The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  Afterwards, the porter told me the following story: In the winter just past a pogrom had overwhelmed the poorer Jewish sections of the city. It had been followed by a series of disorders, cruel and persistent, so that even the richest Jews had been forced to fly: Jewish teachers were assassinated in their schools, Jewish bankers in their carriages. At length the soldiers of the Czar were forced to intervene, but that was after many murders. Alexandra’s parents had escaped with the young family to the frontier, after the first outbreak, but left behind them all their money and goods. They had time only to send a short message to Alexandra in her school out of town, to tell her to join them at the frontier. Alone, without money, without daring to tell her teachers, who were mostly of another race, Alexandra left her school and joined them after several days, during which they had waited in terror, deferring their departure from hour to hour.

  “What do you want?” was the girl’s first question.

  “The Angel of Death has taken up his abode in this land of terror, cruelty and superstition,” said the father solemnly: “there is no safety for us here. We are going to America the golden, where we can work in peace, and where there is unlimited opportunity for us all: they say the streets are paved with gold—doubtless, that is a manner of speaking, but they are all rich there; and there are no Cossacks, and there is no Czar.”

  “We have only waited for you, Sacha,” said the mother: “God be praised, you are unhurt: now let us be off.”

  “I won’t go!” said Sacha.

  The cries and gloomy prophecies of the family, and especially her mother’s stern laments, prevailed on her after more than a day’s argument. The others were leaving, she would make her family miss their opportunity: she would ruin the whole family. “Then go, leave us, leave your mother to die of a broken heart, just at the moment that life promises us so much in America! Has the girl the heart of a Cossack? And as for your music, in America there are pianos too, I hope,” said her mother. Alexandra attempted to leave them, but her heart, steeled against cries, softened at their crestfallen and beaten aspect, and she joined them. Besides, the worst possible news was still coming through, horrors more horrible than the imagination could supply: there was not a hole in K——to hide her, not a breast to lay her head on, there. The family took ship at Hamburg and she came sulking. In the hold the immigrants sat, prayed, wept and ate the ritual food they had brought with them; and they read over the letters sent them by cousins and acquaintances of the seventh degree, from America, the land of unlimited opportunity: life was easy there, everyone worked, the pay was fabulously high, one even got farms free. But it was said that one could be refused admission to this land for defects of vision or utterance, for disease, deformity and moral corruption: anarchists and loose women were refused. At last they came in sight of the promised land; Alexandra turned her back on it, went and sat in the stern of the ship and tried to devise a way to have herself returned to Europe. When the immigrants filed through the turnstiles, the examining officer stopped the girl with glasses, who peered at him at a hand’s-breadth from his nose, and sent her for examination. The family sat about in the greatest misery, while the father talked madly in his foreign tongue to the ignorant officer. “O, the wicked, wicked girl! For what has God punished us! She wants to see us all drop dead of shame and grief!” When Sacha found that she was about to be passed through to her family, she said frantically, “I am not well: I have a disease.”

  “What disease?”

  “A bad disease—I am a fallen woman!”

  The family let out many cries of desolation, and begged the doctors to examine the lying child, but they were fatigued and cross, and the family was large and poor. Alexandra said good-bye without a tear, and was returned on the next boat going to Hamburg, travelling in the most depraved company, without any comforts, almost without food, without money. The captain of the vessel seeing her beauty, lent her a bunk in his cabin and treated her well. She endured all her misfortunes with equanimity, and was perhaps unconscious of them. Disembarked at Hamburg, refusing the captain’s offer of another sea-voyage, she began to look for work in the Jewish community: she gave piano lessons and worked as a servant, telling her friends that she intended to rejoin me as soon as she had enough money to pay for her lessons. Money was hard to come by. Presently, a letter came from her family in America, enclosing enough money for her passage, and telling her that they had made friends and she would be allowed to enter the country, despite the dreadful lie she had told. She took the money and set out on foot for K——. On the way she was seen by a rascally innkeeper to take money from her bodice and he sent accomplices after her on her road, to rob her: by them she was ravished and killed, and the body, flung into a thicket, had been discovered only a few weeks before I came to the town.

  THE Musician turned pale. “What is wilder, more reckless and weaker than a rebellious woman? History, reason and intuition all tell her she must fail in this world of men. How blind and reckless is Love, who sends his most beloved to venture out on such perilous voyages in such frail ships!”

  “There is a sound on the hill,” said the Lady from Périgord to the Musician, “as if your tale continued: it may be the prologue to mine. It is the mattress-maker’s boy playing his flute in the Gate. He sits there in the window with two cats, morning and evening, and sends his quavering tunes through the Capuchin Wood. Let him syrinx to us awhile the scattered notes of his childish melancholy. There is his false cadence. Now, if you wish, I will begin my pastorale, but of the south, this, a périgourdine.

  “Down there, in Périgord, the day is long, and I am out all day among the vineyards and wheat-fields. When we ride out in the cool of the day, the provincial people salute us, even when unknown to us, and say of my mother or of me, ‘There goes a de Borne’; for in the whole province there is only one family with our stature and colouring, that is my mother’s family, of Borne, an ancient stock. At home I work at tapestry, as I have done since I was a child, making old forest and hunting scenes, with castles of the province which once reared their warrior towers into the green sky. My godchild sits at my knee, and repeats haltingly the Fables of La Fontaine in Latin.

  “Down there each vineyard has its secret liquor distilled in a few drops, and kept according to the vintage in cupboards; and each family has its slowly concocted legend. Bell-tongued Calliope, the mistress of us all, fattening on the perfumed berry, and treading with sunburnt feet between the embroidered vines, tells many a ribald pasquinade or minor pomp, and pieces together with florid interludes, village tales whose tissues long ago fell in tatters in the sun. This tale is one.”

  The Frenchwoman’s Tale

  GASPARD

  IN La Guyenne, the village of Castelreal stands on a gently declining hill above the river Trope, and looks over a valley and plain bearing wheat and inferior vines. From there the Trope runs southwards, tributary to the Garonne, through the famous vineyards and domains of Bordeaux. The ruined castle of the Dukes of Castelreal still dominates the country with its walls and towers built in the formidable fourteenth-century style. It shows the blows of time: it was buffeted by all the storm-winds of our history; the last of its Dukes died long ago in exile; it was often put to sack and pillaged, in siege, jacquerie and terror, and its treasures have been dispersed throughout the province, and even throughout the world.

  After being destroyed by order of the King of France, Charles V, towards the end of the fourteenth century, it was rebuilt by a Huguenot noble in its present form. A massive wall rose in two wings, running north and south, with six thick angle-towers of stone, enclosing dwellings, courts and granaries. The castle rested on a double series of barrel vaults, partly constructed in the rock itself. Facing east, the cliff was quarried to make a precipitous face. In the fifteenth century, after the religious disorders, the south wing was girdled with a stone gallery of rich grace, which seemed to raise the squat stronghold and project its facade over the valley.

  This wing still stan
ds. Thick vines drip from the cliff face; orchards roll across the flat to mask the lower vaults. On the shoulder of the hill, on the southern side, is the worn grove of chestnuts, last remnants of a park extending to the water’s edge. It is said that a concealed flight of steps climbs the cliff, enters one of the cavernous vaults, and penetrating the wall, joins a now obstructed passage in the southern tower, and a passage leading through the foundations to a secret refuge, or ammunition chamber, somewhere under the southern wall. I doubt it, but so says the legend.

  When the Huguenot Dukes fled to South America, or to the harbours of the Tyrrhenian Sea, where their name is still preserved, the estate was partitioned and passed through several hands. The castle with its dependencies was bought eventually by a noble provincial family called Maurin. The last gentleman of this family, born in 1734, suffered from hay-fever. For him, birds not sang but creaked, pastoral sunsets were as the inadmissible polychromes of a squalid painter, country girls danced and sighed with bovine ingenuousness, and an unmodish arrangement of adipose tissue. When his wife, a city-bred Spaniard, died, shortly after the birth of their only child, Isabella, he engaged a nurse and a steward and made for Bordeaux as fast as the coach could take him. There he took passage for foreign parts, blessing the salt dew that clung to the polished seagoing tree, and with amorous thirst unquenched, floated forever between the dark and rosy enchantments and stupors of clamorous ports and surf-pearled green coasts.

  Isabella, his daughter, unfolded between the stones of the castle like the groundsel, modestly starry, and likewise, it must be confessed, dedicated to the moon. She arrived at the age of sixteen, mild and stupid, and though softly and opulently built, not one to revive with her grace alone the fields of Castelreal. Maurin paid a hasty visit to his seat, engaged his lawyer and Isabella’s cousin Raymond to find him a son-in-law, and was temerariously about to try the springtime weather of that frigid but elegant zone, the Ile-de-France, when Raymond, born pandar, told him that the deed was done, or practically.

  The wealthiest bourgeois of the region, Emile Nigaudin de Beaumesnil (born simple Nigaudin), wheat merchant, wine-grower, and provincial banker, had now for some years had expectations of a title. He had been confidant of a corrupt Finance Minister, and subsidised a promising courtier or two in Paris. He sensed, however, that his fortune was dawdling on her legitimate way, and seeing come upon him his forty-fifth year, he decided to buy or otherwise acquire the kernel of Castelreal, and rehabilitate the seigniory. Managed as he could manage an estate, it would yield him a fine revenue. He had recently acquired, secretly and separately, a number of small properties adjacent to the domain.

  The marriage was arranged to everyone’s satisfaction: Raymond received an annuity, and the trusteeship of Isabella’s particular interests; Nigaudin, by the immediate advancement of money and other benefits, received the right of inheritance, management and equal profits during Maurin’s lifetime. The romantic father of Madame de Beaumesnil went to Paris immediately after the wedding, and very naturally caught cold there, they said, through climbing out of a lady’s window in his shirt in the early morning, and died.

  Nigaudin de Beaumesnil was not at all the type of our men: he was a taciturn, unsociable, hardworking man, who expected to get all with money; a man with quite a northern character, not likely to endear himself to the province, of course. He regarded his wife as a necessary part of the estate, but entertained a mistress in Bordeaux. In Paris it would have been a different matter, but in Bordeaux, where he had a town house, it was not respectable. It is true that intellectual rank and success in the professions should be rewarded, but the rapid success of this son of the lower bourgeoisie was a sure index of that decay in the governing classes that brought about the Revolution.

  Isabella had peasant traits, a broad face covered with fine golden down, thick brows and lids, high cheek-bones, large eyes in pearshaped sockets, a wide delicate mouth of light red, and a coarse wide nose. Her fair hair was banded over a beautifully-arched crown. When she spoke in a slow style of reverie, small fine teeth charged her expression with a ray of light. She had, over all, a fresh expression when she spoke, and a darkling look when she sat silent, as if she still hesitated between the dark and fair casts. Summer and winter, she sat in the great chamber with beamed ceiling, gilded and painted, which is still intact in the south tower of Castelreal, and is called “the Duchess’s room”. She worked at her frames, played her mother’s clavecin, frisked with her small dogs and listened to the affectionate, coaxing, insinuating talk of her nurse, a woman of forty-five whose bosom and loves, eternally in flower, would have suckled the world entire. She invented a hundred womanly plans for bringing together the estranged pair, and coquetted innocently with her master for Isabella’s pure benefit.

  But the wife, unconscious, seemed to wait patiently, as if she were still her father’s daughter, among these kindly-disposed aliens, for the brother Geminid a coincidence of birth had surely planted for her somewhere, burning among the dispassionate legions of the earth, first and last dream of the heart.

  When she was in her twentieth year her husband became Marquis de Beaumesnil de Castelreal, and the nurse with jubilation and longing saw her foster-child paraded through the festivities of the occasion, and hoped Isabella’s understanding would be perfected by age, experience and love. The child was now in her full bloom; she looked with ineffable pleasure in spring on the snowy plum-trees, and the ardent land, friend of the prepotent sun and sentimental rain. The young labourers flattered her with their glances, and Raymond, her cousin, bringing her a bouquet on her birthday, received a look so pleased and anxious, that he retired to walk an hour profoundly lost in thought in the chestnut grove, to gauge the consequences of a possible good fortune. But prudence was the mistress of this promising young man.

