The Salzburg Tales (42 page)

Something in the natural action responded to a question long since marauding in the heart of the master. He grasped Jean's wrist; Jean freed himself, rushed to the door, and turning there, shouted wildly, “She was my dear wife, and the child was mine, too; now you know who came in by the secret door!” and weeping aloud, he rushed out of the castle, and away.

But he was arrested two days later on the seacoast, where he had rejoined the woman and child. These latter got away at the last moment, for he confided them to a friend among the smugglers, but he was arraigned and condemned to torture and death. That was still done in those days. The executioner was ordered to break his arms, legs, thighs and hips, while he lived, and to expose him afterwards on a pole with his face to the sun, for such time as God extended
his breath. This was done, and he hung all day on the pole before he died, for he was very strong. I say, dreadfully wrong things were done in those days.

This was in the year 1789, as I said. In that same month the news from Paris spread through the effervescent provinces, and a great fear spread with it, with reports of pillage, rapine and murder by armed bands. These robbers did not reach our province, but the alarm given, stirred the peasantry, who in terror, in misery and in bloody lust, rose, burned, robbed and fired castle, domain and monastery. The Marquis fled before the storm, retired to a lonely cottage in a remote part of the province. There he was found by the people, by the treachery of a servant, with the Marquise's old nurse, still faithful. His head bleeding, his arm broken, bruised with kicks and blows, he struggled and fell along the road they took him, back towards Castelreal, for they said they would burn the old crow in his nest. Night came on before they reached the village. They broke into a few farmhouses, and brought out the owners, who ransomed themselves with their hidden stores of food and drink. The revolutionists then prepared to sleep in the farmhouses and under the stars. Castelreal feared that his end was near, but he still hoped to meet a body of soldiery from Bordeaux or elsewhere. Roped to a hitching-post for the night, and in great pain, he nevertheless managed to cut through the rope with a nail from his boot, and freed himself. But he had only gone a few steps when a peasant, kept awake by toothache, gave the warning, and he was taken again, and so injured that he died almost immediately. The people, angry, hungry, troubled, disordered, set out again in the early morning with his body towards the castle, now in flames.

The upper air quivered like white banners hung on a sombre castle wall at night, and the morning began to glow. New songs and bubbling rhythms of a day and season magnificently fair, rose in the fields and streams, and the refreshed paddocks gambolled, and the purple-clotted vines fluttered, while the birds whistled in the woods. I wish they might all have been turned into birds, even poor Jean
into a crow or sparrow, and flown off into the trees, effacing with the hand of miracle this bloody tale. But no, these things happened, and perhaps will again. God knows. That is the legend.

I
N
the afternoon, in the soft wood of that green knoll called the Mönchsberg, in face of the Untersberg shining in the brilliant sun as if the whole rock were one great jewel, they called for a fairy tale, and in response, the Schoolgirl began.

 

I
N
a deep field at Morpeth stands a tower at the water's edge. The Hunter River flows rapid, cold and quiet between paddocks of lucerne. The tower is built of square stones, and its high-pitched roof is open to the sky. It has been there a long time, nobody knows how long; it has been there since the first day living in the memory of living man.

It is night, now the moon is high, and the anemones at the foot of the tower drop their petals: the wind weaves lucerne-leaves and night-hours in its hair. The evening strikes twelve: at once all men put their heads on their pillows. Shutters are flung open in the wall. A garden springs up at the foot of the tower and a woman looks out of the window. Her long milk-white hair hangs down the tower, and makes a pool in the garden below: moths pass and repass. She sings and beckons: the flowers begin to tip their heads, their ghosts slide out of the cup and up the wall and to the roof, where they clamber over the beams: they roof the tower, the tower is whole.

Now sounds begin inside, as if it were a giant musical-box. First, rich confused chords arising in the river earth, then dispersed tones of small range, like stones struck with a pick, and then the sounds of cockchafers sawing a leaf by the wall, and earthworms singing
under their breath as they labour to uproot the tower, and the glassy, penetrating voice of the lady, together echo and swirl inside the stones. The music rises high, like the tide rising rapidly in a cave, and when it reaches the roof, the tower becomes clumsily human in form, seizes the lady's hair and begins to draw a bow across it: the lady cries in pain, and her cries are the cries of a violin. Then a wilder music pours round and round the stone tower, drowning it: grey light fills the land, the night approaches to the other brink of the river, with the hostile ululations of dreams.

