The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  In November of the seventh year, after a feverish correspondence which made Svend quite ill with excitement, Karen accepted him, and he was to come home, not in December, but in January, to marry Karen and settle down to work in Copenhagen.

  He was a good workman, but distraught. An impatient and uncouth originality made him produce works and designs which had no attraction for anybody except a few friends. When Karen saw him again and heard his patient, plodding plans for the future, she looked three times in the glass, became afraid to tie such a pretty face and body to such a poor destiny, and refused him again. Svend, in his agony, refused to release her, for a minute’s space: this frightened Karen entirely, and she freed herself as she knew well how to. It was all very natural. We had always foreseen such an end. A girl like that would really rather remain unmarried than cook lentils and darn socks in an ill-lighted workshop and listen to the humble syllabus of fifty years of patience sung out by the hammer, the creaking presses and the hissing leather.

  Svend became silent. Although we watched him as well as one can watch a grown man, he escaped from us and only returned to us when he was completely exhausted with walking and almost frozen: then he would lie in bed like a stone, with his face to the wall. My father and brother sermonised him: “Be a man, your life’s before you: what, for a feather-brained flirt!” Svend said nothing.

  I was older than Svend by ten years. I looked after him day and night, when, his hip becoming much worse, he had to remain in his room. It was only my duty; and in the waking nightmares and sick torpors that crush the watcher through the long nights, I perceived that Svend was closely knit to me in nature and affection. It is often like that in a large family; a sister has one true brother, or sister—the others are strangers.

  Svend lingered on, morose and implacable for a year. We often heard the tapping of his hammer, or the little noises of his work, as we sat downstairs, but in the presence of anyone but me he remained silent and motionless. We once swallowed our sorrow and pride and asked Karen to go to see him. He turned his back on her and looking out of the window, began whistling. I took her out, weeping, and when I came back, found him in a dead faint: yet he would not see her. Was it pride? Madness? Our family was unsympathetic in the long run to this life of recluse. I, too, when the year had run its course, I hoped he would be out and about and be himself in the Spring. The attic room, with its benches and presses, depressed me horribly: then it was so far for me to climb—three flights from the hall. I pestered Svend, in a quiet way, for which he could not reproach me, to go out and make himself a man again. He said, in a grumbling voice, “Perhaps I will: this Spring. Wait!”

  One day in January, gloomy and windy, but with a clear, high, northern light in the nave of the sky, I was returning from marketing, and, feeling a twinge of pain round my heart, let my eyes fall to the pavement. I walked a few steps in meditation, thus. I lifted my eyes and saw at fifty paces from me, an old woman about five feet high, neatly dressed in a black cloak, with white collar, both voluminous, advancing towards me over the blue-black pavement. Her white hair was tightly drawn over her skull; a great white plaster covered one eye and half the head; the other eye was ringed with a thick black ring which looked dreadful on her bony face, chalk-white and hollow. She advanced steadily, as if she would run me down, although she was so small. The breath sprang out of my lungs and gently blew out her cloak: “It is Death,” I thought, very certain. A moment afterwards, I thought, “She must know she looks deathly, poor woman; I will look away.” I did so, with an effort. As she came near, I was obliged to look at her again, to be sure that this extraordinary impression was not all a dream. No, there, firmly, without deviating, she walked towards me as if she would walk through me. I wondered if she were blind. The sunken, large bright eye was steady and looked soberly but directly at me, the skin was bone-white, the cheekbones and jawbones prominent. The terror of death entered me, and I already gave up my spirit. I struggled a little, thinking I could avoid her perhaps, with a heartsickening wrench. The woman came up with me, brushed my coat with the edge of her faded, blue apron which she held in her hand between the folds of her cloak, and suddenly turned at a right angle to the left, and entered the sculptured door of a rich apartment house I was passing.

  What was she doing there? Was she a midwife; an old companion kept out of charity? My heart seemed a drop of jet. At the next crossing an automobile, powerful and silent, rolling at a great pace, knocked me over and spun me into the centre of the roadway. The thick dusk was falling, the lights were not yet on. Half-unconscious, I lay amongst the traffic in the middle of the road unseen, escaped miraculously and crawled, as a sea-elephant crawls, by little leaps and bounds, to the pavement.

