XVIII THE SYSTEM’S FLOWER

Countess Tann’s house faced a street so narrow that had not her walls been high and her opposite neighbour’s abode humble she would have been forced to keep her curtains drawn. It was on the very edge of the village, and her garden extended along the highway beyond. There were few flowers in the garden, for Bavaria is not the land of flowers, but there were many trees; and wide gates at the back could be rolled apart to frame a picture of the Isar and the Englischergarten.

The front gate was of wrought iron and afforded glimpses of the secluded little park and of the villa’s ornate fa?ade. Ordham rang the bell several times before the old butler sauntered out, half asleep, and informed the impatient visitor that the Frau Gr?fin was driving, but had left instructions to admit Mein Herr, should he call and be disposed to wait.

Ordham sent his kutscher to a near-by beer garden and followed the servant to the gallery. He declined coffee until the return of the hostess, and old Kurt opened a box of cigarettes and departed to ponder upon the marvel of a young man in the house. The maids were gallivanting or there would have been high discussion.

Ordham realized that he was a little tired, but before making himself comfortable with a book, strolled into the tower to listen for a moment to the band playing in the pagoda of the Englischergarten, and picture the numberless tables, amongst which trudged unceasingly big perspiring Bavarian maidens, carrying mugs of foaming beer to an ever thirsty people. But his eye was immediately attracted to the books on the shelves which covered the walls of the tower, and he scanned them eagerly. He was astonished to find that the collection was almost wholly scientific. Bastian, David Strauss, Johannes Müller, Virchow, Descartes, Goethe, Baer, Lamarck, Paul Holbach, Du Bois-Reymond, Harvey, Heinrich Hertz, Bacon, Aristotle, Darwin, Spencer, Alexander Humboldt, the Vogts, Lavoisier, Spinoza, Cuvier, were a few of the names in this catholic assemblage, which had its representative in every branch of science, using the word in its broad sense. Ordham ceased to wonder that the great Styr had been able to extinguish her merely feminine ego. With such meat for daily sustenance, and the strong wine of art, the wonder was that she had not developed into a new species. The only works of fiction were the novels of Balzac, Gautier, Flaubert, and On the Heights. Other shelves were filled with volumes devoted to the analysis of music and the lives and letters of composers.

He returned to the gallery with a volume of Illusions Perdues, and looked longingly at the divan, but compromised upon the deepest of the chairs. He would have liked to smoke, but he was far too formal both by nature and training to make himself at home at this early stage of his acquaintance with Countess Tann. His eyes roved over the gallery with much curiosity. It was the first time he had known a woman that worked for her living, and he appreciated that this room, full of beautiful and interesting objects as it was, had an entirely different atmosphere from the boudoirs of the fine ladies of the world. There was a certain austerity about it, rather an absence of the luxury, frivolity, soft magnificence, of the personal nests of women that neither knew nor cared how their wants were gratified. Even the carved old chairs looked comfortable, but it was not the room of a woman who lounged, but who worked, studied, thought. To Ordham it was more personal than any woman’s room he had ever seen; then he suddenly realized that it was its component of masculinity which had enveloped him at once like an emanation from his own spirit.

Half an hour later he opened his eyes to behold a tall figure in a long grey cloak smiling before him. He rose with a deep blush and stammered apologies. “Is it possible—will you ever forgive me?”

“Why not, Herr Invalide? I will go and change my frock, and then we will have coffee. Just a moment.”

She reached the door, then, as if suddenly assailed by an anxious memory, turned and said hesitatingly: “I have felt so worried—it was such a relief to hear that you were really ill—and to-day you look so much less careworn, almost happy—”

“I am quite happy—thanks so much. Please don’t bother—how good of you! The lady thought better of it, as I might have known she would,—has thrown me over, in fact.”

“Delightful! I was at my wit’s end. Now we shall keep you in Munich. Do sit down again.”

She returned dressed in a white organdie frock sprigged with violets. It was flounced and full, the bodice crossed by a Marie Antoinette fichu tied loosely at the back, and in her hair she had twisted a lavender ribbon. She looked as if she had merely adapted herself to the warm afternoon, not in the least coquettish or alluring. How could she, thought Ordham, with that library behind her?