Abruptly a small cloud throws itself at the moon's face: the distant paddocks are light, but there is a dark patch on the earth at hand. The cloud takes form quickly in the air, drawing together the unseen threads of vapour. The ghosts disappear, the garden sinks into the earth, the lady winds up her hair, and the shutters fly to: the covering falls from the roof, and the beams stand stark naked against the grey paddocks. The cloud passes.

Along the road appears a riderless black horse who strikes sparks from the earth with his hoofs. He passes behind the tower: the tower, like a demon rider, leaps on his back: the horse shoots a flaming glance from his eye and bounds on. Where the tower stood, a white mouse with silken ears nibbles a grain of corn. The horse flies down the road towards Hinton and is seen no more. What is that thunder of hoofs returning? That is the heart's blood. There stands the tower, unroofed, silent, in a deep field at the water's edge.

What is this? This is what a child sees, who stands on the Hinton road, on a certain night in a certain year, when the water flowing down past Morpeth treads out the last moment of a secular cycle.

The Schoolgirl stopped abruptly, and the Lady from Périgord protested,

“That is only a drop of water, when we asked for a cup.”

“It was a river of water,” said the Schoolgirl.

“Then give us the ocean,” responded the Lady; and the Schoolgirl continued.

T
HE
sea froths, the coroneted swans cover the cliff with their feathers, a groan bursts from the belly of the sea, black as blood. Sappho has sung to the sea-king's daughter, who steals the keys of jasper and opens the prison gates for her to pass out. The waters divide, and Sappho, with shut eyes, her white amorous body asleep, and still and pale as a sandy beach under the last embraces of regretful seas, passes upward, drawn by the desires of the hosts of heavenly virgins. With the sound of the surge, the swans burst from the cliff, leaving it sable, and, closing round Sappho, bear upward in their flight, a sweep of long wings into heaven. The misty beam of the moonlit night strikes on the swan's plume as it shoulders away the dark, and glistens on the dark eyeball: left and right, the line re-forms as they rise and fall along the dewy uplands of air. Ever they climb precipitously up the steep of night, spirally as a Babylonian tower. The sinuous waves have long ago been calmed beneath them, and sleep like frost: the forests and lakes are dark, like the secret locks of young women. They pass out of the cone of night, and they see the earth struck by sunlight, smiling as it imperceptibly rolls over the twilight strand into the surf of dawn.

The Swans pass through the groaning meteors and the yelping winds and tempests of the upper air: their wings, wearing, drop feathers and down, which, a month after, come to earth, as the snow that falls in white climes. They cross the red, blue, green, yellow and white rivers which shine in the rainbow, they cross without danger the blue burning plains and the rivers of corrosive gold which show when the pavilions of air are rent by thunder: they hear the growling of the bears, escape the hoofs of the charioteer who treads the tails of comets to dust, and make signs to all the impudent Zodiac. As they pass by the Maiden, Sappho stirs in her sleep, and her nostrils, hitherto obstructed by the bad cold she caught two days ago falling into the Mediterranean, expand. The first flush of blood gushes into her cheek as they pass swift as light through the palaces of Perihelion
and Aphelion, cleaving the bowing and murmuring company of astral mandarins, with coloured topknots according to their magnitudes.

But now the solar system is past, and they are in the pathless waste. Only the instinct of the coroneted swans, who are fed on dragon-flies every morning at the heavenly gate, can guide her over the steppes of the Middle Distance. It is past: the heavenly light begins, as the dawn with us, only with all those known delights heightened in their transcendental way to delights inconceivable: this I say, who relate it, for I cannot conceive what they may be. Now the hosts of virgins and all the saints of the calendar, even the full tale of saints of these latter days, sing faintly as sings the morning star to the lover who has watched all night in the shrubbery: the noise grows louder, as surf to tempest-tossed ears: it sings about them as sings the drenching summer rain: and Sappho wakes.

“Where are we, O dearest Swan?” says she to the nearest crowned head, resting so lightly on its long stalk of pleasing form.

“We approach the gates of pearl,” said the Swan, singing now, as do the heaven-born Swans.

“Who is there to receive us?”

“The Virgin, the Lords of Heaven, Buddha, Confucius, the hosts of martyrs and saints, Venus, Diana and other celebrities, the Muses with elegantly-poised feet, the Graces in their naked chastity, all, all you knew on earth and under sea.”

“What will I wear? I am naked!”

“The future director of the Moscow Art Theatre, yet unborn, will study your type and tell you!”

“Whom shall I have to love me?”

“The Lord, the saints——”

“Hm! Hm!”

“——the nymphs and oreads——”

“Pallid souls!”

“——Ariadne, Andromeda, Cassiopeia——”

“Too sentimental!”

“——Lilith, Dalila, Potiphar's wife, Cleopatra, Thaïs, Ninon, Catherine the Great, Ste Thérése——”

“Too religious!”

“——all the daughters of Eve!”

“But Eve?”

“On Wednesdays and Sundays,” said the Swan, “she visits Heaven to see her numerous descendants, but at other times she stays on earth, refusing to give up her little notions.”

“Is today Wednesday?”

“Alas, there is a wretched innovation here, the Gregorian Calendar,” said the Swan, “I never know what day it is, now.”

“Give me a mirror,” said Sappho.

“There are no mirrors in heaven, for no one can make reflections there,” said the Swan, shaking his head.

Sappho pouted, but she reached for an asphodel floating past in the air, and twined this in her hair, shaking from it as she did so seaweeds and pearls put there secretly by the sea-king's daughter. “Lend me a pen,” said Sappho, and the Swan made haste to do so. Sappho began frowning and counting on her fingers: “This sapphic metre is the very dickens,” she said. Presently she said to the Swan, “Do you know a rhyme for Leda?”

“Certainly not,” said the Swan coldly: “and I hope you were not taken in by that very tall story of Leda's, none of us swans was. But it was generally believed by a population ignorant of biology, and we have been much annoyed by those forward water-nymphs ever since.”

“Don't take on so,” said Sappho: “but I admit a girl is lucky who lives in antiquity, a taradiddle is as good as coin of the realm.”

“There you have it,” said the Swan indignantly. “Take Semele: she had a happy conceit: she bothered no one.”

They now arrived at the gates of pearl on the crystal shore. St. Peter pulled aside a little shutter and looked out through a grille, a razor in his hand and his face covered with suds. “You are very early,” he observed amiably, “but do come in. I took you for a gentleman who
has been too much with us lately. He contributed to the rebuilding of the Delphic oracle, and has always treated the cloth honourably; and then, that loafter Mercury slept late and permitted him to be caught short on the stock exchange. Most unfortunate; and he positively insists that we cover his losses!”

“Very reasonable,” said the Swan, ruffling his feathers. “There is a good deal too much
dolce far niente
in this place: look at yourself, not shaved at this time of day!”

“I've a good mind to grow a beard,” said St. Peter ruefully. “Beatitudes are so frequent now that I have no time to dress for dinner: and here, as you know, we still feel that manna maketh man.”

They entered. Tents of silk covered endless lawns, harps twanged of themselves in the air, so that the blessed should not have to work, for it was an honourable society living entirely on its capital of faith and good works. The Lord, an old-timer, conscious of his rustic origins, sat and listened valiantly to the Earl of Chesterfield, Brillat- Savarin and Vedius Pollio, but he could not keep his eye from glazing, nor his foot from idly waggling.

An angel bore down on Sappho, and politely but firmly took from her fist her pen.

“I can't write here?” said Sappho, surprised, knowing that the holy are addicted to the Word.

“No,” said the angel, “it is a very old regulation, first imposed by the Lord (God bless him!), who is a writer himself, as you have probably guessed from the number of his writings, both attested and apocryphal, scattered about the earth. The day after Heaven opened, two journalists came here and immediately started rival journals: the interpretations they gave of the Gospels and their disputes under the heads of theophany, theogony and theopathy were so ridiculous and bitter, that the Lord himself was assailed by religious doubt: but he was wisely advised, and since then there has been no literature in heaven.”