XXVI FRIENDSHIP IN A BORROWED FRAME

The King suffered from toothache. Detesting dentists, and knowing from bitter experience that it would endure until the nerve died, he indifferently granted Styr’s request for a month’s leave of absence. Chaperoned by Fr?ulein Lutz, she and Ordham went on what they called a walking tour in the Bavarian Alps. Travelling third class, both for the picturesque companionship it afforded and to escape awkward rencounters, they took the train from village to village, and spent several hours of each day leisurely climbing, driving, wandering in the woods, or floating on the brilliant waters, as deeply toned as emerald or sapphire, of Alpine lakes. Avoiding hotels, they lodged on the outskirts of their villages, and Lutz went to market every morning. They took no servants with them, and nothing could exceed Ordham’s devotion in carrying wraps and ordering carriages. But this, they were not long discovering, was the limit of his usefulness. Either Styr or the chaperon bought the tickets, found the porters, engaged the rooms, bargained with guides, ordered the meals, made out the routes, and asked all necessary questions. On the morning after their arrival in Oberammergau, Fr?ulein Lutz almost burst into Styr’s bedroom.

“Mein Gott!” she exclaimed. “But I have just prepared his bath! But I, Hiobe Lutz! This is the climax. I met him wandering in the hall with his eyes half opened and seeming to look for something he could not find. He wore a pink dressing-gown with green facings, and his bare feet were not even in slippers. I asked him if he were ill. He said, No, that he had no bath. It never occurred to him to walk downstairs and ask for his tub, nor even to call out of the window. But he looked so helpless, so young, that I—Himmel!—I ran downstairs and found for that giant baby his tub, which had been put in the shed. Then, accompanied by the daughter of the house, I carried it up to his room—then returned again with jugs of water, hot and cold! He thanked us ‘so much.’ Oh, he has the prettiest manners. They never fail. But myself, I shall have to cross the English Channel and pass those examinations for him.”

“You know you are devoted to him.”

“What is it?” asked Lutz with sudden suspicion. “Can it be this hypnotism they talk about?”

“Charm comes from the same root, I fancy. And then he really is helpless. How can people, even the rich and great, bring up a boy like that?”

Lutz nodded in sage disgust. “The aristocracy! Ach Gott! What will become of them when the next French Revolution, so to speak, comes? How they must have suffered, those poor pampered things! It was not the fear of death. That was nothing. Race can always meet downfall and death with an air—an air that sustains them within as without. But before the scaffold! When they had to dress, to wait on themselves!—to think! Ah, that was the tragedy. I feel sorry for these poor helpless aristocrats; but no, I would not abolish the institution, because it gives to us humble bourgeois the savour that Europe furnishes for America! So, when I saw that poor helpless boy—who can talk like his grandfather—ach! I cannot understand him. He is made up of too many parts, contradictions, for my old brain. On the whole, I should like to spank him.”

Styr laughed and put the finishing touches to her costume of brown linen, which looked simple and bucolic, but had been cut in Paris, and, with a hat and veil as soft and rich in their shading as a pheasant’s wing, was no less artistic and becoming than the white frocks she put on for supper. A few moments later Ordham entered their common sitting room, fresh, smiling, unconscious of the comment he had inspired. He had quite forgotten the episode of the bath.

He shook hands with Countess Tann and Fr?ulein Lutz in his usual formal manner, his eyes beaming with pleasure as they always did upon entering the presence of his chosen friend, unless something had happened to put him out of temper. As he was so much more amiable and happy even than usual this morning, Styr suddenly understood how he must have missed his servant, although he had never referred to the man. He was feeling pleasantly cared for once more, even if he had ungratefully forgotten the author of his well-being. No doubt the warm water for his bath had often failed to appear, and he had none of the national mania for “cold tubs.” From this time forth, until he was safely deposited in the Legation once more, Lutz grimly made a nurse of herself. She not only saw to his bath, but she packed and unpacked his trunk, and discovering that many objects were mateless, divorced, of course, in the laundry, she wrote to Hines for a new supply. He accepted all these attentions with the most charming courtesy, but his lack of emphasis amused Styr, although poor Lutz took his polite acquiescence in her devotions as a matter of course.

Upon this morning he went at once out upon the little balcony where they were to breakfast, and murmured his delight, calling Styr to join him with an imperious motion of his head. They had arrived after dark and seen little of the long straggling village on the bank of its narrow stream. Their lodging was at the very end of the street, where the road branches to Ettal, and from the balcony they could see the romantic winding village in the narrow valley, above which towered a peak surmounted by a cross. There were mills with great wheels on the river, dilapidated bridges, peasants in costume, the usual church with its domed steeple high on its terrace, and surrounded by tombs. Even the roofs of the houses were picturesque, the women working in the narrow fields. On all sides, covering the mountains, was the forest, and over all a peace indescribable.

