The Salzburg Tales (50 page)

What a misery, to be born a timid woman and to love a man like myself without energy. Love is giving and I have nothing to give. I have gone on stretching out my life, my career and my talent from one year to another, hungering from day to day for the scrap of favourable criticism and the snack of patronage that would land me a good contract for the next year, and one that required only easy writing. I thought, biting my nails, of my first book, and was caught by every hotfoot idea because I had cold feet. Then, disgruntled, I began to write sarcastic reviews, and you tattled more and more of
literary scandals. I would like to set all this right by a last act with some lively and richly ornate fancy in it, and I would like to give you something, because you have been kind to me and thrown away on me all your affections.

I thought that last night: suppose I came to Chloë (I said), and brought her the fatal, desirable, wild and supernatural joy of death, the blackout for which an unhusbanded spirit has waited: she would be happy. Or am I a boy still behind you in years, disenchantment and knowledge of human nature? Suppose I come to tea this afternoon: the toast is made, the fire burns cheerfully under the gloomy Muirhead Bone: the old snuff jar is on the bookcase and the Sèvres tea-set is out. You simper and I frown. We drink tea, and in the middle of some remark about “decadence” I neatly stick a knife in you! Then I pull down one of those artistic curtains and some of your Pompadour silks: on the carpet I throw the rich stuffs in a pile and on top something I brought in a packet under my cloak, a cloak of black swans' feathers. There I put it, and loosen your hair, and you lie there like a woman floating at sea in a storm in the snarled manes of seahorses. Then I say, into your deaf ears:

“Eyes which have wept tenderly over my creations, lips which have twitched with a tender laugh at my follies, nostrils drawing breath suddenly at the sight of me, liver and lights which flushed at the mention of my name, heart which contracted in my absence, feet which ran on so many errands for me and hands which have burned to embrace me, lie still, rest, grow cold, sleep for ever: farewell.”

I wipe my knife on my breeches, blow my nose, and leave you lying there, for the inquisitive Old Mother Hubbard of a morning when she comes prying through the open curtains: and you will not come haunting me again, for you will be fatigued and glad to sleep.

T
HIS
letter Chloë often read and cried over, and lent in secret to her intimate friends, as an evidence of the perverse but true passion her friend had for her. She got into an accident soon after, whether by chance or fatality no one can say, and when she was dying hid it in
her dress and asked that all his letters be buried with her. But Colin, knowing her sentimentality well, came to see her dead, and abstracted all these letters from her sheets. This last letter he lent me once, in a fit of vanity, to see what I thought of his soul, and destroyed it the next day in a fit of remorse: for he is like that, like a ship steering no true course, shuddering at the touch of the rocks, bounding away from the breakers, yearning for the day when it will founder silently in mid-ocean. But I have a secret copy of the letter and the contents are as I have recited.

T
HE
Translator finished his tale, curled his moustaches and looked inquisitively at his audience to see how the tale had been received. The Old Lady was shaking her head doubtfully, and gently fanning herself with a black lace fan: “Such people,” she said reproachfully, “do not exist: such a monster would be shut up.”

The Frenchwoman made a whimsical face at the Translator and said, “No, it is just a horrid example of Protestant repression: when you see a timid personage with a cold face and clear eyes, you can expect lunatic follies to peep out at any moment: in my country we are never surprised by anything an Englishman does. If he acts normally we are ill-at-ease and suspicious, but if he does something entirely incomprehensible, we realise that he is himself and not meditating anything.”

“A stupid thing,” said the Lawyer. “Apart from anything else, the young man might easily have been questioned after a letter like that, if the cause of her death had been obscure.”

“What a desperately boring pair,” said the young Schoolgirl, shaking back her black curls from her thin shoulders and sniffing superciliously: “little mushrooms spring out of the humus of a dead tree and talk about their depravity.”

The Doctor proclaimed with gravity, “Do away with crumpets and steak-and-kidney pie in the English cuisine and these colic-born micmacs will disappear and you will see the old golden Elizabethan strain.”

