The Salzburg Tales (23 page)

So my sister detailed their life from stage to stage, while Jourdain stood quiet, waiting to hear the end. She cried, “Ernest, I am sitting
up in bed, very ill, and I know I am dying. I am afraid to die and be without you, always to be alone, to have the sods pressing me down and the dust getting thicker over me, and the weeds' roots sucking up all that is fluid in me. I think that if you put your arms round me, I shall die quickly and warm, and never know that it is not an ordinary sleep. Ernest, do that, for the moment of death has come …”

Jourdain hastily embraced her and tried to draw her away, but she looked over his shoulder and said, “Yes, I am dead, but I am an old woman, and I have not died before my time. My face is yellow, like an Oriental.” She continued, “Let me look again. Now, it is night and all have gone away but you and that transparent child. It seems that he is eight years old. And now only you remain. I seem to sleep calmer because you are there. The candles flickering sometimes make you think that my expression changes. But I feel an iciness growing round my heart, and I am beginning not to care whether anyone is there or not. I only want to slide deep into unconsciousness, like a body floating quietly to the bottom of a river, not to rise again till the third day when memory is dissolved.

“My face is changing slowly. I am nothing now, as if filled with night. Now I am being carried among the mourners, and I see that they are tired with walking, yawning and hungry. The midday sun rides above. No one but you and my son seem to care much. The boy (but he is no shade), is rather pleased with the new, strange spectacle, than sad; and all around him, in the shuffling of feet, the crepitation of the vehicles, the blowing of trees, he hears enchanting tones, such as we never heard.

“I am lying still now, in the buried box. My features are altering rapidly, and dark colours mottle my flesh. I see myself as if naked now, I am of another flesh, and I am beginning to rot.” At this moment she put her hand quickly to her side, cried out, and tried to tear something away. Jourdain dragged her from the glass, and I came into the room, angry at the scene. She smiled at us in her ordinary way, and said, “If you had not done that, I should have known what my skeleton looks like.” Jourdain said to me, “I found
it strange. I had intended to give her a black-and-white spaniel, but now I will not.”

They were married in April. On her wedding-day, while she was dressing, a basket arrived for her, and when it was opened, out jumped a black-and-white spaniel, with a brass collar on which was engraved, “S
IRIUS
, to Giselda from Aunt Leah.” They were laughing at that, when two bouquets were delivered to the house, one from Jourdain himself, and a great one, heart-shaped, in a gold box with gold filigree paper, composed of many blue flowers, and chiefly forget-me-nots. To this one no name was attached. “How lovely!” said my sister and flew to the window in her white silk stockings, to look for a card. There she cried, “Oh, come quickly, everyone: look, there's Metternich going past and never stopped to say, Good luck, on my wedding-day.” My mother rustled across and looked down a moment, saying, “How absurd!” and the ladies who were there looked down and saw an ageing man in an old-fashioned costume, jabot, mustard-coloured coat with tails, black breeches, buckled shoes and long hair brushed back, carrying his head thoughtfully bent on his breast.

The maid said, “Look, Madam, there is the gentleman who brought the blue bouquet!” “It's the schoolmaster from the lower town,” said one of the ladies. “No, it's Fenugreek the veterinary surgeon, you must know him,” said another. “I do declare, it's the eccentric who lives in my quarter, Halley O'Librorum,” cried Mrs Hellebore, who acted the great lady and purified local society; “he's a perfect misanthrope, misogynist, I should say: he never would come to my salons, and I suspect his wit, therefore, despite his reputation for learning, the seedy old fossil. And now look at him bringing a bouquet for Giselda. My compliments, dear!”

I looked out myself, coming in at this moment to kiss my sister, and exclaimed, “He looks to me to be Buchstaben, the lunatic stamp-collector, poor Herman, my college friend, works for to pay his board: Herman, who played here as a violinist.” My mother stamped her masterful little foot and said, “Nonsense! There are not two like
that man. It's Schnellzug the research officer who works for the Gulyas Travellers' Guide Publications. He is never at home, he has to go to every country under the sun. He speaks all kinds of Double Dutch; he has to, for he has to visit the hotels, churches, museums and bathing establishments, and find out the local customs. It's very hard on his wife, I think, a most respectable woman. He got the position three months after he married her.” My sister laughing said, “I see only one man, but it appears there are half a dozen!”

The old fellow loped along the road at a round pace, despite his age, and disappeared quickly over the brow of the hill. The ladies, careless observers, chattering and rubbing each other's plumage, imagined that he had got down the hill rather quickly; my mother cried out that he had stumbled and rolled down; my sister went pale, but to my eye, looking out towards the sun which shone so brightly that bridal day, it seemed that he stepped off the rim into the air and dissolved immediately there.

Now all happened as she had foreseen. I will only mention my father's death. My father had changed very much in the two years since Giselda's marriage, and had become eccentric and morbid. Some inexplicable fancy had turned my father against me during those two years; he hardly received me, and he died in my presence with his head turned to the wall and without a word. Yet I was working in a way not unworthy of his name: he might have looked on me as his successor. What laboured to his destruction in my father's spirit? The world is full of private and incomprehensible disappointments.

When at last I left the room where my father lay dead, I went into the hall, but started back with a cry of surprise and dismay, for not only were all the windows blinded, but every mirror was covered with a black veil. It appeared that my father had asked for that to be done. He had said, “Cover all those mirrors and glasses, except the skylight in the observatory. When I die, open the roof there, and leave it open all night. Let my soul go out that way, and let no one see it pass: sleep tight that night and mind your own business. Most of all, keep my son from my bedside so that he will not perturb
my departing spirit. Let him not look in my eyes at the moment of death: who knows how far these crystals will see then? What will be reflected there? No one shall look and penetrate my transfiguration, no one shall see me annihilated.”

I said to my mother, “That is all very well. But how is it that you have all this crape and mourning in the house: and how is it that you are already dressed in your mourning?” “Since he wished it done, I was prepared: I had to get a new dress, so I got a black one,” said my mother calmly. Alienated from my father, and shocked by my mother's coldness, I went to the mirror, to draw aside the veil and look in at the face that would comfort and understand me, my own. In the gilded mirror shone my pale thin face, with red eyes, and the stubble of a beard growing thick around the chin. My mother jerked the veil from my hand and covered the glass, breathing heavily meanwhile. The movement dislodged the nail on which the mirror had been hanging for so many years. I started forward to save the glass and saw my image falling heavily to the floor. Metternich bending deep and curiously as ever, inspected my frightened face, round and gushing eyes, in the mirror's mellow chiaroscuro. “How like your poor father you look,” said my mother unluckily, looking over my shoulder. “Then there's no rest for me in my career,” I responded, and felt it a very unfortunate omen.

I was disinherited by my father's will. My sister inherited several houses, and she and Jourdain moved into one of these, an old roomy one, built of great blocks of half-dressed stone. The principal rooms opened out on either side of a hall which could have been used for a ballroom. Kitchens, flagged yards, pantries, servants' quarters, stables, coach-houses and dependences, and the upstairs attics and cupboards were built on a vast scale, and there were concealed passages running through the walls and chimney-stacks. This house was always full of wind, of creaking boards and rattling rafters. On the attic floor the largest room was of great size, covering two downstairs rooms. There was a chimney-stack in the centre of the room, and round the sides were numerous strange corners and bays, due
to the irregularities of the plan. Because of constant noises made by rats running over the rafters and in the wall passages, and of the chitterings of swallows that made their nests in the roof, and the bats that sheltered there in the daytime, this room had been called “The Rat Room”. It was lighted only by two windows in gables near the door. The portion of the room behind the chimney-stack was therefore ill-lighted, and was not seen from the door. There, on the floor and on the four wide steps of the chimney-stack, all sorts of unused household furniture was stacked.

In the walls were doors about three feet high leading into the small passages. These doors were covered with large old-fashioned prints from Christmas supplements, “The Squatter's Dream”, “The Battle of Copenhagen”, “King Cophetua”, “By the Waters of Babylon”, and so forth.

I was estranged from my sister for a number of years by my own fault, for private difficulties irritated the nervous disposition I had from my father. These difficulties were vanishing and I was becoming reasonable again, when I heard that my sister's eldest child, a boy of eight years old, had died. She had another boy, two years younger. The death of the firstborn, however, affected her so much that she became seriously ill, and the family was obliged to take her to the mountains. This was the first time in nearly nine years that they had taken a holiday. Jourdain always spent the summer vacation with his extension and summer school lectures, and my sister spent the same time studying with him.

The house was to be shut up; and the packing went on apace. Jourdain climbed up into the attic one warm morning and went behind the chimney-stack to put some household silver into the wall-passage. He turned from the little door, and was inexpressibly startled to see, standing on one of the steps of the chimney-stack, a strange man with a singularly familiar, lively, but pensive expression, a face distinguished but distorted, diabolically intimate. He gazed for a full moment at the self-possessed intruder, and suddenly
recognised himself! The light falling on him from each side of the stack lighted him into the dark gilded mirror, cracked and wreathed with crape and covered with a film of dust, which my sister had put there secretly years before, after the house was broken up, for old sake's sake. This poignant face which appears in an unsuspected mirror, like the peaked child-faces one sees at a window at night, seem glimpses of a man's own spirit, and harden, isolate and terrify him as if he were alone in the world.

Jourdain was overworked, no doubt, and had worried about his family troubles. That night he had an attack of aphasia, and was ill for a month afterwards. When he recovered he had the mirror taken out, and, for fear it should turn up again in some curiosity shop, he took the precaution of burying it in the bottom of a depression in the orchard. In this depression he subsequently built a cement basin for a pond, and grew water-lilies and rushes there. He felt comforted.

A year or so later I began to see my sister's family regularly. I now felt independent, and was willing to accept what I had earlier refused, my sister's offer of a more equitable division of my father's estate. Our relations became very friendly. We stood one Saturday afternoon by the pool in the orchard and my sister's boy played round about us, cutting whistles in the reeds, in the canna shoots and in the melon vines. He had them of all pitches. He took a reed and sharpened it: he held it carelessly and it cut his palm. He washed his hand in the water of the pool, and there the blood straggled away in a kind of illegible script. My sister then told Jourdain and me that she had dreamed the night before a dismal dream. She found herself in a crypt underground by a glacial pool, and three coffins were piled in front of her. In the lowest was dreadful putrefaction: in the second, was a male child alive, in swaddling clothes, which trailed out under the dislodged lid; and in the top one was a child inchoate, which nevertheless opened its eyes, spoke to her, and bursting through a chrysalis of corruption, arose pure and fair, and coming towards her, seemed to threaten her with its superior spiritual
force. Then she saw the earth in the roof of the crypt heave and break in twice pinnate cracks, and through this quaking earth the child began to pass, unfolding as a plant. Reedy music expressive of desolation which had been some time in the background, now forced itself into her head, and she had the sensation of drowning. She saw, although still underground, the surface of the germinating earth: horribly suggestive roots and cotyledons arose waving violently and tossing their sensitive blinded tips as if in the grip of primitive and ruthless passions. Above this turmoil lay the peaceful waters of a lake, around whose brim grew water-lilies and rushes. On its surface was the same scrawling and illegible writing which she had dreamed of years before, in the parchment given her by Metternich. “Then I realised that it was our own pond,” said my sister, “and I was standing beside it, and that underneath it was my treasure, my dead son, with his hands and feet closed as are these lilies at night, all that was fine and delicate, lying buried.” I was not surprised to learn that my sister expected a third child and that she dreaded the event.

One day in the October of that year, the weather was so fine that it seemed an early spring day. There had been rain at night, the morning was grey, and windows rattled in brief gusts of wind. Suddenly a brightness flooded the chambers and halls, and the sky was blue entirely. The white reflections of stucco walls shone on the clean windows of newly-vacated apartments, and the sun warmed with youthful beneficence the men working on roofs, scaffoldings and drains. A constant wind blew and the ground was covered with pools of rainwater and yellowed plane-tree leaves. It was Thursday afternoon. Girls' schools walking out in queues were gay with the unusual excitement of the air. They laughed merrily like the rat-tat of smithy hammers, when a child's blue bonnet fell in the brimming gutter.