The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  “After the first day or two the Jenkins family spent little time with the other guests, walking alone, and even taking meals in its own room. The servants complained first, because they could never make the full tale of dessert knives and plates. There were always several in Mr Jenkins’ room. Later, the ladies found Sylvia too pert for her age, too indifferent to the dignity of married ladies, and too assured with the boys. And she was dressed far, far too well for a child.

  “The mother of a dark-haired, dark-eyed, timid and confiding little girl called Jean, said with despite: ‘Imagine that yesterday that child changed her dress three times, I counted: I can’t see myself dressing Jean so. That girl Sylvia’s a ball of fluff: a nice coquette!’ The boys were far from being so severe.

  “The Vandenbrighs, family of social distinction, without whom the social columns of the city newspapers could hardly have survived, ‘cut’ the Jenkinses entirely. My mother, a mild person, said shaking her head, to her maid, as they went over the boys’ linen: ‘I don’t cotton on to Mrs Jenkins at all.’ The report spread that ‘the whole family drank’: the boys said that old Jenkins’ jokes, off colour from the first, were now ‘too much of a good thing’: solemn, excited little girls, guests in the house, brought to their mothers shillings and cakes given them by the old fellow, and were sent flying back to return these gifts. Rhoda said, ‘I shan’t have them again.’

  “One day I lay under the boughs of a little hollow by the sandhills, listening to the pleasant distant cries of the Vandenbrigh boys, who had a separate pavilion higher up towards the ocean beach, on the border of the swimming channel, on this side of the lake. The breeze rustled intermittently. I heard a prolonged rustling, and looking over my feet, saw Mr Jenkins peering like a satyr through the branches. I sat up and said nothing: I disliked him as if he were a piece of dirty rag. He smiled ingratiatingly and approached. He sat down facing me, cross-legged, and began scraping in the sand between us, in a curious manner. Presently, he took a shilling out of his pocket and offered it to me, without a word. I pushed it away, while my heart thumped hard. His two small eyes were reddish and ichorous, as if they were two little wounds looking on an interior ulcer. I jumped to my feet, murmured some excuse about seeing my mother, and left him sitting there in the little hollow. I did not know why I was scared.

  “One night I slept very uneasily, and waking, found myself, although conscious, paralysed. The darkness sat over me like an incubus. I strained from side to side, as I imagined, and beat on the bed, doing all I could to utter a cry that would waken my mother. Suddenly, I heard that cry, a dreadful cry, ringing in my ears. I found myself at the same moment awake, and my mother sitting up in bed.

  “‘Did you hear that?’

  “‘Perhaps it was I,’ I said. ‘I tried to call out.’

  “‘I thought it came from outside, though.’

  “‘It was a dog, or a curlew in the swamps,’ said my mother’s maid, holding her knees, as she sat up in bed, with her curl-papers swarming round her head.

  “‘It seemed different from a curlew’s cry, horrid as that is,’ said my mother, discontentedly, ‘but it may have been. How I hate those birds. And how I hate this everlasting gush and hiss of the sea, and those swishing trees. What, in heaven’s name, possessed me to come to “Ascalon?” I hate nature: it is full of cries and tears like a female madhouse.’ She settled herself back in bed, and I heard her sigh and mutter several times before her regular breathing began again.

  “In the morning, Rhoda came knocking on our door, to get us out in a hurry: little Jean, the dark-haired girl, had been found in the channel at five o’clock in the morning, by the Vandenbrigh boys and the others, going swimming. She had been murdered, and then thrown in. There was something secret about the business that we could not know. The police had been telephoned, but had to come seven miles by the regular launch, and would take some time to get there. Rhoda was getting the guests up, to be dressed and have an informal breakfast. No one could leave the house. The children spoke in whispers, if they dared speak at all.

