XXV FRIENDSHIP AT FOUR IN THE MORNING

On the following day, Styr, who had never been more gracious, asked him if he would walk with her in the park next morning at four of the clock. For a moment he felt so blank that his mouth stood ajar; but not only had he grown accustomed to fall in with her plans, but he had an immediate vision of himself and the heroine of his romantic friendship alone in the vast solitudes of the Englischergarten, and assented with enthusiasm. Margarethe, when not out of temper (when he, too, could be very sulky and obstinate), never failed to carry him whither she listed; but this mere tantalizing of the natural romance of youth was to breed results of which Styr, far-sighted as she commonly was, had no presentiment.

He went to bed at nine o’clock, an event that had not occurred within his memory. On the following morning at three he fumbled into his clothes under the impression that he was a somnambulist, and wished between prodigious yawns that Frau von Tann had chosen to explore the mysteries of the Englischergarten by moonlight. But when his gloomy servant, who had been ordered to rouse him, brought him a cup of strong coffee, his wits quickened. Further encouraged by the waiting droschke, in whose appearance he had placed little faith, he repaired to the Schwabing bridge in the proper frame of mind to meet a dark-browed woman muffled in a long white cloak and with a white veil floating about her head.

She led him with shining eyes past the lake with its sleeping swans, past the sweetly smelling fields, through silences as of untrodden mountain tops. The stars were crowding one another out of the deep cold blue of the sky; from the earth rose strange subtle perfumes which made him blush for his decadent Roman love of artificial scents; the shadows were dark on the open reaches; distant trees stood out black and sharp; the woods seemed huddled together; even the Isar crawled silently in its sleep.

Suddenly Styr flung out her hands, the palms upturned to the flickering sky. She looked like a priestess about to chant her p?an to the gods. Off the stage she had never appealed so directly to that artistic and sensuous side of his nature he had assiduously cultivated, and he gazed at her, stirred by a formless but eager sense of expectation which he did not comprehend until long after. He did not even attempt to formulate the wish that she were a goddess and himself a god, and that they had floated to a plane where no sound stirred but the music of Wagner; but as she turned her head and her eyes met his, she looked so young, and at the same time so different from all women, that involuntarily he moved a step forward.

“Oh!” she cried. “Do you know that this is the very first time in my life that I have known—lived—romance? Romance! The mere word is wonderful. During all the years of my youth I did not even believe in its existence. To think that once I was sixteen—twenty—twenty-eight—the ideal age—and that I never once glanced over the wall into the lovely mysterious gardens of other women’s youth! It is incredible that I never at least dreamed of—anticipated it.”

“But if it has come—what matter?”

“No, it does not matter. But oh, poor poets! poor psychologists! That I can drink this full cup of romance without finding the commonplace dregs of love at the bottom! All the other senses and appreciations are intensified, instead of being submerged, as when one is surrendering ignominiously to the race. I feel that I have attained heights that other women, silly victims that most of them are, have not even the power to imagine. My hands are in the secret caskets of life, and all the jewels are mine! mine!”

She looked so triumphant, so wholly beautiful, so like Isolde, that the colour mounted to his face, although she frightened him a little, and he wished he were ten years older. But she never gave him time to feel that he was not rising to the occasion (although this agonizing sensation visited him occasionally in the retrospect), any more than she ever permitted an electrified moment to prolong itself until it had kindled fire. She came down to earth abruptly.

“Let us walk faster. I want to walk in the woods, and if we loiter we shall take cold.”

But as they entered those dim glades which might have been the depths of remote forests, he asked abruptly, “Am I your lover?”

“Yes—in a new fashion!” She spoke gayly. “It is a sort of mental marriage. Are you content?” She looked at him with the humorous flash in her eyes which always lit up the breach between their ages.

“I think it is rather odd that I am, you know. I must be as cold as a fish—or else that woman I told you about so put me off—”

“Well, don’t put your good fortune under a microscope. Be grateful that when you do awaken you will have preserved the freshness of youth to give zest and charm to the energy of maturity.”

“Suppose I never do awaken.”

“You will. For long I wondered why you had so many of the qualifications as well as something of the temperament of genius, without any one of the creative gifts. But I have come to the conclusion that you have a very rare gift—that of the supreme lover.”

“I?”

“It will wake up in due course, that genius of yours—oh, yes.”

“And why not for you?” He was still conscious of no desire to touch her, but what man could resist flirtation in such surroundings?

“Because neither of us wishes it. We have a perfect thing. Why shatter it? When you cross that dark threshold, you never know! If I were fifteen years younger and of your own world—”

“You would not be you. I don’t know—I have a feeling—a presentiment—that one day I shall love you. I sometimes have a vision of myself ten years older living with you in Venice.” He spoke with sudden energy. “I am certain it will come to pass.”

“Venice smells so dreadfully. I had no idea you were given to romantic musings.”

“I am not. It is, as I said, a sort of fleeting vision, a presentiment. I know that you will always be in my life; and naturally I see you where one can command the greatest seclusion. I do not picture myself wholly your lover, but I always see you quite alone with me—when I am older, and, somehow, different.”

“Well, remember that I too shall be older,” she replied with mock sadness. “By that time, no doubt, Wagner will have ground my voice to powder, and I shall be playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, or introducing Ibsen to London and New York.”

She had succeeded in diverting him. “Ah! you would go to America—you intend to go there some day?”

“Long before my voice has gone, I hope. If I could create a furore in London I should not hesitate to go to New York at once. And—after all—it is my own city; as much mine as if I had been born there, for I went so young. The hatred I felt for it when I left has fled—with the memory of other things; I dream of it now sometimes, and love every stone of it. One can never continue to hate one’s own city, which must always stand out in the memory as one’s best friend. Besides, when you look down upon the world—Society—from one of its own pedestals, nothing matters; no one can hurt you.”

“Would any one try to hurt you?” he asked anxiously. “Do you fear any one now?”

“Not here. But if I went to the land of the free to interpret an unpopular master unprotected by personal fame,—which, in American eyes, only London can give, and only New York set the final seal upon,—I should be hounded into the Hudson River.”

An intonation started him upon a fresh tack. “Did you ever think of self-destruction?”

“More than once. No doubt you have yourself. But because you are young and temperamental. I contemplated putting an end to myself for no such poetic reasons. There were more reasons than one, and generally it was the intense vitality of my mind that deterred me, perhaps an insolent sense of power that would not permit me to lose in the game with life. Now and again, I loved too much—what I then called love; but the reflection that no man was worth the sacrifice restored my cynicism, and cynicism is fatal to that intensity of egoism which counsels annihilation. Strange to think that I once was hard and cynical!”

“At least you might tell me something of your love attacks.” He continued artfully, “I shall never feel really in your confidence until you do.”

“Love affairs of that sort are too commonplace to remember. At first I loved once or twice out of mere youth and racial instinct. But I soon got over that. The great affair? Well, he was the conventional hero, fashioned by satirical Nature for the crudity of youth. He was handsome—but handsome!—brilliant, charming, above all, inconstant—the sort of man that keeps a woman questioning, ‘Will he come?’ Such a man would only incite me to amusement to-day; no type is so ingenuous. But then—well, I tried to kill him one day. He was too quick and too strong for me. I was spared the vulgarity of a newspaper scandal; even a whisper of the attempt never passed my threshold; I took good care that it should not. The mere vision of half a column of headlines with my name in letters as black as Pluto did as much later on to extinguish my love as my separation from the man—I never saw him after. But I had been possessed with the lust to kill, to annihilate, to whirl him and myself out of life. And it was long before that rage, which included everybody and everything on earth, subsided. But at last I came to my senses. And—who knows?—all my life seems to have been but a schooling for my art.”

“Then you regret nothing?”

“I waste no time in futilities, and there is nothing of the Magdalene in my composition.”

“What would you have done if you had not discovered your voice?”

“No doubt I should have discovered in time that I was an actress. Had it not been for that smouldering mental fire in me which always seemed to whisper, ‘Wait! wait!’ I should have become the most famous courtesan of modern times. I had it in me! There were intervals when Cora Pearl inspired me with envy. It was mere instinct—rather the watch-fires of genius—that led me to shun the public eye, even when on the stage.”

“You would have been a horrible woman if you had chosen to go that pace!” he exclaimed, with a sudden access of vision. “You had it in you to become all bad.”

“All.”

“Was art your only hope? Suppose you had loved the right sort of man?”

“Such women don’t love the right sort of man. They are born off the key, and they do not meet the men to inspire them with ideals. Nor women either. Besides, after that I never wished to love again. The only good thing about love is the getting over it. Good God!” She flung out her hands again. “The delight of that recovery, the sense of freedom, the intoxicating liberty! Love to women of my nature is a hideous slavery, the sooner we become flint the better. Leave love for the conservators of the race. But enough of such black subjects this beautiful morning. The sun climbed the Alps while we were in the woods, and the stars have gone out. Let us return. I have a make-up for you! After breakfast I shall take a photograph—but it will flatter you!”

Some time before she had taught him how to use her camera, and he had taken a series of photographs of her in the costumes and attitudes of her various r?les. Thus it happens that to-day Bridgminster is the only person living who can recall Styr without the aid of memory, for even in London, when she realized the half of her supreme ambition, she would not be photographed for the public. And as Ordham, in spite of his laziness, could do most things well that he gave his mind to, these photographs, some twenty in number, are not only admirable specimens of the amateur’s art, but such approximate presentments of Styr that it is to be hoped they will yet find their way into a public gallery.

She let him sleep for two hours after breakfast, then sending for him to come to her in the garden, dressed him in a flowing wig, a velvet jacket, a low soft collar, and wandering scarf. Then she stood off.

“Pout out your lips. Make your eyes heavy with sullen dreams. There! You are Rossetti at nineteen. You look as if about to die of a rose in aromatic pain. How have you escaped the ?sthetic craze, at the very least?”

“I don’t think that I have. Only whereas they think they can do things, I know that I cannot, and do not propose to make myself ridiculous to no end. Please hurry. This wig is very warm.”

He sent the photograph later to his mother, and it left her breathless for quite a moment. As much as she could fall in love with any man, she had fallen in love with Rossetti. At least he had haunted her girlish dreams, and perhaps those of her early married life until the world absorbed her. Of course she had never seen him in his beautiful youth; and to him—then deeply in love with Elizabeth Siddal—she had been nothing more than an interesting sitter whom her august papa had not too graciously allowed him to paint. But stranger things than that have happened in Nature’s workshop.