XXXIX PEGGY HILL AND MARGARETHE STYR

Styr locked herself in her gallery and wondered if she were alive or a walking automaton. Her passion had expended itself, the blood had left her brain, but she was filled to the brim with a sullen, silent, deadly rage—curiously mixed with disappointment and regret. For nearly nine years, in a life ordered to please herself, with not an outer disturbing force, save only an occasional tilt with the opera house cabal, or a fit of temper after a performance, quickly forgotten, with not a disturbance from within, for she had buried the past, trained her powerful will to banish all such futilities as regret, she had aimed not only to lead an ideal life but to perfect and ennoble her character. Although she had been almost a recluse, she had helped many young people with promising voices, and her purse was always open to the unfortunates in the chorus. Perhaps she had deliberately kept her humanity alive by these acts of kindness and sympathy, knowing that there was danger to art in the drying up of the springs of human nature. Perhaps; she could not tell; did not care. But at least she had led not only a blameless, a kindly, an inspiring, a finely mental and nobly artistic life, but she had achieved what she knew to be happiness, and this by the sealing up of her inner kingdom.

It is easy to ignore the inner kingdom so long as no man enters it. It is easy to be impersonal, mental, a consummate devotee of art so long as the heart and soul and passions encounter no powerful disturbing force. Nothing so astonished and shocked her in these comparatively calm moments as the discovery that art was not all, that common primitive instincts were stronger in the final test than the elevated choice of the brain supported by genius and will. So profound had been her contempt for human weakness, her loathing for men, so exalted, so triumphant her progress in that great sphere to which her voice had given her the golden key, that she had believed herself to be elevated permanently to a plane high above the common. She had never closed her eyes to the very second-rate clay of which most musicians were composed, both mental and moral, but she had been as serenely aware of her superior intellectual gifts, of a will stronger than any she had ever encountered, as she had been of her voice, her dramatic genius; and she had never even speculated upon a possible descent from that glorious plane where she dwelt alone with her art. She was a woman, after all, and she so abhorred herself that, had she possessed the sorceries of Isolde’s ancestors, she would have obliterated Earth from the cosmic scheme.

She had received Ordham’s letter a few moments before departing for the opera house, and the same post brought a note from Princess Nachmeister, announcing that “our jüngling, Gott sei dank, was really engaged to the American heiress of forty million marks, and was the more riveted to his bargain—that charming uncertain youth!—by being madly, nay absurdly, in love with the ravishing beauty.” Then the blood had gone to Styr’s head.

Even now she wondered if she really loved Ordham, for she was sensible of none of that organic craving which once alone would have distinguished one man from another in her imperial regard. At this moment, indeed, she did not love him at all; she hated him with a passion which, if stilled by exhaustion, was none the less volcanic, eloquent of the tremendous upheaval in her nature. But she was too wise not to suspect that it was the hatred which is merely love reversed. It would pass, her very mental balance would see to that; and what then? Hers had not been the experience of love in its infinite variety, and she stared out at the dark future with the first real fear of her life. During her long intimacy with Ordham she had been fully conscious that she had never liked any one half as well, never drawn as close to any mortal spirit. When he had gone, she had had time for but a brief reaction from her perverse feminine exultation in renewed freedom, in the luxury of missing him, for she had left almost immediately for Switzerland, then on her second Gastspiel. Even so she had missed him, and had thought of him tenderly, hoped that he would keep his word and return to Munich. But she had been very busy, very uncomfortable, very much diverted, and the ovations she received had put all other wants in her soul to sleep. It was not until she was again in Munich, in the house which he still pervaded, where she saw him in his characteristic attitudes, heard his mellow English voice with its languid drawl and impatient breaks, that her vague sense of loss had grown poignant. But even that had been tempered before long by a gentle melancholy, a new sensation and not unpleasant, for the ego likes to run the gamut; and the certainty that he would return to Munich from time to time had further mitigated that deep sense of loss. She even hoped, or thought she did, that he would marry well, be delivered of the belittling embittering want of money; nothing could interfere with their friendship, or whatever it was. She, too, was possessed by the uneasy sense that it was something more, but even as the days passed and she finally became restless, more and more disturbed, coming out of her sleep sometimes with a sense of actual terror, she would not permit her thought to enter the analytical zone, the word love to rise before the judgment seat.

