The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  “No-one but yourself would dare to be the criminal,” said the Musician.

  The Architect, who liked to talk in an intimate circle, began at once.

  The Architect’s Tale

  SILK-SHIRT

  MR James Oliphant Winchey, born in Westmorland, naturalised in New York, emigrated oversea to become City Engineer in Banjo, capital city of Fiddle-de-dee, resigned one fine day when he found the Lord Mayor and Corporation, all famous sleight-of-hand artists (as is requisite in that land), all prophetically aware of the terms of an unopened tender. Mr Winchey wished to build roads to outlast the Appian Way; the Council thought it better to renew the roads every five years: Mr Winchey wished to have his name incised in white letters in high places; the Council preferred a memorial of perennial brass. With Mr Winchey resigned Alathea, his secretary, whose opulent form, supple step, white skin and voluptuously caressing voice had illuminated the dark corridors of the Town Hall for five years. The newspapers, at odds with the prestidigitators at the moment, commented on her fidelity, and Mr Winchey’s honour.

  Now Winchey at the age of forty, free and virtuous, and with a valuable connection among the suburban councils and Government institutions, set up in business for himself. He had a suite of offices in the newest building in the city, one built by him. In the heart of the suite was his private office, or consulting-room. The curtains were egg-blue, the walls Nile-green, the furniture mahogany; a rich Chinese screen concealed a draughtsman’s table. The long windows looked out over a small park. On the glass-topped table was a modern inkwell, and, in a thick grey cover, fastened with grey silk threading three gold eyelets, with the title decorously emphasised in red and black, the “Specifications for the Remodelling of Seamore Park, Seamore, and for the Construction of a Children’s Playground and an Artificial Wilderness.” On thick, white, handmade paper within, the specifications were typed so neatly that they appeared to have been set up on a typecasting machine: there were no alterations and no emendations: all these had long ago appeared and disappeared on one or other of the innumerable draft copies. This was, to date, Mr Winchey’s most successful and expensive job. In order to work it up, Mr Winchey had gone out in a fine landau automobile, and standing coolly under a tree in Seamore Park, with his expensive hat on his scented hair, and his hand-made boots in the humbled grass soon to give place to grass of a higher social station, emitting a delicate odour of lavender, and with a gold stylus in his hand, he had dictated slowly and precisely his notions, coming back a hundred times to punctuate and perfect, to read, revise, query, define, elaborate, compress, until there appeared a balanced and compendious page. In this way, no doubt, a Roman road was built. The eyelet machine which bound the document, now complete, had been imported from England, all those in Banjo having been tried and found inefficient. The typist wrapped the specifications in tissue paper until they met Mr Winchey’s eye, not for fear of his eye, but for fear of an incontinent fly, which might see fit to falsify the punctuation.

  Each morning early, the office boy was obliged to polish carefully each leaf of the six palms that made Mr Winchey’s consultingroom like a bower, and to water them, from a pint-measure, neither too much nor too little. On the first day of each lunar month, the nurserymen called and changed the plants. The door was padded, and the only sound ever heard in the room was the whispering of the palms, as the breeze blew through, and the soft lacquer-clatter of fourteen, neat, black frames which hung round the walls. Thirteen of these frames contained certificates of learning and honour, won by Mr James Oliphant Winchey: the fourteenth had Raeburn’s picture of a laughing beggar-boy.

  One day, Mr Winchey came back from the Forestville Lunatic Asylum, where he had been commissioned to build a new ward, a new workshop, and to lay out the grounds for pleasure and recreation. He was hot on the trail of a fine design that had appeared to him in a moment of inspiration, and yet would cost him many an hour of solitude to reproduce; indeed, he feared to lose it on the road. He was so elegant in his person, and so sensitive of his fame, that he would call back a thousand times an elaborated plan, to remedy the least defect. He could not bear those airy voices without, that penetrated his walls and padded doors, and which, though inaudible and inexistent, might scream in his ear at any moment, the airy, but raucous and ribald voices of criticism. He was an orphan of ambition: thus, he went always darkly and anxiously over all his work.

  It was nearly midday when Mr Winchey returned to his quiet room. He told Alathea to go home, kissed the pucker from her mouth and locked himself in. He sat there while the sun rode from zenith to horizon, and while the stars rose, the moon mounted high, and the street-lamps came on, shone and went out, and until daylight once more appeared, under his indirect opal lamp, pencil and rubber in hand, once more weighing, excising, sharpening and diminishing, while his regular breaths moved very gently the black moiré watchribbon (imported from France). But it was not yet morning.

  The transoms, open at an angle of fifty degrees, admitted the sweet, night air; the palms clittered their metallic leaves; the lamplight fell scarcely on the beggar-boy, but was reflected frostily on the gold and red seals and gold mounts of the thirteen certificates. Before morning came, Mr Winchey put on his coat and wandered in the building. He shut the inner and outer doors of his offices, his keys were in his pocket, and all was neat and spotless behind him.

  The beggar-boy smiled, yawned and stepped lightly from the frame. He inspected Mr Winchey’s lunatic palimpsest, and very gently placing his thumb in the centre of the quire of paper, whirled it round so that the papers, equally distributed, formed a fan. He walked lightly on elegant long legs round the soft blue carpet, leaned a moment on the locked book cabinet, stripped a leaf from the largest palm and came thus to Mr Winchey’s private drawing-table. He looked at the sketch for the lunatic workshop: he opened the drawer and looked curiously through a number of impure watercolours, signed “James Winchey”, and some wilful French etchings underneath them. “James,” he said softly, “have you these ripe ideas?” He pranked a moment or two, executing a marvellous pas seul with the most flexible limbs in the world, on a space of two or three inches, pulled down his beautiful ripe mouth, made a frog face, and incontinently poked his finger through the eye of a dragon on the splendid Chinese screen.

  He opened the door into the outer offices, but at that moment he heard James returning. “Whist, my darling, let’s be going,” he said, sprang across the room, leaped to the windowsill, shivered a large pane, and dropped into the darkness. Two motorcars purred up Bridge Street, on the other side of the park, and honked. A slight mist had risen, and from the street-lamp thousands of fine golden filaments radiated into the dark. The lamplight fell dully in patches through the trees on to the grass of the park. Some silent figures occupied the benches, though the hour was late.

  The night wind blew through the broken pane into Mr Winchey’s office, and the palms swished, like the commencement of an eerie dance. Mr Winchey opened the outer door and saw the light in his sanctum: “I thought I closed it,” he murmured dutifully. As he entered, the gentle blast of wind moistened his face. “The window blew open,” he remarked, “but surely Alathea fixed it.” He entered his room: he saw the stripped palm, his eye fell on the whorled paper, he saw the broken window. His oversmall heart leapt into his full throat and he rushed, with the pattering feet of a small, but nicelyweighted man, to the window. He looked below: nothing—no mark on the sill. “Was it a bird?” He looked carefully round the room, and saw everything in order and then—saw the colour of the opposite wall through the hole in the dragon’s eye. The fine small hairs on his body began gradually but concertedly to rise, and at that moment he looked at Raeburn’s picture, and he saw there a very fine frame and a delicious gold mount surrounding—opaque nothing.

  “This is, this is really too much,” said James; and he sat down in his chair. He mechanically arranged his papers. Then he took out his scissors, cut off the dangling leaf of the palm, folded the
leaf of the screen from his sight and held the light towards the picture. Undeniably, nothing! Delicate perspiration appeared upon James’s broad forehead at the roots of his sparse, polished hair. For the first time in, really, ten years, something had interrupted that inaudible but gracious chorus which had repeated regularly in his ear, several times a minute: “Your mien is soft and smooth, James! Your manner calm and cool, James! Your courtesy is silk, James! Your like is very rare, James!” Mr Winchey rose and went to close the broken window, and at that moment a finely-timbred boyish voice rose from the park, “Ja-ames! James Win-chey l Come on down, James!”

  Mr Winchey started. He looked down into the dark well, and saw standing under the lamp a full-grown, but otherwise familiar figure. He started again, looked at the empty picture, looked back: James was a man of courage; he shouted in his scarcely-mellowed, strained tenor: “What is it? What do you want?”

