XXI THE WOMAN BY THE ISAR

Ordham had no intention of ignoring the impromptu to which he had been treated, whether she expected it of him or not, and on the following Thursday evening, as they were drinking coffee in the garden after supper, he said abruptly:

“I should not have recognized your voice the other night if I had not seen you—ah—when you demolished that poor little man. Is—is it the native American?”

“One variety.” Her present tones were dry, but without displeasure. “It was the voice of the Middle West. When I was Peggy Hill, working in the coal-mines—and for several years after—the burrs on my voice were as thick as a chestnut tree’s. Insensibly, in New York, they began to peel off, and soon after I went on the stage I fell in love with purity of diction and studied with an English teacher of elocution until I retained not a trace of even the generic American. But when I lose my temper it bursts out of its little dungeon exactly as other bad characteristics do when we are off guard. I used to flatter myself that I had uprooted certain qualities I resented having been born with, but I have discovered that they occupy remote chambers of my brain, biding their time. Perhaps I was one of the viragoes of the French Revolution!”

“Did you—once let it go rather often? Somehow you seemed so wonderfully natural.”

“I let it go pretty often down in that opera house. Men have such tact! Fancy telling a singer at the end of a performance, when every nerve in her body is a red-hot humming wire, that her wig was not on straight! The intendant came to me one night after the first act of Isolde and presumed to criticise my tempo. I threw a hand mirror at him, and he has never visited my dressing-room since. I would have treated the King in the same fashion, but he is the one man that would never make such a mistake. Wagner has a good deal to answer for! The lyrics are excitable enough, but the music of The Master creates a madness; it sets up a vibration in the nervous system, which, added to the obsession of the characters, lifts us bodily from the plane of the normal, and no doubt works permanent changes. I am talking, of course, of singers that have temperament as well as voice.” She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her rustic chair. “Before?—Oh, yes. But less and less as time went on. Tantrums do not hurt a prima donna; in fact they are of use in inspiring the authorities with awe. But in the private life—well, the price I sometimes had to pay was too high. I soon stopped throwing things about like a fishwife; and all the rest of it.”

Ordham studied her face attentively in the pause that followed. Apparently she had forgotten him, and was staring into the deep arbours beyond the river. Her profile looked hard and cruel, sharpened against the black shadow of the trees, like the fine edge of an axe. He held his breath as the expression deepened into sullen ferocity, then stood up, overturning his chair.

“I should like to know every bit of your history,” he said, “every detail.”

“How you would hate me!”

“I think not. Some people might have hated you the other night when you looked like all the furies, but I was the more interested. The usual does not appeal to me particularly.”

“But there is a limit! If ever I want you to hate me, I will tell you the story of my life, as they say in New York.”

“Why in New York?”

“It is a bit of slang, and New York is the factory of much of the American slang and a sort of clearing-house for the rest. Does not our slang appeal to you?”

“I find it utterly meaningless,” he said candidly. “Ours is bad enough, but at least it has some point.”

“That ours has none is the whole point. It takes the sharp American wits to understand a new bit of slang or a new joke; the cryptic quality of both, indeed, has played its part in sharpening those same wits. If you are not ever on the alert over there, you go under.”

“Really? What a bore!”

She laughed as naturally as a child, but even in her mirth she no longer betrayed the nurture of the West.

“You are so delightfully genuine! The American imitation of the British aristocrat is the funniest thing in the world. You are not unhumorous from our crude point of view, but I doubt if you could really be affected if you tried, and you never would try. And yet over there you would be thought a mass of affectations.”

“I hope I’ll never go ‘over there.’ I’ve scarcely ever met an American that I liked. The women want too much waiting on, and I always have a feeling that the men despise me.”

“Perhaps they do, understanding no type but their own; few have had the opportunity to study the men of other races. To an American the man with no capacity for work, to ‘hustle,’ no desire to fight his way to the top, simply encumbers the earth. I hope you never will go over. No matter how good an Englishman’s manners may be at home, they become abominable the moment he sets foot in the United States. Even yours might not stand the test—whatever that test is.”

“I am sure they are merely terrified. We are not accustomed to reporters, interviewers, to an avalanche of invitations from people we don’t know. It is enough to terrify any one; and being a shy race—not having had your liberal education!—we shrink into a sort of panoply of war. We don’t go over meaning to be rude, but we are driven to appear so rather than show our fright and look ridiculous. One of my cousins visited the United States a year or two ago, just after he came into his title, and he was so hounded by reporters and lion hunters, that after doubling and dodging until he was worn out, he gave himself the airs of a stage lord and succeeded in freezing them off. Then the journalists wrote vicious articles calling him a snob—It would seem that like a good many others, they do not know exactly what that word means. And Jim is as decent a little chap as you could find in England.”

“Well, you misjudge us too. You are always commiserating the American husbands left at home to coin dollars while their wives swarm over Europe. If you only knew how delighted the American husband is to get rid of his wife for a few months out of the year! But come, let us go in. I know that you long for an easy chair and to see your cigarette smoke, while I dare not sit out too late. Who is not a slave of some sort?”