  “The Jenkins family was also still asleep. Their curtains were drawn and they did not answer repeated knockings. Rhoda said, ‘Pigs! They probably drank too much last night: I heard them talking late in their room: well, they’ve got to get up and look respectable before the police come.’ She thought with despair of her lover, who went there for two or three weeks, every six months, getting away from his family to live quietly there with her, in the off-season, on the pretext of a rest-cure. He was a brilliant lawyer, a labour turncoat, and was expected to be Prime Minister at the next change of Government. He could not afford to be involved in any scandal of any kind, nor to visit a house whose reputation was not high. They beat on the door, with irons brought from the stove, and when they had no response, the kitchen-man and the scullion forced the lock, and stood timid in the warm sleeping-chamber.

  “Listening, gratified, we heard exclamations and the voice of Rhoda, trying to rouse Mrs Jenkins. They came out leading her, dazed, in her nightgown. Rhoda wrapped her in a rug, saying meanwhile, in a rage: ‘Pig, pig!’

  “‘Get yourself in hand,’ said my mother: ‘are the others like that too?’

  “‘The old fellow’s lying in there weltering in his blood,’ said Rhoda, in a businesslike voice. ‘The little girl’s nowhere to be seen. Provided she hasn’t been murdered too …’ My mother began to moan. ‘Why should you cry?’ said Rhoda brutally. ‘I’m ruined by this affair. Who will come here now?’

  “Two days later Sylvia was discovered living in a hotel in a large market town seven or eight miles away. She had given a false name, but her appearance and clothes betrayed her. The mother, confronted with the daughter, accused her of the murder of her father, out of jealousy. The daughter, cold and assured, accused the mother! Terrified, the wretched mother immediately confessed that the father and daughter had cohabited for three years, and that the father, growing more depraved with advancing age, had for some time given the masterful Sylvia cause for jealousy. Sylvia at last, breaking down, like the child she was, admitted that she had killed her father in his sleep, ‘because he had betrayed her.’ She had suspected from his furtive manner that night that it was so; she questioned him adroitly, a past-master in the horrid art, and had proved her suspicions when he fell asleep: she did not know of course that Jean was dead. She had intended to make her way to the capital, and with the money she had taken with her, take a boat ‘somewhere’.

  “Poor Carlo, tender Don Juan, attended the trial, hardly able to keep calm when Sylvia was attacked and questioned, and when she was proved guilty, saying miserably, ‘How she must have suffered, how she must have suffered, to reach that point.’ He was perhaps the only person in the whole country that pitied her. She was sentenced to a reformatory for ten years, to be released after that if her family gave proper guarantees. The father of Carlo, a judge, moved by his son’s desperate pleas, arranged for her to be allowed to enter a private asylum. She was rich by her father’s will, and would inherit the whole fortune when her mother died.

  “She had a boy child some months after she went into this house of correction, and the boy was brought up by the widow of the murdered man.”

  “THAT boy,” said the Doctress, “was unquestionably Arnold, the boy of the triskelion.” She looked at the coin which dangled on her bracelet.

  “You can bear to wear that dreadful thing?” said a young lady.

  “Poor Arnold!” sighed the Doctress. “It is in memory of him.”

  “I liked to hear your story, both your stories,” said the Balkan Lawyer. “There is a sequel to all that, too, which I know by chance. Last year, an oldish woman with her daughter, both widows, it was said, and both rich, came to Vienna and made rather a sensation in the fast set of the foreign colony. There they met Count Winkel, a penniless young man of good family, good looks, and scruples: when I say scruples, I mean he had scruples about the people he took money from; he would not take it from a b
ankrupt or a beggar, for example! Count Winkel danced attendance on both ladies, determined to catch one and either. They did all the lidos, casinos, and fashionable resorts. They lived en famille for a month on a certain islet in the Adriatic, where it is said, no woman can go without losing her virtue.

  “The daughter, quite a pretty woman, but delicate, believed that he and she were engaged, wore a ring, and referred to him as ‘my fiancé, Cornelius Count Winkel, you know’. They returned to Vienna. She waited for him one afternoon in the public gardens and presently saw him coming towards her, with her mother leaning on his arm. The mother radiant and triumphant, in pink organdie, rushed up and presented, with a little confusion, ‘the new stepfather’. The marriage had just been celebrated.