After dessert they turned lazily to the Centenarist once more and pressed him to relate some of his tales. The Centenarist chuckled, said, “First wait till I light a big cigar”; and he sat back twinkling in his seat, pretending that he had no wish at all to talk. After he had blown into the air two or three rings of smoke, and his eyelids began to flutter downwards as if he was lost in inner contemplation, the Viennese Conductor clapped his hands and cried:

“Centenarist, now it is night: now do all songs of the loving ones awake, as Nietzsche chants, and your heart also is the song of a loving one.”

“Have I to work every night,” asked the Centenarist coyly, “like a burglar or a gay lady?”

“Something cheerful tonight,” said the Lawyer, “you are always so religious.”

“Religious am I? Then nothing but atheist tales,” said the Centenarist sharply.

“Atheist is simply religious in reverse,” remarked the Lawyer, making a face.

“Nonsense,” said the Centenarist, and began, smiling at the Schoolteacher.

I
N
one of the English Dominions an only boy named Jamie was brought up with much indulgence in a strict atheist family. He was not allowed to play with the ordinary children who went to the public schools (and in that country most children go to the public schools), nor with the few High Church and Roman Catholic children who went to private schools. He never saw in his family anyone drink, smoke, swear or lie, he never read a low or immoral book, and as he was brought up on the philosophers, sacred writers of all times, poets and scientists, he had a calm, reasonable, but inspired view of life: he
was not a prig, but the ordinary amusements of young men seemed flat and vapid to him. He walked by the seashore and mountainside, talking fraternally to all who came his way; he wrote poetry and worshipped, from season to season, some highschool girl or other. At the age of twenty-three, at a reception given for scientific societies at the State Government house, he met a Society girl of striking looks and energetic manner who inspired him with an immense love. The girl likewise fell in love with Jamie, was unable to seduce him and forced her father to accept him as son-in-law. The father, an oyster-merchant, who had made a million in the fisheries, did not object to this intellectual son-in-law, but he insisted, in his bluff, old way that Jamie, as he was still called, should go into the business with him. Jamie was glad to do so.

“When you see how men work, manage, struggle, compete, plot, lie and make profits, and sweat blood at night dreaming their overdraft is refused, Jamie,” said his father-in-law, “you will be a thousand times the philosopher. How much do you know? For example, have you ever told a lie, and what kind of a lie?”

“No,” said Jamie: “I believe I have never told one.”

The father-in-law concealed his feelings, and continued:

“You have a good head: you will soon learn the business, no doubt: race tells. And as I say, how can you know what impels men to lie universally as they do, if you have never done it yourself?”

“That is reasonable,” said Jamie.

“Try hard to tell a lie tomorrow,” said the merchant, with an encouraging smile. At the club he told his friends, “Even if he knows nothing about business, it's an honour to have a man with a head like that marry your daughter.”

But Jamie the phoenix, established branch manager of the business in another State capital, showed no aptitude for business at all. In three months he had lost three thousand pounds (putting it at the lowest figure), and he had not taken in above a hundred, net. His employees had all gone on strike for better wages and better living conditions, and Jamie had sent a long letter to his father-in-law telling
him that their demands were perfectly justified. He would not sell any fish not fresh from the sea the same day, and he instituted an offal plant to make fertiliser from all two-day fish. When the advertising men of the press called on him for advertisements, and being refused, attempted to blackmail him, he kicked them out of his office with scorn. This justly aroused in the entire press of the capital a campaign of indignation, for if newspapers do not have advertisements, how can they pay their printers? Articles appeared every day condemning his methods, accusing him of subversive politics, or of wilfully poisoning men, women and children, of robbing the workers and seducing servant-girls, of having natural negro children, of assaulting his mother with a lath, of supporting houses of prostitution, and of spreading leprosy and goitre.

His wife was grieved at this unpopularity and tried to make Jamie see the light in long curtain lectures; and when he remained obdurate, she returned to her father in a pet and demanded a divorce. The father-in-law asked for Jamie's resignation, but Jamie had a bank account and refused. The father-in-law said:

“Jamie, with learning you are beside yourself.”

