The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  As they went down, in the morning, in the fresh air rich with the violent smells of sub-tropical flora, they looked at each other, musing.

  “Remember yesterday?” said Rachel with a shudder.

  “Let’s forget horrors,” said Lilias. “But I assure you, you’ll not get me up that mountain again: it’s haunted, I think.”

  “Even I don’t glory in that height as I used to.”

  “This is my landscape,” said Lilias, as they rode easily through the flowering pass. “I want to get old as quickly as possible to take my ease. I sleep as much as I can and work as much as I can. Last year my ankle became stiff: this year I feel rheumy, my blood is certainly running colder, and I cannot work late at night. With good luck I shall be in a year or two perfectly resigned, and I will be able to enter the warm and indolent country of my heart.”

  “But when you were young you must have wished …”

  “Let’s not talk of days so old. What fine weather!”

  A gunshot in the valley rolled among the mountains, the great beast grunted in his stronghold, and the birds flew up in a cloud.

  THE Master of the Day then turned to the Translator.

  “You live among literary people, you are always translating books: you must know hundreds of tales inaccessible to us: your life must be an Arabian Nights Entertainment.”

  “Literary people are two dimensional,” said the Schoolboy, with scorn.

  “You can decide,” replied the Translator, and began.

  The Translator’s Tale

  A COLIN, A CHLOË

  WHEN Colin came to London at seventeen, leaving the South Downs and Phyllis, it was said everywhere that he was a young man with a future. His first book, come out in the Autumn, and called “The Vale of Arun”, was collected, in its first edition, by the cognoscenti.

  Chloë, curd-browed, pink-cheeked, in Liberty silks, served tea on St. Valentine’s Day, her birthday, to her invalid foster-parents and a few friends, and mentioned Van Dongen, Lawrence and Proust: to Kisskass the middle-aged ceramist she seemed a perennial adolescent, preserved for years and imperceptibly deteriorating in calve’s-foot jelly: to Colin she seemed a Muse.

  They exchanged for two years quiverfuls of pen-and-ink passions, birds singing in trees in the square and patches of scarlet in ferns on cliff’s-edge. They went out on Sundays and picked wild flowers whose names they knew to the number of a thousand, declaimed in the ignorant woodland, made country couplets in the mushroomy thicket, went down ducal valleys following trout-pools full of Spring freshets, trod the snow in crusty Winter cracking ancient meaty chestnuts; and the conversation always turned wilfully, pleasantly, skilfully to Colin’s advancement and the sweetness of mutual aid. Colin’s second book had a gallery of characterless, gold-skinned women moving in domestic chiaroscuro, distilling incompetent charm; but behind all was the tantalising shape of some dark child, some graceful servant, some country-girl. Chloë’ had the key to that gallery alone, Colin said: but at night she was oppressed with dreams and was haunted by an unknown face.

  London is an old hag, dowdy, trinketed, smelling of whisky, but with an Isis bosom still and the unexpected tricks of an ageing passion: here comes a young man fresh from the country, full of green sap, with breezes in his hair; she invites him to her salon, gives him cakes and cocktails, is affected and seeks a handkerchief in her bosom, begs him to feel how her heart beats (still young in a body too soon old), rings for the maid, relents, pays tribute to his sympathy and invites him to the supreme feast on a day when he will arrive to find the drawing-room full of half literary London. And the elderly Lavinia of Colin’s sorrow, on this day retired to her study visibly emotional on the arm of an old violinist, while the guests smiled in a sophisticated fashion and Colin dashed down his cold tea-cup and went outside into the Spring air, white to the hair and bitter, bitter and biting: to his river-grass nose the hyacinths in the square had the choking, dusty odour of faded paper flowers.

  Chloë, between a literary broil and a scandalous limerick, remarked over her fancywork, in a thin voice:

  “You know, I’m collecting Colin’s early efforts for my cunabular catalogue: here are the first pages of ‘The Vale of Arun’”.

  And after reading a few pages aloud with sighing cadences, she said:

  “That spontaneous fusion of emotion and expression comes with the first bloom of youth: is it genius, is it innocence—who knows? He was so fresh and credulous when he first came up: will he become facile or great? Will he replace Lawrence? All of us, his friends, are trembling with anxiety. In London there are so many influences for good and evil! The wildfowl, ignorant, from the waters of his native valley, do not go astray on the bare hills, but man has not sufficient instincts for his needs: a young country boy can easily go astray.”

  Phyllis, phthisic, came to town: she was eighteen, Colin was twenty, and their parents thought the engagement had lasted long enough. The night Colin kept those two meek sisters an hour late over coffee, describing with suggestive smirks his conquest of the brilliant old lady in her salon, and the exquisite odour of hyacinths, Chloë tucked Phyllis into the cretonnes and lavendered linens of her own bed with tearful kisses, and told her to be patient. Chloë cut lunches for their walks in the bluebell country, and found cottages for the long amorous holidays of the pair, by the sea; she sent Phyllis medicines and Colin fine editions, and spent the Christmas before their marriage sewing a silk trousseau for the bride. She sighed and said, as she sewed, “She is getting much worse: they say she cannot live long. She is such a child—I doubt if she knows what she is undertaking in marriage.”

  Sometimes, in a jolly mood, Colin still wrote Chloë titbits of the sky, air, ground-larks, reed-warblers, which came his way and were part of his emotive stock-in-trade, and wound up some country excursion with a comparison of Chloë to a windflower, a daisy “tricked out in dainty petticoats”, called her “a maze-treader of the heart, confused and charmingly wistful”, and would inscribe in his own hand on some virelay pulled on handmade paper on a private press, some genteel thought with characteristic quirk.

  When Colin and Phyllis were married, Chloë got a little pale and went about with a churchly young fellow who taught ethics to the poor and collected insects. Colin down in the country loitered for weeks without writing, weak with discouragement and ennui: sometimes he wrote tenderly of pregnant mothers and children, sometimes he wept, walking bitterly by himself in the fields, and thought of “The Vale of Arun” written in the innocence and faith of the angels.

  During the winter Phyllis and her newborn baby died, and Colin, coming up to London, peremptorily broke off Chloë’s friendship with the insect-collector and bound her for good, fruitlessly and hopelessly, to his single life. This he did by means of love-letters of perverse cunning, exquisitely excruciating like the sounds of a violin, solos to be played on a sensual, timid and solitary heart. On the St. Valentine’s Day of her fortieth birthday, he wrote his last letter. Chloë died, by accident, shortly after, and now cares no more for her troubles than you and I, and Colin only is left to mumble them over when he wants a pathetic undertone in his modish literary essays.

  The Last Love-letter

  CHLOË—It seems to me that you still hear the sound of the waters that were running through the valley of Arun twenty years ago. It is a long time since they reflected the sky for me and heard my irresolute footfalls in the grass. The year began, the birds mated, the snowdrops sprang, the wood heard the fledglings crying, your love flew towards me fresher after a frozen Spring: all nature was stirring and I even, a dullminded man, felt a new impulse: you knew the poets and I was intoxicated with the Word. Time leads us over lawns and pricks and the heart knocks each moment louder on Death’s yielding door: first one she, then another, flitting, seemed for a moment habited like Time, but you have remained, an unwilling sister to the doorstep.

  Here is St. Valentine bringing you your fortieth year. I ought to give you something too, especially this
year, for something has unsettled me lately, and you come to trouble me at night: your face, white as a smile in the dark, hovers above my bed and turns a sorry, understanding glance on my night-thoughts. It seems to me that I owe you something. They say only the generous can owe gratitude: me it irritates—I shall pay you in full. Why didn’t you marry the daddle-headed insect-collector, or join the china-cabinet of Kisskass the elderly collector of clays? Instead, you let me ruin your life, you clung to my bad tempers, my irritability, my vanity and dull pomp, and for want of love you fell into the embraces of the blackskinned Venus who wrestles with women in hired rooms and under the shades of patriarchal fourposters alike, in the locked and curtained secrecy dangerous to chastity, in the morning full of suspect odours as a tropical hothouse, who presses her bulbous breasts over the soft paps half-blown, her mouth over the fugitive suffocating mouth, her heavy sterile belly streaming with juices over the thin hips, cold as a silver jar, of the solitary weeping in her pillow-slips, the Venus who at her multiple touches makes flower from the steaming skin the thousand different roses of sensuality and from the inspired prophetic imagination spring a whole creation of beasts, plants, tentacles, gargoyles, figures of potency and imps which hang in the accomplice sheets.

  Long ago I saw you wander in the banyan forest, and stepping over the margin of bulrushes sink in the torpid lake, thick with lilystalks and curdled with watersnakes: in this sacred wood you fled from even the shades of men, finding their charms pale beside the horrible attractions of the wood’s inhabitants. You preferred their bestial companies roving with shouts in the enchanted borders of the wood, you plucked the fatal asphodel and the long-leaved nepenthes. Soon at the end of every city-street and in each court and area you heard whispering and saw red lamps, and your forested creatures sprang up with footfalls and scurrying. Then, tired, you looked in the surface of the lake, to see if you could see the crescent moon shine, sword of Diana the cruel: and looked again to see if there was no Diana but the light of a lamp in a window or a hand beckoning you out of the thicket.

  What a misery, to be born a timid woman and to love a man like myself without energy. Love is giving and I have nothing to give. I have gone on stretching out my life, my career and my talent from one year to another, hungering from day to day for the scrap of favourable criticism and the snack of patronage that would land me a good contract for the next year, and one that required only easy writing. I thought, biting my nails, of my first book, and was caught by every hotfoot idea because I had cold feet. Then, disgruntled, I began to write sarcastic reviews, and you tattled more and more of literary scandals. I would like to set all this right by a last act with some lively and richly ornate fancy in it, and I would like to give you something, because you have been kind to me and thrown away on me all your affections.

  I thought that last night: suppose I came to Chloë (I said), and brought her the fatal, desirable, wild and supernatural joy of death, the blackout for which an unhusbanded spirit has waited: she would be happy. Or am I a boy still behind you in years, disenchantment and knowledge of human nature? Suppose I come to tea this afternoon: the toast is made, the fire burns cheerfully under the gloomy Muirhead Bone: the old snuff jar is on the bookcase and the Sèvres tea-set is out. You simper and I frown. We drink tea, and in the middle of some remark about “decadence” I neatly stick a knife in you! Then I pull down one of those artistic curtains and some of your Pompadour silks: on the carpet I throw the rich stuffs in a pile and on top something I brought in a packet under my cloak, a cloak of black swans’ feathers. There I put it, and loosen your hair, and you lie there like a woman floating at sea in a storm in the snarled manes of seahorses. Then I say, into your deaf ears:

  “Eyes which have wept tenderly over my creations, lips which have twitched with a tender laugh at my follies, nostrils drawing breath suddenly at the sight of me, liver and lights which flushed at the mention of my name, heart which contracted in my absence, feet which ran on so many errands for me and hands which have burned to embrace me, lie still, rest, grow cold, sleep for ever: farewell.”

  I wipe my knife on my breeches, blow my nose, and leave you lying there, for the inquisitive Old Mother Hubbard of a morning when she comes prying through the open curtains: and you will not come haunting me again, for you will be fatigued and glad to sleep.

  THIS letter Chloë often read and cried over, and lent in secret to her intimate friends, as an evidence of the perverse but true passion her friend had for her. She got into an accident soon after, whether by chance or fatality no one can say, and when she was dying hid it in her dress and asked that all his letters be buried with her. But Colin, knowing her sentimentality well, came to see her dead, and abstracted all these letters from her sheets. This last letter he lent me once, in a fit of vanity, to see what I thought of his soul, and destroyed it the next day in a fit of remorse: for he is like that, like a ship steering no true course, shuddering at the touch of the rocks, bounding away from the breakers, yearning for the day when it will founder silently in mid-ocean. But I have a secret copy of the letter and the contents are as I have recited.

  THE Translator finished his tale, curled his moustaches and looked inquisitively at his audience to see how the tale had been received. The Old Lady was shaking her head doubtfully, and gently fanning herself with a black lace fan: “Such people,” she said reproachfully, “do not exist: such a monster would be shut up.”

  The Frenchwoman made a whimsical face at the Translator and said, “No, it is just a horrid example of Protestant repression: when you see a timid personage with a cold face and clear eyes, you can expect lunatic follies to peep out at any moment: in my country we are never surprised by anything an Englishman does. If he acts normally we are ill-at-ease and suspicious, but if he does something entirely incomprehensible, we realise that he is himself and not meditating anything.”

  “A stupid thing,” said the Lawyer. “Apart from anything else, the young man might easily have been questioned after a letter like that, if the cause of her death had been obscure.”

  “What a desperately boring pair,” said the young Schoolgirl, shaking back her black curls from her thin shoulders and sniffing superciliously: “little mushrooms spring out of the humus of a dead tree and talk about their depravity.”

  The Doctor proclaimed with gravity, “Do away with crumpets and steak-and-kidney pie in the English cuisine and these colic-born micmacs will disappear and you will see the old golden Elizabethan strain.”

  After dessert they turned lazily to the Centenarist once more and pressed him to relate some of his tales. The Centenarist chuckled, said, “First wait till I light a big cigar”; and he sat back twinkling in his seat, pretending that he had no wish at all to talk. After he had blown into the air two or three rings of smoke, and his eyelids began to flutter downwards as if he was lost in inner contemplation, the Viennese Conductor clapped his hands and cried:

  “Centenarist, now it is night: now do all songs of the loving ones awake, as Nietzsche chants, and your heart also is the song of a loving one.”

  “Have I to work every night,” asked the Centenarist coyly, “like a burglar or a gay lady?”

  “Something cheerful tonight,” said the Lawyer, “you are always so religious.”

  “Religious am I? Then nothing but atheist tales,” said the Centenarist sharply.

  “Atheist is simply religious in reverse,” remarked the Lawyer, making a face.

  “Nonsense,” said the Centenarist, and began, smiling at the Schoolteacher.

  THE CENTENARIST’S TALES

  IN one of the English Dominions an only boy named Jamie was brought up with much indulgence in a strict atheist family. He was not allowed to play with the ordinary children who went to the public schools (and in that country most children go to the public schools), nor with the few High Church and Roman Catholic children who went to private schools. He never saw in his family anyone drink, smoke, swear or lie, he never read a low or immoral book
, and as he was brought up on the philosophers, sacred writers of all times, poets and scientists, he had a calm, reasonable, but inspired view of life: he was not a prig, but the ordinary amusements of young men seemed flat and vapid to him. He walked by the seashore and mountainside, talking fraternally to all who came his way; he wrote poetry and worshipped, from season to season, some highschool girl or other. At the age of twenty-three, at a reception given for scientific societies at the State Government house, he met a Society girl of striking looks and energetic manner who inspired him with an immense love. The girl likewise fell in love with Jamie, was unable to seduce him and forced her father to accept him as son-in-law. The father, an oyster-merchant, who had made a million in the fisheries, did not object to this intellectual son-in-law, but he insisted, in his bluff, old way that Jamie, as he was still called, should go into the business with him. Jamie was glad to do so.

  “When you see how men work, manage, struggle, compete, plot, lie and make profits, and sweat blood at night dreaming their overdraft is refused, Jamie,” said his father-in-law, “you will be a thousand times the philosopher. How much do you know? For example, have you ever told a lie, and what kind of a lie?”

  “No,” said Jamie: “I believe I have never told one.”

  The father-in-law concealed his feelings, and continued:

  “You have a good head: you will soon learn the business, no doubt: race tells. And as I say, how can you know what impels men to lie universally as they do, if you have never done it yourself?”

  “That is reasonable,” said Jamie.