XI THE DIPLOMATIC TEMPERAMENT

Ordham had been leaning against the wall, staring at her, carried out of himself. He had heard the roar of the waters, the fragment of ship pounding on the rocks, seen the solitary woman lashed to the mast for an eternity, witnessed the tragedy of the gallant youth in whose death he felt a poignant sense of loss. Once or twice he shivered, as when Styr screamed on the stage, or her voice seemed to come from some far hidden bower, dying of languor, in the love duet of Tristan und Isolde.

She passed through an archway and lit a lamp. As she turned and motioned him to a chair she thought she had never seen any one look so young. Every memory in his brain but this last might have withered and floated away. He recovered himself and followed her into what appeared to be a long gallery used as a living room.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “I think he deserved that one man should honour his memory. Why don’t you sit on this comfortable divan?”

He arranged the pillows about her, took a chair close by, and accepted a cigarette; which, he felt, he had never needed more. She did not smoke, but sat staring straight before her. Her eyes seemed to burn her white face, but her repose was absolute. In a few moments she spoke abruptly.

“Twice I have lifted the curtain for you. I hope I never may again. It is not good for me and can be of no use to you. All that know me here are concerned only with my present—”

“Yes, with Die Styr, not Margarethe Styr.”

“I have little private life, but you seem to have been projected into it, and you may remain if you think it would interest you to come here and talk to me occasionally.”

He did not answer her, for he was wondering again if he wanted to know her or not. Was not his personal experience of this famous woman already romantic and adventurous enough to satisfy any man not in love? Whatever it may have amused him to fancy before they met, that night at Neuschwanstein had convinced him that he never should love her. The woman was too wholly suffocated by the artist. Even now he hardly realized that he was not in the presence of Brynhildr or Iseult, summoned to earth by the necromancy of the mad King. Certainly he had shared her delusion for a moment to-night. But he was a modern of the moderns. There was nothing of the old gods in him. It was only when Styr sang that the dead men in his soul awoke and surrendered. Contact with herself did not stir his senses in the least, although it agitated his mind.

If there be such a thing as the diplomatic temperament, John Ordham may be said to have possessed it. Side by side with the recklessness of youth and a sensitive nature, marched already a tendency to regard life as a sort of musical instrument whose keys were to be touched delicately, warily; crashing chords to be struck at precisely the right moment or not at all—whatever the temptation. It was hardly more than an instinct as yet, but he had made surprisingly few mistakes for a man of his years. In spite of his British reserve he had little of the narrow conservatism of his race; his tastes, his sympathies, his points of view, were catholic. Nevertheless, even the acquaintances made outside of his own world were never of a character to cause him future annoyance; and when he tired of them, they experienced pangs of self-reproach, or chafed at relentless fate. As the natural grace of his body saved him in difficult social moments, its mental partner gently extricated him from the most delicate situations. In spite of that stratum of iron in his nature, he would never be brutal, but he might be more ruthless and inflexible where his interests, or perhaps his desires, were concerned, than the more primitive being who sticks a knife into a rival or beats his woman.

But if insensible to the sex in this woman whom so many men had loved, still loved, his mind was on the brink of an irresistible attraction. It was not so much that her secrets and her depths tormented his curiosity, as that her intellect called to his with that vague seductive promise of completion which is usually confined to the whispers of sex.

He turned his head and looked at her. Her eyes were staring far beyond him again, and his slight motion did not attract her attention. Her hair was half down, but her skin, although white and clear, had none of the freshness of youth. Her figure, in its loose white gown, looked massive, immobile. He had a sudden conviction that she would never receive him in a revealing gown, that he could not be more determined than she to keep their intercourse on the rational plane. In a flash he comprehended her intense loathing of his sex. She had demolished a barrier for his sake, either because she had decided that fate was too strong or because their chance intimacy had forced her to appreciate the loneliness of her life. Down in the depths of his being he fancied that he heard a sharply struck note of warning, but it was stifled under a rush of sympathy and mental avidity.

He felt an intense desire to relieve the tension of the moment and uttered the first commonplace that came to his mind:

“Should I not go? You look pale. Your skin has lost its wonderful luminousness—”

She replied indifferently, “I did not put it on,” then laughed. “Are you horrified?”

“Not in the least. Why should not a complexion be as fine a work of art as a canvas that hangs on the line? As for nature—I have seen nothing so exquisite in Venice as the pictures of Turner.”

“I have worked out a make-up which enables me to delude the world into the belief that I am a beauty. But it is not merely these minor arts that disguise me; I am transfigured, even when I merely sing Venus or Senta; and that is the reason I have never been recognized in Bayreuth, where the elect of America are beginning to flock.”

“You change your eyes in both size and expression, but I should know you.”

“Now, perhaps, that my characters have become a part of myself.” She added abruptly, “I believe you know nothing in England of Ibsen, but he is the only dramatist who, in some moods, makes me wish that I were on the other stage.”

“I made my first teacher in Munich translate several of his plays: first, because it was a straight path away from declensions, then because I became interested. I never miss an Ibsen night, unless it happens to be one of yours. I hardly know whether I like him or not—yes, I suppose I do; that is to say, he fascinates my mind, while I resent him with all my inherited particles, that cry out in favour of illusions and lies.”

“Ah!” She looked at him with keen interest. “It may be those uncompromising pictures of middle-class life, mean, sordid, bare, that excite your mere curiosity—you are a pampered baby yourself. But you are too young to hate shams.”

“I am sure that I love them. Perhaps he merely induces an irritability of mind, which is a novel sensation. I shouldn’t wonder if I really hated him. I cannot imagine you in any of these r?les. You do not suggest his heroines—you whose mission it is to give intense reality to impossible romance.”

“In other words you deny my right to be called an actress?”

“Oh! oh! How can you say such a thing? I have a theory that Wagner’s music changed the character of the void itself. The souls floating downward vibrated to the new harmonies, the least of them; and now and again a great one was saturated, absorbed, imperiously impelled—”

“I never heard a more ingenious theory, but considering that Tristan was written in ’57-’59, and G?tterd?mmerung nearly fifteen years later—”

“Souls sometimes sleep a long while,” he said softly.

For the first time he saw her flush. Then she sat erect suddenly.

“I won’t permit you to question my right to be called an actress! You remember the scene in Ghosts in which Mrs. Alving listens to Oswald’s terrible revelation?”

He nodded, holding his breath. She did not rise, nor repeat a word of the play, but he watched her skin turn grey, her muscles bag, the withering cracking soul stare through her eyes. Every part of her face expressed a separate horror, and he could have sworn that her hair turned white. He shivered as if he had fallen into the snow water beneath the tower, and stood up.

“It is too horrible! I am glad there is no such part in opera.”

She smiled triumphantly and Mrs. Alving vanished. But she turned pale again as he asked abruptly:

“Was it of Mrs. Alving you were thinking?”

“Yes and no. It was Mrs. Alving on a superstructure. For the moment I was that tormented mother, but were I merely a clever actress that had left a pleasant home for the stage, I might make myself feel—well—half, perhaps, of what I expressed for your benefit just now.”

He asked irresistibly, “Are you glad or sorry?”

“Glad.” And neither had the vaguest premonition of when and where she would answer that question at length.

“I think I shall go now. It is late and I have kept you up long enough. Thank you so much.”

“What are you thanking me for?”

“Everything. When may I come again?”

“Tuesday evening for supper, if you are not invited.”

“Of course I shall come.”

They shook hands and Ordham left as he had entered. As he rowed up the Isar and heard the iron shutters slam, he felt some exultation in the thought that no longer were they closed to him. And he knew that an atmosphere both bracing and quickening was his to command. There was the scent of neither violets nor patchouli in it, in other words, neither bland conservatism nor commonplace outlawry. He was too modern for the one and too fastidious for the other. He could not identify scent at all with Margarethe Styr, not even those rare and subtle perfumes fabricated for the elect, among whom was himself; and this a little disappointed him.