The Salzburg Tales (51 page)

“No, it will cost you nothing.”

“But afterwards,” said the fishmonger, “you have to put something in the box on Sundays, eh? I know, cause I asked.”

“You needn't,” said the priest a little stiffly, for the village was small, “if you bring a true heart and complete faith, it is enough.”

The fishmonger hesitated for some time longer, however, and perhaps even pondered this serious question, as he sold his fish and went out with his nets, or as he mended his nets, or rolled in the sun with his dogs on the beach; but he said no word to the priest. He thought to himself: “It is the priest's business to get me: it means more business for him.” At last the priest, a weak man with a little vanity, said:

“Giuliani, if you are converted and baptised and truly belong to the Catholic Church, I will buy my fish from you and speak about you to my parishioners so that they will patronise you.” But the fishmonger was well patronised already, and he still hesitated. At last, the priest came into his shop one morning, bought a bream from him and argued with him so soundly that the black fishmonger relented and agreed to come to the priest's house for instruction. All went well; the fishmonger showed a natural aptitude for learning, and possessed a good memory. The news of the fishmonger's studies spread far and wide and he did a great business.

The day came that the fishmonger was to be examined on his beliefs, and his examination proceeded satisfactorily. Then, thinking to make it easier for the convert by mentioning things familiar to him, the bishop said:

“Do you believe that Christ performed many miracles?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that when the multitude followed Christ to the shores of the sea and were hungry, he took five loaves and two fishes and brake them into pieces and sent the pieces among the five thousand, and that they did eat thereof and were satisfied?”

“Yes,” said the fishmonger: “that they were hungry, I believe: that there were five loaves and two fishes, I believe: that Christ broke them into bits I believe, and that there were five thousand who ate, I believe: and that they were satisfied …” he hesitated.

“Well,” said the bishop.

“No,” said the fishmonger stubbornly. “Two fish! That they were satisfied I cannot believe.”

So they had to accept him without the miracle of the five thousand, but to the end he distrusted a body of scripture so contrary to ichthyophagy.

I
N
this way ended the sixth day of the Tales.

 

O
N
the morning of the seventh day, climbing the Calvary Way to the Capuchin Wood, the Festival guests passed a tatterdemalion family of woodcutters and their wives and children. The women, bronzed, hollow-cheeked and yellow-haired, stumbled down the path with their stockings round their ankles, and argued sharply with the men: the children, little serious scarecrows, dressed in their fathers' hand-me-downs, carried bunches of wood-violets to sell in the town to visitors. The whole party stopped and blocked the way while one of the women hitched up her skirt and pinned her stocking to her shirt. When she saw the guests approaching she began to titter loudly, and the men stood up close against her: the children stood to one side with alacrity and one of them offered a bunch of violets to the Doctress.

The child's father pulled it sharply aside by its sleeve and said, in his peasant German, “You know very well you are not allowed to sell here in the wood.”

The elegants went on and the decadent Poet said:

“What a flavour it gives to culture to be in a country where these miseries exist: in a country where there is no peasantry there is no true refinement: civilisation lives by contrasts: a gentleman can only be, in a land of helots, where he can be out of sound of the counting-house and so far from the threshing-floor that he can study
it objectively as an artistic unit. Thank God for a country where a man need not know where his money comes from!”

The Balkan Lawyer was not listening to the Poet, but was looking about him, and at the vanguard of the woodcutters' party, an isolated couple now walking down the hill, hand in hand, as if he were living in a dream. At the top of the hill, they sat down within a group of trees, and the Master of the Day pointed to the Balkan Lawyer, who began immediately to tell his tale.

 

O
NE
of my ancestors was sent to the colonies for an epigram; my great-grandfather was governor of a gaol, my grandfather, Speaker in a colonial legislative assembly and my father a life member of the Selden Society: in my cradle my mother crooned me to sleep with the more lyric passages in Dicey, Maitland and Blackstone. Thus we have profited by poetic justice.

When I was a child I dreamed one night that I saw lying asleep inside thorns, a woman with a heart-shaped bodice, a wig of steel shavings and a bicornuate headdress made of two ink-horns. Her eyeballs rolled and tears ran freely from the lids and watered the ground. Aconite grew round her bed, the legs of which had long sunk deep in the earth and been eaten by roots and lichens: her pillow was stuffed with nettles and her coverlet was made of leaves fallen through the years from overhanging plane-trees: but the leaves of the plane-trees were papers, signed, sealed, beribboned. In one hand hung a cat-o'-nine-tails: in the other was a leather purse with drawstrings, overflowing with money. On the woman's dress was a pair
of jeweller's scales, so small and delicate that they could have weighed the thousandth-part of a fly's eye, but their links had come apart and the plates had fallen, like cups, over her breasts. She struggled in her glassy state. By the bedside two lackeys in black clothes leaned on their staffs asleep, and each had a slave's collar in gold with his name on: one had the white, aristocratic, conservative, tarnished face of a Chief Justice grown old, and had on his collar the word “Intention”, and the other, with pince-nez, young, cunning, handsome, affected, bore the name “Letter”. On the pillow sat, wide awake, a monkey with a nimbus looking at himself in a mirror and arranging the lady's curls in true lovers' knots, and above, hanging in the canopy, was a bat, half-angel, half attorney-general, fast asleep, and from his mouth a scroll issued with the words, “Ideal Justice”.

