The Salzburg Tales (22 page)

“That is so,” agreed the Mathematician: “but I defy you to find me a mute, inglorious Newton, or even a Newton with his light under a bushel of snobbery.”

The Centenarist was willing to continue the discussion, for debate made him fatter than bread and meat, but the Viennese Conductor said,

“Mathematician, I am altogether of your mind. A person of talent cannot be buried. All great men have been recognised by their contemporaries before their death”; and while the guests were laughing at this, he continued: “We have already heard eight tales from eight different mouths and not one of them like another; now, you tell us a tale, Mathematician, and prove, in telling it, your thesis.”

The Mathematician was silent for a moment, flushing darkly. Then he smiled, tugged at his hair and replied,

“Let me think a moment. I am quite hot in the collar because the Centenarist is denying my individual soul. No doubt it comes down to that. You are an old reprobate, Centenarist: you have been too long backstage. From behind, no doubt, all look alike.”

He then called for some coffee for the Centenarist, who drank coffee and smoked cigars all day, and began to tell his tale.

 

M
Y
friend, Ernest Jourdain, the celebrated historian, is equally celebrated for the disorder in his dress (said the Mathematician). No man on earth ties a worse knot in his tie: one day he is half-choked, his collar is wrinkled and dragged out by the roots; and the next day,
the knot is so loose that he seems to have been lassoed. He puts his hat on recklessly, in the middle of a conversation, awry, so that the brim is neatly frilled all round his head.

His students say that there cannot be a single looking-glass in his house. There is none, in fact, but the reason for it is known only to me. And although it is very simple, it is in a sense, a tale, and I will tell it, for I know very few tales (unless, of course, I count professional jokes such as, how Diderot disputed with the mathematical Euler at the Russian Court; or what Napier found in the Revelations of St. John.)

I was born in my father's observatory, and my sister Giselda two years after me. The celestial telescope was the genius of our house. When the roof slid back to show the roof of the sky, at night, it seemed as momentous as sunrise. In our dreams we saw always on a blueblack sky, the shadow of the giant telescope, fixed against the wheeling constellations.

Father was a severe schoolmaster. During lessons we dared not glance down the hill towards the town, nor at the clouds bowling like cricket balls on high. The town had slipped over the side of the hill into the grassy bottom, and only the steeple and one or two gables stood up like freesias through the grass. In the late afternoon, children's voice skyrocketed up our way.

Giselda liked to sit in the square hall at nightfall, by one of the sword-shaped windows which ran between panels into the red ceiling, and to look out at the grass turning grey, the flattening lines of the landscape, the pictorial windy beauties of a gusty world, rippling and tossing behind glass, which she could view with unlifted hair and cheek very faintly rose.

We had a mirror in the hall, four feet long by three feet wide, mounted in a heavy gilt frame. The frame was carved in a rococo design and surmounted by a knot of twisted acanthus leaves, which my sister called “The Violin Master” or “Metternich”. This knot, to the fantastic eye, was a courtier in long-tailed coat and in breeches, with sleek wig bowing low over a fine jabot. He seemed to carry a hat in his hand. The lines of the foreshortened face were cruel, aged
and cunning. The head of hair with its middle parting, was almost heart-shaped. In a half-light, “Metternich” alone stood out on the frame and seemed to examine the mirror, which at that time of day was as a lake that lies at night in a park at a distance from the lamps; one or two pencils of light wander and fall therein, but in the greater part, it sleeps.

Aunt Leah was for sending Giselda some pet to amuse her in her solitary play-hours. “She'll dream her brains away,” she told my mother each time she came to the house. Father refused to have any such “varmints and nuisances” about. He thought of Aunt Leah's house with repugnance. That extravagant woman lived in cheer with a sort of private zoo, which included not only every domestic animal that could be got into a house and farm, but also many wild animals, and there were monkeys, marmosets, lizards, dasyures, pigmy opossums, foxes and weasels. Our quiet house, smelling of floor-polish and linen put too damp in the press, discomfited Aunt Leah, and she soon retired. Father, who had a very long nose, said she carried her domestic odours with her and aired the house pointedly, while she was there. I am quite sure that for a fortnight after her visit, father and mother were uneasy with visions of a Biblical plague of unclean creatures descending upon us with the first wind that blew from her direction. But indeed, we had quite enough ourselves, with the Bears, the Scorpion, the Goat, the Crab, the Dog-star and the Pole Cat.

Because there was no one in the house but father's pale assistant, and his secretive visitors, my sister made companions of inanimate things. Thus, one spring, when she was twelve or thirteen, I suppose, she put a flower in Metternich's coat, hung a garland of forget-me-nots round his heart-shaped head, a garland round her own neck, and said that she was “solemnly affianced to Metternich”.

I returned from the University the year Giselda was eighteen, bringing one of my teachers to meet my father, Ernest Jourdain, a prodigious polymath, an artesian well of rhetoric, but not a bore. Jourdain was then thirty years old, stout, swarthy, somewhat careless in dress, I suppose, but it became him. In discourse, he seemed even
truculent and brusque as he rose on the hawk feathers of logic, and went with his mount squawking through the circumambient airs in search of some preternatural prospect; but in private conversation he was reasonable, sweet and patient, earthy as a sparrow, deft as a martin.

He met my sister with the exquisitely tender, bright and almost compassionate glance which he had for all women, and made his deep bow. She began to laugh at his anecdotes, in private retailed them with gusto, or described his quaint and amiable mannerisms. My mother said to her, irritated by this gushing, innocent affection, “Are you going to fall in love with that man?” To which Giselda, starting and honestly protesting, replied, “How should I be? With a man so brilliant?”

When my father was busy, Jourdain walked with me, or else he stayed in the house with my mother and Giselda. He liked to sit hour after hour, till the sun went down and the sky hung its curtain of stars over the observatory, not looking, he, at the twilight land, but flashing his smile at each of us, and talking, talking perpetually, talking as if we were not bodies but ears, and as if the soul were in the ear, recalling to us our own pasts, things he had guessed from some chance reference, things he had been told, which others had already forgotten, raking up strange acquaintances he had all over the world, ransacking all his unforgotten lore for tales, analogies and arguments. In the dark, as it settled around us, like nymphae or the flowers of the night-blooming Cereus, sudden and splendid, exploded the hundred flowers of his unpremeditated virtuosity. Giselda sat with an expression of reverie. So he wound himself out, and scarcely asked for more in this world, perhaps, than to have so kind an audience.

Then Jourdain, after spending a day and night restless and almost silent, declared to my father and me that he loved Giselda; and in a week or so, there was my sister going about all day trembling with a joyful impulse, iridescent and transparent, like a drop of water.

One day I sat with my sister on the grassy hill. We were silent. Quietly she began speaking: “At the end, I said to myself, who is the
woman who will love such a man, so forthright, with such strange manners? What a bizarre idea! Not I, I thought. One afternoon, he, I mean Ernest, came into the hall by the windows, so that I saw him approaching in the mirror. The light fell on him from above. That moment I saw him in his true light, and my head began to swim, as in those moments when one sees an extraordinary verity that puts the rest of the world askew. I thought suddenly, If he came near me now, I could not bear it, such a strange man (as if he were a Nubian or a Turk!). He hesitated and instead of coming straight across to me, he went to the glass between the windows and peered in at himself, arranged his hair and tie, and continued to look in for some time, as if he had some commerce with it.

“The next day we sat in the bow-window. I was watching birds fly over the trees, and he suddenly bent low down—to my knee—and kissed my hand. I was—paralysed with surprise. Then I thought, he is so kind to me, I had better kiss him back. The whole thing was very odd indeed. That is not the sort of thing one could put in a love-story.”

My mother celebrated the engagement by a fine family dinner; she even engaged musicians to play dance-music afterwards. The night before, Giselda dreamed that long-forgotten Metternich, in powdered wig, flowered grey satin waistcoat, satin-lined, long-tailed coat, jabot with four lace frills, and black satin hat in hand, appeared to her, descending from a gilt coach, and handed her a stiff, yellow document written in a scrawling hand, imposing but illegible. She signed the parchment trembling, with a stylus which she plucked out of the ground. Immediately afterwards, he snatched the paper from her, jabbed the stylus into the paper and laughed in a wicked way. She saw, too late, that it was a marriage contract. She tried to wrench from her neck the golden chain she found miraculously on it, and awoke, sobbing loudly, with a strand of hair round her neck.

At the dinner that evening in the hall, all were ceremonially gay. I had the idea, with looking about at the unaccustomed gaiety of the hall, and being exhilarated with wine, of toasting old Metternich thus:
“Here's to you, Metternich” (lifting my glass so far that its reflection appeared in the mirror, below his feet), “poor old artful dodger, out- at-elbow beau, sentimental anachronism, superannuated suitor, tart and crusty pie-eye, come, women are jilts, repair your loss in wine.” I drank: a strange fluty voice cried: “What impertinence! You'll regret it,” and in my surprise the glass escaped from my fingers and bounced on the carpet, but, miraculously, did not break. “Who's there?” called my father. In the doorway appeared the three musicians, who had been supping in the next room. They bowed low, apologised, and explained that the second violin, a young, amateur violinist who had been engaged in a hurry, and who had been given a waltz of the master violinist's own, to copy out for that evening's entertainment, had had the temerity to edit the composition while making his three copies. “Were you asleep when you did it?” the first violinist had said in a raucous whisper. “No, so wide awake that I saw an ape sitting and grinning on top of every note,” said the young man. “What does that mean?” said the suspicious composer, a dirty, pretentious old man in a wig. “Ha, ha, it means that you compose after much
reflection
,” said the second violinist, who was slightly in his cups, for he was a poor and hungry student with little acquaintance with good living. “What impertinence! You'll regret it,” the old man had cried, in a rage.

My mother made haste to have the hall cleared and the dancing begun; and as a sop to the old fellow we asked him to play his waltz first. But what a strange composition it was! Had it the enchantment of the masters, stolen, confused but still active? Had the young man cast some strain of his own into the conventional melodies of the first violinist? Was the old man himself inspired? Or was it the unusual company in that silent house, the wine and the late hour, that put Giselda and me into such a state of mind? Suddenly Giselda began to cry, and to tremble violently. Jourdain took her by the hand and went out with her on to the hill, and when they came back the music had stopped and everyone was calm again.

Some time during the next few days, I saw the following scene: My sister and Jourdain passed through the hall, and pausing casually
in front of the mirror, Giselda began to laugh, and said, “Did you ever see two such funny faces?” She examined Jourdain's features in the glass, finding mathematical symbols, signs of the zodiac, animal likenesses, Hebrew letters, cabbalistic signs in every feature. She dragged a chair in front of the glass and sat down, and with Jourdain leaning on the shoulder of the chair, she began to improvise, pretending that she had a vision of their future.

She said: “I see myself in my wedding-dress; and you are standing behind me in your new suit. There is a black-and-white spaniel at my feet: you have given it to me, I think.” Jourdain here interrupted with “That's a fib! You know I would never give you anything!” She said, “Hush, Ernest! Now it is evening. You are leaning over the back of my chair as I sit before the fire, and telling me all that happened in the University today. One of the professors was forced to resign for his political opinions. The students went on strike, and there were three separate duels fought on his account between students. One of the students being seriously wounded, you went to see him. I see you in his lodging, and now I recognise him, it is the second violinist, the poor student that we had here the other day. He does not live alone. He is employed by an old scholar as amanuensis. The old scholar returns with provisions before you leave, and without exchanging a word, you recognise each other and bow: you think it is the first violinist we had here, but in bowing he bends very low, and you see the strange shape of his cranium. It is certainly no other than Metternich! He goes to the table and suddenly turns and rushes at you with a knife: the student cries out in a feeble voice that the old man is insane: you escape, but the student dies.

“I see you on another evening, trying to tell me that my father is dead. And I see again our children: two are playing noisily, but one is standing by himself in a corner without a sound, smaller than the others, and strange to say, transparent: he is not a child at all, but the shade of one. What can that mean?”