The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  There was with him a SOLICITOR from London. He liked to walk in the City on a sunny morning swinging his cane and rubbing shoulders with the crowd in Throgmorton Street. He loved a little chat, with a legal joke and a neat personality, and a little cup of tea. He lived at Streatham and always wore light clothes, although his income was not large, because he was blond, delicate and palefaced. He acted the male lead in private theatricals in a Y.M.C.A. Literary Club and played tennis on Saturday afternoons. In the train in the morning, he read the exchanges, recommended a purchase of Witwatersrand, asked why the Government was riding the fence in the present crisis, and knew the sporting news. His highest ambition was to come by a great deal of money one day and go shares with some reliable client in a bill-broking business. He wrote genial solicitor’s letters, leaving not a single knot to catch his foot in, and even in conversation his remarks were without prejudice. His clients’ secrets were inviolate with him, but if a wealthy client had a well-cut suit and told him a good joke he would let the brush tail of a strong-scented affair peep through his thicket of discretion. His integrity was spotless; and he always saw that his clients were properly protected. His knowledge of the law was exact so that he could circumvent it with grace, but it was necessary to ask his services with a merry smiling countenance and a round, periphrastic style. He kept a little diary at home, neat as a sandwich bar, where he noted the events of a life spent among the great, fruity with sagacious little aphorisms. He strolled out on Sunday afternoons with his wife along the hedges and explained the masonic ritual of his business.

  There was a DANISH WOMAN, a bookbinder in Paris. She had bright blue eyes and a large nose; her large head was covered with curls. She talked all day and recounted hundreds of tales, mostly improbable, like a female Munchhausen: she was usually gay, but sometimes a weird melancholy fell on her, like the gloomy shades of the north. She loved cats and bright-coloured leathers, dyes and gilt. Her workshop, though in a cold and dirty apartment in a tumble-down building by the river, was always humming with talk, hammer-taps, the creaking of presses and the roaring of flames in the stove; and was as cheerful as the common-room of the knights in heroic times, when they lived and slept by the fires and their swords jingled. The walls were covered with papers she painted and dyed, and with pictures of Copenhagen, and caricatures by her pupils. She was lively as a trooper at night, and drank wine, beer, punch, champagne, vodka and every strong drink they had at the table, until she rolled under it. She was as free as a brother with men; but she was modest, she blushed if a man looked at her boldly, was faithful to her husband, and would stare for hours at modern books, with their naked men, women and truths, red, gay, astonished and abashed.

  With her was a young ARCHITECT, a gentle creature, modest and shy, whose restless fingers designed without end, even as they tapped on his knee, and who covered his walls, trunks, letters, easels and restaurant tables with the motifs of his irrepressible fantasy. He had built in Russia where the workers’ cities are made of glass, aluminium, stone and tile, and in Amsterdam in the garden-cities, and in Paris where they build houses of glass and each stone is chiselled by hand, and in New York where they tear down twenty-five storey buildings in which the heating is expensive to put up thirty-five-storey buildings in which the heating is more scientifically planned, and in Hollywood where the porches must frame beauties and the bathrooms are designed for Houdini; in seaports where the tiles must be wavy bendy to correspond with the waves of the sea, on mountain-tops where the beetling walls must fit in with the craggy scenery, and in wheat-growing areas where the silos, towering in the fields, must look like a mightier cathedral. He had blossomed out, in his morning sun of success, and was the darling of poets and rich amateurs. His curly black hair fell over a white and red face, and his heart was simple, although he wrote cryptic verses. He danced like a feather; when by himself he capered, sent up darts, and sang, for he liked to be alone; but when he worked in a room with other draughtsmen, he was bemused, putting down his first strokes with diffidence as if afraid to spoil perfection, until the plan burst out in final clarity, like a rocket in his forehead.