He promptly sloughed off the branch business which Jamie ran, and started another in the same city, in successful competition, in order to ruin Jamie and bring him to his senses: for he loved him, at bottom.

“I will not give up,” said Jamie. “I will finish this job as if it were the only job I had had from the cradle: I will never give up, I will make a career, even an apostolate, out of being a fishman,” and he wrote his father as much.

His father, likewise, to bring him to his senses (for he was a very sensible philosopher himself, and had always made a splendid living), disowned Jamie. At the end of the fourth month, Jamie saw himself ruined, sold up, laughed out of town, likely to be tarred and feathered by the town vigilantes, and his shop-fittings, carriers, motor delivery vans, fish-baskets and tickets packed up to be sold at auction.

Jamie went to the bank then, to get some money to wire to his father, for, engrossed with the struggle, he had come down to his last
penny; but he found all his accounts attached in all his banks. When he got back home the bailiff was there, so that he found himself on the pavement without bread or a roof.

Jamie then went to the head of the city University, where the rector, kindly but firmly, told him that the University could never find a place even as instructor, even as laboratory assistant, for a man whose name had been covered with such public ignominy; and that youth could not be put in the hands of a man who, it was said, betrayed servant-girls.

“I am a ruined man,” said Jamie, wringing his hands, “and all for the fish that swim in the sea; who could believe that Satan's invisible world would be revealed behind a fish counter?”

Tired, beaten, and weary to death, Jamie went to the auctionrooms where his shop-fittings and aquaria were to be offered for sale. It was a large set of auction-rooms, the largest in the city. Jamie, in his anguish, wandered through them from one end to the other. Here was a Persian carpet, there a Gainsborough, there a French chair, there a set of old fire-dogs, there a lot of pictures stood on the floor. His head was splitting, the sweat poured over his face, and with the sweat, a few tears, if it must be told. He stood by the lot of pictures, and presently sank into an armchair covered with tapestry, which stood by them. He thought over all his troubles; in his misery, tears poured over his face. He looked dejectedly before him, and presently focussing his eyes on a near object, it seemed to him that he was looking into a mirror put down there on the floor in the obscurity next to the pictures. There was a kind, delicate face, with large eyes from which tears rolled: but the fair hair was in long curls such as Jamie had not worn since he was a little boy, and the shoulders were draped in some white cloth: round the high, fair forehead was a ring of spinous things, perhaps fishbones. Tears and blood rolled down the suffering and forgiving face, and the expression of the eyes touched Jamie's heart. Jamie looked at this picture, which he had never seen in his life before, and he wondered what it could be.

“It is a picture of the old times,” he said to himself in his simplicity and sorrow. “But men in all ages are alike; that crown of fishbones is symbolical: see how the tears roll! No doubt he also was a fishman.”

“Y
OUR
literary chaps are all alike,” exclaimed the Banker. “What good did it do him to ruin himself, lose his wife and upset a whole industry?”

“No good at all,” said the Centenarist calmly.

“There are plenty of those,” remarked the Schoolgirl with disdain: “softshell liberals sparring at the ghosts of economic problems.”

“Neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring,” said the Banker stoutly.

“Do you know any more atheist tales?” asked the Old Lady. The Centenarist said:

I
N
a small coastal village near the same city, an old Italian kept a fish store, and his initials were J. C., which stood for Jesus Christ, the name given him by his parents, without baptism. A priest who came to the village was surprised to find that J. C. was utterly ignorant of the Christian religion, and that no-one had taken the trouble to instruct him, because he was black and had come, a pagan boy, from Africa. He approached him and described to him the advantages of joining the Roman Catholic church, and he endeavoured to give him religious information sandwiched into his ordinary conversation. The black fishmonger was not refractory, but whenever it came to the question of conversion and baptism, he jibbed. At last the priest, anxious for this conversion, became extremely pressing, and J. C. said cautiously, “It costs a lot, your baptism and conversion, don't it?” The priest hesitating, at length said: