The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  The old fellow loped along the road at a round pace, despite his age, and disappeared quickly over the brow of the hill. The ladies, careless observers, chattering and rubbing each other’s plumage, imagined that he had got down the hill rather quickly; my mother cried out that he had stumbled and rolled down; my sister went pale, but to my eye, looking out towards the sun which shone so brightly that bridal day, it seemed that he stepped off the rim into the air and dissolved immediately there.

  Now all happened as she had foreseen. I will only mention my father’s death. My father had changed very much in the two years since Giselda’s marriage, and had become eccentric and morbid. Some inexplicable fancy had turned my father against me during those two years; he hardly received me, and he died in my presence with his head turned to the wall and without a word. Yet I was working in a way not unworthy of his name: he might have looked on me as his successor. What laboured to his destruction in my father’s spirit? The world is full of private and incomprehensible disappointments.

  When at last I left the room where my father lay dead, I went into the hall, but started back with a cry of surprise and dismay, for not only were all the windows blinded, but every mirror was covered with a black veil. It appeared that my father had asked for that to be done. He had said, “Cover all those mirrors and glasses, except the skylight in the observatory. When I die, open the roof there, and leave it open all night. Let my soul go out that way, and let no one see it pass: sleep tight that night and mind your own business. Most of all, keep my son from my bedside so that he will not perturb my departing spirit. Let him not look in my eyes at the moment of death: who knows how far these crystals will see then? What will be reflected there? No one shall look and penetrate my transfiguration, no one shall see me annihilated.”

  I said to my mother, “That is all very well. But how is it that you have all this crape and mourning in the house: and how is it that you are already dressed in your mourning?” “Since he wished it done, I was prepared: I had to get a new dress, so I got a black one,” said my mother calmly. Alienated from my father, and shocked by my mother’s coldness, I went to the mirror, to draw aside the veil and look in at the face that would comfort and understand me, my own. In the gilded mirror shone my pale thin face, with red eyes, and the stubble of a beard growing thick around the chin. My mother jerked the veil from my hand and covered the glass, breathing heavily meanwhile. The movement dislodged the nail on which the mirror had been hanging for so many years. I started forward to save the glass and saw my image falling heavily to the floor. Metternich bending deep and curiously as ever, inspected my frightened face, round and gushing eyes, in the mirror’s mellow chiaroscuro. “How like your poor father you look,” said my mother unluckily, looking over my shoulder. “Then there’s no rest for me in my career,” I responded, and felt it a very unfortunate omen.

  I was disinherited by my father’s will. My sister inherited several houses, and she and Jourdain moved into one of these, an old roomy one, built of great blocks of half-dressed stone. The principal rooms opened out on either side of a hall which could have been used for a ballroom. Kitchens, flagged yards, pantries, servants’ quarters, stables, coach-houses and dependences, and the upstairs attics and cupboards were built on a vast scale, and there were concealed passages running through the walls and chimney-stacks. This house was always full of wind, of creaking boards and rattling rafters. On the attic floor the largest room was of great size, covering two downstairs rooms. There was a chimney-stack in the centre of the room, and round the sides were numerous strange corners and bays, due to the irregularities of the plan. Because of constant noises made by rats running over the rafters and in the wall passages, and of the chitterings of swallows that made their nests in the roof, and the bats that sheltered there in the daytime, this room had been called “The Rat Room”. It was lighted only by two windows in gables near the door. The portion of the room behind the chimney-stack was therefore ill-lighted, and was not seen from the door. There, on the floor and on the four wide steps of the chimney-stack, all sorts of unused household furniture was stacked.

  In the walls were doors about three feet high leading into the small passages. These doors were covered with large old-fashioned prints from Christmas supplements, “The Squatter’s Dream”, “The Battle of Copenhagen”, “King Cophetua”, “By the Waters of Babylon”, and so forth.

  I was estranged from my sister for a number of years by my own fault, for private difficulties irritated the nervous disposition I had from my father. These difficulties were vanishing and I was becoming reasonable again, when I heard that my sister’s eldest child, a boy of eight years old, had died. She had another boy, two years younger. The death of the firstborn, however, affected her so much that she became seriously ill, and the family was obliged to take her to the mountains. This was the first time in nearly nine years that they had taken a holiday. Jourdain always spent the summer vacation with his extension and summer school lectures, and my sister spent the same time studying with him.

  The house was to be shut up; and the packing went on apace. Jourdain climbed up into the attic one warm morning and went behind the chimney-stack to put some household silver into the wall-passage. He turned from the little door, and was inexpressibly startled to see, standing on one of the steps of the chimney-stack, a strange man with a singularly familiar, lively, but pensive expression, a face distinguished but distorted, diabolically intimate. He gazed for a full moment at the self-possessed intruder, and suddenly recognised himself! The light falling on him from each side of the stack lighted him into the dark gilded mirror, cracked and wreathed with crape and covered with a film of dust, which my sister had put there secretly years before, after the house was broken up, for old sake’s sake. This poignant face which appears in an unsuspected mirror, like the peaked child-faces one sees at a window at night, seem glimpses of a man’s own spirit, and harden, isolate and terrify him as if he were alone in the world.

  Jourdain was overworked, no doubt, and had worried about his family troubles. That night he had an attack of aphasia, and was ill for a month afterwards. When he recovered he had the mirror taken out, and, for fear it should turn up again in some curiosity shop, he took the precaution of burying it in the bottom of a depression in the orchard. In this depression he subsequently built a cement basin for a pond, and grew water-lilies and rushes there. He felt comforted.

  A year or so later I began to see my sister’s family regularly. I now felt independent, and was willing to accept what I had earlier refused, my sister’s offer of a more equitable division of my father’s estate. Our relations became very friendly. We stood one Saturday afternoon by the pool in the orchard and my sister’s boy played round about us, cutting whistles in the reeds, in the canna shoots and in the melon vines. He had them of all pitches. He took a reed and sharpened it: he held it carelessly and it cut his palm. He washed his hand in the water of the pool, and there the blood straggled away in a kind of illegible script. My sister then told Jourdain and me that she had dreamed the night before a dismal dream. She found herself in a crypt underground by a glacial pool, and three coffins were piled in front of her. In the lowest was dreadful putrefaction: in the second, was a male child alive, in swaddling clothes, which trailed out under the dislodged lid; and in the top one was a child inchoate, which nevertheless opened its eyes, spoke to her, and bursting through a chrysalis of corruption, arose pure and fair, and coming towards her, seemed to threaten her with its superior spiritual force. Then she saw the earth in the roof of the crypt heave and break in twice pinnate cracks, and through this quaking earth the child began to pass, unfolding as a plant. Reedy music expressive of desolation which had been some time in the background, now forced itself into her head, and she had the sensation of drowning. She saw, although still underground, the surface of the germinating earth: horribly suggestive roots and cotyledons arose waving violently and tossing their sensitive blinded tips as if in the grip of primitive an
d ruthless passions. Above this turmoil lay the peaceful waters of a lake, around whose brim grew water-lilies and rushes. On its surface was the same scrawling and illegible writing which she had dreamed of years before, in the parchment given her by Metternich. “Then I realised that it was our own pond,” said my sister, “and I was standing beside it, and that underneath it was my treasure, my dead son, with his hands and feet closed as are these lilies at night, all that was fine and delicate, lying buried.” I was not surprised to learn that my sister expected a third child and that she dreaded the event.

  One day in the October of that year, the weather was so fine that it seemed an early spring day. There had been rain at night, the morning was grey, and windows rattled in brief gusts of wind. Suddenly a brightness flooded the chambers and halls, and the sky was blue entirely. The white reflections of stucco walls shone on the clean windows of newly-vacated apartments, and the sun warmed with youthful beneficence the men working on roofs, scaffoldings and drains. A constant wind blew and the ground was covered with pools of rainwater and yellowed plane-tree leaves. It was Thursday afternoon. Girls’ schools walking out in queues were gay with the unusual excitement of the air. They laughed merrily like the rat-tat of smithy hammers, when a child’s blue bonnet fell in the brimming gutter.

