Next came in an ENGLISH GENTLEMAN, born and bred on an estate in one of the southern counties, a laureate in Greek and Latin poetry, who spoke of race horses and foxhounds in unconscious hexameters. He wore a suit of Scottish tweed in a large check pattern, a brown shirt in a small check pattern and a cream tie with a fine check; and he had no idea of the value of money. His small pale-thatched head, the size and appearance of a rock melon almost, he made as insignificant as possible by wearing an unsuitable (but correct) hat: his slender six foot-two he reduced by a studied crouch; his natural wit he veiled in an impenetrably bad accent taught at home, cultivated at Eton, brought to mysterious flower at Balliol and improved out of his own fantasy. His intelligence was only occasionally allowed to gleam through a moving cloud of flippancies and racing metaphors: his natural benevolence and soft heart he would have concealed if he had known how they were naked: he pretended, with all the ardour of his nature, to a vapid cynicism, but he could never learn the art. He carried a fine snakewood cane with a gold initial, and was ready to wink and pull his blond moustache at any lady who came his way.
After the English country gentleman came two women. One was forty years of age and spoke English with an Irish accent. She wore a silk coatee, a silk dress flowered in a small pattern, a hat with a blue velvet ribbon and forget-me-nots, and worn, brown kid gloves; and she carried a large brown leather bag. She had a paperwhite skin and greying hair, and she spoke with confidence rare phrases of guide-book German to help out her description of all she had seen in Europe. She had on her small wrist, from which a round bone stuck out, a gilt bracelet set with malachite, and on her foulard corsage, flat and draped, she wore a large Victorian brooch, with a moonstone heart set in gold filigree. Above, on her bare, windblown neck, pitted with a web of goose-flesh, like shagrin, hung a plain gold cross such as little girls get to wear to Sunday School. She ambled along in high-heeled kid shoes with six or seven straps, which she had bought in an expensive Dublin shop. She almost wept talking about the Falls of Schaffhausen and the castled crag of Drachenfels, for she had asked Thomas Cook to include these in her itinerary and it would cost her seventeen pounds extra. She wished to see the Pitti Palace, the tomb of Virgil and the David of Michel-Angelo, whom she called, clearing her throat, “mikkelanghelo.”
The second woman, a SCHOOL TEACHER, was fifty years old, taller, thinner, with no rings on her fingers, but gloves of brown silk net. She sailed along on her long legs, like a bare pole on a smooth sea. She nodded her head, smiling with purplish lips at her companion’s chatter, and smoothed down her brown skirt of crêpede-chine, with attention; she held her shoulders straight, plumped out her frilled blouse and looked in the mirrors of shops as they passed, at her straight hair, the colour of gold-bearing sand, done up in a neat coil, and tilted more fashionably her expensive brown satin toque. Wherever she moved she gave out buff or yellow shades. She put her hand to her side and felt it, for she had a pain there, and she smiled still more obligingly at her garrulous friend. She had been a highschool mistress for thirty years and now lived in a pretty town house with a flower garden, and on the walls the prints of the Medici Society, of Botticelli and the Dutch painters. She ate delicately of chicken, salad and jelly; she never spoke loudly, and an allusion, however discreet, to immodest subjects troubled and shocked her. Although she was a good scholar and an apt learner and believed in modernism, so that her pupils were always reading the most recent books put out, her intricate, delicate and tenuous mind somehow transformed all she had learned into a kind of mediaeval manuscript with the modern instances as a cynical and even comic gloss. She said she believed in a Divinity not in God. Liberal, rationalist, philanthropist, she called herself, and she remained as foolishly credulous as a girl of fifteen: she had read all the white, blue, green, brown and yellow books published on crime, war, drugs, prostitution and atrocities, and she still believed in the sacredness of patriotic passion and the perspicacity of private interest. She thought these evils which she read about but never saw, could be stamped out by strong-minded old ladies with fat pocketbooks. She always wept when clergymen and publicists spoke of the welfare of man. She presented with the same equanimity to the jovial misses of her school, the system of Bergson and the little flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. She now nodded to her friend, recommended a German liner for Ireland, said she had heard the Falls of Schaffhausen were much spoiled, and all the time under the fortress, now in shade on this side, and the mountainpierced sky, the sun and the breeze seemed to repeat to her the simple poetical ideas of the play of “Jedermann”, which she had just read. She spoke German fluently and listened attentively to the remarks of the bands of young people, so that she could use their words as an illustration of the ideas of modern youth abroad, when she gave her address to the Headmistresses’ Association in her own country.
There came in next the POET. He was tall, spare and ill, with hollow cheeks and eyes. He liked to rake through muck for a jewel: he exalted things like himself, useless and attenuated in form. His expiring sensibility preferred obscure verbal tingle-tongle to intelligible verse, suggestiveness of syllable-sequence to the banality of grammar, phantoms flying out of a dark cloud to the bright, close-embroidered visions of reason, with their everyday woof and warp. To stimulate his dying talent and hope, he proclaimed the advent of mathematics into poetry, when symbols would serve for concepts and kill rhetoric. He published manifestoes proclaiming a gentlemen’s revolution, the virgin birth and the divine right of an aristocratic, analphabetic, table-rapping soul; he protested against the cult of the working man, although he made use of those portions of his vocabulary which permitted him to shock and mystify. With a feverish ear for assonances and puns and a moribund imagination he tried to pierce the clouds that hung over his lethargic soul, or to transform them into shapes of fantasy. He borrowed phrases from all the sciences and religions, he got his colours from the plush, chalices, laces, windows and stone angels of churches and tried to revive his appetites with ever wilder perversities. He was a man deathly sick; he had struggled all his life against extreme poverty and he retreated from it farther and farther into the night, bringing up in his dreams images of bounding youth and female beauty as a last hunger for life; and in despair, ruined with drugs (which he had first bought to calm neuralgia) wasted his days and nights without knowing their number nor the seasons that passed over his head, in the luxurious apartment in which a wealthy patron kept him. When they asked him to tell a tale, he began in a lively way, but soon his voice dropped and he pointed to his companion, a pale, lively boy, also a poet, who had remained unnoticed till that moment. Beside the seats stood a band of school and college girls, travelling through Europe in their long vacation. They imagined that, in general, the real was the contrary of the apparent, for they had all suffered gross deceptions when very young. They were atheists, anarchists and hard as nails, they said; they were profane, sacrilegious and low at one moment, and the next, obscure, lofty, and as technical with their artistic and psychological terms as a magician’s apprentices wrinkling their brows in the smoke of his devil’s kitchen. Being in their first soft and dazzling youth, with strength untried and impertinence unreproved, and savage with their ripe passions, they called love rough names and suspected their friends of psychological and even moral perversions from every sentence uttered in conversation. They bandied about the names and works of all the high priests of music, letters and art, placing them into a rigid hierarchy which no one questioned, but which varied from week to week; but they were ignorant of any principle of aesthetics or of the problems of composition. They were fanciers of the infinitely precious, the shockingly immodest and the undiscoverably insignificant; they reproved symbolists and incoherent poets for lost chances of obscurity, and themselves wrote verses full of childish images and rhythms, using a vocabulary of a thousand words which had been signed with their seal and signature. They read, on their trips along the country roads and in the students’ hostels, passionate and polite
verses, sang sea-chanties, discussed exotic religions and did physical exercises together, naked.
There was one of them, a girl of sixteen, whose Eastern face was the shape of the most beautiful and secret of triangles: her eyes and hair were equally bold, wild and black, and she seemed to bear under her ivory skin the blue which she had knitted into her grotesque garments. A cobalt blue and black sweater, badly-knitted, ravelled, with dropped stitches, and skin-tight, covered the smooth triangle of her thorax: her breasts stood out like small bosses on a breastplate, and her waist was not more than eighteen inches round although she wore no corset. Her skirt of cobalt blue serge, impatiently tightened at the waist with an old belt, wrapped round her like a chrysalis skin, gave her greater and more singular beauty, since beneath it, perfectly moulded, could be seen her pear-shaped hips. Her legs were not long, but thin, and her feet and hands, both bare, were burned dark-brown. A scowling, affronted and bitter expression contracted her childish face; she had a loud, threatening voice, in which was nevertheless a twanging, that might have come from an Æolian harp. Her companions had her manners, for the most part, but not her harsh beauty, and they did not arouse love, pity and horror as she did.
Yet one of them was curious to see. She was a girl of seventeen with a sunburnt, fair skin, a ready blush and pale blue eyes with large pupils from which came an intense liquid glare unusual in blue-eyed persons. Her hair was the flax-colour common in Norway and hung round her face on her shoulders straight and plain, unwashed and unbrushed, in strands; but she had bound round her head a band of coloured woollen flowers she had bought at a village in the Tyrol; and this, with her blue dress, her knapsack, plump coarse face with large bones and bare brown feet, gave her the appearance of a country girl transported there from the far north. She ordered her friends about, arranged everything to suit her convenience and took a seat which she had not paid for, but which was empty: then in the hearing of half a hundred people, she began to read a letter she had received from Wisconsin, from her mother, that morning, laughing at its stupidity, describing, in parenthesis, her mother’s slavery in a tenement kitchen and her father’s life, labouring for forty years in a factory; she laughed pleasantly and pictured her mother as a sow routing in the mud, and her father as a mule tied to a tumtable: “That is what they are, exactly,” she cried, “if we are to be Behaviourists!” But she was a brave and adventurous girl and so vigorous that no miseries could move her.
There was near them, with her father, a SCHOOL-GIRL of different breeding. She had fair hair curling round her ears and her face seemed to be made by a dollmaker: her small nose turned up and her large, pale, well-shaped mouth weighted well her cream, untinted face. Her eyebrows were long, crescent-shaped and dark, and the flesh swelled under the eyebrow like an almond lying above the eye. Her eye was large and grey. She had the attentive, startled looks of a rabbit-girl, a soft and trustful smile; and in everything she did appeared so strong a desire to sleep on a faithful heart that both men and women looked after her with a tender smile. She spoke in a hesitating voice, almost under her breath, and her throat creaked and whirred out of pure timidity; and when she had once stated her opinion she at once deferred to another and deplored her haste in statement. Only in matters of behaviour her opinion was strong, her judgments were harsh, her rules inflexible: and her rule of behaviour was this, that no one should hurt a fly, and that no one should tell a lie. Her shoulders were broad, her arms white and her breast soft and prominent. Her waist was narrow and her hips round like a clock: she had little flesh and that was light and almost translucent, but it was elegantly massed and disposed. Among the valleys one can see a little landscape, verdant, hilly and lovely to the eye, which has no rocks, thick, bristling woods, sharp precipices or loud streams, and over which the clouds, hours and seasons, pass with a thousand superficial moods while beneath the place is always soft and mild. She was like that. Her legs were not long, but her feet were very small and she always wore expensive shoes, with thin leathers and small toes, and with high heels like threads. Her pale, small hands had large round nails like rock-crystal. She always wore a scarf over her shoulders, which were rounded a bit, as if in modesty; out of timidity she blinked when she was spoken to suddenly. But although she was not vain and not assured like the others, she was full of romantic ideas and was anxious to please, so that if they asked her to amuse them, she did not demur but did her best to speak.
Then there stood behind the rope a band of German youths and girls on a walking trip. The youths wore thick woollen stockings, white, green and blue, embroidered in cross-stitch, linen coats in white or blue and heavy corduroy shorts, the shorts very dirty. The girls wore short socks, discoloured with dust, skirts and sweaters; they wore no corsets, and some of them wore no belts; they had no hats; their faces were brown and dirty. In town, over their blouses they wore blue linen coats or a shawl: they leaned forward as they walked, tramping heavily, with sweating cheeks and wrinkled foreheads, like peasant women who must carry a great burden up a mountain-side. Sometimes they all sang together; they yodelled in the mountains. They stopped at cheap wayside houses to drink bad beer and eat some meat stew with heavy piquant sauce: or they went into a chapel to pray, the men taking off their mountain hats of felt and clanking over the flagged pavement with their hobnailed boots till they reached the altar; the women, kneeling down farther back, bending their fair, unkempt heads, their large bellies and bosoms unstayed, while the studded soles of their boots turned up in line along the bench. These students stood at the barrier in the cathedral place and waited, for this day and hour had been carefully reckoned with in their schedules. When an hour had passed they would be on their way with their road-maps flapping, in celluloid cases, on their hips. They could not afford lodging or entertainments; they were all poor, and though most were University students, some were unemployed, and some were clerks and factory hands. They had to be on their way long before sunset. They had many exhausting miles by cloudy thicket and mountain stream, on hobnailed boots or leather-soled bare feet uphill and down dale, to cities, rivers and mountain outlooks, to cathedrals, birthplaces of famous men and picturesque old streets, such as are starred in Baedeker, before they could return, contented, to their homes. Their cheeks were lean, some were hollow, their stomachs were bad and their breaths sour: their clothing was scanty and they had only a few marks between them, but their legs and arms were thick, muscular and brown; and when someone said, for instance, “Cologne Cathedral is a masterpiece,” each could say, “I have seen it: it is marvellous!” This was their reward.
They were to sleep that night in a cabin on a hillside, built by a society of round-walkers, and had only to get the key from the guardian in the village, to enter into their own demesne. The cabin was between two hills on a green hummock, among summer gardens: there was a smell of honeysuckle in the air, convolvuluses grew over the walls and birds and insects went in and out of the untenanted cottage by a window left unfastened. They would not know that; but, falling heavily on the benches and floor of the cabin would sleep like beasts in the dark, snoring, and flinging their limbs about in their exhaustion; but seeing perhaps in their dreams when the first fatigue had passed, the fantastic spire of some great cathedral, lacy on a blue sky, the cryptic black marble door closing in the sarcophagus of a great man, or a wide outlook over a blue mountain lake, that was starred in Baedeker. O passionate and devout race! They had no time to pause: they told no tales. They passed on and went back to their dull, oppressed lives, their ambitions pacified with their conquests over boulders and nettles, until the next vacation.
But there was a GERMAN STUDENT who had travelled with them from Innsbruck only: not a fair, lantern-jawed, blue-eyed youth, such as they all were, but one with a chubby face and red cheeks and fine manners, who raised women’s hands to his lips when he saluted them. He was a student in philosophy. He squirmed with delight at the sight of a little bit of tracery in a clerestory, and went into fits over the counterpoint of Brahms:
he had the sententiousness of a cherub when he declared that El Greco was a back number and the tricks of a water spaniel in the water when he sang from Richard Strauss’s operas. He loved singing and he had a mild will but absolute judgment. He worshipped famous people and ran after women, who were his despair. His skin was white, his hair black and he wore fine clothes; he could not bear the least sight of blood but he was happy one day to give his handkerchief to tie up the leg of a dog run over by a cart: and whenever he heard a shot rumble in the hills and saw the birds fly scattered out of the trees, he said, “O, my goodness, my goodness, isn’t that dreadful? It should never be allowed.”
The Salzburg Tales Page 3