The Salzburg Tales (19 page)

“Nina took the business in hand and made the peasants give her their urine, because she heard it dyes wool a better red,” said Sophie. “Stepan soon gave up all his schemes and let Nina run everything. He is a moochy cove, a maundering bard: he does not like to be in all these business deals, but she does most of the work and the money keeps him lilyhanded while he “creates”: and Nina's piling up a small fortune.”

“They say,” said Sophie earnestly, “that once Nina looked for him all day, and ran all over the village with her bouncing trot, to the watchmaker's, to the churchyard, to the hills, to the château, to all the cottages, calling across the empty pastures towards evening, ‘Stepan, Stepan!' She began to cry at the end, the only time anyone saw her eyes moist. The artists laughed behind curtains thinking, ‘Perhaps the poor devil has given her the slip!' Presently Nina had to satisfy a certain need: she had been so anxious all day that she had not had time to think about it before. She went to the proper place, could not get in, heard the key turn in the lock, and there found Stepan looking innocent and content. All day in the calm and cool of the little house he had escaped her, and thought about his girls and his bloody deeds. So they say, but it is really a wicked, malicious, little world down here, when it starts telling tales.”

Charles' face twitched and he looked grey. He said apologetically,

“Those histories spring up here spontaneously: it is like the feverish, foul air of decay, or a loathsome deposit left by the old mountain lake that infects the air, a melancholy or ague which everyone of us gets eventually, even the best of us. All except the Nyiregyhazas: they like the place and they seem ignorant of the tales current: they only care about their business. They were born peasants and they understand the village from top to bottom. They are much more at home here than we are, wandering, uprooted, homeless, casteless people, always self-exiled, always looking for the little space that death leaves in this busy world: decay, our only comfort!”

Sophie went and sat beside Charles and took his hand. Her eyes were full of tears. “You don't feel well again, Charlie?”

He put his hand on her knee and said,

“I'm all right, my love: I haven't done enough work today, that's all: and I'm disappointed about not being able to get the press yet from Paris. It puts all our dreams so much farther off in the distance.”

Holding her husband's hand and looking at him from time to time, tenderly, Sophie went on clattering to us,

“They say Nina's cat-hammed and potbellied, and that she wears black stockings and rose-coloured garters nevertheless. She is ridiculously affectionate to animals. She talks all day to five canaries, a castrated cat and a frilled lizard she has in the house. Stepan loathes animals. And as for Stepan, she looks after him like a baby: puts aromatic oils over him to keep him in good health, bathes him and powders him. He smells so sweet that the dogs and cows follow him in the fields!”

She went into shrieks of laughter without glancing at Charles sitting pale at her side.

“She has stencilled mottoes from Thoreau and William Morris round her ceilings, and every morning they repeat before breakfast three sayings from the Stoics!”

Charles looked at his wife kindly.

“I never heard such a clack-tongue and crackbrain as you, Sophie: won't you give the poor Nyiregyhazas a rest?”

She answered cheerfully,

“I am a scandal-monger, I admit.”

“No, but it is quite true that Nina seems to have taught weaving to the whole village.”

Sophie blushed as we got up to leave. On the way up to the vantage-point where we were to watch the tightrope dancer's feat, she opened her mouth two or three times, obviously on the point of recounting some other section of the incredible legend of the Nyiregyhazas, but she shut her mouth with a determined air and squeezed her husband's fingers.

Before us the flat was sprinkled with people in holiday dress. The wire hung, incredibly delicate, between the hills. Standing
on a rock was the daring tightrope walker in evening dress. The wedding party was disporting itself near us, the bridegroom fighting drunk, the bride tired and ready to cry. The tightrope dancer began his foolhardy trick; unable to look at him continuously, I glanced back at fair Doulcemer lying like a handful of seashells in a green rockpool. I recognised a square dot which must be Nina Nyiregyhaza and a round dot which I took for Stepan in his artist's hat, where they stared up, standing stiff in the dotted village street, like two of the watchmaker's little figures trotted out to tell the hour: they were absorbed by the phenomenon passing over their heads, the daring fellow, a mountebank skedaddling across the rent-free sky of Doulcemer: no doubt, it filled them with ineffable content to see this measureless sky which no-one could own, not even the Cerfeuil.

“Each one of us is like that,” said Charles, “balancing on as thin a cord between precipice and precipice.”

“It seems to me more like Doulcemer,” said Sophie, “suspended in the air precariously between its peaks. Scatter-brained colony doing a polka in thin air.”

At this moment the tight-rope performer put an end to all this bad poetry by plunging headfirst into the chasm and coming to rest, calm as could be, on the rocks at the bottom.

“He is very, very still,” said Charles thoughtfully: “he does not even know he fell.”

T
HE
Architect now began, “We are without our Master; he is off conducting his little flock and there goes the Doctor of Medicine hurrying off to the concert without getting our thanks. We should be ashamed. Let us make some amends to the Viennese Conductor by honouring his office of Master and let us take revenge on the people who have deserted us, by telling a tale in their absence.”

“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.

 

M
R
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.