XVII ROMANTIC MUNICH

For two days Ordham was really ill, or at least so uncomfortable that his mind was quite averted from his evil fortunes. But with the quick submission of his ailment to treatment alarm bells began to ring in his brain once more. He wasted no time, however, cursing fate and his folly, neither did he make any effort to consign their achievements to one of those water-tight compartments of which he was so proud. He set his wits to work and finally hit upon a compromise which promised to save both his honour and his credit. Immediately upon his recovery he would go to England, and by hook or crook get his debts paid. He would appeal to Bridgminster first; finding him obdurate, he would confide his predicament to his mother, and he well knew that to avert a scandal she would raise the money if she had to sell her jewels or beg of her relatives. Meanwhile he should have written to Frau von Wass, very formally,—when had he ever written to her otherwise?—assuring her that he should return to Munich within the month. If she followed him, she could be kept out of sight in London. Otherwise, he might venture to hope that before his return her common sense would have revived. If not, he supposed he should be an ass, as other men had been before him; but while his chances for the diplomatic career would be ruined, his credit would be immaculate in the eyes of his world, and that would almost console him.

As it was prudent to receive no visitors and as he was in no mood for the fiction of other minds, he arrayed one of his tables with certain books presented to him by his father long since, and whose contents he must master before presenting himself before the Civil Service Commission: histories of Europe, Asia, and America covering the period between 1789 and 1880; Blackstone’s Commentaries, Ker’s edition, 1862; Hallam’s Constitutional History of England; Mill’s Political Economy; Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Before now, when ill or annoyed, he had taken refuge in this austere masonry, and had found its fascinations quite as powerful for the time as the jewelled streets of literature where the creative minds displayed their wares. Sometimes, too, he read them when mortified with the knowledge that he had not “played up,” “risen to the occasion,” as an older man still gambling with edged tools would have done; a manifestation of the quickness and assimilative qualities of his intellect salved his wounded vanity and induced a temporary scorn of youthful follies. But, truth to tell, it is not likely that he would have opened one of these books for ten years to come could he have passed his examinations without their aid.

During the six days of his convalescence he read steadily, and if the severe diet did not elevate his spirits, it diverted his mind. From the third day of his incarceration he wrote Frau von Wass a series of pleasant little notes to keep her quiet, and, receiving no answer, inferred that she was sulking. As she crossed her letters (she never wrote him notes), he was thankful for the additional respite until the eighth day of his seclusion; then he began to feel uneasy and to wonder if she really meditated an attack on the Legation. He was on the point of cutting his convalescence short and hastening to London, when he was astounded to receive the following note from Hungary:

“Dear Mr. Ordham: The most dreadful thing has happened to me! I am threatened with a goitre!! I spent a part of last summer in the Bavarian Alps—I remember certain villages where every other person had one—and the young men on Sundays with their arm round the waist of some hideous disfigured girl, as if that awful growth were a sort of heirloom! The sight made me quite ill; and now I—who am always so particular about water—I am in the wildest rage with myself for being so careless. The doctors say that it will yield to treatment, but meanwhile I prefer to keep out of sight. And you were to dine with me next week! Please don’t think me rude. One of these days you will visit Munich again and then I shall give a great dinner in your honour.

“Yours sincerely,

“Hélène v. Wass.”

Then for the first time did Ordham fairly appreciate the load that had weighed his spirits to earth, delaying his recovery, driving him to pound his brain into a state of stupefaction before night. In a moment he felt entirely well. Flinging his dressing-gown off and Blackstone into a corner, he began to dress hastily that he might go out of doors, take a drive, call on Countess Tann. He even felt an affectionate impulse toward Princess Nachmeister and other friends that had given much and asked little. He whistled, wondering that he had ever lost faith in his star; he felt young,—“but young!” as these foreigners would say, gay, insolent. His imagination took leaps and bounds: he saw himself an ambassador; Bridg long since retired from a world in which he had no place, leaving behind him an income which delivered his illustrious heir from the fatiguing obligation of marrying one; returning to Munich every year to hear Styr sing, and to sit for hours in that delightful gallery—no doubt in time she would let him lie on the divan while she sat in that odd American rocking-chair looking like a friendly goddess—

