The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  At the Bank, Henry, wonderfully elated at being seen with the Baron, paid the taxi-driver, and when he turned, found the Baron out of sight. He had already reached his broker’s office. Henry waited all day for the Baron to go and look at the fish. In the evening, he regretfully picked them out of the foul water, gutted them, cleaned them and put them in his cabin while he went and fetched glass jars, white slides, formalin and paraffin. He then put each fish in a separate jar with the label, “Goldfish from Kin-Saï” with a word of history and the date of decease, put in formalin, closed the jars with paraffin and set up his funereal museum on the roof for the Baron to sec when he arrived.

  He spent a sad weekend. The Saturday afternoon came with electric warnings in the air, and a stir in the City. He passed Sunday rather sadly looking at the columns of “Positions Vacant”. He awakened on Monday to a changed world! That was the morning on which our country declared publicly an embargo on the export of gold, “went off the gold standard” as they said. I trust the ladies will forgive my mentioning these details.

  In the afternoon of this day Henry found the Baron on the roof-terrace. “Where are the fish?” said the Baron. Henry showed him. The Baron laughed and said, “Pickle; never inter!” He took the young man’s arm and walked him into the lift, still holding his arm till he reached the sixth floor, where he went out and left Henry to the lift-attendant’s respectful congratulations.

  “What the Baron touches,” said the lift-man, “turns to gold: and he has only to shake hands with a man for him to make money: I believe in you, sir: I’ll make you a proposition. You pick out a stock and I’ll put up the money: we share fifty-fifty, either way, but you do the business.”

  Henry was impressed by the lift-man’s words, took the money and bought one hundred shares of North Atlantis Gold Mining and Diamond Syndicate Ltd. at 17/6, and sold them at a shade less than 39/9, the best price this company’s shares ever saw in the market. At the price just mentioned the lamentable discovery was made that diamonds were a drug in the market, and gold absent from the North Atlantis workings, at least in the northern parts, that the directors were taking rest-cures on the Continent and the hyperbolic geologist who had made the reports was cruising along the Dalmatian coast. Henry, who had received a jar containing one of the sensitive goldfish, as a personal present from the Baron, and who always kept this souvenir on his mantelpiece, one morning began speculating to himself and said aloud, “Now if North Atlantis goes up again … ” when he noticed the goldfish go as pale as a sheet. Experimentally, he said, as if still thinking aloud, “Perhaps, though, I should sell North Atlantis … ” and he observed that the dead goldfish became red again. The same day he took an option on the sale of 1,000 North Atlantis and before the end of the month had realised a large profit on the downgrade.

  Except for this singular accident, Henry would never have made any money. But now we can safely leave him with his foot well advanced for the slipper of fortune, and pursue no farther than today the remarkable and true, yet fantastic story of the Sensitive Goldfish. I should say that the rest of the goldfish have been secreted by the Baron, for they are not always exactly of the same shade of opinion, and he is then obliged to take a majority ruling.

  THEY laughed and congratulated the Banker handsomely on his tale. Some of the men began to ask the Banker whether gold would be demonetised, and some of the women asked him about prices of bonds. The Master of the Day immediately called upon the Solicitor who, in the general silence, began his tale without excuse, saying simply that it was a true tale.

  The Solicitor’s Tale

  THE AMENITIES

  ISIDOR found himself on his fourteenth birthday fatherless, half-illiterate, poor and honest: his father had died the week before, penniless, and his brothers and sisters were now the object of consideration of the Jewish Board of Guardians. Isidor wished to be a scholar and to be rich, ends not incompatible, and the less so since he was descended from the wealthy hereditary prophets of eighteenth-century revolting Lithuanian Jewry. The wealth had vanished, but the soul of the Zaddik had come through his father, a poor man, to him: and if there is one thing (he said to himself ) that can overcome the cold calculation of the Gentiles, it is the mystic soul of the impassioned Jew.

  Isidor, bearing the burden of his race on his thin shoulders, groaned and shivered in the Whitechapel winter, and, standing at the corner of Leadenhall Street, saw the motor-cars roll past bearing the rich Israelites into the City: and looking into the shop of the learned Talmudist, coveted the Hebrew books bound in Russia leather. He was a communist in principle but he disdained the poor Jews of Wentworth Street. His pride was inordinate; he tried to hide it for the time being under his rags and his slang, yet not only had he set himself to read all the philosophy, literature and political economy of the country he lived in, his piercing short-sighted eyes close to the book at midnight, under the light of a begged candle end, but he intended to get the better of them all by learning and business acumen. When he ventured into the West End and saw the sixfoot retired Army captains sitting in the club windows, and the elegants of Bond Street patrolling past in their shirt-fronts and pearl studs in the evening, he sighed.

  “What crass uniformity,” he said. “In the evening they stick on, to a man, the livery of lucre: how it destroys the character to be born rich—(but the amenities, the amenities!)” and then thought regretfully of Cambridge and the academic woods.

  “What would I do, a little Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians?” he continued, and nevertheless, with his first money, in the summer, took a train trip to Cambridge.

  He sat up late at night rolled in a rag on the floor of the garret of his father’s business neighbours, the Silbersteins, and eventually a bright idea occurred to him. He washed himself very clean the next day and went to Mendelssohn, a rich fur merchant, one of the supporters of the Synagogue. Refused admittance by the office-boy, he put on a bold front, said his business was most urgent and personal and must be despatched at once. After delivering this message, he sat still in the anteroom, his heart beating hard at his effrontery, and rapidly reviewed his arguments. When he was admitted to Mendelssohn, he greeted him respectfully in Hebrew and named his father, his mother’s father and his origin. Then he said:

  “I came to ask you to give me money, even me, an unknown boy, a stranger. I am poor and ambitious, and I want charity, and not the charity of the Board of Guardians: and the reason I have forgotten my pride, the usual pride of the poor scholar, of one of the race of Baalshem, and come to you, a ragged boy to a millionaire who has no interest in him, is that I am impelled by one passion, that is the passion for learning. I am almost illiterate, but I wish to be more learned than the old rabbin, not only in the Torah and Hebrew lore, but in all that passes for wisdom among these people. These people are of a cunning and masterful race, crooked and conspiring, proud and difficult abroad, but at home peaceful, yielding and credulous, and positively worshipful of talent, even of choleric and misanthropic, arrogant or spiteful talents, provided they remain conservative. Think of Disraeli: think of the Lord Chief Justice. How better can a Jew serve his race in exile?”

  The fur merchant was hit in the softest places of a Jewish heart, and after questioning the boy and satisfying himself that Isidor was not only truly enamoured of learning, but had also extraordinary acuity of wits, he agreed to give him the sum of £20 with which to get himself tuition.

  “What do you propose to do after these preparatory studies?”

  “I will certainly proceed by scholarships,” said Isidor.

  “And after all,” thought the merchant, “a Jew is not without gratitude. He will repay me if he makes money—and he undoubtedly will, for the sparks that fly out of his mouth are from a hot terrestrial fire, Baalshem’s or not. Then if he becomes another Disraeli, think of the honour to myself: in any case it is a good action, one God will note,” and at home to his wife he became sentimental on the subject of poor Jewish genius.

  Men
delssohn meantime told the boy that he would make inquiries for him, enough to satisfy himself that the money would be spent for proper tuition, and told him to call back the next day for the money. The professor designated by Isidor for his studies was a poor man who did not have a banking account: Mendelssohn simply exacted a receipt signed by the professor.

  Isidor left the office of the fur merchant warmed by the idea that he would be able to study, and without the crushing burden of supporting himself by daily work. He walked about the city, examined the bookstores in Chancery Lane, and came into Great Turnstile where he looked a long time at the beautiful crests exhibited in an engraver’s window. He walked into Lincoln’s Inn Fields and began to think about his future. The crocuses were just coming up there, through a thin remainder of snow, a promise of early Spring. Isidor did not see the crocuses, for he was short-sighted, and besides, had no use for the flimsy little weeds with coloured tops that some people pretended to admire; but he had all the heraldic crests before his eyes, with the pomp of their devices which he had easily read, and they set themselves in a procession before his eyes, marking all the stages of the brilliant careerist’s life.

  The next day he went with the professor’s receipt and the professor’s syllabus to Mendelssohn. He crumpled the money in his pocket and wondered again what had made Mendelssohn part with it so easily, and what made the professor trust him with it: he knew quite well himself that before the majesty of a banknote all scruples, all preconceived notions, all obligations vanished into air. It occurred to him that two professors were better than one. After considerable hesitation, he called upon another rich man of the Jewish community and with even more assurance and even more mellifluously, addressed him as he had addressed the first. He named a well-known professor at the University of London, and this operation likewise miraculously succeeded: it became clear that the mantle and forty tongues of the godly had descended on this humble Isidor.

  “How often” (he said to himself ), “have I reviled these rich men, and now I find that though their situation is different from that of the poor, their hearts are equally accessible and their pockets more extensible: in fact, they have a charm, humanity and affability which the poor, in their wretchedness, have not had the time to acquire. In fact, I find that Mendelssohn and Bernstein are exceptionally sensible of the amenities of Life.”

  Having repeated this process several times, so that he was confirmed in his sympathetic view of the rich men, Isidor at length found himself the present owner of £60 and the prospective owner of £120. It then seemed to him that if he bought pants or twill sheetings with his £60 and sold these goods to advantage, he would have money of his own, not owed to charity; and that by fruitfully using his talents he could soon be free of obligation to further benefactors, and even able to repay the first if necessary. He acted in this fashion, and in a few months had a much larger capital than ever his father had. Meanwhile he went to the professors and put off the tuition for another term. When the end of the term came, he paid them.

  About the same time Mendelssohn the fur-merchant, unable to keep the secret of his generosity any longer, let Bernstein know that he was interested in a young Jewish scholar of exceptional promise, and had even let his heart run away with him to the extent of £20. Bernstein’s response was flattering: he inquired the name of the struggling scholar, and when he learned it, he said roundly,

  “Abie, we’ve been done: we’re getting weak in the head in our old age.”

  But they found out from the professors that they had been paid; they were filled with remorse, and yet they looked for a catch. Soon Rosenthal told them, during a long, lively discussion on the Exchange, that he had been capable of singular generosity to a poor scholar; and the murder was then out. In a short time the ten or twelve benefactors of Isidor gathered in conclave and there was some passionate declamation: but after half an hour of laughter and shouting, Mendelssohn (who had been a good choice after all), got up and said:

  “Boys, we were taken in and basted, as is right where three yards of credulity cover a nitwit. We are ten men, a minyon of bright jewels, and we may as well pray for brains on the spot. But I still stake—my word—on the future of that young scapegrace: consider that he is only fourteen. We are fools, we have been fooled: every fool to his folly. We arc rich, he is poor, he has mulcted us in the space of sixty days of enough geld for any smart boy to start with: he can probably pay us back, and I admit that his manner of delivering his speech was simply irresistible. That boy is a smart boy: we could do worse than to take him into business with us.”

  And with some little dissent this opinion was accepted, and the steadier among the benefactors began presently to tell it against themselves, as a joke: for after all, it reflected a certain amount of credit on them.

  Thus, and not otherwise, did Isidor find himself at the age of twenty-four literate, rich and honest as the world goes: and it is to be said to his credit that no orphan’s curse was recorded against him on high, nor had he seen the curse in a dead man’s eye. But now, although he was a doctor of civil law and was no longer poor, he was still without a wife, “and” (said Isidor to himself as he looked into the salons of richer men and saw through panes glistening like silver, some beautiful woman presiding over board and hearth), “a beautiful woman brings into the life of a man all the amenities.”

  He was living at this time in a small flat in a tranquil street opposite a grand mansion, which was closed during the summer. A few months after he took the flat he looked out of his window, while the gramophone was playing a Beethoven quartet, and saw the yellowing leaves blowing over the macadam, melancholy and irresolute.

  “Ah,” he said, profoundly sad at heart, “to live way up north in the dark winter of the German Ocean, almost under the Aurora Borealis, in the melancholy slow death of brief summer, under the pale gleam of the sun of these waterlands where the women are tall and cheerless and arthritic pessimism fills their eyes—” but at this moment, he was startled by seeing the great shutters opposite flung open; and a domestic, in a striped apron, hurriedly withdrawing from the bitter breeze, struggled for some minutes with the catch on the windows. The windows were of great size, as if they lighted a ballroom, and were of leaded glass. The pale apron and vest of the servant retired from behind the panes, but Isidor, still watching, saw the windows flutter for a moment and once more burst open. The house was very old and the catches, no doubt, were breaking away in the wood. The servant came flying back in his soft house- shoes and once more adjusted the catch. Half-an-hour afterwards, as Isidor passed his window on his way out, he saw the windows opposite break open once more. He imagined the luxury of the great uninhabited house.

  For several days the windows stayed shut, and the shutters on the top floor were irregularly opened, apparently in the servants’ quarters. It seemed that the masters were about to return from their summer resort. And it happened that Isidor, lonely the next Sunday morning, gazed out of his bedroom window and saw the large windows again fly inwards and disclose, seated at a fine polished table on which were numerous volumes, an old gentleman of about sixty years of age, with white hair and a lofty bony forehead: his nose was hooked and his eyes youthful and brilliant.

  “One of the glaubensgenossen,” said Isidor softly, and immediately went downstairs and asked the maid, whom he saw at the front door shaking the hall carpet, the name of the owner.

  “Sir Solomon Perez, it is, sir,” she said with pride.

  “A doctor?”

  “A benker, a big benker, sir,” said the maid, and feeling that she might have in some way undermined the dignity of her master, she went indoors, not without a last glance round the edge of the door at Isidor, who was a young man of pleasing exterior (and in using this phrase I am not making moral reflections).

  Isidor’s occupations at this moment were various and multi- farious, but they brought him into touch with plenty of bankers: therefore the following day, he made inquiries and discovered that Sir
Solomon Perez was a millionaire, and had a beautiful young wife from Buda-Pesth, whose father had made a fortune in steel-mills during the war, had turned a private into a public company before the end of the war, and had sold out his entire interest at a great profit six months before the business failed. He discovered also that Sir Solomon was an amateur and connoisseur of pictures, a poet and musician in his own right: that Sir Solomon, interested in barley, had presented a fine Russian wolfhound to the Prime Minister, who contemplated a measure on cereals, that the Prime Minister had come to conceal his ignorance in front of Sir Solomon’s valuable collection of Boucher and Fragonard, and that the Prime Minister had admired much more evidently the young beauty from Buda-Pesth.

  Isidor went to bed that evening, after scrutinizing the closed shutters of the mansion opposite, with his head full of the collections of Sir Solomon, both in art and banking, and his heart burning to see the wife. As for affairs, he and Sir Solomon’s had nothing in common at present, but he would go on sedulously collecting all the information and tittle-tattle about the town till he found an excuse for presenting himself to the old man.

  There was nothing he longed for so much as a portion of the stored-up treasure of the world, enough to decorate himself with those beauties and that culture which counted for nothing in the marshes of Lithuania and would have made a figure of carnaval in the Mile End Road. The mere making of money (he told himself ) would never have attracted him had it not promised for him a long series of halcyon days in the prime of life, sweetened by the comforts of luxury, amidst which he could pore over manuscripts, drawings and books, recognize a painter by a stroke of the brush, a musician by a strain, speak with a polished accent and enjoy the delightful solace of a beautiful wife, who should be elegant, cultivated and musical in voice.