The Salzburg Tales (27 page)

“‘So you see I am anxious,' said Rhoda. ‘Perhaps something will happen to the Jenkinses, who are coming late this evening. You know them, Thomas Jenkins, the jam man from Haviland Street. They have taken the large front room with the bow-window. Some of their luggage has come on already. They are staying for a month: and imagine that they have sent on already two cases of whiskey, one of liqueurs, one of champagne, and conserves, biscuits and fruits galore! They think they get nothing to eat here: or else, they expect us to be quarantined when they arrive! Provided they hand it round a little, and are sociable …'

“At this moment we heard the distant siren of the ferry, and saw the lights across the water, now roughened by the rising wind. The young guests gathered on the verandah under the tossing Chinese lanterns and shouted encouragingly. The Jenkins family disembarked with a quantity of boxes, valises and handbags. They were scrutinised in the lamplight in the usual comic spirit by the established guests.

“Mr Thomas Jenkins, known to everyone present by his jams, was at least fifty years old, prematurely decrepit it seemed, with a small, creased, bearded face, on which a lascivious little smile played. He inclined frequently in conversation towards the person talking and in all ways displayed obsequious manners. Mrs Thomas Jenkins seemed a little over thirty, thickening towards the forty-year, pleasant, partly the conserved coquette, partly the made-over country girl. Sylvia, a self-possessed girl perhaps fifteen years old, sprung up unseasonably, thin like a sapling, and yet large-breasted, moved in advance of her
parents and looked to left and right, sizing up the company and her surroundings with composure. She passed before them into the room reserved for them.

“Sylvia had not been in the drawing-room more than a few minutes before the young men had all gathered round her, questioning her and laughing at her sage or cunning replies. They angled with delicacy to know her age, but she replied directly, ‘I will be twelve next month: I am always taken for fourteen, at least!' She coughed a little and said she had a delicate chest. The boys, abashed by her youth, looked at that admirably moulded part and said, ‘What a shame!' Her father came into the room after a few minutes, and softly, with numerous polite little smiles, called her to bed.

“‘Only eleven—what bad luck,' said one: ‘such a jolly kid.'

“‘I don't believe it,' said Carlo, a puppy Don Juan, chief buck of the troupe: but in a moment to controvert him, the mother appeared, soft, young and pretty, to explain that Sylvia was ‘only a baby', and had to rest, and that her father had gone out for a smoke.

“After the first day or two the Jenkins family spent little time with the other guests, walking alone, and even taking meals in its own room. The servants complained first, because they could never make the full tale of dessert knives and plates. There were always several in Mr Jenkins' room. Later, the ladies found Sylvia too pert for her age, too indifferent to the dignity of married ladies, and too assured with the boys. And she was dressed far, far too well for a child.

“The mother of a dark-haired, dark-eyed, timid and confiding little girl called Jean, said with despite: ‘Imagine that yesterday that child changed her dress three times, I counted: I can't see myself dressing Jean so. That girl Sylvia's a ball of fluff: a nice coquette!' The boys were far from being so severe.

“The Vandenbrighs, family of social distinction, without whom the social columns of the city newspapers could hardly have survived, ‘cut' the Jenkinses entirely. My mother, a mild person, said shaking her head, to her maid, as they went over the boys' linen: ‘I don't cotton on to Mrs Jenkins at all.' The report spread that ‘the whole
family drank': the boys said that old Jenkins' jokes, off colour from the first, were now ‘too much of a good thing': solemn, excited little girls, guests in the house, brought to their mothers shillings and cakes given them by the old fellow, and were sent flying back to return these gifts. Rhoda said, ‘I shan't have them again.'

“One day I lay under the boughs of a little hollow by the sandhills, listening to the pleasant distant cries of the Vandenbrigh boys, who had a separate pavilion higher up towards the ocean beach, on the border of the swimming channel, on this side of the lake. The breeze rustled intermittently. I heard a prolonged rustling, and looking over my feet, saw Mr Jenkins peering like a satyr through the branches. I sat up and said nothing: I disliked him as if he were a piece of dirty rag. He smiled ingratiatingly and approached. He sat down facing me, cross-legged, and began scraping in the sand between us, in a curious manner. Presently, he took a shilling out of his pocket and offered it to me, without a word. I pushed it away, while my heart thumped hard. His two small eyes were reddish and ichorous, as if they were two little wounds looking on an interior ulcer. I jumped to my feet, murmured some excuse about seeing my mother, and left him sitting there in the little hollow. I did not know why I was scared.

“One night I slept very uneasily, and waking, found myself, although conscious, paralysed. The darkness sat over me like an incubus. I strained from side to side, as I imagined, and beat on the bed, doing all I could to utter a cry that would waken my mother. Suddenly, I heard that cry, a dreadful cry, ringing in my ears. I found myself at the same moment awake, and my mother sitting up in bed.

“‘Did you hear that?'

“‘Perhaps it was I,' I said. ‘I tried to call out.'

“‘I thought it came from outside, though.'

“‘It was a dog, or a curlew in the swamps,' said my mother's maid, holding her knees, as she sat up in bed, with her curl-papers swarming round her head.

“‘It seemed different from a curlew's cry, horrid as that is,' said my mother, discontentedly, ‘but it may have been. How I hate those birds. And how I hate this everlasting gush and hiss of the sea, and those swishing trees. What, in heaven's name, possessed me to come to “Ascalon?” I hate nature: it is full of cries and tears like a female madhouse.' She settled herself back in bed, and I heard her sigh and mutter several times before her regular breathing began again.

“In the morning, Rhoda came knocking on our door, to get us out in a hurry: little Jean, the dark-haired girl, had been found in the channel at five o'clock in the morning, by the Vandenbrigh boys and the others, going swimming. She had been murdered, and then thrown in. There was something secret about the business that we could not know. The police had been telephoned, but had to come seven miles by the regular launch, and would take some time to get there. Rhoda was getting the guests up, to be dressed and have an informal breakfast. No one could leave the house. The children spoke in whispers, if they dared speak at all.

“The Jenkins family was also still asleep. Their curtains were drawn and they did not answer repeated knockings. Rhoda said, ‘Pigs! They probably drank too much last night: I heard them talking late in their room: well, they've got to get up and look respectable before the police come.' She thought with despair of her lover, who went there for two or three weeks, every six months, getting away from his family to live quietly there with her, in the off-season, on the pretext of a rest-cure. He was a brilliant lawyer, a labour turncoat, and was expected to be Prime Minister at the next change of Government. He could not afford to be involved in any scandal of any kind, nor to visit a house whose reputation was not high. They beat on the door, with irons brought from the stove, and when they had no response, the kitchen-man and the scullion forced the lock, and stood timid in the warm sleeping-chamber.

“Listening, gratified, we heard exclamations and the voice of Rhoda, trying to rouse Mrs Jenkins. They came out leading her,
dazed, in her nightgown. Rhoda wrapped her in a rug, saying meanwhile, in a rage: ‘Pig, pig!'

“‘Get yourself in hand,' said my mother: ‘are the others like that too?'

“‘The old fellow's lying in there weltering in his blood,' said Rhoda, in a businesslike voice. ‘The little girl's nowhere to be seen. Provided she hasn't been murdered too …' My mother began to moan. ‘Why should you cry?' said Rhoda brutally. ‘I'm ruined by this affair. Who will come here now?'

“Two days later Sylvia was discovered living in a hotel in a large market town seven or eight miles away. She had given a false name, but her appearance and clothes betrayed her. The mother, confronted with the daughter, accused her of the murder of her father, out of
jealousy
. The daughter, cold and assured, accused the mother! Terrified, the wretched mother immediately confessed that the father and daughter had cohabited for three years, and that the father, growing more depraved with advancing age, had for some time given the masterful Sylvia cause for jealousy. Sylvia at last, breaking down, like the child she was, admitted that she had killed her father in his sleep, ‘because he had betrayed her.' She had suspected from his furtive manner that night that it was so; she questioned him adroitly, a past-master in the horrid art, and had proved her suspicions when he fell asleep: she did not know of course that Jean was dead. She had intended to make her way to the capital, and with the money she had taken with her, take a boat ‘somewhere'.

“Poor Carlo, tender Don Juan, attended the trial, hardly able to keep calm when Sylvia was attacked and questioned, and when she was proved guilty, saying miserably, ‘How she must have suffered, how she must have suffered, to reach that point.' He was perhaps the only person in the whole country that pitied her. She was sentenced to a reformatory for ten years, to be released after that if her family gave proper guarantees. The father of Carlo, a judge, moved by his son's desperate pleas, arranged for her to be allowed to enter a
private asylum. She was rich by her father's will, and would inherit the whole fortune when her mother died.

“She had a boy child some months after she went into this house of correction, and the boy was brought up by the widow of the murdered man.”

“T
HAT
boy,” said the Doctress, “was unquestionably Arnold, the boy of the triskelion.” She looked at the coin which dangled on her bracelet.

“You can bear to wear that dreadful thing?” said a young lady.

“Poor Arnold!” sighed the Doctress. “It is in memory of him.”

“I liked to hear your story, both your stories,” said the Balkan Lawyer. “There is a sequel to all that, too, which I know by chance. Last year, an oldish woman with her daughter, both widows, it was said, and both rich, came to Vienna and made rather a sensation in the fast set of the foreign colony. There they met Count Winkel, a penniless young man of good family, good looks, and scruples: when I say scruples, I mean he had scruples about the people he took money from; he would not take it from a bankrupt or a beggar, for example! Count Winkel danced attendance on both ladies, determined to catch one and either. They did all the lidos, casinos, and fashionable resorts. They lived
en famille
for a month on a certain islet in the Adriatic, where it is said, no woman can go without losing her virtue.

“The daughter, quite a pretty woman, but delicate, believed that he and she were engaged, wore a ring, and referred to him as ‘my fiancé, Cornelius Count Winkel, you know'. They returned to Vienna. She waited for him one afternoon in the public gardens and presently saw him coming towards her, with her mother leaning on his arm. The mother radiant and triumphant, in pink organdie, rushed up and presented, with a little confusion, ‘the new stepfather'. The marriage had just been celebrated.

“The daughter said nothing: the next morning the young man received by post the daughter's supposed engagement ring: the girl
died forty-eight hours later from an ‘overdose of sleeping draught', as they say.

“The inquiry, which brought out these details, forced the newly-married pair to leave the city, and revealed among other things, that the young lady was Mrs Sylvia Skelton, divorced for serious misdemeanours, and the mother, Mrs Thomas Jeffries, a widow. The vice certainly flowered in that family in all its forms!”

“What a three-legged history!” said the Doctress. “I begin to think it will never stop.”

“And you can still bear to wear that ornament?” said the young lady, irritably.

“If I throw it away, I am afraid it will start rolling again, making more business for clerks, registrars and judges,” said the Doctress seriously.

“There is still time, and it is warm now,” remarked the Master. “Philosopher, it is getting dark: you might light us a little way with your lantern.”

 

I
ONLY
tell fairy-tales (said the Philosopher) for I would rather be seen in their sober vestments than in the prismatic unlikelihood of reality. Besides, every fairy-tale has a modern instance. You know the story of the princess in the lemon?

I met a millionaire at one of my lectures—lugged there by some recidivist friend, no doubt. He had made his money in the grain trade. He was born in Southwark and at the age of twelve was obliged to live, with his family, on public and private charity. He stood for hours in the wintry slime of the miserable streets and
received coals and blankets from the servants of Ludwig Tripos, who has been the benefactor of that region for twenty years.

The boy's name was St. Clemens-Smith. When he was born the bells of St. Clement Danes were ringing “Oranges and Lemons”, and his mother, lying-in in a little house within earshot, began to murmur weakly the children's song. In honour of this accident, the boy was named St. Clemens, and everyone, remembering the birth of Henry IV of France, ran to get garlic: garlic they found, but of wine, none at all, and they smoothed his infant lip with a little lemon-juice, and his nose with mustard, or so it is said now.