He brought in with him, a LAWYER from Buda-Pesth, a swagger beau who spent his nights in night-clubs and paid attention to every woman he met, dark or fair, pretty or plain, sweet or forbidding, out of incontinence. He read all the gossip sheets and liked to pretend that he could find out the truth of every affair in the city, by fraud, bribery, threats and natural cunning. He believed whatever his client believed, affected to be cynical and saturnine, speaking in innuendoes; or jovial, sly and hail-fellows well-met, according to the case. He soothed and flattered his client as if the client were a prince and he the prince’s vizier. He examined a contract so closely for a flaw or deceitful intent, that he often missed the nature of the business and he was astonished to observe that a business could be unsound when a contract was watertight. He loved to crack a walnut with a sledge-hammer. He gulped down all the information thrown at him, went ahead in business and conversation by leaps and bounds, was called for that a bounder, loved to interrupt a business conversation with a quotation from his schoolbook poets, read the memoirs of diplomats with fervour and credulity, rejoiced at the crashing fall of magnates and kings, and was an ardent patriot and a conservative voter. He was like a man who has got into a pair of bewitched shoes by accident and must always be hopping and pirouetting, curtseying and leaping in the air, malapropos. He was a handsome young man of thirty-two with thick curly hair, brown eyes and a red mouth: he wore a morning coat in the morning and an eyeglass and evening dress every evening. He had learned, in two or three hours, all about the people in the hotel, and he now flattered and fawned on them shamelessly; he went about the place with dancing steps and his head in the air, delighted to be able to show his glittering talents to so cultivated a crowd. He was not a bad man, but very foolish: he was rich, because he had married a rich wife: he flattered her to her heart’s content, and was a gay man about town.
Now he was laughing excessively at every word that fell out of the mouth of the PHILOSOPHER. The philosopher was heir to a noble house, but not rich: he lived from his lectures and his writings. He was odd in appearance, with a bloodless face and a receding chin and an underlip that dropped engagingly like a young foal’s. His hands were the colour of bleached bone, and when he stood, he stood not straight, but shifting from one foot to the other like a schoolboy reciting a piece. Nothing astonished his admirers so much as the sight of him. He was received like a grandee in every country in the world and his books on history and moral philosophy, written clearly, picturesquely, with an economy of words, and full of quaint, moral notions often caught during illicit revels nightly in a sphere without morals, delighting pastors and schoolteachers, were translated into every language. He had rapid soft speech and caressing manners like an adolescent boy, but he was nearly fifty years old. Ladies were very partial to him, saying that he looked harmless, but knowing quite well that he was ardent, well-born, enterprising and in a sphere beyond prejudices. He had no difficulty; he never had to eat green fruit although he was poor: the best and ripest fruit fell into his lap from the highest and best-tended trees, London was his orchard, the world was his estate. He ate very well and was one of the first gentlemen of the realm, but his shoes were often down-at-heel and he did not give a rap for it. He liked popularity, but he was happy in his soul, and unpopularity was the same thing to him, he thought. He would go to gaol for his opinions, he said: and because he liked to flout opinions in fee entail and mock inherited gentility, he never visited the House of Lords, which he called the prosiest and least select of all private clubs. He was not married and had no children.
There was also a MATHEMATICIAN born in Finland, educated in France, America and Germany, who taught in Spain. He had lived all his life in schools and universities, and knew the rough and tumble of life only as a thorny proposition. His brown, thick skin was pitted with smallpox; his hair was so thick and tufty that it fell into his eyes and he could not wear a hat. His eyes were deep-blue and narrowed under brows like dried peony follicles, dark, twisted and cleft sidelong: he was of Tartar blood. He had a large library of books in four languages; many languages he read well but did not speak with ease. He had a slight impediment in his speech and in revenge he invented a story to this effect, that after the establishment of Grimm’s Law, Grimm broke his heart at the incorrect deformation of primitive tongues by the vulgar, wooden-eared and thick-tongued, that he went mad and went to a mountain fastness where he established Grimm’s Anarchy and taught to a simple people a language without rhyme or reason: in this way arose the Basque tongue. For every anomaly he invented an amusing reason. All day he sat before a quire of paper writing and figuring in a crabbed script, in his leisure hours he read to his young wife. He pitied women for their thwarted ambitions, and found many diamonds of plain truth in the sand of their conversation. He meditated everything a long time: he liked to sleep twelve hours a day and dream. He was wrathful at the errors of men, at fatuity, lunacy and dishonour, because he was forced to doubt the perfection of his own organism. He was in his relations with his friends violent, partial in love or hate, easily offended and given to bloody ideas of revenge like a schoolboy. He liked the cloistered academic path he would tread all his life: from windows of universities he looked out speculatively on every kind of activity. He was not indulgent but he was kind. He had cold feet because he liked to sit hours by himself spinning his web with his head in his own web. He dreamed at night of curious manipulations of logic and letters from which he got the supple solutions of theorems. He liked mathematical tricks and logical puzzles: at dinner, with his coffee he would puzzle his friends with “the class of all classes”. Then he would laugh, show his white teeth and begin to sing themes from Bach in a sonorous humming tone, or he would go to the piano and play with a firm, delicate, improvising touch. He liked to play chess and learn the grammars of languages. He had a brother he loved so dearly he would have died for him. He calculated his brother’s chances of survival with a slide-rule and his birthday, according to the Julian calendar. He could calculate very well, both what he owed and what was owed him. He liked to eat well, go in his friends’ automobiles, wear silk shirts not overpriced, and entertain his friends generously, for by spending money he could be potent while supine. He was thin and flexible as a fishing-rod but his grace was disguised in suits of expensive tweed cloth, cut in pompous fashion. The cloth was chosen for the sober intricacy of its pattern, but the colours, violet, blue, russet and green, were always at variance with the rest of his turn-out and with the fashion; he lived in a world of black and white, and when he turned his attention to colours, he was without prejudices. His house was barely furnished as a hermit’s cell, so that his wife could polish her mind and not brass fittings; but he bought electrical contrivances of every sort, out of curiosity, and liked to fossick in ironmongery shops and bring home patent egg-shellers and butter-coolers, or anything that was ingenious. He kept his work in pigeonholes and sent by registered post to trusted colleagues his original ideas for their criticism, but he was careful not to mention his ideas in mixed company; he knew mathematicians are not honest and have sharp ears.
If he found fault in persons he thought perfect before, he suffered for days; he came back to the imperfection again and again to understand how he could have been deceived at first, or else, what strange rule of harmony permitted these flaws to reign in organisms that pleased him.
In the middle block, which is the most expensive, sat a Berlin business man with his wife, richly furred and gloved, although not in the best style either of Paris or Vienna. Her great round face was heavily topped by uncut blonde hair and a fashionable sunhat, while he sat uncovered and mopped with a silk initialled handkerchief his bald cranium shaped like a sea-elephant’s.
His lady’s tongue, flowered head, and stout bosom under a lace front, all niddle-noddled; he barked his responses in stiff Berlin German, and sniffed the perfume and eyed the white silk of a barearmed Society girl who sat with a lapdog, indifferent on his left hand. A long white glove covered he
r warm arm in the most fashionable wrinkles: when she asked for a glass of milk at the ambulant milkstore or for a book of verse at the booksellers, her voice lisped softer than milk and sweeter than verses. Always a sort of natural fresh odour came from her as one seems to come from green fields, even when they are a long way off and no wind is blowing.
This young lady turned her back to the Berliner (at which his wife sighed pleasantly), and answered the young Viennese woman beside her, who asked her in that liquid German certainly invented by the Rhine maidens, when the play would begin. This young Viennese woman was dressed in costly Swiss embroidery and embroidered gloves. Her bronzed hair was neatly curled; she wore a small crocheted hat: her little white and black shoes shone like snakes’ heads, with their jet stones. She wore a wedding-ring and a necklace of crystals. She began to confide in the Berlin girl the social confidences and hurried conventional raptures of one who is a little fluttered and uneasy, and whose social station is not assured.
“What a crowd is here this year! They say the American President’s financial advisers all are here: there are five millionaires … The first performance of ‘Don Juan’ this evening will unquestionably be brilliant! … I am here with my husband,” said the Viennese lady: “he has some business in the south,” and she licked her dark red lips and looked appealingly at her confidante. The Berlin girl’s practised eyes turned for a moment to her lapdog while she said to herself, “She is here with her lover, on an escapade”; then she prattled sociably on with an indefinite note of patronage: not indeed, for the escapade, but for the weak confidence.
The afternoon shadows drew a little nearer. The Viennese beauty, young, appealing and lonely, drew a bizarre embroidered scarf round her bust and sighed.
Stolidly, in the same row, but in the cheapest seat, with a sharp nose and weary and uncoloured face, with drab hair and a blue dress, a young woman clerk from Cologne shaded her eyes and read a French literary review. She raised her eyes patiently from time to time to the back of the stage, quizzed the elegants with the critical looks of an ambitious white-collar who has had to buy every luxury with soul-deadening parsimony; she was palely but precisely aware of a growing antipathy for a Jewish citizen of Vienna who sat beside her, in Tyrolean mountain costume, chortling at his fine seat, declaiming with a soft lisp and holding his wife’s gloved hand.
There came late into his seat a thickset, cheerful DOCTOR from New York, who had just come from a conference in Constantinople on hay-fever. His teeth, his starched linen, his jewelled shirt-studs, his finger-nails and his shoe-tops all shone as he walked. When he talked, he often spread the square stubbed fingers of his small hand in a round gesture, and he had the shadowy smile of the Mona Lisa hovering unconsciously in the folds of his firm mouth. He was very rich; he loved art and music; he had at his home in New York a private gallery; he attracted to his home by cajolery and good suppers, twice a week, a trio of musicians with whom he practised quartets. He was so strong that he would keep them sitting there till their backs cracked, their wrists were sprained, their eyes dropped and they were obliged to kick over his music-stands by stealth to interrupt him. When he began to play his quartet, to pursue an indigent painter in whose work he fancied he saw a profitable streak, or to make a scatter-diagram of temperatures, his eyes shone and he became insensible to other things, like a figure of stone. He knew to the least detail the soft scenes pictured by Sisley and the dazzling suns of Van Gogh, but he would walk through fields and by streams and villages unconscious if the sun, moon or stars shone, or if his way was lighted by rainbows, northern lights, lightning or roman candles, for his walks only served to develop his theories on art and his dexterity in determining the coefficient of correlation between two sets of facts. He had taken up all his hobbies late, after a mild youth, and he went at them with the pleasure and abandon of a mastiff pup chasing chickens.
There was also there a Chinaman, the FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT of a French newspaper. He spoke five languages, and all without a foreign accent. He had studied in Universities in America, France and Germany. He was a passionate patriot, but he said little about his own country in Western European society, preferring to talk about his childhood when he had lived in sheltered calm. He had a high forehead and round eyes with arched brows like the warriors in old paintings; he wore European dress. He spoke in clear tones like a clapper falling on thin ivory; his red mouth smiled sweetly though with melancholy, and everything he said came out with compressed visionary epithets, as if his imagination flowered impetuously, quicker than the tongue. He expected many more years of trouble for his country: this cloud sat over all he said and thought. He sat shining and neat in black clothes and shining shoes, with smooth hair and bright eyes, resembling a newt or other smart black water animal, or a legendary dragon very small, carved on an urn of genii from the old tales.