  I crossed the park near my home and saw an Englishman in a silk top hat and a black overcoat coming from a wedding, with a white flower in his lapel. He held his hat in his hand and bowed, as if in reverence to the wind which blew in his face, with rude pushes buffeting his knees and shoulders. The gardens were a fresh windy yellow. Birds floated like butterflies over the roofs. Two sparrows chased each other about the gables at the corner of the street, like the love birds in the Willow Pattern Plate. Kitchen windows, opening for housewives to hang out dishcloths and put out tomatoes to ripen, sent golden reflections back and forth over the lichened walls. I paused by the pond in the park. Two fat stone cherubs danced over the jet of water. There, on the other side of the water, the Englishman stood, bowed over the rim of the pool, looking at the goldfish, or the reflections of the gaily contorted cherubs swimming in the water. The shape of his head was curious, heart-shaped, and the lines of his foreshortened face were cruel, old and cunning: his overcoat parting as he bent, showed that he wore a sort of court dress, with black silk breeches.

  I was afraid to see that gentleman raise his head. I hurried away, through the park towards my home. My heart beat hard and I muttered to myself, “That’s a bad omen, that’s a bad omen, I’m afraid.” When I got home I found a telegram telling me that my sister’s baby was born, and that Giselda was very ill, not expected to live. I hastened to their house. The shorter way was through a field that led to the orchard. In the orchard I found the boy Bobby, now an eight-year-old, sitting on the edge of the pond, throwing decayed and dried apples into the shallow water. I said, “What are you doing, Tom Pippin? Does your father know you’re by yourself in the orchard?” “No,” said my nephew gaily, “he don’t. They sent me up to the Rat Room, but when I looked out of the window the old man waved to me from the orchard. So I ’scaped to come and play with the children.”

  “What old man is that? And where are the children?” “The old man used to live in the Rat Room and creep downstairs quietly, to go and play in the orchard, but since Papa put the pond here, he likes better to stay here.” “Ah? And what little boys?” He began skipping on the edge of the basin. “The other little boys,” he said seriously: “you can’t see them; you can hear them, though.” I heard the wind skipping over the leaves, and my nephew Bobby whispering loudly behind his hand. “None of that,” I said, “you’re doing it yourself.” “I play with them,” shouted the little boy. “I throw apples at them: they dodge and if anyone comes they jump back into the pond where the old man put them.” He picked up a beetle, drugged with cold, which had been feebly struggling over the leaves: he watched it struggle for a moment, and volunteered, “I don’t see the old man any more, since the day you were there and I cut my finger and washed the blood off in the water.” I dragged him to the house. At the doorstep he wrenched his hand free and, putting his fingers to his mouth, let out a terrifying whistle. He said, “That’s to tell the boys I won’t be out for a bit. Mother’s sick.” He stopped for a moment in the hall-entrance. “The boys,” he said significantly, “don’t like to see anyone but me.” He smiled mischievously. “There are no other little boys,” he said, and fled into the dining-room, where he began playing a mournful little air on some xylophonic toy.

  My sister knew she was dying and said to Jourdain, “Bring me my handglass.” She looked sadly at her worn face, and let the mirror drop from her hand. It fell to the floor and broke. Bobby put his bullet head into the room to see what was going on. He saw a crowd of people skirmishing to pick up the bits of broken glass and thought his mother was better. He went to the window and unconcernedly pushed aside the curtain to look into the orchard. A ray of sunlight fell across my sister’s face, showing her pallor and fatigue, and thus she died.

  That is all. A little later Jourdain married again. He said he was marrying to escape the transparent solitude in which he lived, the bodiless quiet, full of invisible memories, of inaudible voices, of embraces of air winding about his neck, of silver-footed dancings in the corner of the eye, and of the silken rustlings heard by the lonely ear in vacant rooms. He married one of his students, a young, lively girl, and is happy with her.

  He sold the house, but his son, my nephew, now adult and an accomplished violinist, has never ceased regretting it, its gardens, meadows, coach-houses and attics full of illusions, and its perfect days, of which every instant is reflected in his mind as in the unblemished surface of the pool.

  THE Mathematician was silent. Out of the slight murmur that arose among the guests, the German Student began to speak.

  The German Student’s Tale

  THE SPARROW IN LOVE

  IT seems your story had a profound meaning, a sort of Gothic Narcissus legend, a reversed Hylas and the water-nymphs. I heard my grandmother say that if a girl looks in her glass on Midsummer’s Eve she will see the face of her husband: likewise, I had a little sister who died, who told me never to look in a mirror at midnight, for fear I should see my ghost therein and die. It is clear, the mirror is a world with furniture, but without inhabitants—the fancy wants to people it, and with whom but ourselves? That is the feeling a primitive savage might have on seeing himself in a glass for the first time. I saw a thing like that at home.

  I had a little bird in a cage, and your story strongly reminded me of it. (Please forgive me, sir, for making a sort of anecdotal tailpiece to your touching story.) One morning I caught in the gutter outside the house a little half breed, half sparrow, half canary. The weather was cold and it was fainting in the freezing gutter. I am not very fond of animals, but I was moved to take it in and put it in a large motor-oil case with wire-netting over the front, a shelf to rest on, a ladder and a door with a leather hinge. I made this cage while the bird was getting warm in a flannel on the stove.

  We had no bird, so we paid attention to this little one: we called it Liesl, bought different sorts of birdseed for it, and made it fat. It was a young bird and got very spry. When spring came it chirped loudly with long parlando passages, canary’s trills suited to a sparrow’s throat. When summer came and the heat was intense, the poor creature began to show signs of mental disorder: it moped about, fluffed up, with a dull, discontented eye, sometimes would squeak wildly in a fit of temper, and would peck at us when we put in food. One morning my brother broke the small shaving mirror in the bathroom, and while bringing it out to give it to the children to play with, or to use in the doll’s house, he had the idea of putting it in with the canary, to furnish its drab little house. The canary, surprised, inspected the reflected bird closely, chirruped, affected to ignore it, and seemed to be trying to catch it at its tricks, but the subtle reflection was too quick for Liesl. She presently made a companion of it, an
d passed all her time in front of the glass peering with extreme intensity at her image, or making a few dainty coquettish steps back and forth, which were imitated by the mirror-bird.

  In a day or two our poor creature was in a high state of excitement, and began to stand before the image with a piece of grass in its beak, taken from the floor of the cage. The image responded to this sentimental suggestion by holding a piece of grass in its beak, too. Thus began and increased the loves of the canary and its image. In a few days more, Liesl, tormented by an inept instinct, had put together on the floor a rough assortment of dry grass-stalks, ignorantly and blindly attempting a nest. Out of pity, I made a sort of nest myself, and put it into the cage, and the bird then, with satisfaction, interrupted her intense silent colloquies at the glass, with brooding on the nest. Curiosity, and, I suppose, a sort of cruel humour, forbade me to take away the glass. One hot morning when I came to look, I found the bird sitting on the nest with excitement, and when I put in her seed, she made as if to peck me, with a stupid, hot, crazy look in her eyes. I dislodged her, and found she had laid an egg. She laid three such eggs, greyish, without shells, infertile, of course. I stole some sparrows’ eggs and gave her two real eggs to sit on, white with brown specks. She immediately became a self-assured, hotheaded little creature, with important airs, and no manners for society at all. But I suppose she didn’t know how to take care of the eggs: in fact, her passions would suddenly cool and she would walk off round the cage, calmly neglecting the adopted eggs. Then I took the glass away and she became her normal self, and picked and chirped, and only at rare moments her passion would return and she would go back and sit like a grenadier on the nest, in a painful state of mind, and glaring at the world.