LIII LOVE

“Ketch ’em alive! Ketch ’em alive!” The fly-paper vender had the note of spring in his voice, and other and more distant street cries betrayed the same almost plaintive quickening under the influence of the warmth and light so long withdrawn. Ordham let himself out of the house looking as hard as he felt, but in a few moments the pagan beauty of the morning and the gay face of London in her springtime laughed his ill humor away and banished the memory of his wife. No city is more beautiful than London during her brief season of sunshine, with the flower boxes set like little Italian balconies on her grim old houses, the vivid close green of parks and squares, the endless processions of open carriages filled with smartly dressed folk from all parts of the world; some in the native finery of countries so far from occidental that they give the scene a touch of opera bouffe. As Ordham walked toward Dover Street he fancied he could hear the birds singing in Hyde Park—a colony that dwelt in a tree beside his bedroom window had awakened him early with their chattering—see the swans sailing on the lake in the park of St. James. It was good to be alive, good to belong by divine right to the one really great city in the world, and as he presented six-pence to several of his friends the crossing sweepers—more for the pleasure of receiving their blessing than because he had the least idea they needed it—he smiled at them so radiantly that more than ever they were convinced he was the sweetest young gentleman that ever gave siller, and ‘oped he would be ‘appy for ever and ever.

Ordham felt that he had every reason to be happy. Were not he and Margarethe Styr going for a long day in the country, a long unbroken day? Although they had carried out their programme and visited many sights, still was it their first whole day together. Rehearsals demanded by the heterogeneous mass of singers they had been able to borrow from German cities had stolen many of her free days; she had felt obliged to attend three receptions arranged in her honour and receive once; and during the coming week practically all her spare time would be occupied with rehearsals for Tannh?user and Lohengrin, for she had not sung the r?les of Elizabeth and Elsa for several years. But these hours they had snatched together had been wholly delightful, their spirits had been high to the edge of excitement; both took a nervous delight in playing with a danger that would soon finish, leave them face to face either with tragedy or a vast and cynical philosophy. It was tacitly understood that this was to be their last period of companionship, and although Ordham alternated between the pit of melancholy when alone and an almost fierce sensation of happiness while with this woman, whom he found more surely his than in the old days when his eyes were closed, he refused at any time to ask more of fate or to dwell upon the future. But that he was no longer the languid manageable youth of less than a year ago he knew as well as she. If he too put ambition before love, accepted the consequences of his marrying, it was because he chose to do so, not because of the woman’s subtle manipulation. Ordham sometimes found an added food for sadness in the knowledge that he had left the best of his youth behind him, but was wise enough to congratulate himself that his acute attack of racial industry had cleared his blood of blinding humours.

But only to Styr was there any change in his appearance, and as he entered her sitting room this morning he looked the archetype of conquering youth, of splendid young English manhood. His mouth, which of late had often been consciously firm, was as soft and boyish as when they had met at Neuschwanstein, and his eyes, always luminous, were sparkling with anticipation. Not the least of his attractions to Styr was his perfect grooming, for being artist as well as woman, she hated the sight of “artistic” men. She herself looked very smart, as he immediately told her, in an entire costume of tan-coloured cloth. As the day was warm and she could not wear a wrap, and as her tailor was the best in Paris, her frock followed every line and curve of her perfect figure. But as she had concluded to ignore the fact that Ordham was man as well as soul, and circumstances protected them both, she saw no reason for making herself clumsy and uncomfortable, as if he were a boy and she his guardian! Moreover, she was not averse from leaving in his memory as many charming pictures of herself as might be composed.

“How delicious it is merely to be alive!” she exclaimed with that enthusiasm which, when the sullenness of her face was routed by the mere pagan joy of living, was not the least of her fascinations. “Where are we going?” she added, as they entered a hansom.

“I have not the least idea.” But in a moment he lifted the trap and directed the cabby to drive to Euston Station.