Next came sliding and bustling across the centre of the place, from beneath the archway, a small-footed man with a thin face. Whenever the centenary of the birth or death of a great composer of music approached, he flew about the world with propaganda, forming committees, cajoling Departments of Education and of the Fine-Arts, flattering musicians, bribing publishing companies, engaging publicists, writing, speaking, wheedling, persuading, his head swarming with wily, original schemes for making the world take an interest in Haydn, Brahms, Schubert, or whatever other musician was a hundred years born or dead. It was he who first conceived the idea of finishing the Unfinished Symphony, and he who wrote and distributed to schoolmasters, mayors and representatives of the people, the “Few Thoughts on the Place of Music in the Home and in the Market-place”, in which he worked the threads of patriotism and the family, public education and private sensibility, Schubert and the wares of gramophone companies. He had a fine ear, long with a large orifice, and he sang in an angelic falsetto which resembled at will a wood or string instrument, or a desert voice rising through the sharp edges of the sand. He knew many thousand themes from the master musicians and many peasant songs and single strains picked up here and there on the earth: he had as friends all the musicians and was able to make a child understand a theme. He loved to sit in a large audience and be moved with its emotions, as if his heart was a silver disc recording an orchestral piece. He was as sympathetic as a nervous beauty to his hearers and endeavoured to enchant all by showing the glittering facets of his talents. His eyes with animal intensity and sagacity, blue and oval, darted left and right: he got into his seat with the movement of a bird settling into a thick tree, disappearing in the crowd. His clothes had cost him a great deal but seemed unsuitable to his movements and habit of mind: he should have worn a smock, or Persian trousers. His shoe might have concealed the long tip of a seraphic wing or the long toe of a satyr’s foot. When Death approached in the Miracle Play, he shuddered and cast his eyes discreetly from side to side to see how the audience took it, and when the heavenly bells and voices rang out, his eyes sent out points of light and his dark-veined thin hand played delicately from the soft pale wrist on which was a gold chain. He had a dark crafty profile, like an ancient Venetian, with a long, pointed nose and thin lips; he was as attentive as a lizard. He hummed ever and again to himself like syrinx when the tide is rising in the reeds. He was full of tales as the poets of Persia: he unwound endlessly his fabrics, as from a spool the silks of Arabia. He was a publicist, a salesman, but of so peculiar a sort, specialising in the centenaries of famous men, that they invented a name and called him THE CENTENARIST.
There was near him, amused by him, sitting with the five millionaires, youngest of the six wealthy men that the other guests in derision called the Gold Trust, a very thin young man, with a long Dutch nose; a BANKER he was, from London. He had a sea-going yacht, three motor-cars, a house in Grosvenor Square, a house in the country, three racehorses and twelve servants: he gave five hundred guineas for a horse-race and a silver cup for polo, and he went each weekend to France to get the sun. But in town his chief amusement was to go to the pictures wi
th his wife seven times a week. He abhorred the opera which he thought was noisy and the theatre which he thought old-fashioned and wordy. He lived in the depths of his house alone with his wife; and they went about as inseparable as twins. He dined off an omelette and a chop badly served by his lazy and spoiled French chef, and sipped a glass of bad, red wine from a bin in the pantry furnished by his thief of a butler. He knew his servants robbed him but could not bear to sack them (he said), because they would thereby lose their jobs. He did not like to go to friends’ houses to dine for he could not understand the sense of their flippancies and their high-church passions drove him mad; and he never entertained, for he liked to live at home with his wife alone.
If he met a pretty girl, he looked for a rich husband for her to marry: if he was amused by a journalist he mentioned his name to some cabinet minister to get him influence: if he thought an author hardworking and mild, he would think about his case, telling him, perhaps, that he could work quicker if he took the stories out of the Arabian Nights and simply changed the names, and local colour, such as the degree of heat and the type of costume. He had stolen his brother’s shillings when they were in the nursery together and had only been beaten by his brother’s squirrel secretiveness. He never read a book; and he had passed through the costliest and most famous schools of his land and all their bosh (he said) had fallen off him like water off a duck’s back. But in banking he knew all that he should know. His natural ingenuity was so complex and so wakeful that if a clerk made an error of two pence he made four pence out of it; if the world was prosperous he promoted gambling-circles, rotary movements and publishing houses, lent money to liberal professors and ne’er-do-weel geniuses and made fortunes in speculation in fraudulent inventions exploited on the exchange; and if the world was black and most men were ruined, he laid in stocks of fat, flour, and cotton, speculated in armaments and cheap shirts and got back his money from the liberal professors now turned conservative. If a king lay at death’s door, he bought a bolt of crape, if a peasant girl in adolescent delirium saw the Virgin at her furrow’s end, he started an omnibus line. He understood only one thing, Profit; he thought all men thought as he did, and that their bank-balances were the measure of their brains. He would risk half his fortune on a throw, turn head-over-heels in the air in an aeroplane, tell anyone in the world to go to Hell, laugh at princes and throw tax-collectors out the door, but he suffered excessively from toothache because he feared the dentist’s chair: and he was convinced that his luck depended on numbers, events, persons, odd things he encountered; his head accountant was forced to wear the same tie for six weeks because it preserved a liberal state of mind in the Government in a difficult time: his chauffeur was obliged to carry for nine months the same umbrella, rain, hail or shine, because the umbrella depressed the market in a stock he had sold short.
The Salzburg Tales Page 4