VII THE EDGE OF THE ABYSS

Ordham was unstrung and miserable for quite twelve hours. He went that night to a rout at one of the embassies, and, dully alive to the paltriness of life in general, and the absurdities of small courts in particular, he pushed past a group of astonished royalties with as little ceremony as had they been hucksters and the occasion Lord Mayor’s Day in London. He managed to avoid speaking to every one he knew; but at the end of an hour, realizing that he could no longer ignore Princess Nachmeister or Frau von Wass, he left the house. In no mood for the student cafés, with their careless gayety, their atmosphere so dense with smoke that the clusters of caps on the “trees” were mere blurs of colour, he strolled into Maximilia, a restaurant fashionable during the day and early evening on account of its exceptional cooking, but rather more interesting toward midnight and after. There was little night life in Munich, outside of the student haunts, but Maximilia was a favourite resort with the young bloods that had seen enough of other capitals to scorn the bourgeois hours of the true Münchener. Occasionally there was a dashing stranger to ogle, but few ladies of the lower ten thousand found Munich worthy of their enterprise. The pretty waitresses, actresses, chorus girls, then, as now, had each her patron, for even the young Bavarian officer is of a domestic turn; and the floating tribe received such cursory attention that they had been known to cut short their visits with anathema. But the officers often brought their gaudy young friends to Maximilia after twelve, and it amused Ordham, interested in every phase of life, to sit and watch this honest German attempt to feel as sophisticated as the Parisian.

And only in Munich, perhaps, a city too artistic to have a moral left, would army officers and their almost respectable partners rub elbows, in the best restaurant in the town, with painted young men come on the same quest as the floating female. There were three of these young men here to-night, all members of noble families, who had neither the energy nor the ambition in their worn-out blood to cross the ocean and seek to replenish their equally exhausted coffers in the manly avocations of waiter and riding master. Ordham usually watched them with a mild contempt, for they were of his class and he felt sorry for them. But to-night, as he saw the head of one of the oldest and most distinguished houses in Europe, a young man with something of Apollo in his slender grace, and a face of perfect beauty, despite its signal-flag of paint, enter, seat himself, and cast about the room a slow, anxious, appraising glance, Ordham, depressed as he already was, felt the very walls of his soul shudder. How much better fitted was he to cope with the grim problem of mere existence than these unfortunates? He had a fine physique, but his indolent habits, long indulged, had made nearly every form of exertion distasteful to him. Individual as he was, he yet belonged to that strictly modern type of English aristocrat impatiently dubbed “literary” by those that shoot and ride and eat and drink in the good old fashion of their ancestors. These intellectual young scions, without any peculiar talent or the obligations of poverty, too modest or too indolent to dream of enriching the arts they love, give themselves up more and more to the refined pleasures and sensibilities of the intellect, less and less to the pursuits that keep the blood swift and red in the veins. With many this attitude begins in affectation, even though as often it develops into something like a vocation; but in the case of Ordham the subtler chords of Life’s big orchestra, forever inaudible to the swarm, had allured him since he could remember. If there was one reason more than another why Lord Bridgminster disliked and disapproved of his heir presumptive, it was because of Ordham’s candid aversion from “long tiresome meaningless days behind a gun,” “tearing across country at the tail of a frantic fox,” “wolfing food that would have stupefied the brain of a day labourer.” But if the life he led was set to the tune of his temperament, he was forced to admit that he paid toll in the depletion of his physical vigours, for at this age, at all events, he should have been developing his muscles and enriching his blood in the open air.