  An OLD LADY was there because her third husband had been a conductor in Vienna, and dying, had left her with plenty of money and a taste for elevated society. She took scores to every performance, always turned over the page before the conductor and nodded over the last page. She wore a long gold chain and a lorgnette and an expensive hat made of satin, feathers, straw and tulle, all mixed and mummified together: no one could imagine what octogenarian designer and what antediluvian stock of unfashionable materials had been drawn upon to make her hat. Perhaps the old lady, this Frau Hofrat, designed her own hats, or had them made by her maid, taken over from the service of some ex-Empress. She was dignified at table, took mineral waters and powders, and was pleasantly condescending to the young. She cleared her throat often, and wore a high white lace collar and a chased gold band which supported her old dun throat.

  There was an OLD MAN who liked company and joined in all the conversations to show he was a spark and an accomplished trifler. He dressed with coquetry. His thin, bent head nodded every few minutes like a tremulous head of oats, and the skin hung down on his neck. He wore soft gloves; his handkerchief and thin silver hair were perfumed with a thin, fine scent. His shoes were polished like glass and his clothes pressed every morning by a valet who travelled with him. When he was at home he exacted a special service of his five sons: each one had to call on him at his home, in a morning coat, wearing a flower and a bowler hat to pay his father his respects and kiss the hand of his mother. The old man had disinherited his youngest son, a Liberal Deputy, who refused to do this. Abroad, he treated everyone with caressing condescension but he was cold to waiters. His manners were so fine that one would have thought they had been invented specially to suit his frame: he wore them like a handmade shirt next to his skin. He thought estates were bestowed by divine mandate and that those born to high estate should show that God had chosen well. Not even the wines, painters and racehorses he fancied, gave him the pleasure that he had from contemplating a fine family-tree; he imagined that he could tell noble birth even in a monster, if a monster were born in a great family. He allowed that it was inoffensive for a beautiful woman or an artist, low-born, to climb out of their natural sphere, because, on the one hand, women’s empiry is always brief and rarely disturbs an inheritance, and on the other hand, artists are like the alchemists his fathers kept, who spun money out of thin air, sunshine, spoof.

  He still let his bright brown eyes, clear as enamel, rove over the women’s faces, feet and bosoms, and he heaved delicate sighs before them, as if a zephyr were blowing up a banked fire, or as if autumnal breaths were there, succeeding summer, but with winter yet a long way off. He put his hands under his coat-tails and told the men embroidered anecdotes of the old days.

  There was a CRITIC OF MUSIC too, a columnist, who knew a musician’s art by the way he whirled his stool, pulled at his collar, shrugged his shoulders, spread his hands, or looked in profile; by his manager or his bows; and in music he knew the difference between staccato and glissando, between Chopin and Rimsky-Korsakov, between fat playing and lean playing. He disliked versatile performers, he liked those who had a single doctrine of art and who wrote it down in words. But he had a fine ear: he could hear a whisper in the farthest corner of a concert hall, and if he heard it he would frown tremendously: and he could hear the opinions of other critics three seats away, even in a tumult. He could hear the fluid in the tube of a barometer rising and falling and the rise and fall of the tides of opinion. He could predict fashions in music a year away, and describe his state of mind at a concert in such sympathetic terms that the majority of people imagined he had heard the music. He was, truth to tell, a very poor musician, but a good journalist and a natural prestidigitateur: he could squeeze blood out of a stone, make a dinner out of a bar-room invention, and borrow money at a chess-table. He had once taken to agriculture and grown pota
to plants with potatoes in the leaves and to cattle-raising and bred a calf with two heads. This experience had given him such confidence that he expected to conquer every subject with like ease, producing miracles. The calf should have been blamed for his musical criticisms.

  A quiet man was there, a NATURALIST, who had come over the mountains on a walking-tour, with his lens and collecting-case. His ear was so fine that he could hear caterpillars eating leaves and crickets burrowing in the earth and buds starting out of nodes. He was a Russian, gay, full of songs which he sang by himself in the open. He had always walking with him a SCHOOLBOY to whose ires, fires and laments he listened with the attention and objections of a naturalist.