But his jubilance came to a violent halt. His mind had tossed up mechanically her avowed intention to save him. He had not given it a second thought, so manifest was her inability to play any part in this intensely personal crisis of his life. He recalled her eager insistence that he grant her a week, the strength that had pulled him toward her like a magnet, remembered that she had attempted greater things than foiling a silly woman and failed in none of them.

The blood mounted to his hair, he pressed his lips together until their soft boyish curves were obliterated. A wave of shame, anger, rebellion, rose and choked him.

In a few moments it receded, left him quite cold. He was a wise young man, in spite of follies. Whatever had been done—assuming that vivacious note from Hungary to have been written under coercion—had been carried to a finish. The episode was over. Frau von Wass announced that fact herself. If mystery were here, it were a mystery best unsolved. A water-tight compartment opened, closed. He refused even to harbour a natural curiosity.

He returned to the pleasant occupation of arraying himself, one in which he still took as much pleasure as any girl. Hines, his man, was ill, but he was too happy to resent the trifling exertion involved in a lonely toilet. It was a brilliant morning in late spring and he selected socks, necktie, and handkerchief of a delicate sage green, and a dull grey suit cut in a fashion that often tempted even the officers to turn and look at him. Much to his chagrin, no part of his morning was ever wasted at the barber’s. When he played tennis he exposed an arm with a proper filamentous surface, and on the top of his head his hair, a light burnished brown, grew as thickly as sprouting corn; but never a blade had appeared on his face. For this he should have been grateful, as his chief claim to regular beauty was the perfect oval of his face and the clean yet rounded outline of the long jaw; but he yearned for a beard to shave as a girl yearns for her first adorer to maltreat.

He finished his toilet in the course of time, sauntered out of the Legation, and, entering the cab that had awaited him forty minutes, concluded to drive for an hour, as it was too early to call. The kutscher, whose vast expanse looked as if about to burst through its rusty old livery, hunched down into himself after the fashion of his kind, and, with his high battered hat tilted on one side of his red face, his eyes half closed, and apparently in momentary danger of rolling from his perch, gave the Munich droschke that final touch of style which is the despair of Paris and Berlin.

But he drove his fare safely and slowly about a city, which after a week’s tormented seclusion seemed quite the most beautiful in the world. The stately Renaissance capital with its Gothic corners; its old palaces and modern public buildings, the former severe, the new ornate but dignified and magnificent: its churches representing the vagaries of all architectures; its oblongs and squares of green, set with statues of public men and gushing fountains—torrents of sparkling water as free and crystal as Alpine torrents; its classic K?nigplatz, as severe and beautiful as Rome in the days of the C?sars; its superb statues to the Bavarian rulers that had transformed a medi?val stronghold into the most artistic city in Europe; its innumerable terraces for beer drinking and coffee; its winding river of many branches and massive bridges, poetical name, and strange colour like melted ice reflecting pale green jewels; and then the fields and woods, the stately drives and winding ways, of the Englischergarten, where naught of Munich save its irregular but fine and soaring sky-line can be seen,—all go to the making of a city whose like is to be found nowhere on earth, and in which one can linger longest alone.

The Ludwigstrasse, one of the most imposing streets in Europe, lined from end to end with the high flat fa?ades of the Italian Renaissance, starts from the Feldherrnhalle, a copy of the famous Loggia in Florence, and terminates far down in the perspective with the Siegesthor, a triumphal arch in the fashion of Constantine’s, but surmounted by a colossal “Bavaria” driving her lions in the direction of Prussia!