To-night he felt more tired than usual, and as he stared blankly at the young nobleman to whom the centuries had given beauty and breeding in their highest perfection, and a sufficient amount of brain to make him something of a social star in every capital he visited, Ordham was driven to review his own resources. His income was inadequate for his mere needs, much less for his tastes, and some unthinkable reverse of fortune might deprive him of it altogether. Upon what, then, could he rely, not only to supply his material wants, but those others, which, never having been hungry, he believed to be far more indispensable were life to be tolerated at all. He was a lover of all the arts and a pupil of none. His reading was wide, he was fastidious in his manner of expressing himself; but what his fellow-students had learned out of books or in lecture rooms he had but the vaguest idea. The mere thought of roughing it in any of the colonies was as repugnant as of marrying a rich woman devoid of charm. “The City,” into which he knew that many of his kind disappeared, he visualized as a maelstrom of high hats and office stools without backs. He had an aristocratic distaste for business, not out of snobbery, of which he was innocent, but because of a belief, both hazy and firm, that it commanded the development of the meaner faculties, that only the cynically dishonest emerged from the gorged arena with fortune in their disfigured hands. To-night, however, he recalled, what he had practically forgotten, that the moneyed foundations of the house of Ordham had been laid anew but four generations since by the desperate heir of the ancient but impoverished family: he had built a textile factory on one end of his Yorkshire property. This enterprise prospering, he had built another, and another, until he was enabled to buy back twenty thousand of the acres confiscated during the Civil Wars, restore Ordham Castle, unroofed and sacked by Cromwell, and furnish it with all the horrors in horsehair, rep, mahogany, and meaningless bronze which preceded the crusade of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He then found leisure to occupy his seat in the House of Lords, developed other useful talents, and was raised from the barony of Ordham to the earldom of Bridgminster. Since then there had always been an Ordham in Parliament, but the majority of the family were given over to the enjoyment of sport, and were noted mainly for their selection of beautiful wives and handsome husbands, rarely unendowed with the minor blessings of wealth and race. They had forgotten the origin of the factories still flourishing on the Yorkshire estate, but now far removed from covers and fields; to-night, however, Ordham, facing the contingency of Bridgminster’s marriage, or his own failure to fall in love with a girl whose riches would be a fair exchange for the position he could give her, bitterly envied his wise and possibly unscrupulous ancestor, and would have welcomed similar outcroppings in his own brain.

Or suppose he married for mere love, a folly to which all young men were liable, and, upon his ridiculous income, found himself with a family upon his hands? This, however, he felt to be such a violent strain upon his imagination that he dismissed it, but found no consolation in the prospect of keeping up appearances, much less enjoying life, on a diminishing credit. He was too young, and too accustomed to see the creases of life magically smoothed, to remain dispirited for long, no matter what the combining causes; but during this hour he sat plunged in a melancholy so profound that for years after its bare memory appalled him.

There is a fine line between hypercivilization and degeneracy, too fine to be a barrier for unwary feet: but the natural nobility and refinement of Ordham’s mind, combined with its higher activities and poise, had brought him up short. No matter what his straits, even with his somewhat cynical attitude that all forms of vice were too inevitable to bother about, he was incapable of falling to the horrid level of these young continental nobles. But of what else might he not be capable? As his imagination, morbidly active, pictured him hopelessly involved, without a plank to grasp at, he suddenly swore an oath that he would never go under, no, not if he sacrificed all belonging to him, and every canon that society had invented for her own defence and deluded man into believing was handed down from on high. Ordham, fastidiously bred, and reared above the temptations that men of lower degree must reckon with in their daily struggle, was one of the most finished results of those same immemorial laws; but in this sudden vision of the horrors of poverty, of the terrors and temptations of life, they fell to ashes, and left him part savage, partly as cool, cynical, and unscrupulous, as only the supercivilized can be. He would never go under, never come down one step from the high position to which he had been born. If wishes could have slain Lord Bridgminster, he would have died that night in his Spartan bed. Ordham suddenly wondered if he were capable of killing his brother. He glanced about the restaurant once more, his gaze lingering on the gloomy face of the last of the line that had been illustrious in the history of Europe since it had emerged from the yoke of the Huns. He set his teeth and swore that he could, and without a scruple or a regret. He would never go under, never, never, never. But it was a solution by no means to his taste, and he left the restaurant abruptly and went for a walk of unaccustomed activity in the Englischergarten. When he reached his bed in the small hours his equilibrium was restored, and he reflected with amazement and horror upon the vitalities that had flourished unsuspected in the depths of his being. But his ego was somewhat excited and fascinated at the discovery, and he fell asleep wishing that he could talk it all over with Margarethe Styr.