The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  The Marquis thought he would wait till the foster-mother came to take the child. It was a warm day, and the Marquis had remarked for some time that his health was not what it had been; his back ached badly. He fell asleep, and did not waken till he heard a fresh voice. Drawing in his legs and looking through the leaves, he saw Jean the dwarf quietly carrying off the willow cradle, while the Marquise stood looking after him. The Marquis stepped up to her and took her by the arm. She cried out, and Jean, looking round, saw the Marquis, looked at him squarely, and then quietly resumed his way without a word or backward glance. The Marquis called, “Jean!” but Jean quickly disappeared through the wood.

  The Marquis confined his wife to her apartment under her nurse’s care the next day, and went himself to the hut. He found Jean, without the child, already waiting for him, tranquil, almost somnolent.

  “Where is the child?”

  “With its foster-mother in B——”

  “Why is it in B——?”

  “It caught a cold; it had to see a doctor.”

  “The child’s not a prince,” said the Marquis angrily; “it doesn’t need a doctor; bring it to me tomorrow with the nurse. I’ll pay her and it can go to a foundling asylum. And now kindly get out of my sight; or, stay a little, what does my wife pay you for this little service?”

  “Nothing,” said Jean, “all in this world are not without pity.”

  “I am without pity in this case,” said the Marquis; “let the softhearted pity me, without a wife or child, in all my great labours.”

  “Aren’t you ashamed to abandon in this way a poor woman, a poor creature, almost abandoned by God himself?” said the dwarf.

  “Am I not ashamed …” said the Marquis incredulously. “Jean, you are too deep in all this: why this extraordinary interest in the Marquise? You certainly know the origin of that child you brought here yesterday: you know all the scandals and all the business of the country—you know mine, too. For the love of Heaven, what a game you play! I feel certain that you know the whole thing; those trinkets that were carried to this hut—was it Raymond?”

  “My mother hadn’t half the opinion of my wits that you have,” said Jean: “how should I know these things, matters of a marquisate!”

  “To trust a dwarf,” said the Marquis coldly, “deformed in body and morals, was a marvellous aberration.”

  The dwarf turned his back to his master, who moved forward angrily and struck him across the shoulders with a stick he had broken off in the wood. Jean turned and stood before the Marquis, laughing quickly, defiant and on guard. The Marquis at this moment felt a lumbar twinge. He was also convinced that something unusual lay under this association of Jean with his less auspicious affairs. He therefore said in a hard voice to Jean, “Bring the child to the castle as soon as you can get it here; when will that be?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” said Jean quietly.

  The Marquis waited until sundown the next day, when messengers informed him that Jean the dwarf had fled, and that the peasant woman, a friend of his of long standing, had not returned with the child. The Marquis went in, smiling pleasantly, to the Marquise, and said, “Your precious friend Jean, his peasant woman, the child and the cash settlement have left these parts for spheres no doubt better suited to their considerable talents.”

  A week later he was summoned hastily to his wife, and was led to the chapel of the castle, where he found Isabella lyin with her back broken. She had received that morning, by an unknown hand, the mannikin of the wood, cleaned, painted and dressed in a new piece of cloth; and, after looking at it for a long time, had walked to the balcony and thrown herself down from it, in the insupportable despair which causes even birds and dogs sometimes to commit suicide. She had asked the terrified labourers who found her to carry her to the chapel, remembering the legends of her Catholic girlhood, and there they had covered her with a cloth they found over a chest, while they waited for her husband and his doctor. The sun poured in now, as in her childhood, staining guiltily the snowy stone floor with impotent saints and foolish ladies, staining with a beggar’s patchwork the tapestry with which they had covered her. The tapestry bore a radiant design, “The good Lord rewarding the honest villagers”, where a gallant lord gave his hand in the country dance to the ribboned village beauty; on one side a press of noble youths and dames elegantly admired and whispered, and on the other, the stout simpletons of the village jostled each other: in the distance little boys in their Sunday best reared up a maypole. I have seen this remarkable, but now faded piece.

  The Marquise was dying. Her husband sat by her side and held her hand, apparently lost in melancholy thought, bending over her from time to time and veiling his eyes with appropriate commiseration: but she read there, sickly and without much interest, the eager travail of his thoughts. He found himself at a still marriageable age, rich, honourable and unattached—or would be so in an hour or two. He went over in his head the elegant and remunerative matches going round the countryside, which had been an affliction to him up to this moment.

  Just as he arrived at the eligible image of Consuela, young, proud and prepossessing daughter of a shipping merchant at Bordeaux, and contrasted it with the advantages of a maturer titled heiress of the environs, his dying wife cried, “Jean, Jean, where art thou?”

  “She is wandering: she thinks he will bring her child,” said the nurse.

  The priest, long absent from the castle, arrived shortly and wished to confess her, but she now seemed unable to speak. He said to her husband, “I must proceed: she is dying.” She suddenly opened her eyes with the candour of a last moment, gave her husband a long, alien look, and trying to twist her head towards the door, cried “Jean,” and thus, in a paroxysm, died.

  The nurse cried inconsolably, “What a dreadful death!” The husband, furious and tormented, sat for a long time by her, and prevented the priest or nurse from coming near. It was hot there, but a cold sweat started out from his back and ran down his limbs.

  He heard, after a while, a noise at the door, and looking up, saw Jean Eveille-chien there, and went pale, as if his wife’s last cry had been heard miraculously far off in the province, and Jean had come with feet of air.

  “What do you want?”

  Jean, extremely pale, with goggling eyes, advanced into the chapel, and when he had come to the side of the folded tapestry, under the curious, angry eye of his master, he stood staring straight down at the body, still discomposed with its last effort, and at its eyes. He stretched out his hand to straighten the twisted head.

  Something in the natural action responded to a question long since marauding in the heart of the master. He grasped Jean’s wrist; Jean freed himself, rushed to the door, and turning there, shouted wildly, “She was my dear wife, and the child was mine, too; now you know who came in by the secret door!” and weeping aloud, he rushed out of the castle, and away.

  But he was arrested two days later on the seacoast, where he had rejoined the woman and child. These latter got away at the last moment, for he confided them to a friend among the smugglers, but he was arraigned and condemned to torture and death. That was still done in those days. The executioner was ordered to break his arms, legs, thighs and hips, while he lived, and to expose him afterwards on a pole with his face to the sun, for such time as God extended his breath. This was done, and he hung all day on the pole before he died, for he was very strong. I say, dreadfully wrong things were done in those days.

  This was in the year 1789, as I said. In that same month the news from Paris spread through the effervescent provinces, and a great fear spread with it, with reports of pillage, rapine and murder by armed bands. These robbers did not reach our province, but the alarm given, stirred the peasantry, who in terror, in misery and in bloody lust, rose, burned, robbed and fired castle, domain and monastery. The Marquis fled before the storm, retired to a lonely cottage in a remote part of the province. There he was found by the people, by the treachery of a servant, with the Marquise’s o
ld nurse, still faithful. His head bleeding, his arm broken, bruised with kicks and blows, he struggled and fell along the road they took him, back towards Castelreal, for they said they would burn the old crow in his nest. Night came on before they reached the village. They broke into a few farmhouses, and brought out the owners, who ransomed themselves with their hidden stores of food and drink. The revolutionists then prepared to sleep in the farmhouses and under the stars. Castelreal feared that his end was near, but he still hoped to meet a body of soldiery from Bordeaux or elsewhere. Roped to a hitching-post for the night, and in great pain, he nevertheless managed to cut through the rope with a nail from his boot, and freed himself. But he had only gone a few steps when a peasant, kept awake by toothache, gave the warning, and he was taken again, and so injured that he died almost immediately. The people, angry, hungry, troubled, disordered, set out again in the early morning with his body towards the castle, now in flames.

  The upper air quivered like white banners hung on a sombre castle wall at night, and the morning began to glow. New songs and bubbling rhythms of a day and season magnificently fair, rose in the fields and streams, and the refreshed paddocks gambolled, and the purple-clotted vines fluttered, while the birds whistled in the woods. I wish they might all have been turned into birds, even poor Jean into a crow or sparrow, and flown off into the trees, effacing with the hand of miracle this bloody tale. But no, these things happened, and perhaps will again. God knows. That is the legend.

  IN the afternoon, in the soft wood of that green knoll called the Mönchsberg, in face of the Untersberg shining in the brilliant sun as if the whole rock were one great jewel, they called for a fairy tale, and in response, the Schoolgirl began.

  The Schoolgirl’s Tale

  MORPETH TOWER

  IN a deep field at Morpeth stands a tower at the water’s edge. The Hunter River flows rapid, cold and quiet between paddocks of lucerne. The tower is built of square stones, and its high-pitched roof is open to the sky. It has been there a long time, nobody knows how long; it has been there since the first day living in the memory of living man.

  It is night, now the moon is high, and the anemones at the foot of the tower drop their petals: the wind weaves lucerne-leaves and night-hours in its hair. The evening strikes twelve: at once all men put their heads on their pillows. Shutters are flung open in the wall. A garden springs up at the foot of the tower and a woman looks out of the window. Her long milk-white hair hangs down the tower, and makes a pool in the garden below: moths pass and repass. She sings and beckons: the flowers begin to tip their heads, their ghosts slide out of the cup and up the wall and to the roof, where they clamber over the beams: they roof the tower, the tower is whole.

  Now sounds begin inside, as if it were a giant musical-box. First, rich confused chords arising in the river earth, then dispersed tones of small range, like stones struck with a pick, and then the sounds of cockchafers sawing a leaf by the wall, and earthworms singing under their breath as they labour to uproot the tower, and the glassy, penetrating voice of the lady, together echo and swirl inside the stones. The music rises high, like the tide rising rapidly in a cave, and when it reaches the roof, the tower becomes clumsily human in form, seizes the lady’s hair and begins to draw a bow across it: the lady cries in pain, and her cries are the cries of a violin. Then a wilder music pours round and round the stone tower, drowning it: grey light fills the land, the night approaches to the other brink of the river, with the hostile ululations of dreams.

  Abruptly a small cloud throws itself at the moon’s face: the distant paddocks are light, but there is a dark patch on the earth at hand. The cloud takes form quickly in the air, drawing together the unseen threads of vapour. The ghosts disappear, the garden sinks into the earth, the lady winds up her hair, and the shutters fly to: the covering falls from the roof, and the beams stand stark naked against the grey paddocks. The cloud passes.

  Along the road appears a riderless black horse who strikes sparks from the earth with his hoofs. He passes behind the tower: the tower, like a demon rider, leaps on his back: the horse shoots a flaming glance from his eye and bounds on. Where the tower stood, a white mouse with silken ears nibbles a grain of corn. The horse flies down the road towards Hinton and is seen no more. What is that thunder of hoofs returning? That is the heart’s blood. There stands the tower, unroofed, silent, in a deep field at the water’s edge.

  What is this? This is what a child sees, who stands on the Hinton road, on a certain night in a certain year, when the water flowing down past Morpeth treads out the last moment of a secular cycle.

  The Schoolgirl stopped abruptly, and the Lady from Périgord protested,

  “That is only a drop of water, when we asked for a cup.”

  “It was a river of water,” said the Schoolgirl.

  “Then give us the ocean,” responded the Lady; and the Schoolgirl continued.

  SAPPHO

  THE sea froths, the coroneted swans cover the cliff with their feathers, a groan bursts from the belly of the sea, black as blood. Sappho has sung to the sea-king’s daughter, who steals the keys of jasper and opens the prison gates for her to pass out. The waters divide, and Sappho, with shut eyes, her white amorous body asleep, and still and pale as a sandy beach under the last embraces of regretful seas, passes upward, drawn by the desires of the hosts of heavenly virgins. With the sound of the surge, the swans burst from the cliff, leaving it sable, and, closing round Sappho, bear upward in their flight, a sweep of long wings into heaven. The misty beam of the moonlit night strikes on the swan’s plume as it shoulders away the dark, and glistens on the dark eyeball: left and right, the line re-forms as they rise and fall along the dewy uplands of air. Ever they climb precipitously up the steep of night, spirally as a Babylonian tower. The sinuous waves have long ago been calmed beneath them, and sleep like frost: the forests and lakes are dark, like the secret locks of young women. They pass out of the cone of night, and they see the earth struck by sunlight, smiling as it imperceptibly rolls over the twilight strand into the surf of dawn.