As Ordham’s cab turned into this street to-day, he found it crowded with people, for it was one of those saints’ days, so numerous in the Bavarian calendar, when every Münchener closes his shop, and, if the weather be fine, walks the streets and fills the churches and cafés with his brood. The students too were celebrating, either the saint or some private deity of their own, for open fiakers were full of them: blue caps, green caps, red caps, according to their clubs, but all with the same slashed faces, the same supreme approval of themselves and the institution of universities, which gave so many of them their only chance in life to play. Here and there among the throng were the more impressive figures of officials in brass headgear and gala uniform, white or the dazzling light Bavarian blue. Royal blue carriages, with coachmen and footmen in blue and white livery, were leaving the Residenz gardens, evidently bound for a family reunion at another palace. Everywhere was life, movement, gayety, except, to be sure, in the figures of the sentries standing before the palaces. These were as wooden as only a German soldier on duty can be, but, although they looked as stupid as no doubt they were, their eyes followed the throng.

Overhead, in the rich blue sky (the royal shade!) hung those low soft foam-white masses of clouds composed by Nature for Bavaria alone; the air was warm and light; not a breeze brought down the chill of Alpine snows; although from highest windows the sharp tumbling crowded peaks might be seen glittering through the haze that promised fine weather.

Ordham, as happy as if care had never approached him, lounged in the corner of his uncomfortable droschke and wondered why people went to Italy: here there was so much of Italy, so much more besides. The old Saxon at the base of his centuplicated self always stirred amiably at the sight of the good-natured German crowd (unless it jostled him), and nowhere was that crowd so good-natured as in Bavaria. It was too accustomed to its liberal allowance of daily beer ever to overdrink or crave the excitement of spirits; and although the students occasionally took pride in spurring on their seasoned constitutions to a point which enabled them to sing in the streets all night, even they found it too much of an effort, and transgressed but seldom. It is only the American student in these German universities and art schools who, unfamiliar in his home with alcohol in any form, often becomes a sot; and is a despicable object to behold, where the European is merely absurd.

There was scarcely a factory in the neighbourhood of Munich, little business outside of its shops, which opened late and closed early, no poverty, a prevailing belief that life was made to enjoy, not to take with the fatiguing seriousness of northern climes. The Bavarian understands Italy far better than he will ever understand Prussia.

Ordham, driving slowly through this slowly moving, smiling throng, bent only upon innocent enjoyment, wondered a little that it should practically be the first to welcome all that was distempered in the arts of literature, music, painting, and the drama (those temporary but recurring aberrations, which, in the present instance, were ripening to produce the gifted but dislocated brains of Richard Strauss, Wedekind, and the ultra Secessionists). A people that were happy and simple by nature, yet capable of appreciating Wagner when encouraged by their King, might be expected to turn from this sufficient intoxication of their mental senses to the relief of plays and romances that were either serious in the good old style or merely frolicsome. But the plays presented in the theatres of Munich were enough to make Paris nervously try on her bays; and the greater and more accomplished city had never dreamed of exhibiting in the shop windows of her fashionable streets covers of books so ingenuously shameless. To shock a Münchener, the most domesticated, virtuous, bourgeois, must always have been as difficult as to persuade some Americans that human nature is made up of inconsistencies; but Ordham, at least, had never been more interested in watching the stolid children at a Spanish bull-fight, than these good, homely, soft-waisted people of Bavaria relishing the indecencies of their stage, their expression much the same as when they sat with their elbows on a table in a restaurant and devoured a dinner lasting two hours without raising their eyes. That the lower class of Bavaria was one of the most unmoral in the world, the percentage of illegitimacy being inordinately high, was beside the question, as this was not the class that filled the theatres and bought the paper-covered novels. It was not even the court society that kept the theatres open, for social diversions were many, even if no longer as brilliant as formerly: the theatres then as now were filled night after night with the phlegmatic exemplary bourgeoisie, all of whom ambled home at the end of a performance designed to spare what imaginations they possessed, supped on sausage, black bread, and beer, and snored in stuffy ugly rooms without a dream.