And had it been love? This was the question which now shook her puzzled and tortured brain, and banished all hope of sleep. Was it but an imperious pride outraged, a secure sense of possession shattered, that had lashed her into a berserk rage? Vanity, perhaps, that had been fed and watered into an abnormal growth for twenty-four years, first by the power she wielded over men, then by the far more heady incense of the public,—could that be it, mere vanity screaming with rage at this defeat by a silly little American girl? She knew the type, had seen hundreds of them in her many trips to Paris; moreover, she had seen this Mabel Cutting several times during the conspicuous beauty’s sojourn in Munich, she had sat almost beside her at a performance of Fidelio one night. The girl was beautiful and patrician, no doubt accomplished as girls ran; she was the sort that the American youth was falling in love with every hour, but she was not the girl to bewitch John Ordham, for the type was shallow, vain, soulless, hopelessly unintellectual. If he had fallen a victim to the race, he must have been engineered by very clever women. She knew him well enough to be sure that, left to himself, although he might have thought it best to marry the girl, he never would have fallen in love with her—the real Mabel Cutting—unless something besides gold dust had been thrown into his eyes. There had been extraordinarily clever scheming somewhere. She could but guess its nature, but she knew Ordham. His mind had artfully been lulled, and his mere youth and sex manipulated with the modern sorceries of tact and diplomacy.

And the real Ordham belonged to her. The blood rose to her head once more as she was forced to admit that the fine flower of his awakening would not be hers, was irretrievably given to a little fool whom he would hate, not merely tire of, before a year was out.

And this she could have had. She knew it now as she recalled certain moments when she had caught him looking at her with heavy eyes, or a strange stare as of something stirring and quivering in the depths of his being. But she had slurred over these dangerous moments, and without so much as a flush of self-consciousness. Not only had she finished with the masculinities, but she was not the woman to want the love she must rouse, engineer, reveal to itself. With all her tyrannous strength of will she was woman personified, and she must be wooed and won imperiously, or she should prefer to love alone.

She ground her teeth and beat the floor with her foot, and reverted to the vernacular of her youth, as she anathematized her inconsistency, her dog-in-the-manger attitude. Had Ordham appeared before her at that moment, she would not even have considered marriage with him, would have hesitated long before committing herself to the less binding relation. Not only had she no desire to wreck his career, but she was not sure even now that she should greatly care if she went to her grave without having touched his lips. But he was hers. Inside that charming flesh was a John Ordham that no other woman would ever glimpse, that never would attain full growth save in contact with the woman so jealously hidden within her own noncommittal shell.

It was her first definite experience of the sovereign demands of the soul, of the recognition of the ego, that invisible entity which makes itself so uncomfortable in its earthly home until released by disease or decay. Were the needs of this God-in-little more lasting and determined than those of the affections, the body? Infinite, perhaps? In that case what should she do? what should she do?

She paced up and down the room as a new thought tormented her. This girl? What were most girls at that age but little fools, particularly if pretty and rich? Had not all women once been silly girls? Suppose this lovely creature, under the tutelage of John Ordham and the brilliant society in which she was to spend her most plastic years, should develop into a clever, intellectual, subtle woman? Then, what of her, Margarethe Styr, a fixture in Munich, an outcast from the circles of which this girl would become a component part? She stretched out her arms and opened and shut her long flexible hands. If Mabel Cutting had chanced to sing the part of Brang?ne to-night she would have been strangled in view of all Munich. Oh, no doubt of that! It was as well indeed that the young lady was in London.