  “The daughter said nothing: the next morning the young man received by post the daughter’s supposed engagement ring: the girl died forty-eight hours later from an ‘overdose of sleeping draught’, as they say.

  “The inquiry, which brought out these details, forced the newly-married pair to leave the city, and revealed among other things, that the young lady was Mrs Sylvia Skelton, divorced for serious misdemeanours, and the mother, Mrs Thomas Jeffries, a widow. The vice certainly flowered in that family in all its forms!”

  “What a three-legged history!” said the Doctress. “I begin to think it will never stop.”

  “And you can still bear to wear that ornament?” said the young lady, irritably.

  “If I throw it away, I am afraid it will start rolling again, making more business for clerks, registrars and judges,” said the Doctress seriously.

  “There is still time, and it is warm now,” remarked the Master. “Philosopher, it is getting dark: you might light us a little way with your lantern.”

  The Philosopher’s Tale

  LEMONIAS

  I ONLY tell fairy-tales (said the Philosopher) for I would rather be seen in their sober vestments than in the prismatic unlikelihood of reality. Besides, every fairy-tale has a modern instance. You know the story of the princess in the lemon?

  I met a millionaire at one of my lectures—lugged there by some recidivist friend, no doubt. He had made his money in the grain trade. He was born in Southwark and at the age of twelve was obliged to live, with his family, on public and private charity. He stood for hours in the wintry slime of the miserable streets and received coals and blankets from the servants of Ludwig Tripos, who has been the benefactor of that region for twenty years.

  The boy’s name was St. Clemens-Smith. When he was born the bells of St. Clement Danes were ringing “Oranges and Lemons”, and his mother, lying-in in a little house within earshot, began to murmur weakly the children’s song. In honour of this accident, the boy was named St. Clemens, and everyone, remembering the birth of Henry IV of France, ran to get garlic: garlic they found, but of wine, none at all, and they smoothed his infant lip with a little lemon-juice, and his nose with mustard, or so it is said now.

  St. Clemens had an imposing appearance, even as a boy. If he was short, at twelve, he was very thickset and muscular, his magnificent brown eye rolled sullenly and passionately under a heavy and bold brow, his chin jutted and his great nose flapped its mobile nostrils in the wind. He had a habit of rolling his head from side to side quickly and looking down his nose which was positively terrifying, and of setting his large head far back on his thick neck and looking under half-closed eyelids, which indicated immense self-possession, energy and cunning: when he smiled, the whole aspect of his face changed, his eyes became mild and gay and his glance melting.

  The singular boy smiled and looked thus when he applied to Ludwig Tripos himself at his office for the job of office-boy, and he was accepted. Old Ludwig Tripos was inordinately fond of oranges, and the office-boy was sent out each day before lunch-hour to buy him half-a-dozen. The boys before St. Clemens had always spent the entire shilling given them, feeling that old Ludwig expected and should receive the best. St. Clemens had bargained all his life, and he bargained now: he offered a greengrocer the daily business, mentioned immense bargains in Whitechapel Market, cajoled and flashed his eyes. He returned with six fine oranges and two pence in change. The old man wrinkled his forehead, looked at the two-pence, counted the oranges, wondered if the boy expected a tip, and abruptly put the pennies in his own pocket. The next day he had twopence-halfpenny change! (St. Clemens had found a halfpenny on the pavement.)

  Old Ludwig smiled to himself, delighted, as a rich man often is, in an infinitesimal advantage, but said nothing to the good merchant.

  At the end of the week, St. Clemens received, his pay, five shillings. As he went home, uncommonly rich, he pondered over the problem of the oranges. Should he steal three and buy three on Monday? He was a good thief, but he thought it inadvisable to run the risk of a scandal so early in the day. His father, on the Monday morning next, gave him two shillings out of five, for lunches during the week.

  On Monday St. Clemens brought back with his oranges eightpence change! This surprised Ludwig out of his calculating calm:

  “Did you steal them, boy?”

  “I found a good place, sir.”

  But he would not say where. St. Clemens smiled boldly at Ludwig and a small flush appeared on his smooth brown cheeks.

