The Salzburg Tales (20 page)

“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.

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

A
RCHELIDES
, 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.

After several days he awakened to find the bandage gone and his sight returned. He was in a cave looking out over the desert. In front of him was a well with a gazelle standing by it. The gazelle said to him, “I am a daughter of God, vowed to chastity and solitude. My mother was a woman of riotous life in Alexandria, my father a merchant of Tyre and I was got in a chance encounter. At seventeen I was ashamed of my mother's life and vowed to make amends for us both. Yet I have hot blood in my veins and often I come to cool my head and feet in this well. The monks in this desert are hideous creatures that I am afraid to approach, but you are a handsome boy, and if you will also become a monk or hermit and take the vow of chastity, we will live in each other's memory, as brother and sister in Christ, although alone in the silence of the desert, and our solitude will not be invaded by desires.”

“To think about a gazelle is evil,” reflected Archelides, dubiously.

“To your eyes only I am a gazelle,” said the girl. “God permits that, to shield us from temptation. Now drink this water and fill your bottle; follow me out across the waste and I will show you a convent of austere monks where you can learn the way to salvation.”

The gazelle led him three days and three nights and on the third morning said, “Now I must leave you: go straight before you until sunset; then you will find the convent.”

“Stay with me,” said Archelides.

But the gazelle was already galloping over the sandhills. Archelides then fell on his knees and swore that he would never again look on a female creature. By nightfall he reached forbidding convent-walls and he entered. Soon he found the austere convent life too mild and he became a hermit in the wild. Many miracles were ascribed to him; he was heard of in Alexandria and Rome. His father had adopted a young boy in his place, thinking him dead;
now, when he heard that Archelides was a hermit, he merely said, “First he took leave of Rome and then of his senses.” But the mother gladly undertook the journey and came at last to his cave, with servants and beasts of burden, to take Archelides home. When the hermit heard a man's voice outside his cave saying, “Is this the cave of Archelides, the Roman, a hermit?” he replied faintly, “Yes.” Then came a sound disagreeable to his ear, the voice of his mother. “Son, come out and kiss me: I am worn with travel and sad with mourning you for dead; and I am afraid to venture into that hole of yours.” Archelides replied, “Go away from me and leave me to win my own salvation. I am God's, I have no earthly lien: likewise, because of a vow I took, the voice and flesh of your sex is anathema to me.”

“Has anyone seen the like?” said the mother of Archelides. “I am coming in to bring you to your senses: you are not my boy with this raucous voice, tortured and strange. How you must have suffered here in the desert with no-one to look after you. I have brought new clothes: look, take your hermit's rubbish off your back and put on this cloak and come out to us: I want to see my son Archelides who used to have such refined manners.”

But Archelides did not say another word. In her anger, the mother advanced into the cave and tearing the covering from her breast said, “As soon deny the air you breathe, fanatic, as your mother's blood!”

The hermit covered his face with the sleeve of his coat, praying aloud to be protected by God. His mother snatched the sleeve from his gown, for the stuff was worn, and cried out at his dirty face and beard. But the hermit kept his eyes shut and shouted, “I deny your right to bother me! Let God take away the air I breathe! I would rather die now, heavy with sins, than break my vow, especially for an infidel woman.” At these words, he fell senseless to the ground; then neither his mother nor her servants could move him, for God had attached the whole earth to his leather waistbelt. His mother said to her servants, “Dig him out then! When he wakens he will find himself a long way from this accursed spot,” but the servants could
not dig into the earth, which was like iron, where he had knelt and lain on it in prayer for so many years.