  There a young man stood repeating, “You must look out, you must look out!” and finding me unable to articulate, he went off, stopping every few steps and looking back dubiously. I sat there for half-an-hour. Presently, I could walk, yet I was under a spell and felt myself scarcely flesh at all, but spirit, as if I had really been killed; and the people passed like dumb shadows.

  That evening I sat silent by Svend’s bed: he had not spoken for a long time, but about midnight he moved his lips and seemed to be dreaming: a few broken sounds came from his tied tongue: it passed, and I did not wake him. Svend awakened about two o’clock in the morning, and said,

  “Where is she?” with the deep, quiet, unnatural look of wide pupils.

  “I am here, Svend.”

  “No.”

  “Whom do you want?”

  “Where is the old woman who came through that door and wrapped her apron round me a little while ago?”

  I looked at Svend sorrowfully, without showing surprise, and suddenly I remembered the old woman of the pavement, who had sunk out of my memory, and the same complete conviction settled in me: she made a pass at me, and settled on him. Svend died a few minutes after.

  I have walked down the same street many and many a time, and looked at all who walk in and out of the apartment houses there, but I never saw the old woman. I enquired for her and many had seen her, but no one knew where she lived, and no-one gave an exact description of her, as I did. Then I heard that an old woman who had been living alone in a lumber-room over the bootmaker’s shop, had disappeared on a night that seemed to be that of Svend’s death, taking all her old rubbish with her in a big bundle on her back: a coal-merchant had given her a lift and had put her down with her bundle outside the town. She had not been seen since, nor had she been reported at any police-station: these old ones survive somehow and wander all over the land. What keeps them alive, burning with parsimony the candle-end of life? Is it to watch the young go first? Is it an eternal and terrible youth that outlasts the carcass? Svend was born old.

  THE company sat quiet for a moment after this tale, and then went down the hill in groups of twos and threes.

  “There,” said the Danish Woman with regret; “and they call us the gay Danes: I have ruined my country.”

  “If what I say means anything,” said the Schoolboy, brusquely, “let me compliment you: I liked your story. It was sad. If they go to the café this afternoon, as they say, instead of coming to the Wood, let me sit beside you. I think you feel the same as I do about some things: I feel less awkward with you.”

  “Come and sit with me,” said the Danish Woman laughing, and in great good humour immediately. In the afternoon, then, she was sitting in the café in the Residenz-platz, drinking a liqueur, in the middle of the company, and the Schoolboy was by her: they laughed uproariously at times, so that strangers in the café, through the smoke and newspapers, began to peer about to see what was happening.

  The Frenchwoman said to the Doctor of Medicine:

  “Our Master of the Day is busy preparing for the concert he is conducting this afternoon; but this morning I saw him looking at you with a meaning glance. He certainly intended you for the next tale-teller.”

  The Doctor of Medicine smiled. “If these friends of ours w
ant it, I will try to think of some story, but I am not gifted: I am very prosaic, quite flatfooted in the imagination.”

  The Tale of the Doctor of Medicine

  IN DOULCEMER

  WE went to see a tight-rope dancer walk on a wire stretched between Mount Thorn and Mount Pike up in the hills of Gard. Past ancient villages looking like heaps of broken pots, we came among adzeheaded cliffs into the uplands. On the other side of that rampart, orchards and vegetable gardens in full blossom and leaf surrounded old fortified farmhouses and roofless cabins.

  The château is high up above the village of Doulcemer. The graveyard near the crest of the hill tumbles down the slope like the old Etruscan cities in the Roman campagna. Doulcemer looks out over a natural terrace falling perpendicularly into broad green plains. A tarn once lay below the hills where the gardens now grow thickly and a stream ran down into the river in the valley. That was many hundred years ago. In the village are cabins six hundred years old, and others a thousand years old. Unroofed cabins built of rubble and hung with vines stand along the single street as well as in the cherry and peach orchards.

