The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  France said slowly: “Did you dream that then? Or are you dreaming it now?”

  “Then or now, what is the difference? When I got near Odessa, I got better. You know, after he spoke to me that day, when I told him I was in love with him, I stayed away from school. Do you know what a city is like to one in an ecstasy of passion?

  “I walked round for three days to find out the things he told me of. I dragged myself from door to door. Perhaps one of the days was a Sunday. The curtains were drawn and the windows closed. I swung from one door-handle to another, and passed my gluey, arachnid, tentacular fingers along the glass and walls. The city was silent with thousands of little houses and shutters, and thousands of side-streets running darkly downhill among the ashpans: people passed me silently at high speed, and I always thought ‘Is it he? ‘That is what I saw in the city. A boy bicycling, a child playing on the doorstep looked at me with Ivan Soklow’s old face: I stopped constantly with my heart in my mouth, until I got too tired with seeing the same face so often. Then he passed me by laughing in the air, in hair, ear, eye, lifting my skirt with the rustle, there, passing, invisible, saturnine, unconscious of me, all and none. I went home late to bed at night and got up early in the morning. I went to the library and read for days on end, until I could not see the book, or in a maze of words I read certain phrases which seemed written in letters of fire, written in my entrails with letters of fire: fancies and dancing of invisible feet wafted my attention into the dark. I thought I would become famous and people would say in the end, ‘Under the influence of Ivan Soklow, philosopher, Maria learned all the sciences,’ like Henrietta Hertz. Then, you know, his mother died: he went into the country for the funeral, and in the holidays I married George, in despair, to escape my fatal passion. At seventeen one is ignorant and harassed.

  “Last night I went out of my aunt’s house and over to the college where they were giving the evening lectures. I walked along the terrace and looked down at the city: the old, salt smell came up there, the crushed tufts of grass smelled familiar, the lights swung on the cordage in the harbour, and in the town, and tugs were bringing down the lighters, just the same. I leaned against the gate where the weather-worn old stone from the college was thrown down to be carted away, and I listened against the wall, under the windows, to a lecturer speaking in class. It was Ivan—I thought it was Soklow speaking. I listened: yes, the accents seemed fresher, but the words were the same, the sentiments and delivery were the same. I laughed to myself. ‘In three years you have really come to believe that he is old, old as he said,’ I thought, ‘but with those ideas he remains constantly the friend and solace of youth.’ When the class came out I went and sat in the cloisters and waited to see him, but when the lecturer came out, talking seriously with serious young girl students, it was not he, but a much younger man, a new teacher, very like. I said to one of the girls: ‘Who is that? ‘She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t you know Vladimir Segal, the new lecturer? He’s the rage of the University!’

  “I went to his pension early this morning with little Ivan. A bent, yellow, spectacled maid let me in. There he sat at his table, reading a popular scientific monthly, making little modem annotations on his old lectures in their faded ink.

  “‘Good morning, Mr Soklow!’

  “‘Good morning: what can I do for you?’ He had forgotten.

  “I said: ‘You don’t remember—Maria, Maria Bakinov? I was in your classes of Russian Literature!’

  “He adjusted his glasses and looked at me. ‘Ah, yes; Maria, of course. Let me see, what year, what year now? ‘

  “I said sadly: ‘Four years ago.’

  “Then he remembered. ‘I am so pleased to see you. Is your husband working in Odessa now? I see you have a fine child there.’

  “There he sat; his glasses sat on his nose, he had ink on his temple, his hair was thin, but not thinner than before, he had not yet taken off his slippers, he had not washed. His skin was dark, dry, porous and mean. He squinted a bit in his left eye. He had been eating an orange, the window was shut and there was a stale smell in the room. He had on an old wool dressing-gown on which he was embroidering a design over a moth hole, while reading snatches from the magazine. The green dressing-gown was covered with such designs in bright wools, trees, birds, ships, flowers, children under trees.