  A PUBLIC STENOGRAPHER was passing through Salzburg on her way home to a rural village in England because, she said, she should see the sights before she got too old. She had a large office in Geneva and hired out for occasional work translators, accountants and typists, both men and women. She wore black cotton gloves and buff cotton stockings and a navy-blue silk dress which she thought nice for all occasions. She had greying hair arranged in scallops round her long face: her skin was the colour of young corn in the cob and wrinkled round the eyes. Her mouth was terracotta and she had a faint rufous patch on each cheek which never deepened, but which faded when she worked on some late job, through the night. She had met all the personalities of the League of Nations since 1920: she knew the gay gossip of the town, how they all sat at little tables, alone, during important events so that they should not gab; how a Balkan minister had walked in the bright sunlight with his umbrella up because he had news of his recall. She knew their little miseries, and if they wore spats, and how they should be handled when they wanted to make a speech. She knew the right word to suggest to fill a space, for the League of Nations has a word for everything. She knew how to take a rebuff from bridling vanity; but she looked everyone in the eye with her small brown eyes, for she was old, tried and quite ignorant of the world. She had eaten for fifteen years, at midday and in the evening, in the same large, public restaurant where they had a printed card with perhaps two hundred dishes to choose from. In the face of all those diners, of the changing waiters and of the generous menu, she had learned to hold her countenance and maintain a negligent pose as well as any pretty darling in a young ladies’ school; but she walked with rapid, dry strides, not sinuously like those, because she had often to hurry to a man in the throes of delivery; her arms were thin, muscular and rough skinned as a shark’s fin with too much exercise. At night, over a shaving of cheese, dry and old, with a bitter, mouldy flavour caught in the restaurant’s damp pantry (but which she thought was the natural flavour of the cheese since it had been served so for fifteen years), and over a small cup of black coffee, her single exotic habit caught in forty years abroad, she would lean forward her long neck out of a halter of Madeira embroidery and would amuse herself with anecdotes of the comic, pathetic and marvellous, in her long dull life. She knew a fortune-teller who had predicted her life for ten years (those ten years, she had sat at a typewriter); she speculated about love and its thick mystery; she recalled breaths of the supernatural which had blown on her cheek, and the great strokes of luck which had passed within a hand’s-breadth of humble workers she had known. She knew clerks who had made immense sums, even a thousand dollars, by intercepting a private telephone call passing between heads of firms and accountants who had correctly calculated a firm’s position from a disguised balance-sheet; she knew telegraph girls who had predicted European wars. She could not understand why these darlings of fate had not afterwards had a brilliant career and had their names in the papers, or had not at least become heads of their departments; she supposed it was due to a freakishness of their star, to pernicious anaemia in the seat of ambition.

  She had once, she remembered out of forty years, drunk a very fine drink in a German family, curaçao, she believed, with cream and orange-juice, and in her opinion, no drink could be like that, not even champagne; but she had never tasted it again. Very coy she had been, on first going into Germany, when invited by a girl to take beer in public; but coming out, she had slapped down her money at a bar in the French railway-station and said, “A bock,” and laughed, with her sister, to think what they would say at home in England, to that. Workmen had offered her another and she had accepted out of comradeship.

  Then she had long winter tales. She had gone home to a new apartment late at night, in a storm of rain or snow, and found the window open and seen an apparition weeping on the mantelpiece— long afterwards she had learned that a girl had received a letter from her mother, dead immediately afterwards, in the room. She had tales of cats gone mad with hunger in cellars, running up the walls in frenzy and clinging to the ceiling, their red eyes glaring in the dark; and of seeing her dead grandmother’s ghost, many a time, sitting in the corner darning ghostly socks in a flowered work-basket; of seeing an immaterial personage passing by the hearth leading a great greyhound, the night her mother died. She had once slept in a students’ hostel in a foreign land and awakened to hear a coach driving up with the jingling of bits and the sounds of passengers getting down; and had been astonished at the survival of coaching in this land. Later in the night, someone had walked from a door in her room to her bedside, crying; she thought it the girl next door and had comforted it. But in the morning she had found that there was no door there, but a gas-meter; and that no coach had arrived. Returning that way months later she had heard that an old passage had been discovered, covered in behind the gas-meter, and in this passage a man had been murdered who had come by the coach in the old days. She knew, too, country girls, the daughters of clergymen and honest as the day, who had seen past generations rise in the wayside grass, and children who had seen bloody hands appear on plastered walls in haunted houses. All these tales she told in a quiet musing tone with no sign of nervousness: she told about the old bridge that collapsed near her home and a fatal cardparty in the village, the discovery of an adultery by dreams; and a hundred curious things such as the Society for Psychical Research used to discuss solemnly. She told it so naturally, with such an air of belief, that the hearers at hot midday, gave a shiver of surprise and superstition. Behind her lay the ghostly tradition of English literature, the genius of the Brontës, the popularity of Scott and the mad gifts of Protestantism, but she did not know it. When she had told her tale, she would blow her nose in a cheap lawn handkerchief with machine-made lace and say, “This was given me by a man I did work for, an Under-secretary,” and add, “I often think if I could tell these things to a writer he could write them up.” She would say, listening to a conversation, “What is happening in the world? O, dear, who knows what will happen? The world is so mixed up: you would think I should know more than you, working in Geneva, but I know less than anybody else.”

  After her thin, black figure, there entered late a stalwart young man with dark eyes and rubicund in a furred motoring-coat, who put his automobile behind the Cathedral. His self-possession and the professional glance he cast on the audience, drew glances. He greeted many people in the crowd, bowing from the waist to some, laughing heartily at others, shaking hands again. He had a bounding, healthy look and when he smiled, brilliant teeth made his dark face seem darker. He was the Viennese singer who played the part of “Don Juan”. With him was a thin, sharp-nosed, thick-browed chap with thin hair, very much wrinkled, jealous and salty as a long-tongued woman; a TRANSLATOR he was, who translated all the modern books, flighty, scandalous and political, that were written. He was extremely laborious, verifying each word with a dozen notes at the foot of the page, and bitter, stinging with a thousand imagined affronts, and cruel, ready for a thousand expected attacks. He would run down even his dearest friends for the pleasure of saying something original on his own account, and he cried like a child, at home, if he was found out in a fault of grammar.

  There was a POLICE COMMISSIONER, a lively, political journalist, a moke of all trades who worked ambitiously in any shifts
offered him, thinking he would one day have a chance to sit on the driver’s seat and show a long head despite his ass’s ears. He had been a Minister in a Government, but he drove one day into some too, too slippery mass of garbage, and he had been obliged to take a long rest in the country in the clover, biding his time. In the country, he had improved his manners, taken an eye-glass, studied fine eating, invented a few dishes, written two romances and a book of aphorisms and learned to seem wise by ignoring questions. He had a wife with whom he lived at times in hotels, and then the pair would quarrel so loudly that everyone would rap on the walls and the manager, red in face, would endeavour to silence the domestic ululations, pacifying madam, expostulating with the gentleman, bidding him remember the next elections. And when his wife was ill and went to a sanatorium in Switzerland, the Commissioner published in modern literary journals, post-dada-ist laments on his tubercular love. When he had put his finger successfully into several lucrative scandals in Persia, Thibet and China, he retired for a season again, but now to Biarritz, where he met the best people, including princes of the blood, cinema stars, champion Aberdeen terriers and bathing-suits by Patou, and distinguished himself at water-polo. His supporters then thought him groomed for another public appearance and he emerged as Police Commissioner and was given the Order of Merit by the king of his country. There, he revolutionised the police, introduced military discipline, gave military pay, studied machine-guns and tear-gas bombs and went on long voyages. During these, he visited America and studied their automatic prisons and the adroit way they broadcast robberies so that their police can give the burglar a fair avenue of escape; went to London, admired Dartmoor and crossed the crossing at the Bank; went to Paris to see how they provide one policeman for each citizen, and visited the Quai d’Orsay where they entertained him at dinner: went to Germany and learned how to turn recidivists into citizens by kindness, and how to discover non-existent documents. Then he returned home, made a secret report, was feted in the streets, received bouquets, an Order, and proposals of marriage from ladies, invented a new dish, appeared in the films, improved the munition factories and once more went into retirement to be groomed for a coup d’état. This man of his time had come to Salzburg to polish himself off by rubbing shoulders with the cultivated, and to meet the Gold Trust. In the meantime, he spread sedulously his reputation for caustic repartee and looked through the proofs of a slight volume of neo-symbolist poems dedicated to his Lady of the Snows.