  We heard men’s voices singing in the hill and the scriptch, scriptch, of a fiddle. Over the white road that transected the nodding dark hilltop came a wedding procession, making the traditional nuptial journey to this neighbouring village to dance and drink, before putting the bride to bed in her husband’s cabin, where she would rise the next morning to her usual chores. In front of the band, the weighty, affluent and jovial relatives danced a sort of bourrée, the men with wide-brimmed hats flapping and arms crooked, the matrons with their cheeks shaking, their thin-lipped large mouths twitching and their bosoms lolloping: behind, the meagre young bridegroom, the youth of the party, the overstrung bride, the old women in lace caps. The bridegroom imitated a klaxon and there came a volley of popping corks, blow-outs and klaxons from the boys. The riddles squealed, the wedding-guests swirled round us, hopping, with their song, and impulsively flowed on. In a minute they had forgotten us, winding along through the rich gay fields to the sonorous chanting of the men and the rhythmic floating of veil, scarf and muslin skirt. They moved on with a quick lurching roll, diminished quaintly, their feet lifted in the dance and their round heads nodding. They went up the street of Doulcemer.

  As we started forward, enchanted, into this old world, I saw beside a bush a thin, yellow-skinned man, with large, mournful, freshwater eyes, and a silver plate in his temple. He was annotating a pile of printed sheets in cardboard boxes beside him: between his thighs he had a bottle of milk and a bread roll. Behind him, in the unfenced patch of Brussels sprouts, were three young peasant girls sitting by a broken-down cabin, with looms before them, on which they were weaving red and yellow cloths. I was astonished to recognise the man, and called out.

  “Charles Hodd! Is it here you hid yourself?” He raised his head quickly, defensively, stared a moment, and then said, “It’s Arthur Field! Excuse me—your brother too! I have been sitting all day in the sun, looking through some proofs and never expected to see you, of all people, in Doulcemer!”

  “Is this the heaven on earth you write about in the New York ‘Gazette’?”

  He did not reply for a moment; then, making an effort, said:

  “Yes, this is it—Doulcemer: you mean those little articles about the life here, and the artists’ colony. I didn’t see them: have you seen a ‘Gazette’ lately? Not that it matters, though: I’m not interested any more: I’ll never go back to that, you know!”

  “You don’t miss our Saturday night quartets: the chess club, the late coffee after theatre?”

  “Nothing: I’ve gone back to Nature. I’m hoping to establish a little private press here. I’ve bought a house here, you know, and I have a spare basement. My last two books made a reasonable success!”

  At this moment a cart drawn by two white oxen appeared out of the village street and came slowly towards us. My brother excitedly said,

  “But you live in classical antiquity: milkwhite oxen amongst the cherry-orchards and those weaving girls over there!”

  Charles Hodd raised his head from where he had been drawing figures in the dust, sighed, and said with calm resignation,

  “Those are our poor whites moving out: that is the third family driven out of here by extreme poverty this month. They have to find some way to get back to America!”

  The cart drew nearer. It was piled with battered cases, baskets and fruit-boxes, with bedding bundled into dirty sheets and a multitude of little bags filled with odds and ends. On one of the cases, which was covered with steamer labels, sat a thin young woman, originally good looking, but bleached and pinched with misery, with tears in her eyes, a thin little girl, with large and beautiful eyes, and a young man, sunburnt and furious-looking, who was driving the oxen. Charles waved his hand to them as they went miserably past, and said,

  “Good luck, good luck; I hope you can come back, Jack. Goodbye, Eileen!”

  The young woman began to blubber, crying out,

  “We’ll never come back, I know it! It was too good: there isn’t such luck in this life! If it weren’t for Eileen, I wouldn’t be here!”

  The young man gave Charles a long agonised look, shrugged his shoulders and turned his attention to the hilltop they had to cross before getting down to the plain.

  Charles Hodd said to us, “Would you like to carry us back to the village? I’m a little fatigued, I find,” and he turned towards the cabin and called, “Sophie!”

  A young woman, thin, round-shouldered, spectacled, with wisps of hair, appeared running. She wore a brown linen dress, unfashioned and hand-embroidered, black suède sandals, and a string round her hair.

  “You remember my wife, Sophie?” said Charles. “She is very happy here. With some other foreign women here she is trying to teach the peasants their original arts of dyeing and weaving cloth, which died out during the war. There has been an attempt, likewise, to revive the pure silk industry which supported two thousand people here twenty years ago. It was killed by the artificial silk industry: there are only two hundred and fifty inhabitants left in Doulcemer; the mulberry groves are wasted, the mills silent, and the cabins have been unroofed to avoid the paying of taxes.”

  An old man appeared at the gate of a barnyard staring at us under his heavily-veined hand, anxious for his fruit-trees.

  Charles waved his hand amicably to the old man, and said,

  “You see him? He had three sons: all were killed in the war. All the youths in Doulcemer were killed; there is no life left here.”

  Charles’s wife said, “Only artists—L., the famous French painter, holds a summer school down here. He discovered the place. He had been down here two or three years when Nina Nyiregyhaza came down for a few lessons, invited a crowd of friends down for the purpose of advertising her husband’s new book which was just coming out, and got the idea of selling real estate here to the artists.”

  Charles said, “Yes, they started out with the praiseworthy notion of reviving the dying village. The Cerfeuil, the gentry of these parts, who live in the big house up on the hill, made their money before the war in the local silk industry and in the distillation of liqueurs, for the fruit grows very fine round here. Now they only have the revenue from cottages in the villages and the orchards. There is a guerilla campaign between them and the Nyiregyhazas.”

  Sophie said, “The Nyiregyhazas hoped to become the topnotchers of the countryside, by putting their money into the old business and getting the agency for the unique woven materials of this part, and the primitive pottery, in Paris. Everything is a business to them.”

  “Why not?” said Charles listlessly, in reproof.

  We had entered the village. Under a weatherbeaten arch bearing a defaced escutcheon, stood three statuesque peasant women with their fat arms in their aprons. On each side of the gate, along the single street, the shops stood airlessly together, dark as kennels. The graveyard, white in the grass, the château, in a robe of ancient
trees, the twin peaks, hung high up over the feudal hamlet.

  Sophie waved her hand to a swarthy, pockmarked peasant, dressed in a theatrical Latin Quarter costume, who stood looking down his thick, clayey nose and talking in an undertone to someone inside the watchmaker’s shop. This person raised his head, smiled, showing brilliant creamy teeth and flashing eyeballs, and immediately after let his head fall back on his breast, as if obstinately meditative.

  “That’s Stepan Nyiregyhaza,” said Sophie.

  Charles and Sophie Hodd invited us to tea, for we still had plenty of time to see the rope-dancer. We stopped the car in the middle of the street. A surprising thing happened: to all the doors men and women came running. Venetian blinds and shutters were opened in the upper stories of the small houses and the lace curtains of cottages moved under the touch of a hasty inquisitive hand.

  A flock of geese moving senatorially out of a yard squawked and scattered, and a fat, dwarfed woman, exceedingly dark, with suffused complexion and a marked moustache and beard, carrying a canvas and some brushes, trotted into the road. She grinned widely at us and stopped dead in front of the car. She called out in a naïve voice,

  “Charles! Sophie! You have friends! How nice!”

  She scrutinised us with eager, beady eyes and suddenly squeaked,

  “Why, it’s Dr Field: I know you, you see! I know you have a wonderful collection of pictures! You will be fascinated to see the gallery Stepan and I have hung—only a little one, of course, but all local pictures and new talent. There are some old names too: I guess you came to see the colony, Dr Field!”

  Charles said stiffly,

  “Field, allow me to present to you Mrs Nina Nyiregyhaza.”

  The woman laughed delightedly:

  “Why, he knows me, if not at first hand, at least by reputation. Everyone has heard of Nina Nyiregyhaza: and Stepan too (my husband). And you, Dr Field, are very known in New York, at least to a certain circle where they collect pictures! Jim Shark the critic, your dear friend, you know, said he would bring us up to see your collection, but the day we picked was the day you closed your library to have the pictures valued.”