The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  “He doesn’t feel happy with us, you know that,” said Sylvia to her husband. “Besides, how would he get to work?”

  “Then with your mother, dear,” said the man submissively.

  Mrs Jeffries hastened to say: “I’m too old to be bothered with young men at my age.”

  “At your age? What are you talking about, mother?” said the son-in-law mildly. The boy wondered why these people thought he was deaf because blind, instead of realising that he was all ear.

  They had gone down the long drive to the car waiting at the gate, when Arnold came hurrying back, holding out his arms on both sides, to feel the bushes along the drive. He arrived at the stone verandah where we stood, and queried: “Doctor?”

  “Here, Arnold!”

  He pressed into my hand something which I thought was a shilling, and started back towards his family. I called: “Arnold, what is this? You have given me your ‘three-legs’!”

  He hesitated a moment, said: “Take it, take it, Doctor!” and went on.

  I smiled, and showed the Matron the round gold medal which Arnold had found one day, long ago, making sand castles on the beach: it bore as device, three legs radiating from a small circle. It had been his pride. After feeling it carefully for days, he had been able to reproduce the design. I said to the Matron: “Poor little ‘workman’; he is putting away childish things!” The Matron, shading her eyes with her hand, looked at the car moving away and said: “Well, that’s the closest family that ever I met: I never got a word out of them about Arnold’s parents, or anything else, not even the birth certificate. I suppose there was something wrong with the old lady’s son, that the grandson’s so queer.”

  “Your medical report is birth certificate enough,” I said sadly.

  The Matron said: “I’d give a fair price to know who he is, all the same: there’s a skeleton in the cupboard.”

  “Matron,” I said laughing, “your imagination runs riot.”

  “All right, all right, I’ve got a long nose,” she said, ruffled.

  Two years after, the Matron, who had an insatiable curiosity about the seamy side of life, from natural leaning as well as professional habit, showed me a copy of one of the two blackmail sheets the rich lively city can afford to support. The Public Guardian had printed the following paragraph: “Mrs Sylvia Charteris Skelton, née Jeffries, or Jenkins, heiress to the Jenkins jam fortune, has left home, hubby and mother and gone to spend an indefinite holiday in New Zealand. What’s the fly in the jampot?” Nothing more appeared on this subject, and the Matron, inconsolable, said: “I’ll bet those Jenkinses, or Jeffries, paid up.”

  I went to see the grandmother to find out what Arnold was doing and found him in her house. Mrs Jeffries, a middle-aged woman of young appearance, formerly pretty and fresh, now showed marks of dissipation: she was clumsily rouged, a little flabby, talkative and had a number of tics which like little animals seemed to ravage her against her will. Arnold recognised my voice but did not move from his seat to greet me. I asked the grandmother about his health, and, softening over tea, she told me in a whisper that Arnold had been married almost eighteen months; that his wife, a young immigrant servant girl “who married him for his money,” had turned him out of the house; and that this event had sufficed to transform the boy completely. He sat about the place in a depressed, dull way, never answered his grandmother, and scarcely spoke to me. His fingers, not now thinking in Braille, wandered about his person and I saw that he felt the restraints of polite company no more than a dog or bird.

  They asked me to see Arnold’s wife. I wrote to her with the hope of getting information which would help me to a treatment for him. She told me, cannily, that I might go to see her. I entered a small grocer’s shop bearing the name Arnold Jeffries, and saw her, a good-humoured, sanguine, hefty little woman of about twenty. “Are you the doctor?” she said when she saw me. She showed me into her parlour, down two steps from the shop, curtained with coarse machine lace, red-clothed, with a canary, and old stuffed chairs, a perfect replica of parlours she must have admired as a little girl in the old country.

  She came in without her apron and said cheerfully: “I know you came to ask me about Arnold. Well; I put him out and I ain’t goin’ to take him back. It would suit me in the business to have a husband with me, but he ain’t a husband, he’s a—he’s sick. I suppose his mother told you he put up the money for the stock here? Well, so he did, and every month, too, I send him what’s fair, if there’s any profits. Only, I can’t take him back.”

  “Why?” said I.