All these years of proud mental development, of devotion to her art, the abrupt but uninterrupted sequence to those terrible forty hours in the bony clutch of death,—all, then, were as naught? The evil, the appalling passions of her nature, were but the stronger for their long sleep. All her new life had done for her was to develop a new sort of love capacity with terrors and torments to which the old were but the brief aberrations of a superior beast. Love! Love! She had never even guessed the meaning of the word before. She hated Ordham so desperately that she would have liked to twist her fingers about his own neck; but again she realized, with a sharp expulsion of the breath, that this was but the upheaval of the volcano’s mud and poisonous gases preceding the liberation of the incandescent fires. But while possibly she might not fall into rage again, she must pass through other phases whose mere faint cries for liberty, for birth, terrified her. She was face to face with the greatest of all the mysteries in the always nebulous region of love, an experience known to few, either because they are not developed enough or because they have never met their peer.

She and Ordham were one. He would not appreciate his loss, for he was young, there was too much life before him, too many phases, the prospect of greatness which would finally rouse his energies and fill his time. But she, who was close to the summit of her career, for whom art had no mysteries, fame no more surprises, what should she do? what should she do?

But if the woman is sometimes stronger than the artist, the artist never sits long on the dust heap. Already it was whispering that she would act better than ever, she would descend into deeper and more intricate recesses of human nature when pondering upon her heroines, give the world more complete revelations. Even new forces of expression must be hers. She had never felt so creative as at that moment when she stopped short in her tigerish pacing and laughed aloud at the power of art to make itself heard at such a crisis in the human heart. At that moment, had art possessed a corporeal body, it too might have been throttled.

But it went on whispering: “Cultivate this berserk mood. Do not forget it, do not permit the will to stifle it if it fires the brain again. Continue to love this man, the more hopelessly the better. What is mere human passion to art; what, indeed, but its necessary but inferior partner? It is the stimulant, the drink, the food, the fertilizer. Nurse this! Nurse this!”

And her ambition? Would it not spur that as well? She had been too luxuriously, too artistically content, in this beautiful city, waiting for the world to come to her, content to dream of triumphs in its greater capitals. She had needed a shock, an imperative need of change of scene, of conquest of Earth itself to mend her riven soul; she might have idled here until her high notes had turned from gold to brass.

Her long fingers still twitched and curved, her face was as fearful as that of some dark creature of the Middle Ages poisoning a husband or rival; but her clearing brain argued pro and con, rejected personal happiness in favour of her art, finally announced that she still would have rejected it had the choice been hers. Ordham might have wrought extraordinary changes in her, but of the two passions that controlled her, that for him was not the stronger.

When she realized this, she went over to the dining room and disposed of the cold supper awaiting her. She had little appetite, but she ate abundantly, nevertheless, even warming the bouillon over the spirit lamp, for she knew that nothing would so certainly drain the blood from her head. When she had finished she returned to the gallery, and lighting a cigarette, sat down to think connectedly.

That she had no impulse to go to London and exert her fascinations upon Ordham, bring him to his senses, proved to her, that however she might resent his desertion, regret his loss, love him, in short, her mind would never permit her to wreck his career or her own. She had no taste for love in an Italian villa, idle herself, with an idle man on her hands; she was a worker, an artist; such a life would bore her to extinction, wither those tender and beautiful shoots that had not been blasted by the rain of hot ashes in her mind to-night. What she really wanted was a return of the old conditions, their permanence; and this she had known all along she could not have, known that it was an episode, from every moment of which she had deliberately extracted the full flavour. Did Ordham love and seek her, there were no mortal conditions in which they could unite. Her past life, which would be unearthed to the last detail did she seek to enter society as an equal; her present position, so public as to relegate a husband to the position of a superior lackey; that insatiable artistic nine-tenths of her nature,—all precluded marriage with any man that respected himself; any permanent tie, in fact. She had exulted for eight years in her aloneness, her aloofness; now was the time to decide that this condition must exist as long as she did. There was nothing for her but art, art, art. She uttered the word aloud in her round sonorous voice; she no longer had the least desire to throttle it. On the contrary it induced the profoundest sensation of gratitude she had ever known. Without it where should she be to-night? Where, indeed?

It occurred to her to wonder that after her life of the past eight years there was any of the original woman left. What a poor half-born thing was civilization, with its educations, its spiritual developments, its thousand magnets for the higher and highly specialized centres of the brain, when a really great woman could be overwhelmed by passion like those confidential agents of Nature that swarmed the earth. If she still was unconscious of any elemental ache for this man, the fact remained that she had acted for an hour or two to-night with the blind primitive fury of a jungle beast deprived of its mate. And—it might be—if she was to continue to love the inner hidden man alone,—that product of the centuries charged with the electrical fascination of an uncommon personality which had charmed her out of her happy solitude,—she must see as little of him as possible. It was on the cards, that once roused, his progress would be very rapid, his character would overtake his mind. Then, were they thrown together, the real danger would begin. No doubt, one thing that had protected her was that the visible man was too young. She should have felt embarrassed had they taken to love making. But twenty-five is not young for an Englishman, and she might find him very wide awake indeed a year hence.

She made up her mind to correspond with him intermittently for a time, then drop him out of her life. She should miss him, ache for him, be forced to plod through all the pros and cons again and again, for it is long before the reiterative heart runs down; but her will had carried her through great crises before; she could always rely upon it. And there were worse things than memories to live upon, particularly if radiant enough to put out the ghastly flickers of others.

She should overlook no opportunity that would lead her to a broader stage, replete with distraction. There was talk of organizing a Wagner season in New York as a pendant to the regular season of Italian and French opera, for the fame of The Master, thanks to Theodore Thomas, Leopold Damrosch, and other enthusiasts, was steadily growing. She had met Walter Damrosch in Bayreuth; he had heard her sing many times, and no doubt would have approached her for this innovation had it not been for the ten years’ contract she was known to have signed with the Hof-und-National-Theatre in Munich, and the King’s personal objection that she should leave Munich for more than a few weeks at a time. If this coming season of German opera was successful, she should write to Damrosch and announce her willingness to break her contract if unable to obtain a leave of absence. It was probable that by that time the King would be wholly mad; in that case her enemies in the Hof would be her allies for once. The only shadow on this brilliant future was the possible confiscation of her villa did she summarily leave without permission. That would substitute one unhappiness for another, for she passionately loved the only home she had ever had, and believed that the acuteness of its later associations would mellow with time. Well, she had her friends, Princess Nachmeister among others. Let the future take care of itself. Meanwhile she should demand other r?les here: the revival of the great operas of Glück—Alceste, Ifigénie en Tauride, Orfeo ed Euridice. She would sing the great r?le of Dido in The Trojan. All would afford her fine dramatic opportunities and fill her time with work.

She went to her desk to write to Ordham. The temptation was strong to betray something of what she felt. He deserved that! And a sentimental letter, that last indulgence, was a woman’s right. But she did nothing of the sort, reflecting in time that a man is not open to sentiment from two sources at once, particularly when in the throes of his puppy love. She did not even address the man she knew so well, and whom Mabel Cutting did not know at all, for she felt quite positive that he was sound asleep. She wrote him a dignified friendly note, telling him that she had long been prepared for the news, and was sure that he had chosen wisely. She did not even insert a blunt sting here and there, for she knew him so well that she could write exactly what, in his present mood, he most would wish to receive from her. When it was finished, she found her first real consolation in visualizing it as an impenetrable bulwark about her pride. She thanked her stars that he had not come in person to tell her of his engagement, permitting her to divine his passion for the little fool. No doubt she would have beaten him, and he would have been too polite to beat her in return! Heaven! what a mess she would have made of it. She devoutly hoped she had buried Peggy Hill five fathoms deep at last.