The Salzburg Tales (24 page)

I crossed the park near my home and saw an Englishman in a silk top hat and a black overcoat coming from a wedding, with a white flower in his lapel. He held his hat in his hand and bowed, as if in reverence to
the wind which blew in his face, with rude pushes buffeting his knees and shoulders. The gardens were a fresh windy yellow. Birds floated like butterflies over the roofs. Two sparrows chased each other about the gables at the corner of the street, like the love birds in the Willow Pattern Plate. Kitchen windows, opening for housewives to hang out dishcloths and put out tomatoes to ripen, sent golden reflections back and forth over the lichened walls. I paused by the pond in the park. Two fat stone cherubs danced over the jet of water. There, on the other side of the water, the Englishman stood, bowed over the rim of the pool, looking at the goldfish, or the reflections of the gaily contorted cherubs swimming in the water. The shape of his head was curious, heart-shaped, and the lines of his foreshortened face were cruel, old and cunning: his overcoat parting as he bent, showed that he wore a sort of court dress, with black silk breeches.

I was afraid to see that gentleman raise his head. I hurried away, through the park towards my home. My heart beat hard and I muttered to myself, “That's a bad omen, that's a bad omen, I'm afraid.” When I got home I found a telegram telling me that my sister's baby was born, and that Giselda was very ill, not expected to live. I hastened to their house. The shorter way was through a field that led to the orchard. In the orchard I found the boy Bobby, now an eight-year-old, sitting on the edge of the pond, throwing decayed and dried apples into the shallow water. I said, “What are you doing, Tom Pippin? Does your father know you're by yourself in the orchard?” “No,” said my nephew gaily, “he don't. They sent me up to the Rat Room, but when I looked out of the window the old man waved to me from the orchard. So I 'scaped to come and play with the children.”

“What old man is that? And where are the children?” “The old man used to live in the Rat Room and creep downstairs quietly, to go and play in the orchard, but since Papa put the pond here, he likes better to stay here.” “Ah? And what little boys?” He began skipping on the edge of the basin. “The other little boys,” he said seriously:
“you can't see them; you can hear them, though.” I heard the wind skipping over the leaves, and my nephew Bobby whispering loudly behind his hand. “None of that,” I said, “you're doing it yourself.” “I play with them,” shouted the little boy. “I throw apples at them: they dodge and if anyone comes they jump back into the pond where the old man put them.” He picked up a beetle, drugged with cold, which had been feebly struggling over the leaves: he watched it struggle for a moment, and volunteered, “I don't see the old man any more, since the day you were there and I cut my finger and washed the blood off in the water.” I dragged him to the house. At the doorstep he wrenched his hand free and, putting his fingers to his mouth, let out a terrifying whistle. He said, “That's to tell the boys I won't be out for a bit. Mother's sick.” He stopped for a moment in the hall-entrance. “The boys,” he said significantly, “don't like to see anyone but me.” He smiled mischievously. “There are no other little boys,” he said, and fled into the dining-room, where he began playing a mournful little air on some xylophonic toy.

My sister knew she was dying and said to Jourdain, “Bring me my handglass.” She looked sadly at her worn face, and let the mirror drop from her hand. It fell to the floor and broke. Bobby put his bullet head into the room to see what was going on. He saw a crowd of people skirmishing to pick up the bits of broken glass and thought his mother was better. He went to the window and unconcernedly pushed aside the curtain to look into the orchard. A ray of sunlight fell across my sister's face, showing her pallor and fatigue, and thus she died.

That is all. A little later Jourdain married again. He said he was marrying to escape the transparent solitude in which he lived, the bodiless quiet, full of invisible memories, of inaudible voices, of embraces of air winding about his neck, of silver-footed dancings in the corner of the eye, and of the silken rustlings heard by the lonely ear in vacant rooms. He married one of his students, a young, lively girl, and is happy with her.

He sold the house, but his son, my nephew, now adult and an accomplished violinist, has never ceased regretting it, its gardens,
meadows, coach-houses and attics full of illusions, and its perfect days, of which every instant is reflected in his mind as in the unblemished surface of the pool.

T
HE
Mathematician was silent. Out of the slight murmur that arose among the guests, the German Student began to speak.

 

I
T
seems your story had a profound meaning, a sort of Gothic Narcissus legend, a reversed Hylas and the water-nymphs. I heard my grandmother say that if a girl looks in her glass on Midsummer's Eve she will see the face of her husband: likewise, I had a little sister who died, who told me never to look in a mirror at midnight, for fear I should see my ghost therein and die. It is clear, the mirror is a world with furniture, but without inhabitants—the fancy wants to people it, and with whom but ourselves? That is the feeling a primitive savage might have on seeing himself in a glass for the first time. I saw a thing like that at home.

I had a little bird in a cage, and your story strongly reminded me of it. (Please forgive me, sir, for making a sort of anecdotal tailpiece to your touching story.) One morning I caught in the gutter outside the house a little half breed, half sparrow, half canary. The weather was cold and it was fainting in the freezing gutter. I am not very fond of animals, but I was moved to take it in and put it in a large motor-oil case with wire-netting over the front, a shelf to rest on, a ladder and a door with a leather hinge. I made this cage while the bird was getting warm in a flannel on the stove.

We had no bird, so we paid attention to this little one: we called it Liesl, bought different sorts of birdseed for it, and made
it fat. It was a young bird and got very spry. When spring came it chirped loudly with long parlando passages, canary's trills suited to a sparrow's throat. When summer came and the heat was intense, the poor creature began to show signs of mental disorder: it moped about, fluffed up, with a dull, discontented eye, sometimes would squeak wildly in a fit of temper, and would peck at us when we put in food. One morning my brother broke the small shaving mirror in the bathroom, and while bringing it out to give it to the children to play with, or to use in the doll's house, he had the idea of putting it in with the canary, to furnish its drab little house. The canary, surprised, inspected the reflected bird closely, chirruped, affected to ignore it, and seemed to be trying to catch it at its tricks, but the subtle reflection was too quick for Liesl. She presently made a companion of it, and passed all her time in front of the glass peering with extreme intensity at her image, or making a few dainty coquettish steps back and forth, which were imitated by the mirror-bird.

In a day or two our poor creature was in a high state of excitement, and began to stand before the image with a piece of grass in its beak, taken from the floor of the cage. The image responded to this sentimental suggestion by holding a piece of grass in its beak, too. Thus began and increased the loves of the canary and its image. In a few days more, Liesl, tormented by an inept instinct, had put together on the floor a rough assortment of dry grass-stalks, ignorantly and blindly attempting a nest. Out of pity, I made a sort of nest myself, and put it into the cage, and the bird then, with satisfaction, interrupted her intense silent colloquies at the glass, with brooding on the nest. Curiosity, and, I suppose, a sort of cruel humour, forbade me to take away the glass. One hot morning when I came to look, I found the bird sitting on the nest with excitement, and when I put in her seed, she made as if to peck me, with a stupid, hot, crazy look in her eyes. I dislodged her, and found she had laid an egg. She laid three such eggs, greyish, without shells, infertile, of course. I stole some sparrows' eggs and gave her two real eggs to sit on, white with brown specks. She immediately became a
self-assured, hotheaded little creature, with important airs, and no manners for society at all. But I suppose she didn't know how to take care of the eggs: in fact, her passions would suddenly cool and she would walk off round the cage, calmly neglecting the adopted eggs. Then I took the glass away and she became her normal self, and picked and chirped, and only at rare moments her passion would return and she would go back and sit like a grenadier on the nest, in a painful state of mind, and glaring at the world.

I began to feel uncomfortable in the presence of her poor little craze. Nothing is more disagreeable to me than to see a friend or an intimate become obsessed as if they had a tic, and cherish what is quite indifferent to another. It was to get rid of my discomfort that I threw away nest, eggs, mirror and all. Then I felt an affection for Liesl. I tried to tame the little creature and make her fly about the verandah: when I thought she was tame, she escaped, flew a few flutters in the garden, and suddenly spreading her inexperienced wings, sped out over the housetops, trees and even over the top of the hill, in a moment, like an arrow.

She did not know how to get her living: she probably died of hunger, or was pecked to death by the sparrows, who are suspicious of foreigners. During the whole time I laughed with a good deal of malice at the poor little simpleton, and at the same time, I remembered Liesl as if she had been with me for years: she caused, at the time, a curious pain in my heart, the sparrow so pathetically deceived in love.

I
N
the afternoon the weather cleared and some of the visitors found themselves on the terrace of Hohen-Salzburg overlooking the green hills, the city, the river, the fertile plains in the shadow of the Untersberg: the rain-clouds like Euripidean women drew their skirts together, mounted the stage and went off worn and broken, but with splendours and tempests in their bosoms still. The sun poured down over the mountain, the red walls of the Tannengebirge appeared, the crickets began to sing. Someone said in a musical voice,

“This has existed before in the first visions of our young imaginations. When I was a child I had a book with this title, ‘The Land of Enchantment: or, Banished beyond the Clouds.' The story was dull but the title held me spellbound for months. But I never expected to see my vision clothed with earth, trees, rocks, stones, the sound of water and footsteps, and with the war-worn stones that hang before us.”

Heads turned in all directions and they perceived that the Foreign Correspondent was speaking. They were all silent, as if he had broken through the restraints proper to society. Then the Master of the Day invited him to speak again, about his early days, the romantic youth he had passed through; and with scarcely an acknowledgment, still musing, the Foreign Correspondent told this tale.

 

V
ENGEANCE
is a joy divine, says the Arab: this I heard on many a winter afternoon one year, from my dear friend Raphael, who was a student of mathematics, bursar in the college I attended. I waited for Raphael each afternoon, after school, to walk an hour or so along the terraces, through the park, thronged with schoolchildren whose winter faces had a frosty bloom, beyond the ponds, sullen and thick with fine soot, to my house, to linger at the gate, tasting the savoury end of argument, or passionately trembling to recollect the early talents of great men. Then he would speak with hesitation, of a new theorem he had dreamed of in his sleepless nights, or the new social equation we both discussed with ardour. At the end he would cry out for vengeance against the glorious and powerful, necessary oppressors since the world began. Yet he often forgot our appointment, unable to resist the temptation to shine suddenly
among the boys of his class after a lecture, displaying his rhetoric. Often I crossed him, if I went home slowly, alone, as he went with a crowd of boys in waterproofs, crowing like a young cock along the streets, or silent, meditating some chance for repartee.

One afternoon in early spring I sat near a window in the library and heard Raphael speak suddenly to someone outside, about me, angry because I was rich and he poor, and I was able sometimes to help him out. He ended: “Our prince need not think that dazzled by that, or his republicanism, I forget that he is a snob and a foreigner!” I heard the sound of his high clear voice diminishing as he crossed the lawn. I was paralysed with pure desolation: even in that country, a free republic, it is hard for a person of my race to make a true friend.

The lamps were now turned on at a few desks, while the round lovely trees of the college garden swarmed like insects in the dying light; the windows, bright ogival daggers, lengthened in the dusk. There was no central light in the room: above only shone the little jewels of coloured windows fitted high into the Gothic arch. Who shall say? Pride, passion and vengeance are still considered in my family, noble passions. My life had been quiet. Bullion merchants, goldsmiths, manufacturers of velvets, bankers are the friends of my uncle; I have known nothing of the unhappy but their footsteps softly scuttling behind a distant curtain. Therefore, till then I had had humane ideas. At his words, a slow and cruel resentment began in me. I looked steadily at the book before me, without reading the words, till suddenly some of them sprang up into my eyes with such a radiance that I felt I had been lighted within. The light spread until it seemed that I sat within the pavilion of a great diamond, and thousands of tales flew in a cloud about me; in all of these a wounded heart had pursued and overcome its offender. Then I saw, on the reverse side, thousands of oppressed creatures, winding their ways through the labyrinths of drama, to punish the unconscious offender and right a wrong justice never would. I imagined myself that personage that had figured so often in our daydreams, an absolute king, a philosopher demi-god.