The Salzburg Tales (5 page)

They were to sleep that night in a cabin on a hillside, built by a society of round-walkers, and had only to get the key from the guardian in the village, to enter into their own demesne. The cabin was between two hills on a green hummock, among summer gardens: there was a smell of honeysuckle in the air, convolvuluses grew over the walls and birds and insects went in and out of the untenanted cottage by a window left unfastened. They would not know that; but, falling heavily on the benches and floor of the cabin would sleep like beasts in the dark, snoring, and flinging their limbs about in
their exhaustion; but seeing perhaps in their dreams when the first fatigue had passed, the fantastic spire of some great cathedral, lacy on a blue sky, the cryptic black marble door closing in the sarcophagus of a great man, or a wide outlook over a blue mountain lake, that was starred in Baedeker. O passionate and devout race! They had no time to pause: they told no tales. They passed on and went back to their dull, oppressed lives, their ambitions pacified with their conquests over boulders and nettles, until the next vacation.

But there was a G
ERMAN
S
TUDENT
who had travelled with them from Innsbruck only: not a fair, lantern-jawed, blue-eyed youth, such as they all were, but one with a chubby face and red cheeks and fine manners, who raised women's hands to his lips when he saluted them. He was a student in philosophy. He squirmed with delight at the sight of a little bit of tracery in a clerestory, and went into fits over the counterpoint of Brahms: he had the sententiousness of a cherub when he declared that El Greco was a
back number
and the tricks of a water spaniel in the water when he sang from Richard Strauss's operas. He loved singing and he had a mild will but absolute judgment. He worshipped famous people and ran after women, who were his despair. His skin was white, his hair black and he wore fine clothes; he could not bear the least sight of blood but he was happy one day to give his handkerchief to tie up the leg of a dog run over by a cart: and whenever he heard a shot rumble in the hills and saw the birds fly scattered out of the trees, he said, “O, my goodness, my goodness, isn't that dreadful? It should never be allowed.”

He brought in with him, a L
AWYER
from Buda-Pesth, a swagger beau who spent his nights in night-clubs and paid attention to every woman he met, dark or fair, pretty or plain, sweet or forbidding, out of incontinence. He read all the gossip sheets and liked to pretend that he could find out the truth of every affair in the city, by fraud, bribery, threats and natural cunning. He believed whatever his client believed, affected to be cynical and saturnine, speaking in innuendoes; or jovial, sly and hail-fellows well-met, according to the case. He soothed and flattered his client as if the client were a prince
and he the prince's vizier. He examined a contract so closely for a flaw or deceitful intent, that he often missed the nature of the business and he was astonished to observe that a business could be unsound when a contract was watertight. He loved to crack a walnut with a sledge-hammer. He gulped down all the information thrown at him, went ahead in business and conversation by leaps and bounds, was called for that a bounder, loved to interrupt a business conversation with a quotation from his schoolbook poets, read the memoirs of diplomats with fervour and credulity, rejoiced at the crashing fall of magnates and kings, and was an ardent patriot and a conservative voter. He was like a man who has got into a pair of bewitched shoes by accident and must always be hopping and pirouetting, curtseying and leaping in the air, malapropos. He was a handsome young man of thirty-two with thick curly hair, brown eyes and a red mouth: he wore a morning coat in the morning and an eyeglass and evening dress every evening. He had learned, in two or three hours, all about the people in the hotel, and he now flattered and fawned on them shamelessly; he went about the place with dancing steps and his head in the air, delighted to be able to show his glittering talents to so cultivated a crowd. He was not a bad man, but very foolish: he was rich, because he had married a rich wife: he flattered her to her heart's content, and was a gay man about town.

Now he was laughing excessively at every word that fell out of the mouth of the P
HILOSOPHER
. The philosopher was heir to a noble house, but not rich: he lived from his lectures and his writings. He was odd in appearance, with a bloodless face and a receding chin and an underlip that dropped engagingly like a young foal's. His hands were the colour of bleached bone, and when he stood, he stood not straight, but shifting from one foot to the other like a schoolboy reciting a piece. Nothing astonished his admirers so much as the sight of him. He was received like a grandee in every country in the world and his books on history and moral philosophy, written clearly, picturesquely, with an economy of words, and full of quaint, moral notions often caught during illicit revels nightly in a sphere without
morals, delighting pastors and schoolteachers, were translated into every language. He had rapid soft speech and caressing manners like an adolescent boy, but he was nearly fifty years old. Ladies were very partial to him, saying that he looked harmless, but knowing quite well that he was ardent, well-born, enterprising and in a sphere beyond prejudices. He had no difficulty; he never had to eat green fruit although he was poor: the best and ripest fruit fell into his lap from the highest and best-tended trees, London was his orchard, the world was his estate. He ate very well and was one of the first gentlemen of the realm, but his shoes were often down-at-heel and he did not give a rap for it. He liked popularity, but he was happy in his soul, and unpopularity was the same thing to him, he thought. He would go to gaol for his opinions, he said: and because he liked to flout opinions in fee entail and mock inherited gentility, he never visited the House of Lords, which he called the prosiest and least select of all private clubs. He was not married and had no children.

There was also a M
ATHEMATICIAN
born in Finland, educated in France, America and Germany, who taught in Spain. He had lived all his life in schools and universities, and knew the rough and tumble of life only as a thorny proposition. His brown, thick skin was pitted with smallpox; his hair was so thick and tufty that it fell into his eyes and he could not wear a hat. His eyes were deep-blue and narrowed under brows like dried peony follicles, dark, twisted and cleft sidelong: he was of Tartar blood. He had a large library of books in four languages; many languages he read well but did not speak with ease. He had a slight impediment in his speech and in revenge he invented a story to this effect, that after the establishment of Grimm's Law, Grimm broke his heart at the incorrect deformation of primitive tongues by the vulgar, wooden-eared and thick-tongued, that he went mad and went to a mountain fastness where he established
Grimm
'
s Anarchy
and taught to a simple people a language without rhyme or reason: in this way arose the Basque tongue. For every anomaly he invented an amusing reason. All day he sat before a quire of paper writing and figuring in a crabbed script, in his leisure hours he read to
his young wife. He pitied women for their thwarted ambitions, and found many diamonds of plain truth in the sand of their conversation. He meditated everything a long time: he liked to sleep twelve hours a day and dream. He was wrathful at the errors of men, at fatuity, lunacy and dishonour, because he was forced to doubt the perfection of his own organism. He was in his relations with his friends violent, partial in love or hate, easily offended and given to bloody ideas of revenge like a schoolboy. He liked the cloistered academic path he would tread all his life: from windows of universities he looked out speculatively on every kind of activity. He was not indulgent but he was kind. He had cold feet because he liked to sit hours by himself spinning his web with his head in his own web. He dreamed at night of curious manipulations of logic and letters from which he got the supple solutions of theorems. He liked mathematical tricks and logical puzzles: at dinner, with his coffee he would puzzle his friends with “
the class of all classes
”. Then he would laugh, show his white teeth and begin to sing themes from Bach in a sonorous humming tone, or he would go to the piano and play with a firm, delicate, improvising touch. He liked to play chess and learn the grammars of languages. He had a brother he loved so dearly he would have died for him. He calculated his brother's chances of survival with a slide-rule and his birthday, according to the Julian calendar. He could calculate very well, both what he owed and what was owed him. He liked to eat well, go in his friends' automobiles, wear silk shirts not overpriced, and entertain his friends generously, for by spending money he could be potent while supine. He was thin and flexible as a fishing-rod but his grace was disguised in suits of expensive tweed cloth, cut in pompous fashion. The cloth was chosen for the sober intricacy of its pattern, but the colours, violet, blue, russet and green, were always at variance with the rest of his turn-out and with the fashion; he lived in a world of black and white, and when he turned his attention to colours, he was without prejudices. His house was barely furnished as a hermit's cell, so that his wife could polish her mind and not brass fittings; but he bought electrical contrivances of every sort, out of curiosity, and liked
to fossick in ironmongery shops and bring home patent egg-shellers and butter-coolers, or anything that was ingenious. He kept his work in pigeonholes and sent by registered post to trusted colleagues his original ideas for their criticism, but he was careful not to mention his ideas in mixed company; he knew mathematicians are not honest and have sharp ears.

If he found fault in persons he thought perfect before, he suffered for days; he came back to the imperfection again and again to understand how he could have been deceived at first, or else, what strange rule of harmony permitted these flaws to reign in organisms that pleased him.