Perhaps this echo of domestic rhythm explains all.

But Ordham soon dismissed the shortcomings of a city he hoped to revisit many times in the course of his life. A crowd of peasants trooped through the Siegesthor, which he was leisurely approaching on his way to the villa of Countess Tann. They had come down from their village in the Bavarian Alps to assist in the festivities of Schwabing, and were now bound for one of the humbler cafés of the city. They were in gala attire; the women homely, shapeless, sunburnt, their plastered hair surmounted by a flat round hat that looked like a lid, and probably represented Fashion making her first essay in headgear; the thick full skirt swayed as if hooped, its ugliness offset, however, by the short-waisted white bodice over which was laced a silk or velvet corselet, much decorated with silver chains, buttons, brooches, filigree, and seed pearls. The short skirts revealed large flat feet made conspicuous by their proud owners with white open-work stockings, and low shoes fitted with tassels, bows, and silver buckles. The men were straighter, better set up, improved by their coats of tan. They wore short black leather trousers embroidered with green, lively waistcoats, white shirts, black velvet jackets embroidered with green, and almost as much silver as the women. Their thick knitted stockings of grey and green exposed both knee and ankle, and all wore the little green Alpine hat with its eagle’s feather, and smoked a pipe a yard long with a painted bowl. On the whole they were vastly more attractive than the average young Münchener with his high collar, red face, tight and ill-cut Sunday clothes.

Suddenly, far down the Leopoldstrasse, which continues the Ludwigstrasse beyond the arch, appeared a cloud of dust. From it emerged mounted police. They galloped down the highway, waving the crowds to the pavements, the vehicles to the very curbs. This could mean but one phenomenon, and although Ordham coloured with annoyance at being swept aside with the rabble, he stood up in his cab to obtain a better view. A moment later, escorted by a cavalry guard in brilliant uniforms, a carriage became visible, its six horses galloping as if pursued by the furies of hell. Ordham held his breath, expecting an accident in the tunnel of the Siegesthor, but the carriage shot through without swerving a hair’s breadth; and as Ludwig stood suddenly upright, all that vast concourse, that now so rarely saw their King, set up a shout that made even the old cab horses start and paw the ground.

“Heil! Heil! Unserem K?nig, Heil! Hoch Ludwig! Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!”

A flush rose to the heavy pallid face of the King, and his beautiful restless eyes sparkled, he smiled graciously. But he was always the conscious actor, and as the carriage flew up the street, as if the horses indeed were winged, he stood with his arms folded, his head high, as if already on a pedestal instead of in a bounding vehicle. Little wonder the Bavarians adored a monarch ever able to furnish them with impromptu theatricals. They cheered and yelled, waved hats, parasols, and handkerchiefs, until the Englishman felt the blood racing in his own veins. No doubt it raced in the King’s. The hearts of the Bavarians never wavered in their loyalty to this romanticist, who to the last had something of the immortal gods in his make-up. Had he shown himself spectacularly during those fatal days when arrest impended, but while escape from Neuschwanstein was still possible, his capital would have flocked to his standard and intimidated the ministry. But Ludwig had cultivated the tragic attitude too long.

The King vanished almost as quickly as he had come. Ordham’s cab ambled on its way: through the Siegesthor, along the still half-rustic Leopoldstrasse, and into the village of Schwabing. Here the narrow zigzag streets, the rural lanes, the riverside, the little beer gardens, were as thronged as the city, while opposite, in the Englischergarten, there were glimpses of another crowd which completed the impression that every house in Munich must be deserted.

Few villages in the high Alps are more picturesque than Schwabing, which still has its old mill, and the tower of whose white church, perched high, swells into one of those graceful spheres that form links in an invisible chain through the blue of Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary to the land of the Turk. About the church were many graves; and a few old women in black, hatless, bent, were praying there.