They alighted at Bushey, and, hiring a carriage for the day, drove or strolled through the old English lanes, with their high scented hedges, past houses built for subjects of Elizabeth, visited the tomb of Bacon at St. Albans, and even stared at the splendours of Hatfield House like veritable tourists, Ordham characteristically neglecting to mention that he had dined and slept there more than once. They idled on commons and in woods almost as full of light, lunched at the famous inn of Harrow, sat on the tomb favoured by Byron in the old town’s churchyard, hung over high-walled fences to inhale the perfume of flowers that the island’s moisture makes so rich, and to stare at the immense masses of pink and white hawthorn; bought fruit of a farmer (grown under glass, of course!) and sat on his wall to eat it. Few counties in England have more charms than Hertfordshire, and not its least is that it is practically undiscovered by the tourist.

They dined in the inn at Stanmore, dismissing their carriage, as they could take the train at this beautiful old town, which invited them to linger as long as it was light. They soon forsook the enormous joints, the mess of greens, the peas as round and hard as marbles, and an apple dumpling like a tunnel filled with the débris of many wrecks, and wandered forth once more. The streets were very narrow, the houses, of a dozen centuries, covered with ivy close cut; the church looked as old as England. At this hour the little town was silent and outwardly deserted, but one expected every moment to hear the sound of a horn, to see the London coach dash round a corner, a post-chaise with a lady in powder and patches at the window. Stanmore is so close to London that it was the first town reached by the mounted courier galloping through the dawn to tell the country that Victoria was queen, but it is as old and quiet and forgotten as if it were lost in one of the great counties of the north.

Gypsy wagons were halted on one corner of the heath, and the women cooked supper in the early twilight while the men lay on the ground and smoked their pipes. Their children, catching sight of two prosperous strangers, ran without prompting to beg. Ordham and Margarethe gave them silver, then, declining to have their fortunes told, in other words getting rid of them, strolled out over the heath. This large piece of waste land is as wild as anything in America, broken and rough of surface and covered with tangled grasses and shrubs. Beyond was what looked to be a black mass of woods, but the glimpse of a gateway suggested that they might be but the generously planted trees of a park. A grey church spire of some distant hamlet stood out sharply against a red band of afterglow. There was an intermittent tinkle of cow-bells, but no other sound.

They sat down in the very centre of the heath and watched the twilight gather, that long English twilight without chill or dew which brings with it something of the mystery of night while still holding in a loose embrace the safeguards of day. At that hour the flowers smell more sweetly, the night moths flutter among them, and man feels that his day’s work is done. A pungent scent rose from the gorse of Stanmore Heath, but Margarethe, who had felt as exhilarated all day as if she were a girl unexpectedly alone with a man secretly loved, felt her spirits drop. She remembered who she was and one of her objects in coming to London. So far not a word had passed between them concerning his married life. They had renewed the old intimate friendship in snatches that made them eager for more, but had found much to talk about in the monuments they visited, the most tactful programme for Covent Garden, in many subjects of common impersonal interest. But Margarethe had determined upon at least one crossed and dotted conversation with Ordham, and she believed this to be the time.

Ordham, too, was silent, staring straight before him with an expression which Styr had seen before when words lagged, an expression of mingled abstraction, astonishment, and apprehension.

“I want the whole story,” she said abruptly.

He turned to her with a start and flush. “The whole story?”

“Yes. All that has happened since we parted in Munich.”

“I thought we were to ignore the subject of my marriage.”

“To ignore is not to forget. I have tormented myself with so many versions—possibilities—how shall I call it? I want the truth. It will lay the ghost.”

“I am afraid you will hate me. I was an inconceivable ass.”

“No—it is wonderful that the story should be always the same and always different! But I hate generalities. I cannot go on confounding you with millions of other men. I want the specific incidents, your own version. A man’s viewpoint is always his best excuse.”

“Very well.” And as his love for her had always appealed to the carefully secluded fount of truth in his nature, for love would be wholly truth were it not for life, he told the story from beginning to end, omitting neither the skilful plot he had since unravelled, nor his own abject surrender.