“Such a drive as I have taken!” she exclaimed as she seated herself before the coffee service old Kurt had brought in. “Down into the Isarthal and far beyond Castle Grünwald. It was delightful in the woods, or would have been without the crowds. You will go there with me some day, I hope?”

“I will go with you anywhere.”

“That would mean long walks instead of sleeping until nine o’clock—eleven, I am told, it used to be.”

“But everybody will be leaving Munich soon and I shall not be sitting up so late. Do take me with you—at any hour.”

“But you will be following—not? They will all ask you to visit them. Poor German!”

He hesitated. “Shall you stay here?”

“I seldom go away except for a few days at a time, for I no longer sing in Bayreuth; Frau Cosima and I do not agree on the subject of Brünhilde, whom I interpret for myself. Moreover the King has often private representations in the Hof. It is as well, for I am never so happy as in Munich, and Bayreuth is not the same to me now that The Master is gone. Late in August and in September I must go on my Gastspiel—concert engagements in several German cities and in Vienna—but that is all; I never visit.”

“I think I should remain here all summer and study with Fr?ulein Lutz. I should like to pass my examinations this year. But perhaps Fr?ulein Lutz takes a vacation?”

“I will see that she does not. Yes—stay and study. It is so fatally easy when one is young and heedless to be caught in the maelstrom of insignificance; and two years—what are they? You have the rest of your life to visit country houses.”

“You have a way of phrasing truths that makes it quite impossible to forget them.” He spoke dryly, but his face had flushed. “?‘Caught in the maelstrom of insignificance.’ I shall stay here and alternate the delights of Adam Smith with Fr?ulein Lutz, burn my candle over Blackstone and Hallam, when I might be sneezing in some draughty castle or accumulating typhoid germs. That is to say, if you will let me walk with you—and come here often. My virtues, at least, need admiration and encouragement. May I?”

Styr had made up her mind: having delivered him from wreck, she would lead him to the threshold of his future, then return to her solitudes, pluming herself upon her successful r?le of a kindly fate in the life of a fellow-mortal so much more interesting than the musical fledglings that came to her for advice and help. For a few months she would indulge herself in the luxury and novelty of a friendship, give her mind a companion; later on, vary her isolation with a permanent interest in the career of another. She made no doubt that were Ordham carried safely over this critical interval there was a reasonable chance of his attaining a high and useful eminence. It was a strange r?le for her to be contemplating, that of becoming a deliberate factor in the life of a man with no thought save his own good; but the more she had meditated upon it the more irresistibly had it appealed to her. She was honest enough, however, to admit that had she not liked him so thoroughly her philanthropic tendencies might have slept on undiscovered.

“I will strike a bargain with you,” she said. “If you will promise not to leave town except from Saturday noon until Sunday night, and take a daily lesson with Lutz until you are obliged to leave for England, you may come and go here as you please.”

“That will be every day, and I shall not go to country houses at all. The more I think of it the more I feel convinced that I should pass this August. My brother has never believed in me,—for good reasons, wise man,—but I have an idea that if I astonish him by passing a year sooner than any one expects, he will be so gratified that he will pay my debts. After all, he stands in the place of my father.”

“Are you deeply in debt?” All women sympathize with a man in debt except his wife, who must economize to get him out.

“Horribly!” Ordham buttered a scone and looked as blithe and greedy as a schoolboy on his first day at home.

“You always use such strong expressions!”

“O—h! Re—ally?” Ordham drawled this as only an Englishman can. “Well—perhaps you would not think close upon a thousand pounds a great amount, and I confess I find it disgusting to be unable to pay a sum which if I had in hand would not last me a month. And to Bridgminster it is nothing. I find that more disgusting still.”

“I suggested an American girl the other night—but I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see you married.”

“I should hate to marry. My mother is always urging it—so are all my friends, and I suppose that between extravagant habits and the diplomatic career, I shall be driven into matrimony. But I wish to heaven Bridgminster would divide his income with me. He spends next to nothing. I hear he doesn’t even keep up Ordham.”

“Do you want money so much?”

“I need it.” He spoke with deep intensity.

“And you can think of no other resource but your brother or a rich girl?”

“No, alas!” He began to butter another scone. “All my relations are either poor or stingy.”

