The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  She said that Henna was a weak woman but kind and generous, and only suffered all these wrongs because of her fear of losing Joce, and her fear of losing the inheritance for her son, and her fear of Leo and Meir and all the thousand fears that complicate the simple life of a weak heart, and that her natural shame and her marriage to an old man who could not sympathise with her, and her unnatural situation, made her conceal all that was shameful in her life, and that she was often in an extreme confusion of mind, drawn one way and another by all these considerations: she should know, said Valentino’s wife merrily, that in all lives there are many shameful things. I went to Henna and asked her if these things were true and she acknowledged them.

  Now I went and had someone watch the houses of Leo and Meir, their place of business and their comings and goings, to see if anyone molested them or if any strange characters visited them, not connected apparently with their business, and in a few days, I had a report that a person who might easily have been the prisoner’s friend visited them late in the evening at their business-place, and seemed to wait afterwards in the street, and on one occasion had approached Leo in broad daylight and had then received an assignation from him to meet him at his home. My watcher went to Leo’s house and saw Leo receive the stranger and threaten him, but give him a small packet. Then I had this man brought to me, and so frightened him with knowledge of his blackmail, and with my assumption that I knew the whole story of his assaulting Henna at the orders of Leo and Meir, that he confessed all that I had supposed, and I had him make a statement on the spot and had it witnessed: and it was well I did so, for the next day he had disappeared altogether.

  I visited all the chemists in the neighbourhood of Cok’s house and found that a number of them, and not only one as had been said at the trial, had supplied Cok’s servant with arsenic on the same day, and that Cok’s servant had said to one, it was to kill the rats that ran about Cok’s bedroom, so his master had told him.

  Then I found out by close inquiry the girl whose company Cok’s servant had frequented during that time, and she told me that she asked Cok’s servant this question, “Do you think Cok killed himself?” and the servant had said, “Yes, because he is in great pain and he is afraid he will die a madman: his room is full of books about his disease and some of them have revolting pictures in them showing the final condition of the diseased, and Cok said to me, who am his apprentice, I will not have my sons laugh at me and take the house and workshop, and my money and all my business, while I am alive, and hold their noses at my rotting carcass, and laugh.” I asked this girl, if she knew whether or no Cok had ever spoken of committing suicide, but she did not know.

  Now I did a little more work and then I went to the partners of the law firm and asked them whether, as business was slow with them, they would care to take up the case as a speculation; I pointed out to them what credit it would bring them, and said that it would endear them, actually, to the country, for the people would take it as a great work of poetic justice, although it would actually prove only that all is possible in remedial justice; and it would put them above the bench and encrust them in the law. Happily I was able to persuade them to do this, and the case, which was successful, brought them and me an immense amount of business in a bad year.

  Now Joce and Henna are free and wander about harmlessly, avoiding public attention and consoling each other, I imagine: but I always think this case is a perfect example of the horrors and death’s-heads that let themselves into civilised households under the cloak of romantic love: it is a kind of disorder, an anarchy to which weak ones are prone.

  AT the Lawyer’s last words there was a storm of protest, on sentimental grounds by the women and on logical grounds by the men: some said it was avarice, and some weakness, and some ill-advised matrimony which had brought about all the trouble, and some simply said it was due to Cok’s malady, and some said it was the hideous influence of property on human relations, but the Translator of singular books smiled sourly and said:

  “All these things are appurtenances of passion itself, and pop their heads out of the hose, doublet or fine shoon of any interest that draws the frail, sick and wicked human heart.”

  The Master of the Day pointed to the Naturalist, who seemed to be studying some creature moving on the trunk of a tree, and asked for a story of simple creatures.

  The Naturalist’s Tale

  THE DEATH OF THE BEE

  THIS story is no story at all, said the Naturalist modestly and pleasantly: it is just an incident which seemed to me poignant at the time, on account of the place, and season, and my own illness, perhaps.

