired to the Schwabing bridge in the proper frame of mind to meet a dark-browed woman muffled in a long white cloak and with a white veil floating about her head.
She led him with shining eyes past the lake with its sleeping swans, past the sweetly smelling fields, through silences as of untrodden mountain tops. The stars were crowding one another out of the deep cold blue of the sky; from the earth rose strange subtle perfumes which made him blush for his decadent Roman love of artificial scents; the shadows were dark on the open reaches; distant trees stood out black and sharp; the woods seemed huddled together; even the Isar crawled silently in its sleep.
Suddenly Styr flung out her hands, the palms upturned to the flickering sky. She looked like a priestess about to chant her pæan to the gods. Off the stage she had never appealed so directly to that artistic and sensuous side of his nature he had assiduously cultivated, and he gazed at her, stirred by a formless but eager sense of expectation which he did not comprehend until long after. He did not even attempt to formulate the wish that she were a goddess and himself a god, and that they had floated to a plane where no sound stirred but the music of Wagner; but as she turned her head and her eyes met his, she looked so young, and at the same time so different from all women, that involuntarily he moved a step forward.
“Oh!” she cried. “Do you know that this is the very first time in my life that I have known—lived—romance? Romance! The mere word is wonderful. During all the years of my youth I did not even believe in its existence. To think that once I was sixteen—twenty—twenty-eight—the ideal age—and that I never once glanced over the wall into the lovely mysterious gardens of other women’s youth! It is incredible that I never at least dreamed of—anticipated it.”
“But if it has come—what matter?”
“No, it does not matter. But oh, poor poets! poor psychologists! That I can drink this full cup of romance without finding the commonplace dregs of love at the bottom! All the other senses and appreciations are intensified, instead of being submerged, as when one is surrendering ignominiously to the race. I feel that I have attained heights that other women, silly victims that most of them are, have not even the power to imagine. My hands are in the secret caskets of life, and all the jewels are mine! mine!”