“But I had an idea that all dukes were rich and superb—your mother’s father—”

“He quarrels with his steward every quarter day over the accounts, the very household bills. I hate him, and so did my father. He cannot endure me because I don’t pot birds from the 12th of August until the hunting season begins and then ride to hounds every day. I have an idea he is afraid I will write poetry and disgrace the family. The metre would, no doubt.”

Margarethe looked at him curiously. According to American canons she ought to despise him, but he was so inevitably a part of a system, and so replete with all the delightful qualities for which that system was responsible, besides having an accent all his own, that she could but accept him as a matter of course. Nevertheless, more to draw him out than with motive, she asked: “I suppose it has never occurred to you to work?”

“Work?” He barely saved his knife from dropping to the little Sèvres plate. His eyes grew round and his mouth fell slightly apart.

Styr almost laughed outright, but she dropped her eyes to her cup and said: “Well, I am an American, you know. A young man over there, born in a position corresponding to your own—well, if he found himself in debt or wanted money badly, and there was no immediate prospect of inheritance, he would go to work and make it.”

“How odd! No, I don’t mean that. Of course I know those things do happen, but it must be when they feel fitted, have been prepared—for some of those things that make money. The only time I ever thought about it—one night not long ago,” he paled at the memory, “I could not think of any means by which I could support myself did I lose the little I have. But in America I suppose the business instinct is in every man’s brain—naturally. Why shouldn’t they be able to make fortunes if they must? Some of our chaps have to go to work also, but I never heard of any of them making a fortune—not even in the colonies. Only people you never heard of before do that. I suppose our brains are too old, they are no longer capable of that amount of concentration and energy. For generations we have had so many interests. To let a fixed idea like money-making control you, I fancy you must have, and inherit, little intellectual development. Nevertheless, I should think that those same indulgences and developments must be among the incentives.”

“That is the most ingenious defence I ever heard a lazy man put up! But I am not sure there is not a good deal in it. The fact remains, however, that you want money and do not want to marry. Suppose I send you to my banker in New York? He is a good friend of mine and would give you a chance of some sort. Would you concentrate your very superior faculties upon the making of money?”

“Good heavens, no! I should hate it. To spend one’s life trying to be more dishonest than the next man—I had rather live on a younger son’s portion all my life.” And he elevated his nose in aristocratic disgust.

“It is not quite as bad as that, although I do not pretend that great fortunes are made with gloves on.”

“I should hate the people I should be compelled to associate with. As I said just now, it requires enormous concentration to be a successful man of business; and fancy hearing no other topic of conversation day in and out, to see, to feel, nothing else in the men by whom one was surrounded!”

“You might be a cow-boy. That has appealed to other Englishmen, and is more picturesque—quite honest, also, I should think.”

“But so dirty, and such a hard life physically. They get up at four and go to bed with their boots on. Then, after they are quite demoralized, all their finer tastes hopelessly blunted, they come home without a penny. Heaven only knows into what limbo they disappear then. Don’t think I am really lazy.” (There was a genuine anxiety in his tones!) “What you said at Neuschwanstein about the possibility of finishing as a society drone has got me up every morning in time for Fr?ulein Lutz. I mean to pass my examinations and enter diplomacy. But I am afraid I am fitted for nothing else. I haven’t stumbled into it blindly. It is that or nothing, and although the suggestion was my mother’s, my father quite agreed with her.”

“It all comes back to this,—you must marry money.”

“Alas, yes! But four or five years hence. I will pay these bills somehow, and then I can run up others. They will always wait a few years.”

“But suppose you could meet some girl of great wealth whom you could love? That would be the ideal solution, and there are many rich and lovely girls. Should not you like peace of mind and happiness?”

“Happiness?” He stared at her in a fashion he had dropped into before, as if she were a mirror in which the future might take form. “I fancy that no matter whom I married . . . even if persuaded that I was in love with her . . . I should no sooner be settled down than I should begin to invent some one I might have loved better.” He came to himself with a smile. “Will you let me smoke? And tell you what a delight it is to see you again? And this room! To think that I may sit in it often! That we are to be friends for a whole summer! Nothing in life can ever be as wonderful as that.”