  I was at Igls, a village in the hills above Innsbruck. The ascent was steep through tall forests, and the bare mountains on the opposite side of the valley rose with us through the air, blue-bonneted; the brilliant and cool sun shone all day. The village lies between pinewoods, to which the clouds descend, and thin mountain fields, ill-cultivated and twisted by rain and snow. The paddocks are spotted with molehills, and the openings of crickets’ holes, large as a penny; the crickets themselves sit at their doors, hideous but timorous, whenever the sun is out, and are so thick that the earth seems alive. The sun shines every day, so the flowers grow rank and odorous, and bees are so common and industrious that they are a nuisance. A large apiary has set out its hives on the side of a mound, beside a clear brooklet, and it sends its winged employees out to suck the flowers of the neighbourhood. It sells a fine aromatic honey, and the bees, with blundering pertinacity, smell out and suck the jars and pots of honey, set out in all the dining-rooms and garden restaurants of the resort, getting drunk thereby and going dissolutely on the bummel.

  I passed by the apiary one day, twice, for it stands in a blind alley. It is built like a house of gingerbread, with scalloped weatherboards, purple shutters and fretted bargeboards, and the windows are leaded with devices of bee, beehive and garden. Unusual apertures are seen near the guttering, and long poles stick out of these, through half-opened panes. Bees sizzle in and out. At one side, at the bottom of a crazy-pavemented path, overgrown with weeds, is a door on which a skull and cross-bones are rudely drawn: that is the entrance to the apiary proper.

  Around this house, quaint and pictured, the boldest and largest of flowers grow in clumsy profusion: giant sunflowers, inordinate marguerites, roses, bluebells, asters, pansies, lilies of all sorts, balsam, cockscomb, honeysuckle, hollyhocks, canterbury bells and gallardias, all old-fashioned flowers such as we used to prick on embroidery cards when children, stand coarse and gaudy between melliferous weeds and fruit-trees in leaf.

  Within the bow windows hangs a birdcage in the shape of a hive, with a canary which appears brown and purple through the stained glass: and within this again is a carved dresser with upper and lower cupboards and peasant pottery, also brown and purple, properly ranged against a painted board.

  I was ill at that time, and only after two days found the energy to get up and walk about. In the middle of the afternoon I sat down on a bank of grass and flowers, and stared idly at the dropping uplands, the wrinkled and scrofulous peaks, bare of snow, scarified by glacier falls, grey but subject to the brilliant palette of the mountain air; and at the softer blue hills more distant, and the great bearded head behind the village, and the savage but splendidly hyacinthine peaks, wardens of the valley to the left, whose most distant brother lay couchant, black, and maculate with snow, like a giant mountain cow. Cowbells rang their antique lugubrious note in the pine copses.

  Seventeen mountain tops I could descry from my seat on the little mound, with high pastures shaved off the hairy shoulders of the giants, and grizzled groves of pine; near, some fields scratched for cultivation and a handful of Tyrol hotels, decorously faced.

  My eye fell to my feet and the sun warmed my back. Immediately a whole world sprang up: the earth was covered with struggling bodies, the grass bent under numberless irascible gymnasts.

  I saw a stalk bowed beneath an insupportable weight then, and a b
ee crawling along it. He sprang into the air, flew in a tiny arc and plumped on to a closed dandelion, where he struggled with infirm and fearful steps, like an old man with a cloak and a stick in the wind. The sun went behind a light cloud, and a slight but cold wind began to pass over us. The bee clambered about as if he did not see at all: his wings hung weakly at his side, and patches of white hair showed through the dull down of his body.

  When I saw that he was old and inconvenienced, doubtless by the absence of sun, and the cold breeze, I poked a stick into his legs, so that he climbed stupidly along it, and deposited him on a full and vigorous dandelion; but I was anxious, for it was quite half a mile to the apiary. There he clung for long minutes, swaying with the flower, now top-heavy; but presently, repelled by the heavy stink of the dandelion, which perhaps he could not bear any more, or impelled by the tyrant fever which so soon burns up these tiny bodies, he crawled and stumbled away, reached the edge of the flower and fell on to a blade of grass. There after a few feeble movements he stopped dead.

  By this time it was clear that if he was not already blind, his minutes of sunlight could be few now; the cold breeze that blew was the first of the glacial draughts of mortality which were overcoming him: in what dark and gusty cavern did the poor creature move then? Truly, I felt a sort of terror myself. I thrust the stalk to him, but his grip was feebler than before, and it seemed that he was almost unconscious. I put him once more on to a marguerite, larger and less pungent than the other. Here he stayed for a longer period, swaying and rocking in the wind, till he could not hold his feet: he rolled on his side, struggled to his feet again, fell, struggled upright, and unhappy, trying various directions, to escape from his doom, came to the edge of the corolla and fell off unresisting; the marguerite tossed its light head.

  The sick bee struggled twice, but now turned away from the stalk offered it and began to creep patiently up the difficult stem of grass it found by fumbling: it rested after a few movements, and at the next breath of wind, fell to the ground. The agony went on for a quarter of an hour, and then paralysis commenced. The bee lay on its back and feebly moved its forelegs, then its hindlegs, and lay still.

  For quite a long time it had been the centre of my attention. Now, sick of looking at the dying creature, I lifted my eyes, the sun came out, and at the same moment a bold fresh bee, gilt and lampblack, fresh as paint, zoomed heavily and powerfully down on the coquetting marguerite, built for him, not for the old crock lying at the root: and the whole world of seventeen mountains seemed on the instant to shine out and blow and blazon, embellished plenitude and permanent youth.

  The old bee with his grey hairs, lay motionless, as worthless and unimportant an object as ever fell with the shadow to earth. An ant, neatly cuirassed in a black suit, like three drops of jet, shone on the blade of grass he foolishly prospected in search of meat.

  This was many years ago, ladies and gentlemen, when I was not a youth, but a young man still. Before that day I was confident, I had no idea what was death, only that it was the dust to which my beloved young wife would come on a distant and unimaginable day; but after that day, for some reason, whether because the causes of corruption were already assembling, as they do after twenty-five, or because I was ill and easily affected, I conceived my own death, and each day since I have contemplated and known death. For that old bee was the first creature I ever saw die.

  THE women tinkled their sympathy and began to poke their fingers in the soil. The men were scattered on the grass smoking cigarettes: the Schoolboy was restless, perhaps hungry, and petulantly began to speak.

  The Schoolboy’s Tale

  DAY OF WRATH

  DO the mountains wear black for the death of a bee in the old world? Not so in the new. Perhaps Ardennes wept over the “unreturning brave”, but I saw death ride naked on a tropic shore and his breath never darkened the water nor brushed the sky: nature’s children drowned, curdled the water with their blood, while she painted her cheeks, wreathed in smiles, and the hills sparkled with jollity by the pacific sea.

  I lived in Avallon, a waterside village in a seaport. A woman in the district was divorced for adultery. Her husband was a cabinet minister, a rich man, coarse, luxurious and tyrannical. Public opinion was bitter against his wife because she had left his house and gone to live with her lover, and it was proved that because they were poor, she had slept with her two children nightly in her lover’s bed. The children had to appear in court and give this evidence. The father renounced these children, who he declared were not of his blood, and he left all three in great poverty: this was not condemned, for a woman who forsakes wealth for poverty is obviously poor-spirited, and beneath commiseration: even the poor despise her.

  The son was ten years old, the daughter fourteen. I knew her, her name was Viola. She was pretty, but thin, with long black hair, and rather smart with her tongue. Certainly she suffered in such an honest city, where the “Decameron” is forbidden, and England’s colonial history is expurgated for the school books.