“I loved Mabel; there can be no doubt of that. I suppose that the long root of such love is the axis of life. It permits millions to marry every day that have little or no prospect of educating or even supporting possible offspring; but if they paused to forecast, in other words, if their brains were not in a state of toxic poisoning from this love secretion, whatever it may be, the race would soon put an end to itself. Perhaps in time the law will step in and forbid marriages before the man is thirty and the woman twenty-five. As for the turbulence of desire and suffering—after one has endured the acute stage for a certain length of time, there is bound to be a decline and reaction. Man simply cannot suffer and desire at concert pitch forever. Moreover, did the law forbid the banns, a man would take jolly good care to keep out of harm’s way. But I know now that even had Mabel been all they made me believe, all that she looked, I should have ceased to care tuppence for her, although no doubt rather later. It is not necessary to explain the reason to you. A man may love many times in his life, but only one woman takes full and complete possession of his inner kingdom, as you have called it. Man is a sultan. One woman is his sultana; the others, absorbing enough during their little hour, are the caprices of his desultory harem. It is odd that his legal wife should so often be but one of these casual minor passions, and the woman he may never possess the one to persuade him of the immortality of love. It is a nice comment upon the makeshifts of civilization.”

Styr stirred uneasily. She was white, for the story had cut her even more deeply than she had anticipated. It is not pleasant to hear your chosen idol draw a picture of his youthful passion, his first abandon for another woman. She had clenched her long hands, and a blast from the furnace of her soul sped in the direction of Grosvenor Square. But she answered judicially: “The first study of civilized nations is every possible precaution against anarchy. They are doing their little best; we can only wait until the world grows wiser.” Then she laughed with a fair assumption of gayety. “It is something more than humorous that I should be the one to say that, not you: I, Margarethe Styr, and you, John Ordham, so soon to be a hereditary legislator of the most wisely governed country on earth. Well! Never mind! I have played many r?les in my life.”

“Will you not tell me that story now?” he asked eagerly. “You have half promised, more than once. And I am sick of outrageous concoctions. The truth could not be worse.”

“The truth is always worse, when there is any foundation for gossip at all. No!” she said violently, her voice harsh with the revolt let loose by his own story. “I will never tell you. It is only because I have lived so much, suffered so much, weathered a thousand storms, that I have been able to listen to all you have told me to-night without hating you. Were it otherwise, were I ten years younger, it would be months before I should want even to look at you again. You could never stand a similar—a far worse test. This life may not be for us, but at all events you shall never hear from my lips what would make you—Ah! Bah!”

“Do you believe in another life?” he asked, tactfully ignoring this outburst, in which he secretly exulted.

“This inner life of ours does not undergo death and resurrection for nothing,” she replied sullenly. “Nor is imagination a mere offshoot of the active mind. If it means anything, it means that somewhere, in some future incarnation, or on some more satisfactory planet, its supernormal efforts will become the facts of existence. And what then? Still subtler and more imperative wants that can only be realized in a higher state still? It makes one incline to Buddhism and Nirvana.”

“Either way of looking at it is a poor compensation for the disappointments of this life, when you are young, at least; and when you are old, you don’t care. The trouble is with civilization. We need a new religion. Perhaps the solution is in a combination of the Eastern and Western forms. It is as significant that Christianity has converted but one-third of the Earth’s peoples as that the remaining two-thirds are an anomaly in this eve of the twentieth century. The last are too supercilious in their ancient wisdom to borrow anything from us. We are raw conceited schoolboys, too ignorant, and worse, to help ourselves from their abundant stores. Perhaps the time will come.”

Margarethe suppressed her feminine resentment at generalities in the twilight. “Well, that may be one of your many missions. But it was not a personal craving alone that made me demand the history of these last ten months. It is an immense relief to me to know that your eyes are opened, that you are no longer blinded by either love or cunning. I have a strong suspicion, and so has Excellenz, that they do not intend you shall go abroad. I have heard since my arrival of your wife’s consuming ambition to be a beauty in London, of her detestation of Continental life, the third, or fourth, fiddle she would be forced to play for many years. They will keep you here if they can.”

“I have heard nothing of all this, but I shouldn’t wonder—and it makes no difference. As soon as my wife is able to travel, I go to whatever post is open to me. I should go the day you left London had I not given my word to remain here until September or thereabouts.”