  The Marquis was now draining his property and making new roads. A trench had been opened between the chestnut grove and the southern wall, under the windows of Isabella’s tower. Half a dozen men worked there, and among them Jean, the dwarf, called “Eveille-chien”, a thickset, sunburnt blond, squarish in physique, said to be abnormally strong and agile. His traits were almost those of Isabella, but he was more decidedly fair and was transfigured by a fair beard and severer lines. The digging of this deep trench fascinated Isabella, as if it had been a moat or grave. Besides, she habitually explored all the works on the estate, and knew every detail of the innumerable labours of field, farm and wood.

  It was July in the year 1788. The chestnuts were dark and the fruit-trees heavy with leaves and fruit. One had split in halves in the night, loaded to the ground with apricots which strewed the lawn in a Danaân shower. It was too hot for anyone to walk far, except in the two twilights, and the overseer was obliged to give two hours’ respite in the middle of the day. The peasants rested then in the shade near their work. Jean would throw himself on the ground as soon as the castle bell rang at midday, fall asleep instantly, and after half an hour, wake up and make off somewhere in the park or woods. The others slept heavily, or tossed, distressed by flies, or talked largely with the bravura of the south.

  Isabella, restless too, went out from the castle many a hot noonday. The birds with full throats choired in the rank woods, the sun shot down triangular funnels to dapple the earth, and there was no human sound but the crackle of a wain climbing the yellowbearded hill. All slept. In the hedged Wilderness, left with intent in a corner of the chestnut park, Jean slept under a cataract of dreams, in which figured the rough mosses, the lights inconstantly piercing the trees, and the beatitudes of sleep itself, for in those parts sleep is clapped upon the sleeper like a Helm of Darkness, which renders the dreamer invisible to himself, but the rest of the world wonderfully visible. Jean wore a blue tunic, and his yellow waxed sabots stood beside him under a thorn bush. So says the legend.

  One day after he had thus lain for a while he woke. The wood still trembled in the heat, the air was still filled with the tumult of sounds, the birds’ song, t
he stream’s song and the noise of sleep departing four-footed through the air. A quiet fell then, and he saw coming towards him, unawares, the Marquise, wandered from her attendants, dressed in a blue dress, buxom, with forehead, breast and arms gilded by the sun, and dark refulgent eyes. When she looked at him, he rose, bowed almost ceremoniously, smiled, his large white teeth appearing in his brown face like almond flesh in its shell, and he began turning through the Wilderness in a circle, weaving the bushes and trees in a fillet, with handsprings and tumbling. Jean approached again, and sitting on his haunches, began to whistle softly, calling the birds. They answered, hopped, whirred and came with murmurings nearer, filled the bushes and trees, and began to dart their heads, little, round and dark as musical crotchets, inquisitively from rough trunk and airy spray. Isabella stood stockstill in the shade, and the birds, torn between curiosity and fear, skipped about, drops of light and blots of shadow.

  The silence among men, the glare of the mighty archangel riding in the sky, the tufts of leaves turtle-doving in the ceiling of the trees, the velvety air, the little cherubs flown round them in a host, almost transported these poor souls. The birds had a moment of doubt, and the wood had fallen silent; but suddenly a bird’s note, high, trilling and unmusical broke out through the leaves. At the same moment they looked at each other with tears. The sun moving, now fell on the Marquise, once more gilding her, and the birds burst out in a full piping. Isabella’s nurse called her in the distance, and the bell was heard, bringing the workmen back to work. The stream, as if glad to be left alone, cried louder, and the sun shone in more silver solitudes. As they left the grove by different paths, the sound of birds fell behind them. The Marquise suddenly remembered Jean’s antics and looked round; Jean turned another somersault, a bird on a bush near at hand squeaked and flew, a cuckoo began gently to sway and call in the topmost thick, and they came out of the edge of the park. Cuckoo! Cuckoo!