In the middle block, which is the most expensive, sat a Berlin business man with his wife, richly furred and gloved, although not in the best style either of Paris or Vienna. Her great round face was heavily topped by uncut blonde hair and a fashionable sunhat, while he sat uncovered and mopped with a silk initialled handkerchief his bald cranium shaped like a sea-elephant's.

His lady's tongue, flowered head, and stout bosom under a lace front, all niddle-noddled; he barked his responses in stiff Berlin German, and sniffed the perfume and eyed the white silk of a barearmed Society girl who sat with a lapdog, indifferent on his left hand. A long white glove covered her warm arm in the most fashionable wrinkles: when she asked for a glass of milk at the ambulant milkstore or for a book of verse at the booksellers, her voice lisped softer than milk and sweeter than verses. Always a sort of natural fresh odour came from her as one seems to come from green fields, even when they are a long way off and no wind is blowing.

This young lady turned her back to the Berliner (at which his wife sighed pleasantly), and answered the young Viennese woman beside her, who asked her in that liquid German certainly invented by the Rhine maidens, when the play would begin. This young Viennese woman was dressed in costly Swiss embroidery and embroidered gloves. Her bronzed hair was neatly curled; she wore a small crocheted hat: her little white and black shoes shone like snakes' heads, with their
jet stones. She wore a wedding-ring and a necklace of crystals. She began to confide in the Berlin girl the social confidences and hurried conventional raptures of one who is a little fluttered and uneasy, and whose social station is not assured.

“What a crowd is here this year! They say the American President's financial advisers all are here: there are five millionaires … The first performance of ‘
Don Juan
' this evening will unquestionably be brilliant! … I am here with my husband,” said the Viennese lady: “he has some business in the south,” and she licked her dark red lips and looked appealingly at her confidante. The Berlin girl's practised eyes turned for a moment to her lapdog while she said to herself, “She is here with her lover, on an escapade”; then she prattled sociably on with an indefinite note of patronage: not indeed, for the escapade, but for the weak confidence.

The afternoon shadows drew a little nearer. The Viennese beauty, young, appealing and lonely, drew a bizarre embroidered scarf round her bust and sighed.

Stolidly, in the same row, but in the cheapest seat, with a sharp nose and weary and uncoloured face, with drab hair and a blue dress, a young woman clerk from Cologne shaded her eyes and read a French literary review. She raised her eyes patiently from time to time to the back of the stage, quizzed the elegants with the critical looks of an ambitious white-collar who has had to buy every luxury with soul-deadening parsimony; she was palely but precisely aware of a growing antipathy for a Jewish citizen of Vienna who sat beside her, in Tyrolean mountain costume, chortling at his fine seat, declaiming with a soft lisp and holding his wife's gloved hand.

There came late into his seat a thickset, cheerful D
OCTOR
from New York, who had just come from a conference in Constantinople on hay-fever. His teeth, his starched linen, his jewelled shirt-studs, his finger-nails and his shoe-tops all shone as he walked. When he talked, he often spread the square stubbed fingers of his small hand in a round gesture, and he had the shadowy smile of the Mona Lisa hovering unconsciously in the folds of his firm mouth. He was
very rich; he loved art and music; he had at his home in New York a private gallery; he attracted to his home by cajolery and good suppers, twice a week, a trio of musicians with whom he practised quartets. He was so strong that he would keep them sitting there till their backs cracked, their wrists were sprained, their eyes dropped and they were obliged to kick over his music-stands by stealth to interrupt him. When he began to play his quartet, to pursue an indigent painter in whose work he fancied he saw a profitable streak, or to make a scatter-diagram of temperatures, his eyes shone and he became insensible to other things, like a figure of stone. He knew to the least detail the soft scenes pictured by Sisley and the dazzling suns of Van Gogh, but he would walk through fields and by streams and villages unconscious if the sun, moon or stars shone, or if his way was lighted by rainbows, northern lights, lightning or roman candles, for his walks only served to develop his theories on art and his dexterity in determining the coefficient of correlation between two sets of facts. He had taken up all his hobbies late, after a mild youth, and he went at them with the pleasure and abandon of a mastiff pup chasing chickens.