“And what if she refuses to go with you?”

Ordham smiled grimly. “I have not the faintest idea she will refuse to go with me when she is persuaded that no argument or threat will keep me at home. I can understand that she will hate to leave London,—England,—but she will accompany me. Small doubt of that.”

Margarethe set her teeth. It was with some difficulty that she clung to the programme she had worked out before arriving in England. To manipulate him until his wife should be abhorrent and desertion inevitable, with the consequent scandal and disaster, was not the part she had set herself to play in his life. But when the rich soil of a woman’s nature, long covered with the volcanic ashes of old passions, which conserve and fertilize, is sprouting with the roses and the toadstools of a new passion, the r?les of operatic masterpieces are mere play to that of the disinterested friend. Margarethe had come to this renewal of their intimacy secure in the belief that her passions were either dead or safely entombed; but they had revealed themselves, insolent and powerful, when, shaken with the tumults of Isolde, she had met his eyes that first night in Covent Garden. She was appalled, but her will lost nothing of its strength, she had practised self-control for many years; and by one of those profound and obscure contradictions, ever manifesting themselves in human nature, her idealism recovered from its late inertia and entered upon a new lease. The more insistently and unequivocally love spoke, the more determined she grew that descend to that buried plane set thick with awful corpses she would not, those dead foul memories that must forever make the materializing of love mean but one more carnal experience. Once she could have idealized this bond, even had she known Ordham in her ignorant youth, a thousand times more had she met him with a mature mind and a past of even comparative ignorance; but now, the moment she gave herself, all power of idealism would be slain, and she believed that she should kill herself—perhaps him as well.

Nor was self-control an unendurable tax. She had passed that first and best period of reproductiveness, when passion drowns reason, nor had she reached that age when so many women fatally awaken to the fact that but a bit of youth remains and they had best make the most of it. Moreover, perhaps the vitalest point of all, she was a great artist with the world at her feet. Poor women, that had only their good intentions to bulwark them! She threw them a passing sympathy.

“Perhaps it is not necessary,” she said abruptly, “but I should like your promise that you will permit nothing to interfere with your career, the public exercise of your best energies. I know that you will not reply, ‘Of course!’ and that if you make me the promise you will keep it.”

“The promise is not necessary, but you shall have it if you wish. What else have I left? Were it not for that prospect of future usefulness and activity—I don’t care to think of what I should become—or be doing at the present moment.”

“Speculation would be throwing away good time, for without the abilities which are driving you into a career you would not be you. But what you must husband at present are your opportunities. In some subtle way, your wife, supported by your mother, who seems to have great political influence—I believe you told me that two of her cousins or uncles are in the present cabinet?—might rear obstacles, create postponements, until the government wiped you off its slate as a trifler who was blocking the way of more serious men.”

He sat up in a sudden fright. “I’ll go to the F. O. to-morrow and ask definitely for a post in September, giving my word that nothing less than a mortal illness shall prevent my departure the moment I get orders.”

She leaned forward eagerly, and, taking his hand, held it against her breast, which was neither cold nor calm. “You promise me that, you swear it,” she whispered.

He trembled violently, his lids dropped, and he made a sudden movement as if to take her in his arms. She stood up.

“Gypsies have strong eyes,” she said lightly.

“So much the better,” said Ordham.

“If you kiss me, this will be the last time we shall ever be alone.”

“Again, so much the better. I am going to kiss you, and I am willing to take the consequences. If you run from me, you will stumble.”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her a great many times. And she knew that she should be eternally grateful to him for these few moments of terrified happiness he forced her to admit. But she was grateful also for the gypsies.

She disengaged herself and stood back a pace. “They are coming this way,” she said. “You have not given me that other promise.”

He stood before her, whipping one hand with the gloves he held in the other. His face was so white that it would have looked dead but for the eyes, which were black and blazing. He answered steadily enough, however:

“I swear, since you will have it, that, as much to erect a monument to this love of ours, as to gratify my own ambition and compensate myself for the bleakness of my personal life, I will do what I can to make a great and useful man of myself.”