The Salzburg Tales (37 page)

“He stood in front of me, pale and thoughtful, in his coloured gown, strange priest. He looked down at his son who stared at the ants running on the garden path, stupefied by the glaring sun. He looked at me as at the chorus in a tragedy: the real persons were in his head. I had no significance. I then perceived how very little I had meant to him, even when a girl: probably he did not even once
dream of me in some troubled night. I was the feeblest of dreams that was ever turned away from that fireless skull.

“Besides, what did his speech mean? What is the use of being master of Russian Literature, if you can't give a good speech on occasion, about motives?

“Yet, he was withdrawn from me, but he still looked and looked at me, or not at me, but at some-beyond me: it was taller, because he raised his eye, as if he were measuring its height. I flipped idly the broken window cord. Then suddenly I felt embarrassed. I opened the door, picked up my little boy and ran downstairs.

“I heard the man and woman in the yard cry out. I ran out through the passage. Annie, the maid, stood gaping upwards, shrieking and flinging up her arms: the child bawled and the husband was shouting sternly, ‘What are you doing? Stop that, Ivan Soklow!'

“Ivan stood on the window-sill looking down. The little child was almost under him. ‘Pick up the child, Annie,' he said to the maid. She rushed to do it, but instead of throwing himself down, he climbed into the room again, pulled the window up to its full height, by the broken cord, and let it drop on his neck. The child was in its mother's skirt and Ivan was in my bosom. The maid let out a yell. ‘It is your doing,' said she to me.—' It is your doing, harlot,' said her husband to her. ‘What did I tell you this morning? The Lord is patient, but in the end he punishes sin, and I will punish it too.”

“I came away. I felt relieved. The tide was running out, a pennon of sunlight pinned on each wave. I came down to see you. I have no doubt I shall be able to get a job, even in the city here.”

N
OW
, after the Master's tale, the guests were still idle and rebellious, and no-one would agree to tell a tale. They cracked jokes, some of them moved off to sit in the nearby café, or to walk in the town, and in a few moments only a few of the men were left, sitting with the Master, the Musician and the Old Man. The Old Man smiled at the others, pulled his little beard and remarked softly:

“The ladies fly off now, skirling, flirting and tossing their heads like a flock of sparrows: they are so free, the dear creatures, they will have nothing to do with us until sundown!”

“Do we look better at night?” asked the Viennese Conductor with a refined smirk. “Or, do they?”

“Men, women,” exclaimed the Schoolboy with impatience, his lips curling, “they are the same animal: do we have to use these old gaslight distinctions of man, woman, day and night empiry, these suspect gallantries overscented to conceal bad odours! There are only two kinds in our society, rich, poor, master, servant, proprietor and pensioner; and all the foibles of women that we laugh at in secret, are the foibles of a dependent class. Women are open-hearted, good, ambitious, capable as we are, given the same economic opportunity.”

“You are a gallant boy,” said the Old Man, lightly: “I also love women of every kind: for that reason I would not wish them to have our opportunities to become rascals.”

The Schoolboy flushed and was about to reply hotly, when the Master intervened.

“Are we going to have a passage-at-arms, Schoolboy, in the old knightly style, for the honour of the dames? You are young, your manners are coltish, but you are Sir Galahad himself. The Old Man here, a Galahad of another age, one who has known as many women as you have known few, talks so charmingly about them, that we can at least wish that what he says were true. Tell us about the ladies, Old Man, if you will: they quitted us brusquely, but that is no reason for us to abandon them.”

“I know many, many stories about my women,” said the Old Man with tenderness; “and I have known many women, because I loved them. If I had been able to love them more, I should have had more of their heart-in-heart secrets. That was the secret of Don Juan—but I don't need to tell you that, with a ‘Don Juan' on the spot—that he loved passionately all women.”

The Schoolboy's eyes sparkled and his cheek flushed as he said:

“You are right, in that: tell us about some of these women, will you? There is nothing more enthralling than to know what they think, how they move!”

The Old Man said apologetically,

“My pictures are miniatures, and I have superannuated tricks and graces of style.” But when they urged him again, he began his tale, in a reflective tone.

 

C
OME
up, fair women!

In the plain coming from my village, Marion's curls bobbed over her holland apron. Under the bushes covered with red dust, I ate her sherbet-ball and the sour-sweet powder sprayed up out of the green globe. By the tall yew in her garden, children's parrakeet voices shouting “I'm on Tom Tiddler's ground picking up silver,” and Marion rushing out, brown-kneed, yelling. A shiver as she rushed at the lichened trunk of the yew, while dust hung in the sun-lanced arboretum. In the evening she said, “Tell us a story!” and I told her of a rich child of fourteen whose boy from an enemy family made love to her in a balcony and in a funeral vault.

The sea-wind in the old pines, the ants on the ripe kangaroo grass, cumulus clouds, peewees chattering and far off, the spray-bitten cliffs where, with the rising sea, Andromedas stood momentarily in the crevices. Dulce danced with Count Anton at ten: marriage between cousins is sterile, they say, but that's all a superstition. Match-making mamma, filial Dulce is dressed in too tightfitting a maternal affection.

In the gully Olive had the black eye, white cheek, skinny limbs and spines of the blackberry choking the creek-head. Boys and girls
went off in pairs to turn up centipedes under the sandstone boulders. She left to marry, with inelegant abruptness, the greengrocer's lad: the departure of her graceless manner and common voice uncovered the stones and the fence-posts in their bareness.

The evergreen forest planted by our ancestors stood before us: pomegranates glittered. When we approached, a hundred doors opened in the walls, and each one entered alone. Through the galactic flowers of an almond-tree, flushed like the flamingo, upright by a water-well, stood my Phyllis Mirabilis. Is it possible that I was not at your baptism? “That is my father's name.” Afterwards, your dulciloquy a little rusty, saying, “You think I have not changed? No, and I shall never: nowadays, a girl doesn't—” the orange dress tight over a modelled breast. You had tears, though, for an inordinate love: there was dew on your leaves, green bough.

Tempe, habited in black silk for Malvolio, Tempe in a large hat for Lady Teazle: in English class, sending in, in your Greek script, my lines:—

The swollen gourd at evening star

Drops from the bush: its pepins are

Upon the water, near and far
,

Scattered, to Jove's gold similar!

Two stars, like tears, into a well
,

Beside the vines and bushes fell
,

To see a lavish damosel

Give free the melons she should sell
.

Now rising day in iron-barred skies

Clinks his keys, and his round eyes

Canvas the caravanserais
.

Two stars are gone? Now, dog-stars rise!

The culprits caught, then blush as red

As Vulcan in his Venus' bed:

“In orchard gloom we thought” (they said)
,

“Four suns to see: devout we sped

“More suns to do obeisance to
,

Since there two suns two suns did woo:

Two orbs were there that mimicked you
,

And two the evening star—boohoo!”

The dawn confused, weeps modest tears
,

(I, mine), Dew, his (she, Guinevere's):

Phoebus, ejaculating, steers

His white prows through a thousand meers

Seeking his rival: but behind

The pale excuse of your drawn blind

The glutton in the melon's rind

Bites between fresh lips ensanguined
,

And sugar, dripping from the bite
,

With red, marks your complexion white:

The thief, whom such wild fruits invite
,

Stays in your vines another night
.

Your father looks at man-trap, gin
,

By garden-wall; questions your kin:

“Who stole the fruit?” “Father, no sin!

A hungry man—I let him in.”

And when the University Senate called you up and asked, “Where did you find this?” you replied, “I don't even know what it means: I dreamed it, like Coleridge.” Runnel, fleeting, fleeing, reappearing,
lost stream under snow, hawthorn, verdure, river by the lambs and river through the corn-bright fields, flood carrying boats, chips, peach-stones and walnut-shells for the country children of the plains, turning sinuously round and playing through artificial fountains and dyer's sewers in the capital, creeping colourlessly and tastelessly into a tap to be drunk in some suburban home, you that were the rose-browed fountain of Pelleas.

There were no more beauties! Yes, the last one, a beauty in an ugly mask. As we rode into the city on the other side, experienced young men with insinuating voices, a country girl with a powdery outer crust, too long baked over stoves cooking for boundary-riders, too long stewed by the laborious candle and wearing the harlequin costume lent out by the stained glass dignitaries of Gothic libraries, offered a jug of cold water, a scone and a russet apple from a deserted farm; a simple feast, swallowed gluttonously by an omnivorous heart.

Sad middle life where one is alone and everything is for a consideration! There was in a respectable house behind the closed shutters a woman trembling before the indecorous depths of her basin of water: there was a calander turning in the steam of a laundry, with the girls singing and laughing aloud at the shadows cast on their attic roofs the evening before: there were two eyes like coals, and unknotted black hair infuriated with love and vanity—they burn still in my dreams like the eyes of a cat in a tunnel.

Yes, then, the cold crust of common sorrow, the tepid tea of coincidence, anæmic consolations to delay the thin-blooded old man. There is the young girl with the hassock and the nursing sister in her cassock. That's all.

Fair women, fair women, no love ever replaced the love you never gave.

I
N
the evening, the Salzburg guests pressed the Centenarist again for tales and he began immediately to speak.

T
HE
Baalshem knew that the Devil was coming to wrestle with him for his soul, and he sent out a message to the spirits of holy men all over the earth, wherever they should be, to all those that had sewn in their fabric a shred of the essence of God, to come and lend him that shred, so that he could piece together a strong armour to help him in the fight. So they came together from every part of the world, and they were as God makes the good: halt, lame, blind, syphilitic, leprous, demented, epileptic, paralysed, hunch-backed. Along all the roads leading to the Baalshem's hut came the sounds, from far off, of their crutches, their hobbling and stumbling, and every breeze brought their sighs and irrepressible groans, their stink and the fluttering of their rags, their broken voices and their praise of God.

Presently they arrived at the Baalshem's hut and sat round it, crosslegged, or on their haunches or knees, asking for his blessing and offering him their shred of essential virtue for his combat with the Devil. The Baalshem looked over this wretched multitude, and with his sharp eyes he discerned the shreds of virtue lying in different parts of their souls: he counted them up, and weighed and calculated. The hour of his trial approached, and already the air trembled with the shadow, and at a great distance he heard the Devil on the road. They covered the ground for miles, the elect, in their misery and poverty. Baalshem stared at them and stroked his beard; he shook his head and said, “No, take back your virtues, my poor friends: you need them. And now let the Devil come!”

There are thousands of tales associated with Baalshem's name, some probable, some fantastic. Baer, the wise man of Meseritz, became a cripple through ascetic excesses, and sought out Baalshem for medical, not spiritual, aid. He saw that Baalshem lived in comfort and was hail-fellow-well-met with all the people, asking the men about their business, patting the babies on the cheek and telling broad jokes to the women; and that if he had anything to say, he
illustrated it with homely analogies and domestic parables. Baalshem retained Baer at his side for two years, and cured his malady by giving him plenty of food to eat and a fire to sit at; but Baer secretly despised the mildness of Baalshem, and waited in vain to see a true miracle or to hear the revelations of angelic discourse. He listened patiently to his interminable tales, was astonished that the people flocked to see Baalshem, and prepared in private to return to his own town, where he had been honoured for his asceticism and fiery denunciation of sins. One night, as he was making up his bundles and praying to the Lord to give him the visions of his earlier years, a knock came at the door, and he found outside a poor Talmudic student, whom Baalshem nourished, and who did his errands for him. The messenger begged him to go immediately to Baalshem's house. Without asking any questions Baer ran through the snow and found before Baalshem's house a crowd of people on their knees. When he entered the room he saw Baalshem with the great Talmud open; and Baalshem, raising his head, opened his great eyes in their cavernous sockets, and said to him with an air of authority: