“Try hard to tell a lie tomorrow,” said the merchant, with an encouraging smile. At the club he told his friends, “Even if he knows nothing about business, it’s an honour to have a man with a head like that marry your daughter.”
But Jamie the phoenix, established branch manager of the business in another State capital, showed no aptitude for business at all. In three months he had lost three thousand pounds (putting it at the lowest figure), and he had not taken in above a hundred, net. His employees had all gone on strike for better wages and better living conditions, and Jamie had sent a long letter to his father-in-law telling him that their demands were perfectly justified. He would not sell any fish not fresh from the sea the same day, and he instituted an offal plant to make fertiliser from all two-day fish. When the advertising men of the press called on him for advertisements, and being refused, attempted to blackmail him, he kicked them out of his office with scorn. This justly aroused in the entire press of the capital a campaign of indignation, for if newspapers do not have advertisements, how can they pay their printers? Articles appeared every day condemning his methods, accusing him of subversive politics, or of wilfully poisoning men, women and children, of robbing the workers and seducing servant-girls, of having natural negro children, of assaulting his mother with a lath, of supporting houses of prostitution, and of spreading leprosy and goitre.
His wife was grieved at this unpopularity and tried to make Jamie see the light in long curtain lectures; and when he remained obdurate, she returned to her father in a pet and demanded a divorce. The father-in-law asked for Jamie’s resignation, but Jamie had a bank account and refused. The father-in-law said:
“Jamie, with learning you are beside yourself.”
He promptly sloughed off the branch business which Jamie ran, and started another in the same city, in successful competition, in order to ruin Jamie and bring him to his senses: for he loved him, at bottom.
“I will not give up,” said Jamie. “I will finish this job as if it were the only job I had had from the cradle: I will never give up, I will make a career, even an apostolate, out of being a fishman,” and he wrote his father as much.
His father, likewise, to bring him to his senses (for he was a very sensible philosopher himself, and had always made a splendid living), disowned Jamie. At the end of the fourth month, Jamie saw himself ruined, sold up, laughed out of town, likely to be tarred and feathered by the town vigilantes, and his shop-fittings, carriers, motor delivery vans, fish-baskets and tickets packed up to be sold at auction.
Jamie went to the bank then, to get some money to wire to his father, for, engrossed with the struggle, he had come down to his last penny; but he found all his accounts attached in all his banks. When he got back home the bailiff was there, so that he found himself on the pavement without bread or a roof.
Jamie then went to the head of the city University, where the rector, kindly but firmly, told him that the University could never find a place even as instructor, even as laboratory assistant, for a man whose name had been covered with such public ignominy; and that youth could not be put in the hands of a man who, it was said, betrayed servant-girls.
“I am a ruined man,” said Jamie, wringing his hands, “and all for the fish that swim in the sea; who could believe that Satan’s invisible world would be revealed behind a fish counter?”
Tired, beaten, and weary to death, Jamie went to the auctionrooms where his shop-fittings and aquaria were to be offered for sale. It was a large set of auction-rooms, the largest in the city. Jamie, in his anguish, wandered through them from one end to the other. Here was a Persian carpet, there a Gainsborough, there a French chair, there a set of old fire-dogs, there a lot of pictures stood on the floor. His head was splitting, the sweat poured over his face, and with the sweat, a few tears, if it must be told. He stood by the lot of pictures, and presently sank into an armchair covered with tapestry, which stood by them. He thought over all his troubles; in his misery, tears poured over his face. He looked dejectedly before him, and presently focussing his eyes on a near object, it seemed to him that he was looking into a mirror put down there on the floor in the obscurity next to the pictures. There was a kind, delicate face, with large eyes from which tears rolled: but the fair hair was in long curls such as Jamie had not worn since he was a little boy, and the shoulders were draped in some white cloth: round the high, fair forehead was a ring of spinous things, perhaps fishbones. Tears and blood rolled down the suffering and forgiving face, and the expression of the eyes touched Jamie’s heart. Jamie looked at this picture, which he had never seen in his life before, and he wondered what it could be.
“It is a picture of the old times,” he said to himself in his simplicity and sorrow. “But men in all ages are alike; that crown of fishbones is symbolical: see how the tears roll! No doubt he also was a fishman.”
“YOUR literary chaps are all alike,” exclaimed the Banker. “What good did it do him to ruin himself, lose his wife and upset a whole industry?”
“No good at all,” said the Centenarist calmly.
“There are plenty of those,” remarked the Schoolgirl with disdain: “softshell liberals sparring at the ghosts of economic problems.”
“Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring,” said the Banker stoutly.
“Do you know any more atheist tales?” asked the Old Lady. The Centenarist said:
IN a small coastal village near the same city, an old Italian kept a fish store, and his initials were J. C., which stood for Jesus Christ, the name given him by his parents, without baptism. A priest who came to the village was surprised to find that J. C. was utterly ignorant of the Christian religion, and that no-one had taken the trouble to instruct him, because he was black and had come, a pagan boy, from Africa. He approached him and described to him the advantages of joining the Roman Catholic church, and he endeavoured to give him religious information sandwiched into his ordinary conversation. The black fishmonger was not refractory, but whenever it came to the question of conversion and baptism, he jibbed. At last the priest, anxious for this conversion, became extremely pressing, and J. C. said cautiously, “It costs a lot, your baptism and conversion, don’t it?” The priest hesitating, at length said:
“No, it will cost you nothing.”
“But afterwards,” said the fishmonger, “you have to put something in the box on Sundays, eh? I know, cause I asked.”
“You needn’t,” said the priest a little stiffly, for the village was small, “if you bring a true heart and complete faith, it is enough.”
The fishmonger hesitated for some time longer, however, and perhaps even pondered this serious question, as he sold his fish and went out with his nets, or as he mended his nets, or rolled in the sun with his dogs on the beach; but he said no word to the priest. He thought to himself: “It is the priest’s business to get me: it means more business for him.” At last the priest, a weak man with a little vanity, said:
“Giuliani, if you are converted and baptised and truly belong to the Catholic Church, I will buy my fish from you and speak about you to my parishioners so that they will patronise you.” But the fishmonger was well patronised already, and he still hesitated. At last, the priest came into his shop one morning, bought a bream from him and argued with him so soundly that the black fishmonger relented and agreed to come to the priest’s house for instruction. All went well; the fishmonger showed a natural aptitude for learning, and possessed a good memory. The news of the fishmonger’s studies spread far and wide and he did a great business.
The day came that the fishmonger was to be examined on his beliefs, and his examination proceeded satisfactorily. Then, thinking to make it easier for the convert by mentioning things familiar to him, the bishop said:
“Do you believe that Christ performed many miracles?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that when the multitude followed Christ to the shores of the sea and were hungry, he took five loaves and two fishes and brake
them into pieces and sent the pieces among the five thousand, and that they did eat thereof and were satisfied?”
“Yes,” said the fishmonger: “that they were hungry, I believe: that there were five loaves and two fishes, I believe: that Christ broke them into bits I believe, and that there were five thousand who ate, I believe: and that they were satisfied …” he hesitated.
“Well,” said the bishop.
“No,” said the fishmonger stubbornly. “Two fish! That they were satisfied I cannot believe.”
So they had to accept him without the miracle of the five thousand, but to the end he distrusted a body of scripture so contrary to ichthyophagy.
IN this way ended the sixth day of the Tales.
The Seventh Day
ON the morning of the seventh day, climbing the Calvary Way to the Capuchin Wood, the Festival guests passed a tatterdemalion family of woodcutters and their wives and children. The women, bronzed, hollow-cheeked and yellow-haired, stumbled down the path with their stockings round their ankles, and argued sharply with the men: the children, little serious scarecrows, dressed in their fathers’ hand-me-downs, carried bunches of wood-violets to sell in the town to visitors. The whole party stopped and blocked the way while one of the women hitched up her skirt and pinned her stocking to her shirt. When she saw the guests approaching she began to titter loudly, and the men stood up close against her: the children stood to one side with alacrity and one of them offered a bunch of violets to the Doctress.
The child’s father pulled it sharply aside by its sleeve and said, in his peasant German, “You know very well you are not allowed to sell here in the wood.”
The elegants went on and the decadent Poet said:
“What a flavour it gives to culture to be in a country where these miseries exist: in a country where there is no peasantry there is no true refinement: civilisation lives by contrasts: a gentleman can only be, in a land of helots, where he can be out of sound of the counting-house and so far from the threshing-floor that he can study it objectively as an artistic unit. Thank God for a country where a man need not know where his money comes from!”
The Balkan Lawyer was not listening to the Poet, but was looking about him, and at the vanguard of the woodcutters’ party, an isolated couple now walking down the hill, hand in hand, as if he were living in a dream. At the top of the hill, they sat down within a group of trees, and the Master of the Day pointed to the Balkan Lawyer, who began immediately to tell his tale.
The Lawyer’s Tale
SPECULATION IN LOST CAUSES
ONE of my ancestors was sent to the colonies for an epigram; my great-grandfather was governor of a gaol, my grandfather, Speaker in a colonial legislative assembly and my father a life member of the Selden Society: in my cradle my mother crooned me to sleep with the more lyric passages in Dicey, Maitland and Blackstone. Thus we have profited by poetic justice.
When I was a child I dreamed one night that I saw lying asleep inside thorns, a woman with a heart-shaped bodice, a wig of steel shavings and a bicornuate headdress made of two ink-horns. Her eyeballs rolled and tears ran freely from the lids and watered the ground. Aconite grew round her bed, the legs of which had long sunk deep in the earth and been eaten by roots and lichens: her pillow was stuffed with nettles and her coverlet was made of leaves fallen through the years from overhanging plane-trees: but the leaves of the plane-trees were papers, signed, sealed, beribboned. In one hand hung a cat-o’-nine-tails: in the other was a leather purse with drawstrings, overflowing with money. On the woman’s dress was a pair of jeweller’s scales, so small and delicate that they could have weighed the thousandth-part of a fly’s eye, but their links had come apart and the plates had fallen, like cups, over her breasts. She struggled in her glassy state. By the bedside two lackeys in black clothes leaned on their staffs asleep, and each had a slave’s collar in gold with his name on: one had the white, aristocratic, conservative, tarnished face of a Chief Justice grown old, and had on his collar the word “Intention”, and the other, with pince-nez, young, cunning, handsome, affected, bore the name “Letter”. On the pillow sat, wide awake, a monkey with a nimbus looking at himself in a mirror and arranging the lady’s curls in true lovers’ knots, and above, hanging in the canopy, was a bat, half-angel, half attorney-general, fast asleep, and from his mouth a scroll issued with the words, “Ideal Justice”.
I awakened and found that it was morning, the sun was shining and it was my twelfth birthday. My father had just come into the room with a gift, and I told him my dream, asking him who the two personages on the bed might be.
“The lady is unquestionably traditional justice,” said my father, looking at me quizzically: “and you must have stayed up half the night making up so fine a dream!”
“No, indeed,” I protested: “but who was the monkey?”
“Poetic justice, beyond dispute,” said my father.
I said, “Father, what is poetic justice?”
He adjusted his pearl stickpin, and replied:
“The hand of heaven making an apple-pie bed for the man who cooked the accounts for the sleeping partner; a city fired to warm a virgin who caught cold eluding a moonbeam in a bower on a summer night: nonagenarian Dives who stole oranges when a guttersnipe of ten, dying of the pip: rapknuckle for rape, rosemary for rue, Roland for Oliver, holocaust for hankypanky, Sodom and Gomorrah for pinochle, two Macbeths for a Duncan, for tit three tats: so with a quip-pro-quo tickle the ribs of the superannuated saints and stuff with prunes and prisms the last yawn of the third act.”
“Be ashamed, Collingwood!” said my grandmother. (Collingwood was my father’s Christian name.)
“Euripides for a peccadillo,” concluded my father, and winked at me, for he saw that my grandmother had a Martyrology for me as a birthday gift. At any rate, from one cause and another, I became the partisan of the improbable.
Now when I graduated I spent four years in a law firm as chief clerk and I was two years after that in my chambers waiting for briefs. My firm had promised to supply me with them, but there had been a slight disagreement between me and one of the partners and they only sent me paltry affairs. I had nothing at all to do and not much money. In the daytime I worked over the evidence of all the contemporary cases, and went over old rolls and records. Now, I could often see the whole mass of evidence uneasy and restive with the motions of some essential fact buried alive and never mentioned, or some chief witness never called, and saw the arguments revolving round a spindle of circumstance which was not there at all. I wondered how it felt to be that poor wretch, slandered, accused and wrongfully found guilty, taking his burden of injustice into the next world without reparation, after being buried alive in a stone grave in this. He could not be happy, he surely walked up and down, biting his nails and tearing out his hair, grown long in the grave with excessive travail of the skull, or else he sat dumb in some special limbo waiting for an apologist. I wanted to run out on the nameless gravestones of ignominious deaths and shout, “Tell me the secret, old boy: tell it to the moles: let me ferret it out and I’ll set you at rest!”
Well, it was fortune herself pushing me into this path. That was how I began my serious business. Imagine that the Viennese jurist Potago and I, in the forest at Baden-Baden last summer, came face to face with a grey-haired couple walking with their hands joined, and silent. When the woman saw me, she cried out and went on her knees and began to kiss my hand, while the man took my other hand and pressed it. That was a fine moment, but humiliating, touching. I said a few words to them in Magyar, they saluted Potago, whom they recognised, in German, and went their way. Potago asked me a question about them, and I told him.
“That is Henna, the wife of Cok, deceased, and Joce, once her lover, now her husband. They were imprisoned for poisoning Cok and stealing a third part of the inheritance due to Cok’s sons. Five years after the sentence, the case was re-tried and they were pronounced innocent. That made a sensation a couple of years ago.”
Po
tago remembered the case and pressed me to tell him the circumstances, and so I recalled them all and I was only the other day writing them down.
During a dispute over a will, police were informed that Cok, deceased, had only two sons and heirs, Leo and Meir, by a first wife, Elena, and that between these two sons by inheritance all his goods were divisible: that Henna, the second wife, acting on Cok’s weakness in his dotage, persuaded him to add a codicil to his will giving to any children she should have by Cok, an equal share in his estate, and that she had pretended to have a child, which she got from a nurse, and that this child had died by illness, and that Henna then, upon the death of Cok, conspiring with Joce her lover, had wickedly and falsely appropriated what she could of Cok’s goods, to recompense herself, as she pretended, for a third of the inheritance which she pretended was due to her: and that Joce, her lover, had been a party to all this: and that further, the death of Cok was exceedingly suspicious, that he had complained of continuous and increasing pains before death and had slowly died, as if by poisoning, and that the doctor who attended him was willing to testify that Henna had asked him to give Cok arsenic in such quantities as would cause him to die quickly.
The brothers, Leo and Meir, sons of Cok, asserted that on the night of the death of Cok, when they were in the country on business, Joce had been admitted by Henna, by a curtilage adjoining the house, where Cok’s treasure was concealed, and had there taken an amount equalling fifty thousand schillings’ worth of gold and silver, gold and silver cups, a book of Priscian, De Constructione, an ancient Logic, some clothes of Cok, rings, girdles and pieces of gold which the brothers knew that their father had owned, household linen, plate and cutlery, some pictures and some bowls of mazer-wood, and had caused the said treasure to be carried by night up the river to a place where the said Joce resided, and that there the treasure had been divided between them; and that since the burial of their father, Henna had lived with Joce openly as she had discreetly before, so that it might be seen that Henna had every reason of interest and sentiment, to see Cok laid by.
The Salzburg Tales Page 39