  “No, it was not that either, but he did not stand up to greet me. He looked over his darning through his spectacles, and not a gleam of cheer or change came into his face. You see, I had cherished a heroic dream: I thought I did a fine thing and bound another warm and cultivated heart to mine. But no, I saw it was nothing but an incident: perhaps someone else had made him a declaration in the meantime, some green young girl like me. Then I remembered that when Mazzini was in London, the women made him declarations: I was disgusted, women are canaille, I thought. But it was the stale smell in the room.

  “He said: ‘What is the dear little boy’s name, Mrs Weibel?’

  “I said slowly: ‘Ivan: called after you.’

  “He flushed and said: ‘Really, no, you’re joking!’

  “I told him I had another baby still at the breast, and that I had left George my husband and walked all the way back to see him.

  “He looked embarrassed and ran his fingers through his papers. ‘How imprudent! Even if there was a provocation, you have a duty to the man you married, Mrs Weibel! And then, your two children, you owe it to them to give them a good start in life, your husband is an educated man. How do you propose to support them? ‘

  “I was angry, I said: ‘You must not speak about my children: you understand nothing at all, I see.’

  “He answered pacifically: ‘Don’t get angry, my dear young woman. I was really talking about the matter as a man of the world. I think of these things more philosophically than you naturally would. You are a wife and a mother: Nature herself imposes duties with those functions, Mrs Weibel: it is a social and philosophical problem now, not personal. The individual in having children immolates himself.’

  “‘Ah,’ I said furious, quite beside myself, ‘you regard my journey here as a philosophical problem?’

  “He said, nettled: ‘Really, my dear imprudent child, what can I do for you? Did I ask you to come? I thought you had long ago got over that girlish fancy for me: I am an old anchorite, you know!’

  “Just then someone called out in the yard. He opened the window: there stood the ugly, black-dressed maid who had opened the door to me, quarrelling with her husband, an angry old man of sixty or so: he was about thirty years older than his wife, I think. Their child, an ill-favoured sick child of three years, played on the brick garden path and waved his hand when he saw Ivan at the window. ‘Ivan, Ivan,’ he cried: Ivan chortled and waved back. Do you know what I saw? I saw it was Ivan’s child: no-one but a jealous observer would have known, but I knew, and the child’s eye was slightly crossed, too.

  “‘There you are,’ he said, ‘another example. They are very unhappy, poor girl. He shouts at her, and is suspicious of her, and she answers him very amicably, she takes it philosophically: I told her to take it philosophically, and remember her duty. Nothing is perfect.’

  “‘You think nothing is perfect,’ I said to him very calmly. He stood there, sweaty in his old green wool gown, and the rank marguerites in the vase, put there by the maid, I don’t doubt, stank up in my nose. ‘Some miserable lives will be perfect when they can crawl with the worms and roots under-earth!’ And with that I put my child out into the passage. He straightened a bit, and the scholastic chords vibrated in his skinny throat. He thought I meant my suicide! Then he changed his mind: his eyes went greenish, he swallowed down the foolish presumption that I meant to do him violence, but he stood away from me. His treadmill mind, spun off the wheel, only thought of violence.

  “‘I understand women,’ he said, and clucked. ‘So you came back to see me? ‘

  “He moved towards me with two shuffling steps. How odd he looked with his white face and thin strea
ked hair, in his dressing-gown! Even the little flush, the little queasy notion that crossed his mind, did not alter his muscles: he was embalmed, I suppose, years ago.

  “‘And I understand,’ I said loudly, ‘how you take children philosophically.’ I gathered up his blankets and sheets and threw them back over the footrail, laughing and saying: ‘Why doesn’t the husband send his wife earlier to her household tasks? ‘

  “‘His face darkened, that dark skin, he showed his teeth, he seized the bed-clothes and threw them back into place again. I laughed: how comically people behave! He said: ‘Go away! Go away immediately! I did not invite you to stay!’

  “I laughed at him and caught hold of the broken cord of the window that looks into the yard: it had fallen down again. The sun was just coming through. I felt warmed by the sun and by his misery: I felt so young, my last sentimental illusion had just died, knocked on the head by a brick. I sang him the song they sing at weddings. It is nothing: there is nothing in it. Then I started to cross the room to kiss him. It was my right after coming so far: besides, my heart had melted, singing about lovers. But he had been standing there as pale as a sheet, stockstill, and the staleness of the room, and his old papers, rose up about him. I was irritated, and I said, ‘So I was to love you with love of the head? And she? So, in the sublimation of human passion the soul finds salvation, ambition takes wings?’

  “He said to me bitterly, ‘I see you have remained only a child: you believe in impulses that have only a minute’s significance: you are unable to understand misery, which has left no marks on your face, although it has clawed you. It is all one to you. This afternoon the sun will shine and you will have forgotten all this and will laugh like your child. You come back here dressed in picturesque folly and indulgence: if you had come in crape, you might have saved my old life. I am an outcast, you must understand that: the ridiculous pedagogue, sterile and skinny. I only love someone who is depressed, cynical, ruined, downtrodden, miserable and shoddy, like her. That’s why I loved her in my coarse way. I didn’t have your fine passions. You are right, that is my son: he is stupid, he will be like me, a skinny pedagogue, like his mother, downtrodden and reviled. That elf-child is the whole product of my life. You spoke the truth just now, but without intelligence. Death is the consummation of life: death is terrifying to the grandest soul, in death all men are equal, though not in birth.’

  “He stood in front of me, pale and thoughtful, in his coloured gown, strange priest. He looked down at his son who stared at the ants running on the garden path, stupefied by the glaring sun. He looked at me as at the chorus in a tragedy: the real persons were in his head. I had no significance. I then perceived how very little I had meant to him, even when a girl: probably he did not even once dream of me in some troubled night. I was the feeblest of dreams that was ever turned away from that fireless skull.

  “Besides, what did his speech mean? What is the use of being master of Russian Literature, if you can’t give a good speech on occasion, about motives?

  “Yet, he was withdrawn from me, but he still looked and looked at me, or not at me, but at some-beyond me: it was taller, because he raised his eye, as if he were measuring its height. I flipped idly the broken window cord. Then suddenly I felt embarrassed. I opened the door, picked up my little boy and ran downstairs.

  “I heard the man and woman in the yard cry out. I ran out through the passage. Annie, the maid, stood gaping upwards, shrieking and flinging up her arms: the child bawled and the husband was shouting sternly, ‘What are you doing? Stop that, Ivan Soklow!’

  “Ivan stood on the window-sill looking down. The little child was almost under him. ‘Pick up the child, Annie,’ he said to the maid. She rushed to do it, but instead of throwing himself down, he climbed into the room again, pulled the window up to its full height, by the broken cord, and let it drop on his neck. The child was in its mother’s skirt and Ivan was in my bosom. The maid let out a yell. ‘It is your doing,’ said she to me.—’ It is your doing, harlot,’ said her husband to her. ‘What did I tell you this morning? The Lord is patient, but in the end he punishes sin, and I will punish it too.”

  “I came away. I felt relieved. The tide was running out, a pennon of sunlight pinned on each wave. I came down to see you. I have no doubt I shall be able to get a job, even in the city here.”

  NOW, after the Master’s tale, the guests were still idle and rebellious, and no-one would agree to tell a tale. They cracked jokes, some of them moved off to sit in the nearby café, or to walk in the town, and in a few moments only a few of the men were left, sitting with the Master, the Musician and the Old Man. The Old Man smiled at the others, pulled his little beard and remarked softly:

  “The ladies fly off now, skirling, flirting and tossing their heads like a flock of sparrows: they are so free, the dear creatures, they will have nothing to do with us until sundown!”

  “Do we look better at night?” asked the Viennese Conductor with a refined smirk. “Or, do they?”

  “Men, women,” exclaimed the Schoolboy with impatience, his lips curling, “they are the same animal: do we have to use these old gaslight distinctions of man, woman, day and night empiry, these suspect gallantries overscented to conceal bad odours! There are only two kinds in our society, rich, poor, master, servant, proprietor and pensioner; and all the foibles of women that we laugh at in secret, are the foibles of a dependent class. Women are open-hearted, good, ambitious, capable as we are, given the same economic opportunity.”

  “You are a gallant boy,” said the Old Man, lightly: “I also love women of every kind: for that reason I would not wish them to have our opportunities to become rascals.”

  The Schoolboy flushed and was about to reply hotly, when the Master intervened.

  “Are we going to have a passage-at-arms, Schoolboy, in the old knightly style, for the honour of the dames? You are young, your manners are coltish, but you are Sir Galahad himself. The Old Man here, a Galahad of another age, one who has known as many women as you have known few, talks so charmingly about them, that we can at least wish that what he says were true. Tell us about the ladies, Old Man, if you will: they quitted us brusquely, but that is no reason for us to abandon them.”

  “I know many, many stories about my women,” said the Old Man with tenderness; “and I have known many women, because I loved them. If I had been able to love them more, I should have had more of their heart-in-heart secrets. That was the secret of Don Juan—but I don’t need to tell you that, with a ‘Don Juan’ on the spot—that he loved passionately all women.”

  The Schoolboy’s eyes sparkled and his cheek flushed as he said:

  “You are right, in that: tell us about some of these women, will you? There is nothing more enthralling than to know what they think, how they move!”

  The Old Man said apologetically,

  “My pictures are miniatures, and I have superannuated tricks and graces of style.” But when they urged him again, he began his tale, in a reflective tone.

  The Old Man’s Tale

  FAIR WOMEN

  COME up, fair women!

  In the plain coming from my village, Marion’s curls bobbed over her holland apron. Under the bushes covered with red dust, I ate her sherbet-ball and the sour-sweet powder sprayed up out of the green globe. By the tall yew in her garden, children’s parrakeet voices shouting “I’m on Tom Tiddler’s ground picking up silver,” and Marion rushing out, brown-kneed, yelling. A shiver as she rushed at the lichened trunk of the yew, while dust hung in the sun-lanced arboretum. In the evening she said, “Tell us a story!” and I told her of a rich child of fourteen whose boy from an enemy family made love to her in a balcony and in a funeral vault.

  The sea-wind in the old pines, the ants on the ripe kangaroo grass, cumulus clouds, peewees chattering and far off, the spray-bitten cliffs where, with the rising sea, Andromedas stood momentarily in the crevices. Dulce danced with Count Anton at ten: marriage between cousins is sterile, they say, but that’s
all a superstition. Match-making mamma, filial Dulce is dressed in too tightfitting a maternal affection.

  In the gully Olive had the black eye, white cheek, skinny limbs and spines of the blackberry choking the creek-head. Boys and girls went off in pairs to turn up centipedes under the sandstone boulders. She left to marry, with inelegant abruptness, the greengrocer’s lad: the departure of her graceless manner and common voice uncovered the stones and the fence-posts in their bareness.

  The evergreen forest planted by our ancestors stood before us: pomegranates glittered. When we approached, a hundred doors opened in the walls, and each one entered alone. Through the galactic flowers of an almond-tree, flushed like the flamingo, upright by a water-well, stood my Phyllis Mirabilis. Is it possible that I was not at your baptism? “That is my father’s name.” Afterwards, your dulciloquy a little rusty, saying, “You think I have not changed? No, and I shall never: nowadays, a girl doesn’t—” the orange dress tight over a modelled breast. You had tears, though, for an inordinate love: there was dew on your leaves, green bough.

  Tempe, habited in black silk for Malvolio, Tempe in a large hat for Lady Teazle: in English class, sending in, in your Greek script, my lines:—

  The swollen gourd at evening star

  Drops from the bush: its pepins are

  Upon the water, near and far,

  Scattered, to Jove’s gold similar!

  Two stars, like tears, into a well,

  Beside the vines and bushes fell,

  To see a lavish damosel

  Give free the melons she should sell.

  Now rising day in iron-barred skies

  Clinks his keys, and his round eyes

  Canvas the caravanserais.

  Two stars are gone? Now, dog-stars rise!

  The culprits caught, then blush as red

  As Vulcan in his Venus’ bed:

  “In orchard gloom we thought” (they said),