  “Aw,” she said, hesitating for the first time, “I just can’t, he isn’t natural.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I really can’t explain, Doctor,” she said, “even to a doctor.”

  I said: “You mean, he has a certain malady, or is not very strong?”

  She opened her eyes. “Oh, no, with me he’s very lively, that is, when it comes to kissing and that.”

  I was astonished now. “What then? Arnold is my old patient: I have known him since he was a child. Perhaps I can improve him, although he can’t be cured. And now I am distressed to see him sitting there, half-dead, plucking his clothes …”

  She looked upset. Deciding, she said: “Arnold, he—well, I s’pose because he’s blind, and can’t see like other men, and he’s so used to using his hands for eyes (but hands are like eyes that can see in the dark, and no matter where, and go into the smallest corners like a match)—and, why, he can sleep all day if he wants to, but I can’t, I’ve got to run the shop, and if you can imagine what it’s like when you never get any sleep. Besides, my family was always very religious and very decent.”

  I stared at the girl, and suddenly began to smile.

  “It’s no laughing matter,” said the girl, with spirit. “It’s a disease—cure it if you say you can. And all day and night his hands would be running, running, like a pyannist doing his scales.”

  I did not tell this last adventure of Arnold to the Matron. Arnold was now, besides, irretrievably degenerate, and I expected him to die when he reached the difficult age of thirty.

  I saw his wife again and told her this. She said: “Do they treat him well?”

  “Passably.”

  “I’m making some profits now,” she concluded. “I’ll give him a fine funeral: there’s a funeral parlour down the road does it on timepayment. You let me know: they never would.” She wiped her eye, and said: “I mean him no harm.”

  One day, not long after this, my friend, Kate de Lens Ormonde, the barrister, noticed Arnold’s trinket on my bracelet and said:

  “The triskelion!” There were tears in her eyes.

  She continued: “Pardon my crying over it! I’ve had the habit since childhood of crying in the presence of the supernatural.”

  To my blank look she responded, “You shall hear something curious!

  “When I was six, we went to Terrigal, and since that time, three things have haunted me in imagination: a wild bull, for there was one loose in the district that could be heard bellowing at all times of the day; a wild boar, for there was one which had eaten a baby in its cradle and escaped and was somewhere in the woods; and third, the Skillion. The Skillion, or Penthouse, is the headland which rises from the dark, tarnished lagoon at Terrigal. No one in my family knew what the name meant, and it haunted me and was ranged in my mind alongside the Sphinx, the Chimera, the Beast 666 and the Roc. We lived a month in what seemed to me the gloomy and marshy country of the Skillion.

  “When I was twelve my mother took me with my five young brothers to ‘Ascalon’, a fashionable boarding-house at the Lakes Entrance, at Tuggerah, which is not far from Terrigal. I saw, in anticipation, the familiar landscape drenched with romance.

  “Now my mother and her maid were occupied with the little boys, so I had all the day to myself: and in the early morning I left the house, going through the thickets of she-oaks, banksias and ficuses, dwarfed by the sea-winds, and climbing th
e grass-cobbled dunes which overlooked the mangrove swamps of the upper lakes, and the seven-mile ocean beach. There I often sat all day in a hollow of the sand, returning only at lunch-time and in the evening, half deaf with the everlasting crash of the waves on the sand, the bellowing of cows, the thudding of horses exercised on the flats of the beach, and the perpetual conversation of the winds. The curlews cried by the lake, at dawn and dusk, and nothing was more appropriate to the dreary wastes of sand-rooted underbush, the overgrown shrubbery full of tarantulas, the dreary wastes of the turbulent ocean, always peaked and foamy, and the bleak and ravaged headlands. O, that distant time, happy, morbid, cud-chewing dawn of adolescence!

