XXIV THE CRACK IN THE JAR

There were times when Margarethe Styr, so long a recluse, felt embarrassed and awkward in this new and unique intimacy, little as Ordham suspected it; and there were others when she felt an almost irresistible longing to practise the arts of the enchantress and unwrap the lethargy in which her singular young friend appeared to be swaddled—fold by fold. She hated the brute in man as sullenly as ever; but personal vanity—which once had driven her to a ferocious love of power—had been starved for eight years, and, refusing to give up the ghost, sometimes muttered its rights. She imagined scenes in the gallery with the windows open to the moonlight and the warm scented vocal night, when this brilliant but lymphatic young man, under the arts of the accomplished siren, not one of which she had forgotten, would suddenly find himself the passionate determined lover. But the temptation rarely lingered, and finally passed. She indulged in no dream at any time of response, and any such violent dislocation of their present relations could only result in rupture. He would never forgive her, and she should always remember him as looking very young and ridiculous. As it was, she rarely thought of his age, and it was not long before she realized that she had in her hands the clay with which to model the one perfect experience of her life. When she discovered that her mind was revelling in this new and daily companionship, she wondered it had survived that long period of loneliness to which she had condemned it. Styr was essentially a man’s woman. If her brain accepted a mate at all, it must be a man’s. Had she made intimates among her own sex, they would quickly have been reduced to satellites or enemies.

And now, for the first time, her brain had found a mate, a fact the more wonderful and beatific because it was the one glory of which she had never dreamed even in those days when she took refuge in dreams. She determined to forge a deep and mysterious bond with the ego of this man, whom, had she been fifteen years younger and unblackened by life, she fancied she might have loved and married. She had had everything else; now she would have only the highest.

At first she could hardly formulate her wants, for the spiritual desires are very elusive, especially when the brain is fed. Indeed, the line between the mental and the spiritual desires is so fine that the spirit, the soul, is, no doubt, merely the brain raised to a higher and more intense degree both of desire and expression; it has its most comprehensible illustration in the exalted pitch it sometimes reaches under the influence of music, of Nature in the major mood, the account of some stirring and heroical deed. In other words, the soul is the brain in its best moments, when most nearly free of the flesh. It may be that these moments illuminate for a second the misty horizon which obscures the walls of death.

Fortunately there were few if any homely details to dissipate the magic halo flung around this relationship. After all, Ordham had no real rights, no authority, save such as she tacitly granted him. Her cook was a personage of variety and attainments; her household ran on wheels oiled and invisible; society, with its trivial and levelling interruptions, was away; the ugly adder of money could never rear its head between them. If ever the opportunity was granted a woman to snatch a poem out of the vast prose heap of life, it was Margarethe’s, and she had never at any time been the woman to oppose a desire that assailed her in full strength. She would have been the first to make it clear that if she had “reformed,” it was because she had outgrown the lower offerings of her nature and found the higher more interesting and satisfying.

Ordham realized sharply enough later that if he did not love her at this time it was because she pressed down the eyelids of his drowsy passions, his indolent senses; but as the weeks passed he vaguely understood that he was happy, and that only her insistent spurring made him stick to his studies and prepare for a future in which at times he quite lost interest, so perfect was the present. Styr had resisted the demoniacal teasings of her vanity, but she had no intention of denying it rights both natural and harmless; and being a woman as well versed in man as Mercator in the surfaces of Earth, she knew exactly how far to go, when to dazzle and allure him with glimpses of the hidden treasures in both their natures. To have been always merely the good comrade, sexless, the artist dwelling in regions remote from the common interests of life, would have been as fatal as to have laid down all her arms with a sigh and confessed herself the eternal woman. There were times when they quarrelled violently; and, indeed, being mistress of many moods, and not sparing in the use of them, she gave him no opportunity to tire of her and long for the wide circle in which he had hitherto fed his love of variety. She even made him accept an occasional invitation to a castle, and they took many little excursions into the country, where they read and talked and fell silent under the trees of the woods, or on the shores of some lake with a chain of Alps glittering in the distance. For the purposes of a romantic friendship Bavaria is unexcelled!

But if Ordham, owing to his languid temperament and overdeveloped mind, was immature in character and torpid in those recesses of his masculinity inaccessible to any currents not sent out by the heart, he was by no means blind. Although too indolent and too content to analyze deeply, even as time went on, there were moments, generally as he sat by his window at midnight, or loitered up the Isar in the small hours, when he speculated upon the possibility of falling in love with this woman, when his mind was even briefly lit up with the suspicion that he would love her now, were she not so supremely indifferent to the unwilling fascination he had exercised over some other women. But while in other circumstances this fact alone might have piqued his vanity into storming that citadel prisoning all the mysteries of her sex, by this time he was quite determined to marry between his examinations and his first diplomatic appointment; and the mere thought of a love affair with Margarethe Styr, rousing him to his depths as it must, and absorbing every faculty, filled him with terror. She must always be in his life; no girl and her millions should interfere for a moment with this wonderful relationship he had established with the most wonderful of women; but to love her would mean hurricanes and earthquakes in his inner life, whose mere vision not only alarmed the lotus eater in him, but cast an ominous cloud of warning over his future. He might forget it at times, but more and more the uneasy sense of the necessity to provide for that future before it was too late recurred to him under the renewed if gentle manipulation of his mother.

Once he went so far as to resolve that if he detected a disposition on her part to deepen their intimacy, he should leave for England by the next train. This resolution took form one Sunday afternoon when he was returning from a visit to Princess Nachmeister, established for a few weeks in her castle, splendidly poised above lake and woods in the Alps of Tyrol. There had been a large house party, and he had felt frivolous and worldly and irresponsible, in all respects much as he had felt before he met the woman with whom he had found so many more resources than he had dreamed existed in human intercourse. Nachmeister had made a lion of him, had informed her guests, among whom were dignitaries of state, that he was the cleverest young man in Europe, and certain of wielding the baton in the diplomatic orchestra during her lifetime. He was fancying himself mightily.

Nevertheless, he went at once to the villa by the Isar, for he never broke an appointment with its chatelaine. He found Styr in a villanous temper. She had received a late summons to sing in the Hof at midnight for the King. When she unceremoniously turned him out, he was glad to go, and wondered that he could have apprehended sentiment in this sullen, angry, almost ugly woman, who, after a separation of nearly three days, had scarcely a word for him. She had communicated with him in whispers, which forced his own voice down to the same artificial register, and made him feel as absurd as, no doubt, he looked.

“Good-by,” she had whispered in the hall, where he happened to have met her (he had his own gate key); “come to-morrow. I am in the right frame of mind to sing Kundry! I shall pinch Parsifal when I get him under my mantle, and he won’t dare scream. The idea of commanding a performance of Parsifal in this weather!”

“Oh, well,” he whispered back consolingly, “you haven’t sung for a month, and your voice might get rusty.”

“Go away.”

As Ordham, half an hour later, strolled up the Maximilianstrasse, admiring the brown fairy-like palace on its terraces at the end of the perspective (which always looked to him as if it might have been dreamed by some homesick Italian poet), he was pricked by a sudden longing to go and call on a girl. He cared little for girls as a rule, and was well content to be approved by women of the world; but, after all, he was very young, and the mere youth in him moved restlessly now and again as if with an unappeased, if intermittent, hunger. At Princess Nachmeister’s castle he had flirted with three or four charming married women, and upon his return he had hastened to the side of the mortal he liked best on earth. But—well—he would have loved an hour of nonsense, a game of tennis, a gay meaningless flirtation with an innocent light-headed and extravagantly pretty girl. He wondered if the youth in him would last much longer. Had not Styr petted and spoilt him when the mood took her he should have felt quite forty. And he would have enjoyed that extraordinary friendship the more for the occasional relief of a shallow but charming girl. But girls in Munich were as scarce as praise from his Lutz. The thought of her was like a sudden bracing wind out of the northeast. At least he was making progress under her lash that would enable him to face the board of examiners before the end of the summer with few misgivings. He also had taken up French again, and he delved for two hours a day in the other lores prescribed by the guardians of the diplomatic service; so that after all the time left at his disposal for regrets and analysis was limited.