If Lutz was inexorable in her own province she was an irreproachable chaperon. They saw little of her save at meals, and wandered in the woods, or, here in Oberammergau, sat for hours beside the cross, high on Kochel, indulging in those long silences where ego’s wing-tips graze one another now and again. Often Ordham went frankly to sleep, and Styr forgot him, and dreamed of conquests in London and New York, such as Patti herself had never wrung from those blasé publics.
They went on to Berchtesgaden, that strange tumbled mass of peaks and ledges and rocky walls, with its bit of valley, its castle, its village dotted all over the scenery it cannot escape. They climbed to the glacier, explored the salt mine, and spent hours on the great green lake, Königsee; which looks as if a mountain had been sliced through its middle, the high walls thrust apart, and waters, from some dark and sinister depths of Earth, depths where she prepared her demoniacal schemes to blast surfaces dear to man, had risen and covered the floor of the gorge. It is a wild primeval landscape, suggestive of centuries of convulsions, perhaps that the end is not yet. But if the mountains were terrible, the lake gloomy, the monastery in the tiny valley was peaceful, and when they climbed into the recesses of these volcanic masses, they found the peasants, in the little dairy huts, very hospitable and friendly. But once, when they went out by moonlight, quite alone on the lake, the great dark expanse between its bare and menacing walls filled them with terror, and they took hands and ran home like children.
XXVII
ADIEU TO THE ISAR
All things end, and the day after their return to Munich he appeared at the villa with a very long face.
“I leave to-night for England,” he groaned, flinging himself on the divan. “This morning I received a notice that the examinations will begin next Monday. I did not read the reason. The fact was enough.”
“Desolation!” Styr sat down abruptly, but she kept all sentiment out of her voice. “What in heaven’s name am I to do without you?”
“I wish I could think that you felt half as badly as I do. But while I go to untold horrors, you go on a tour to win new laurels.”
“Yes, in hot German cities and hotter concert rooms. And my Gastspiel does not begin until the 25th of August; but I find invitations from Switzerland—Zurich, Geneva, Lucerne. I shall accept them if the King consents. Yes,—I have work—but still! Well, you would have gone soon in any case.”
“I shall return the moment this beastly business is over and I have seen Bridg.”
“But as soon as you pass you are in the service—you must work in the Foreign Office for six months, and then you will be appointed, no doubt far from Munich.”