  “The sun set one evening yellow and red over the woods and lakes, purple over the sea and in the eastern sky, bands of purple and red. The wind hurried along the deserted beaches in spirals and eddies, and the rising tide hummed along the shelving dunes. The sun went down with a last pale gleam on clouds torn to ribbons. The light was lit in the Norah Head lighthouse and blinked out to sea. I had at that time marvellously long sight, not blunted and blinded as I am now, reading for examinations. Something moved in the obscurity under the distant head, at first I thought a buggy, and next it was like a giant turning hand-springs by the sea; then I saw a wheel with three spokes; it approached rapidly, and last I saw there were three legs sprouting from a hub, bound together at the ankles to form a wheel, by a twisted cord, grey as spindrift, blanched as stranded seaweed, trundling along at an unnatural rate towards the Entrance. The circumference of the wheel was about twelve feet: the legs were whitish-brown, thick and muscular, and all were from the right side. The appearance passed me with the speed of a racing chariot or faster, leaped over the Entrance and sped into the darkness of the cliffs beyond.

  “I sat for perhaps a quarter of an hour, while the swart sea assaulted the beaches and rammed the dunes. I looked towards the thickness now enveloping the cliffs of Norah Head to see if another phenomenon would pursue the first, but there was nothing, only the long billows still visible rearing far out, and along the masked beach, waves drawn by the undertows, retreating from the sand. The white line of foam, invariable warning of dirty weather, leaped insatiably round the bombora, a mile from the Entrance, and the yellow lake water still striped the sea. The stars began to appear faintly in the dishevelled heavens, to light some grey-headed drop of spume or some belated leaf for a moment on its unfated way.

  “At last I picked up my legs and went home slowly through the quiet undergrowth. When I reached the house, the gong was ringing for dinner and I went in preoccupied, but without a word: who would believe me?

  “It happened that that night, as the wind made it a little cold, I went into the great kitchen, which was about fifty feet long, and was allowed to make toast in front of the ovens. The cover was removed, and I looked down into the fire, where wood, charcoal and twigs burned. ‘Look, look,’ I cried, laughing, ‘here is a Turk with long beard, fierce, with purple eyes: here is a stuck pig bleeding, here is a judge in ermine and red, and here is a barrister with his hand lifted, in charcoal.’

  “They came to see, the household servants, dinner being finished, the last dishes put in their places, and lassitude filling each one. ‘Yes, yes, so it is,’ they said agreeably.

  “‘You’re seeing things,’ said my mother’s cousin, Rhoda, the proprietor of the boarding-house.

  “‘Imagine what I saw this evening on the beach, Rhoda!’

  “‘What?’ she said languidly.

  “‘On the beach at dusk I saw a wheel made of three legs rolling fast as the wind.’

  “‘Get along with you,’ said my cousin laughing heartily. ‘That’s an old story: someone told it to you.’

  “‘No, I saw it plain as day,’ I said, and though my eyes were wet with superstitious tears, as now, I made it clear what I had seen. I looked at the flushed faces of the kitchen men and maids on the other side of the great mantelpiece.

  “‘Something is going to happen,’ said Rhoda nervously, and went out of the kitchen. I heard her giving orders in the dining-rooms: ‘No one is to promenade along the beach tonight, do you hear? No walks, no fishing, no going on the lake: put up a notice in the hall. Shut up the cows: perhaps they will break loose: there is going to be a storm.’ There was a repressed bustle in the company for the rest of the evening, and the young folks, dancing and gossiping, would go off into explosions of laughter about ‘General Rhoda’, and Carlo, a young fellow tutoring for the University, who had enormous success with the company, told an absurd tale of a ‘ghost train with ten bogies’. In the midst of this the loving couples stole out to consult the amiable stars.

  “Rhoda was annoyed. She said to my mother: ‘It is a sort of phantom: it is called a triskelion, and appears here just before a crime or other grisly accident occurs in the district. I shudder at the mere thought. For example, three brothers and a sister lived in a small house on the other side of the lake, and all were abnormally fat, horribly fat, so that they could scarcely walk. They sent for a quantity of that patent medicine, Antibese, supposed to be a sure cure for obesity: they took it and it made them fatter still, so that people could not bear to go near them, even the tradespeople, to give them food, or the postman with letters—monsters, they seemed. The news spread and was authenticated that a young man had appeared to court the sister. He was thin, overdressed and spoke “plausibly”, as the people say hereabouts: by that they mean something disagreeable. The brothers refused his demand in marriage and chased him from the door. The woman eloped with him and they were married. It turned out that he was a showman attached to a travelling circus, and intended to earn his living by her. He whipped her (she had a nature as soft as jelly), forced her to appear, and lived meanwhile with the tight-rope dancer. The showman was found murdered in his caravan one morning, and the girl missing. The brothers were convicted, one was hung, and the other two are doing time. The girl has to earn her living now, and under another name she travels with the same troupe. The night the couple eloped, the triskelion appeared on the mud bank in the middle of the lake and was seen by all the passengers in the ferry.’

  “‘Very commendable of it,’ said mother, ‘but why didn’t it alight on the chimney of the fat people?’

  “‘Another time,’ said Rhoda, ‘a man and woman were found hanging from a fig-tree back there in the brushwood. It was supposed that they committed suicide, because they had been vagabonding over the country for months, until every door was sick of them and the dogs were set on them. The night they hung themselves, the triskelion appeared rolling quickly over the sea, and rested for a time like a tired sea-bird on the tops of the wood: darkness fell and it could no longer be seen.

  “‘A third time was last year, when the bar at the Entrance was thrown up so high that the flood-waters could not escape and the lake was seething here outside the house. In the night I looked out to see the level of the flood-waters, and saw the sky flickering with lightning, although there was no thunder. In one of the flashes I saw the triskelion, on the submerged lawn there, by the she-oaks. I went round the whole house, into all the bedrooms, with a lamp to see if anything had happened in the house. The next morning people, and some of mine, were out boating on the rough waters, shooting the races and eddies, when suddenly the bar was broken through by the pressure of waters within, and the flood poured out through the Entrance in a fierce torrent. The boats were whirled over a mile in two or three minutes: they shot through the churning overfall at the mouth and were seen no more: wreckage was found along the beach and on the bombora. Eight persons were drowned that morning.

  “‘So you see I am anxious,’ said Rhoda. ‘Perhaps something will happen to the Jenkinses, who are coming late this evening. You know them, Thomas Jenkins, the jam man from Haviland Street. They have taken the large front room with the bow-window. Some of their luggage has come on already. They are staying for a month: and imagine that they have sent on already two cases of whiskey, one of liqueurs, one
of champagne, and conserves, biscuits and fruits galore! They think they get nothing to eat here: or else, they expect us to be quarantined when they arrive! Provided they hand it round a little, and are sociable …’

  “At this moment we heard the distant siren of the ferry, and saw the lights across the water, now roughened by the rising wind. The young guests gathered on the verandah under the tossing Chinese lanterns and shouted encouragingly. The Jenkins family disembarked with a quantity of boxes, valises and handbags. They were scrutinised in the lamplight in the usual comic spirit by the established guests.

  “Mr Thomas Jenkins, known to everyone present by his jams, was at least fifty years old, prematurely decrepit it seemed, with a small, creased, bearded face, on which a lascivious little smile played. He inclined frequently in conversation towards the person talking and in all ways displayed obsequious manners. Mrs Thomas Jenkins seemed a little over thirty, thickening towards the forty-year, pleasant, partly the conserved coquette, partly the made-over country girl. Sylvia, a self-possessed girl perhaps fifteen years old, sprung up unseasonably, thin like a sapling, and yet large-breasted, moved in advance of her parents and looked to left and right, sizing up the company and her surroundings with composure. She passed before them into the room reserved for them.

  “Sylvia had not been in the drawing-room more than a few minutes before the young men had all gathered round her, questioning her and laughing at her sage or cunning replies. They angled with delicacy to know her age, but she replied directly, ‘I will be twelve next month: I am always taken for fourteen, at least!’ She coughed a little and said she had a delicate chest. The boys, abashed by her youth, looked at that admirably moulded part and said, ‘What a shame!’ Her father came into the room after a few minutes, and softly, with numerous polite little smiles, called her to bed.

  “‘Only eleven—what bad luck,’ said one: ‘such a jolly kid.’

  “‘I don’t believe it,’ said Carlo, a puppy Don Juan, chief buck of the troupe: but in a moment to controvert him, the mother appeared, soft, young and pretty, to explain that Sylvia was ‘only a baby’, and had to rest, and that her father had gone out for a smoke.