  I saw her mother once, a pretty, dark, sweet woman, who ventured timidly into the ladies’ cabin on the ferry, and looked quickly but without expectation of greeting at the female faces decorating the walls. When I raised my hat to her she smiled with pleasure, but with indulgence also: she knew I pitied her, but she regarded us all very calmly from another world. The ladies were indignant that she continued to live in our district. “She should have at least the delicacy to go where she is not known,” said my maiden aunt. Society, great beast of tender skin, blind, with elephant ears, felt indignant, lashed its little tail and got hot round the rump. It required a sacrifice, and when Jumbo wants something the gods themselves obey.

  One Wednesday afternoon, the four o’clock ferry, which carried the schoolchildren home from town, was struck amidships by an ocean liner and sank immediately, carrying down more than fifty souls. Thirty children were drowned, and all those who died were from our village of Avallon. I went down to catch the four-thirty ferry and saw the stretchers with bodies brought in already by the rescuers. All the way home, with my books on the seat, I watched the lustrous tide flow in, bearing planks, seats, lifebuoys and splintered wood up into the bays and rivers. Eddies of soot and oil floated past. In a few minutes we reached the spot where the ferry lay with her passengers, and I felt paralysed with a strange and almost voluptuous cramp, and my spirit being wound out of me like a djinn out of a pot. We went dead slow, with our flag at half-mast, and there was a silence on the boat. I thought of those people sitting below, almost living, with a glow on their cheeks still through the green gloom of the deep-water channel: they seemed a company that had gone apart for some conclave. I believed my two young sisters were there, waiting for me with open eyes, and wanted to dive in, but I could not move. When we neared home I saw my little brother running and jumping on our lawn, so I was reassured.

  After a few days, when the last rumours and hopes had died out, and the whole village was in mourning, in the lovely weather, only one piece of fantasy remained: Viola alone had not been found. She must have been carried away, or been lost in the deeper mud of the bottom; the ferry itself had moved several hundred feet. It seemed to my mother and aunt that this was the “judgment of God”; though for what mortal sins the other bereaved women had been punished, no one thought to conjecture.

  At the end of a week Viola was found on one end of the wreck, standing upright, uninjured, her right foot simply entangled in a rope. The founts of pity at this word broke their seals and jetted in each breast, and everyone that night had before his eye the image of Viola standing in the green gloom for a week, upright, looking for the rescuers, astonished that they did not come for her, perhaps with a lively word on her lips at their slowness, and then, prisoned by her poor weak foot, decaying, but with her arms still floating up; a watermaiden tangled in a lily-root, and not able to reach the surface. I cried and thought how she died in that attitude to ask pity.

  In fact, it turned out that way; or at
least, if the church and justice were not moved, for they should be above the frailties of flesh and blood, the women began to lament on her mother’s account, to say she was well punished and one could even pity her. The beast was appeased, as in ancient days, by the sacrifice of a virgin.

  WHEN the Schoolboy’s naïve accents had ceased, some of the ladies looked vacant, some looked a little petulant and some smiled indulgently. The Old German Woman, a Frau Hofrat Privatdozent, included all the ladies in a pleasant glance, and wiping her glasses began to say: It is very foolish of me, no doubt, but somehow our young friend’s heroine reminds me of my sister Anna. Poor Anna!

  The Old Lady’s Tales

  POOR ANNA

  MY sister was five years older than I, very handsome and lively, she pleased the young men, and was so audacious in her manners, although innocent, that she had mother and grandmother anxious and she greatly shocked and mortified me. We lived in Riga, in the second storey of a house in Elizabeth Street, which was fashionable in those days; now I don’t believe you will even find it, it has vanished, I think: that was long ago!

  Our windows matched and faced the large windows of a handsome white house which belonged to a military family. There were old gardens at the side and back of that house, and we would have liked to have gone there to visit, but my father was a liberal and freethinker, and would not cultivate the acquaintance of the military.