As they had brought their own coffee, and fruit was abundant, they enjoyed their breakfast even if the bread was sour and the butter ill-made; luxuries they had dismissed from their minds. When it was over, leaving Lutz to consult with their hostess, Margarethe and Ordham strolled through the village. Oberammergau resembled many other Bavarian and Tyrolean villages up to a certain point, and then its individuality began. On the plastered fa?ades of the pointed houses were beautiful religious frescoes as soft and mellow as those of Ghirlandajo, and in the church, larger and more graceful than many, were two hideous bedizened skeletons of saints. Protected by glass, and gorgeously arrayed, their awful skulls and hands, chemically preserved, seemed to cry out for the last act of death, which would grant them the dust and oblivion of the grave. The church was half full of men and women, dropped in for a casual prayer, and all dressed in the picturesque garb of Ober-Bayern, so rare these few years later.

Even the people of this village of the Passion Play are different from those of other villages. Bavarian peasants are kindly, but these of Oberammergau have an exquisite and unfailing courtesy, and every child greets the stranger with “Grüss Gott,” and runs to kiss his hand. Although it would be several years before the next performance of the Passion Play, many of the men wore their hair long, for a religious drama of some sort is given every year. The very expression of these people indicated a superiority of intelligence and character. All hoped to be chosen, or rechosen, for the next great performance; and few in that village, where the light was as searching as ever was turned upon a throne, but cultivated the best that was in him. It is probably the only spot on Earth where Christianity is a working success.

Ordham and Margarethe lingered at the windows of the shops, admiring the wood carving, and bought a number of crucifixes and religious groups for the servants at home. Finally, they sat down at a table outside one of the cafés, where the Christus of the last performance, who looked as much like Christ as any mortal can, was drinking beer and eating a large piece of black bread and Swiss cheese. Our friends listened for a few moments to his animated discussion with a neighbour upon the utility of damming the river, that it might do more good in summer and less harm in winter. When he had finished his repast he rose, bowed profoundly to the strangers, and sauntered off, followed by a troop of children that all hoped to be Christuses in their turn.

“I should think it must be a terrible strain,” said Ordham. “Surely human nature must break out occasionally.”

“No doubt it does. But these people are saturated with the spirit of the Passion Play, and so have their ancestors been before them—for three hundred years. They are not only moral but happy. The first time I came here, one young woman, whose histrionic talent was remarkable, told me that she had refused two offers from Berlin managers because life would be a blank to her if she could not look out of her window every morning and see the cross on Kochel. This is the only community in the world which is consistent generation in and out to a high ideal.”

“I wonder if it is a haven of rest to outsiders,” said Ordham, who was staring at her after his habit, his cigarette cold. “Could you come here if your voice failed you; if, for any reason, you could not act—come here and find peace?”

Margarethe shook her head. “For a week—a fortnight. Then I should fly to the very centres of distraction. This peace is not for the outsider. It is not sold in the shops with the crucifixes. It takes generations to make. Even if one brought here a peaceful, even a religious, mind, one would never feel quite the real thing. And yet I do not believe there is a self-righteous person in Oberammergau. Alas! Our tête-à-tête is over. Here comes your grenadier.”

Ordham hastily lit a cigarette as his Lutz strode up, exclaiming: “Did you think to escape your lesson? We shall have it here. It shall be conversation and dictation.”

“The morning is so beautiful—you are going away?” Margarethe was opening her parasol.

“But yes,” said Lutz severely. “Is her place here, to distract your sufficiently frivolous mind? Ask me a question.”

“Do you prefer chocolate or coffee?” he asked ingratiatingly.

“Chocolate, with thanks. But we are no longer in the Ollendorff stage or you would not be returning next month to England to face your destiny. I have thought of ten terrible questions, than which they can construct nothing more difficult, more ridiculous. I have brought pencil and paper. Write, while I drink the excellent chocolate.”

And Ordham groaned and resigned himself.

If Lutz was inexorable in her own province she was an irreproachable chaperon. They saw little of her save at meals, and wandered in the woods, or, here in Oberammergau, sat for hours beside the cross, high on Kochel, indulging in those long silences where ego’s wing-tips graze one another now and again. Often Ordham went frankly to sleep, and Styr forgot him, and dreamed of conquests in London and New York, such as Patti herself had never wrung from those blasé publics.

They went on to Berchtesgaden, that strange tumbled mass of peaks and ledges and rocky walls, with its bit of valley, its castle, its village dotted all over the scenery it cannot escape. They climbed to the glacier, explored the salt mine, and spent hours on the great green lake, K?nigsee; which looks as if a mountain had been sliced through its middle, the high walls thrust apart, and waters, from some dark and sinister depths of Earth, depths where she prepared her demoniacal schemes to blast surfaces dear to man, had risen and covered the floor of the gorge. It is a wild primeval landscape, suggestive of centuries of convulsions, perhaps that the end is not yet. But if the mountains were terrible, the lake gloomy, the monastery in the tiny valley was peaceful, and when they climbed into the recesses of these volcanic masses, they found the peasants, in the little dairy huts, very hospitable and friendly. But once, when they went out by moonlight, quite alone on the lake, the great dark expanse between its bare and menacing walls filled them with terror, and they took hands and ran home like children.