  The Swans pass through the groaning meteors and the yelping winds and tempests of the upper air: their wings, wearing, drop feathers and down, which, a month after, come to earth, as the snow that falls in white climes. They cross the red, blue, green, yellow and white rivers which shine in the rainbow, they cross without danger the blue burning plains and the rivers of corrosive gold which show when the pavilions of air are rent by thunder: they hear the growling of the bears, escape the hoofs of the charioteer who treads the tails of comets to dust, and make signs to all the impudent Zodiac. As they pass by the Maiden, Sappho stirs in her sleep, and her nostrils, hitherto obstructed by the bad cold she caught two days ago falling into the Mediterranean, expand. The first flush of blood gushes into her cheek as they pass swift as light through the palaces of Perihelion and Aphelion, cleaving the bowing and murmuring company of astral mandarins, with coloured topknots according to their magnitudes.

  But now the solar system is past, and they are in the pathless waste. Only the instinct of the coroneted swans, who are fed on dragon-flies every morning at the heavenly gate, can guide her over the steppes of the Middle Distance. It is past: the heavenly light begins, as the dawn with us, only with all those known delights heightened in their transcendental way to delights inconceivable: this I say, who relate it, for I cannot conceive what they may be. Now the hosts of virgins and all the saints of the calendar, even the full tale of saints of these latter days, sing faintly as sings the morning star to the lover who has watched all night in the shrubbery: the noise grows louder, as surf to tempest-tossed ears: it sings about them as sings the drenching summer rain: and Sappho wakes.

  “Where are we, O dearest Swan?” says she to the nearest crowned head, resting so lightly on its long stalk of pleasing form.

  “We approach the gates of pearl,” said the Swan, singing now, as do the heaven-born Swans.

  “Who is there to receive us?”

&n
bsp; “The Virgin, the Lords of Heaven, Buddha, Confucius, the hosts of martyrs and saints, Venus, Diana and other celebrities, the Muses with elegantly-poised feet, the Graces in their naked chastity, all, all you knew on earth and under sea.”

  “What will I wear? I am naked!”

  “The future director of the Moscow Art Theatre, yet unborn, will study your type and tell you!”

  “Whom shall I have to love me?”

  “The Lord, the saints——”

  “Hm! Hm!”

  “——the nymphs and oreads——”

  “Pallid souls!”

  “——Ariadne, Andromeda, Cassiopeia——”

  “Too sentimental!”

  “——Lilith, Dalila, Potiphar’s wife, Cleopatra, Thaïs, Ninon, Catherine the Great, Ste Thérése——”

  “Too religious!”

  “——all the daughters of Eve!”

  “But Eve?”

  “On Wednesdays and Sundays,” said the Swan, “she visits Heaven to see her numerous descendants, but at other times she stays on earth, refusing to give up her little notions.”

  “Is today Wednesday?”

  “Alas, there is a wretched innovation here, the Gregorian Calendar,” said the Swan, “I never know what day it is, now.”

  “Give me a mirror,” said Sappho.

  “There are no mirrors in heaven, for no one can make reflections there,” said the Swan, shaking his head.

  Sappho pouted, but she reached for an asphodel floating past in the air, and twined this in her hair, shaking from it as she did so seaweeds and pearls put there secretly by the sea-king’s daughter. “Lend me a pen,” said Sappho, and the Swan made haste to do so. Sappho began frowning and counting on her fingers: “This sapphic metre is the very dickens,” she said. Presently she said to the Swan, “Do you know a rhyme for Leda?”