  “I want you, James: come down, come down!” shouted the boy.

  James pinched himself several times, although he disliked physical pain. Then he closed the window, arranged his tie, turned down the light (it had several intensities), and locked all the doors behind him. He opened the gilt door of the lift and shot down as a lily shoots up. In the lift he put his hand up: true, he had forgotten his hat.

  He let himself out of the front door and stood on the steps of the building, alone, with the wind puffing on his head, and slightly afraid. He looked up at the wild, remote and glittering stars, still visible in their hosts; yet each was solitary and separated by gulfs never to be spanned—surely the symbol of all arduous, possessed and heroic men, and indeed of all men, in their solitary hour. A woman came up to James, soliciting, but he turned abruptly away and crossed the road with a firm step and upright head. At the border of the grass plot, the boy took his arm.

  “Good evening, my sweet James! James, I must positively spend an evening with you, once. Tell me, without hesitation, do you know this song?” And he began to troll a simple air which James had heard somewhere, in his childhood: his memory began to open up, as the view in a crystal when the mists roll back, and he saw his grandmother’s place, Seamore Hill, the wide, tessellated tile verandahs, the hothouses, and the gardener whistling this tune from an old opera.

  “Who are you?” said James in a constrained voice.

  “I am gay,” said the boy.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Who can answer a question like that? How profound you are, James! Maybe, who knows, I’m Andalusian, maybe from the Scilly Isles, who knows? Wait, do you know this air?” And he sang Santa Lucia. “I made all these up,” he finished.

  Mr Winchey said sternly: “That is a Neapolitan song: and the other is from The Beggar’s Opera, you did not invent them. Perhaps you heard them somewhere, and the tune passed into your subconscious…”

  “Am I not Gay?” said the boy admiringly.

  “But Gay was not Andalusian, and besides …”

  “Oh, hold your conscientious tongue,” said the boy pettishly. “I am gay and I am grave: Congrave too and elegiac Gray: but wait, I gather you do not approve of plagiarism?”

  “Certainly not: but what’s that to the purpose? What do you want of me?”

  The boy laughed in a disconcerting manner which James found hard to bear. James suddenly thought of his grandmother, Martha Winchey, a beautiful and elegant old creature, to whom he had shown a design he had made, when a little boy. The family had praised him, but grandmother whisked him into her library and showed him the very book from which he had half-copied it. James’s father, a spoilt and charming man, had said fretfully: “What’s that? The boy’s talented: you surely don’t imagine that all talents have to invent everything new: they are buds grafted on the old stock of invention!”—“Tra-la-la,” sang the grandmother, and took James the next day to a public gallery to see the paintings of her ancestor, one of the most famous of English painters. But into all poor James’s work, try as he would, crept a little bit of the work of someone else: if he rubbed it out, his work appeared altogether a platitude; if he left it in, it eternally leapt up to his eyes like a very demon with a pitchfork: hence, the queer, null opacity of his water-colours, his many erasures. Mr Winchey’s heart sank.

  “Let us observe this beautiful park,” said the boy, and they began to make a tour of the park, which is a triangle, and small enough to put in one’s pocket. The wind sprang up, the leaves chittered, dark forms hovered just outside the circle of the lamp, and the figs stared down with peaked brows at the goblins in their flanks.

  “There,” said the boy, “are two true lovers; there, two false; there are two lovers neither true nor false, but fated.”

  “What is that to me?” said James, nearly crying. A cloud of cherubs flew through the trees, and the true lovers, unconscious of any dark presence, rose and went out of the park. The winged creatures flew after them. The others tasted each other’s dark breath, and were part of the thickness of the night. As they embraced, they rolled against the back of the seat, and the lamplight falling upon them refined the curve of the man’s dark nostril, and gleamed on the woman’s eyeball. It seemed to be the same woman that had stood beside Mr Winchey on the steps. It seemed to him that glowworms, or flakes of light, otherwise embodied, rained upon them from the trees.

  He said to the boy, “Let us move on; it is not polite to look at these persons.”

  The boy said, “Look!”

  Mr Winchey saw that the woman was not what he thought, but was his own lover, the golden-browed Alathea. He started forward, his brow was knotted: he started back, he smoothed his face with his hands, he tried to calm the beating of his heart.

  “I am not sufficient to her,” he murmured. “I am not even sufficient to myself.” He became absorbed for a moment. “There is beauty in passion, even if it has not a white countenance,” he said, “but it jockeys my poor heart too much.”

  The boy drew him round the park, and it seemed infinite, although its lines never drew out. Every time they came upon the fated lovers, Mr Winchey saw a new face, but one which was old too, and rose from farther and farther back in his lifetime. He suddenly stumbled, and saw at his feet a tramp badly wounded, out of whose wounds ants crawled.

  “It is cold, mate,” sighed the man.

  Mr Winchey drew in his breath. “Take my coat, mate,” he said.

  When he next came back, neither man nor coat was there. Mr Winchey said to the boy, as he tried to look upwards through the thick branches at his window, on the fourth floor: “I am full of inexpressible melancholy: I feel as if my heart will break, and it seems to me that the dark is full of forms which I cannot see, but which, if I should, would lessen my trouble. But I cannot reach them any more than the fancies I have in my work, which always end by eluding me. It seems to me that I am among dreams which I have dreamed on all my past nights and forgotten. It seems that I have gone through life with a cataract in my eye, or a silk veil hung between me and the brilliant clarity of daylight forms: when my heart breaks, the veil will be rent—too late.”

  There was no answer. Mr Winchey could not find the boy. Only the lovers were there permanently. He turned to the false lovers: he touched them: they were dead and frozen stiff. “What is the meaning of this?” he said.

  Everywhere through the trees, forms glittered of persons who he felt wished to speak to him, but had not the means. The darkness was thicker, the leaves grew close, and the rays of the lamp bristled with their fine threads. James shivered. He looked for some way out of the park. After much struggling he broke through a thicket which had strange, smooth tendrils, like female hair, and he came upon the fated lovers. They were silent. He said: “Pardon me, I beg your pardon, will you kindly tell me the way out of this park?” There was a quiet. Then the man said: “There is none; there is no way out.” James had the idea that it was the beggar-boy.

  At the same moment he observed that the trees were in their ordinary places, and the office buildings stood just across
the street opposite him. He crossed the street, with a firm tread, and his head upright, and his too succinct heart orderly. He mounted in the lift as a gas bubble mounts in a vat, and he reached his office. All was in order. In the frame Raeburn’s boy stood in his proper place, in colours much less lively than James had imagined. James shook his head. But the night air still blew in through the broken window, and James’s coat was lost, and his silk shirt ripped. He sat down at the desk and put his head on his hands. The mist cleared off, and in a few minutes the cock crew.

  Shortly before the day dawned, the beggar-boy watching steadfast, if impertinent, from his elegant frame, said softly: “But you still have your silk shirt, James.” After that, everything slept.

  IN the evening, at the dinner-table, the Centenarist amused them all again, and these that follow were only some of

  THE CENTENARIST’S TALES

  ARCHELIDES, in Coptic legend, was born in Rome, went with his father’s ships abroad and was shipwrecked on the Egyptian coast, alone saved of all the ship. The vessels passed without seeing his signals and he stayed long on the barren coast looking at the bloodred, treeless mountains, the birds of prey wheeling in the sky and the red sea full of monsters: he feared hourly the Arab tribes, the wild monks, the vulture, scorpion and hyena. He was struck blind by the sun and rolled naked in the sand, while his skin stuck to his ribs. He felt one day under his hands, two sticks tied together in the shape of a Latin cross, which stood upright in the sand; for support he clung to it. A voice soft as the lapping of well-water, said to him, “Blind, you have found the cross: believe, and your eyes will be opened.”

  “I believe,” said the ignorant boy. A cup of cold water touched his lips and his eyes were bandaged. Although he was tormented with thirst, he took the cup of water in his trembling hand and poured the water over the feet of his rescuer, as a libation to the god who had rescued him. He again heard the voice, a man’s voice, and felt himself lifted in a man’s arms.