  “How do you do it? You might tell an old businessman like myself!”

  “I smoodge and I hedge!” said the child.

  “You’re a pretty smart boy, aren’t you?” said the old man insolently.

  “I’d like to be as smart as you, sir,” said the boy.

  The old man laughed in the corners of his eyes and let the boy go. When he returned on Tuesday with his oranges and his eightpence, the old man took the boy over into the trading division and shouted jovially.

  “Look at St. Clemens, you fellows: he saves me eightpence on a shilling a day: not one of you has his merchanting ability. Take him on here with you, Jefferson, and teach him the business: he’ll make a wonderful trader.”

  St. Clemens became a wonderful trader, the quickest man by far on the floor of the exchange, the most perspicacious of buyers, the most sagacious of diviners of men. He became general manager of the firm and in the course of time was able to repay himself the “small change” he had put, out of his lunch-money, into rich old Ludwig’s pockets. Thus, the prophecy of the oranges was fulfilled: now as to the lemons.

  The firm which St. Clemens manages has branches all over the world, in Shanghai, Bombay, Karachi, New York, San Francisco and South American towns. St. Clemens made a tour, some years ago, of the Eastern branches, travelling through India by rail and meeting all the officials of the Company.

  He was given a great reception at Karachi and treated like a prince. On the dinner table in front of him was placed, curiously enough, a large and handsome épergne of lemons, with the smoothest skins and finest colour he had ever seen. He thought the natives must be addicted to lemon-squashes.

  When he was leaving, at the station, a young native girl, dressed in white muslin and ribbons, with ivory teeth laughing through a black smile, presented him with a branch of a lemon-tree bearing ripe fruit.

  He passed through India and at every large station a representative of the Company came to the train-window to pay him their respects.

  Sometimes they had arranged a native band to serenade him while the train dallied: the officials were in uncreased white, the station-master ran obsequiously hither and thither, and young girls in white dresses, or handsome boys in embroidered tunics and striped skirts with slick black hair, came forward, smiling and bowing, and on each occasion gave him a basket of fine lemons, or a branch of a lemon-tree laden with fruit, or even a coronet of lemon-blossoms, fragile, perfumed, white tinged with pink. Presently St. Clemens said to one of the white managers:

  “What does the lemon signify? I don’t like them particularly!”

  “Mr Smith, the lemons in this country are the symbol and prophecy of fertility: the native officials are doing you great honour and giving you these
lemons so that your wife will bear you numerous stalwart sons.”

  St. Clemens laughed a great laugh and squared his shoulders, for he had in himself the attributes of a great lemon-tree, and at the next station he smiled at the offerer of lemons and thanking him, added,

  “You are very kind, but I have no wife: I should like to have all these sons, but you must first give me a wife!”

  The Indian manager thanked St. Clemens, bowed and retired.

  At the next station he got off, for he had to inspect the Company’s offices. When he reached his suite in the town’s largest hotel, he noticed a grave and ceremonious bustle, and presently a native gentleman in rich dress was ushered in, with servants and secretaries. He bowed to St. Clemens, and after paying him a thousand compliments in a fine English, told him that he had been informed of his desires, and that, if all were in order, he offered him his daughter, Lemonias, an accomplished virgin of beauty and charm, and in addition, a dowry of a certain magnitude, with pearls and diamonds left by her mother, a number of silk dresses, houses in Bombay, cotton- and rice-fields. In return, the English gentleman, whose wealth and influence was known and respected, would merely make the usual settlements, and provide for his wife’s welfare and her children’s heritages, in the usual way.

  St. Clemens was so thoroughly taken aback by this offer that he made some temporising compliments, retired, and besought his secretary to find out how this embarrassing mistake had occurred. The secretary came running.

  “Mr Smith, it is native courtesy again! At the last station, you asked them to give you a wife to beget those lemon-sons with, and they have no sense of humour: they fixed up a match right away.”

  St. Clemens roared.

  “They’re smart, those sons of canine granddams: so the local competitor wants to hook up with Ludwig Tripos, the old thief!” Then his natural gallantry getting the upper hand, he enquired,