I awakened and found that it was morning, the sun was shining and it was my twelfth birthday. My father had just come into the room with a gift, and I told him my dream, asking him who the two personages on the bed might be.

“The lady is unquestionably traditional justice,” said my father, looking at me quizzically: “and you must have stayed up half the night making up so fine a dream!”

“No, indeed,” I protested: “but who was the monkey?”

“Poetic justice, beyond dispute,” said my father.

I said, “Father, what is poetic justice?”

He adjusted his pearl stickpin, and replied:

“The hand of heaven making an apple-pie bed for the man who cooked the accounts for the sleeping partner; a city fired to warm a virgin who caught cold eluding a moonbeam in a bower on a summer night: nonagenarian Dives who stole oranges when a guttersnipe of ten, dying of the pip: rapknuckle for rape, rosemary for rue, Roland for Oliver, holocaust for hankypanky, Sodom and Gomorrah for pinochle, two Macbeths for a Duncan, for tit three tats: so with a quip-pro-quo tickle the ribs of the superannuated saints and stuff with prunes and prisms the last yawn of the third act.”

“Be ashamed, Collingwood!” said my grandmother. (Collingwood was my father's Christian name.)

“Euripides for a peccadillo,” concluded my father, and winked at me, for he saw that my grandmother had a Martyrology for me as a birthday gift. At any rate, from one cause and another, I became the partisan of the improbable.

Now when I graduated I spent four years in a law firm as chief clerk and I was two years after that in my chambers waiting for briefs. My firm had promised to supply me with them, but there had been a slight disagreement between me and one of the partners and they only sent me paltry affairs. I had nothing at all to do and not much money. In the daytime I worked over the evidence of all the contemporary cases, and went over old rolls and records. Now, I could often see the whole mass of evidence uneasy and restive with the motions of some essential fact buried alive and never mentioned, or some chief witness never called, and saw the arguments revolving round a spindle of circumstance which was not there at all. I wondered how it felt to be that poor wretch, slandered, accused and wrongfully found guilty, taking his burden of injustice into the next world without reparation, after being buried alive in a stone grave in this. He could not be happy, he surely walked up and down, biting his nails and tearing out his hair, grown long in the grave with excessive travail of the skull, or else he sat dumb in some special limbo waiting for an apologist. I wanted to run out on the nameless gravestones of ignominious deaths and shout, “Tell me the secret, old boy: tell it to the moles: let me ferret it out and I'll set you at rest!”

Well, it was fortune herself pushing me into this path. That was how I began my serious business. Imagine that the Viennese jurist Potago and I, in the forest at Baden-Baden last summer, came face to face with a grey-haired couple walking with their hands joined, and silent. When the woman saw me, she cried out and went on her knees and began to kiss my hand, while the man took my other hand and pressed it. That was a fine moment, but humiliating, touching.
I said a few words to them in Magyar, they saluted Potago, whom they recognised, in German, and went their way. Potago asked me a question about them, and I told him.

“That is Henna, the wife of Cok, deceased, and Joce, once her lover, now her husband. They were imprisoned for poisoning Cok and stealing a third part of the inheritance due to Cok's sons. Five years after the sentence, the case was re-tried and they were pronounced innocent. That made a sensation a couple of years ago.”

Potago remembered the case and pressed me to tell him the circumstances, and so I recalled them all and I was only the other day writing them down.

During a dispute over a will, police were informed that Cok, deceased, had only two sons and heirs, Leo and Meir, by a first wife, Elena, and that between these two sons by inheritance all his goods were divisible: that Henna, the second wife, acting on Cok's weakness in his dotage, persuaded him to add a codicil to his will giving to any children she should have by Cok, an equal share in his estate, and that she had pretended to have a child, which she got from a nurse, and that this child had died by illness, and that Henna then, upon the death of Cok, conspiring with Joce her lover, had wickedly and falsely appropriated what she could of Cok's goods, to recompense herself, as she pretended, for a third of the inheritance which she pretended was due to her: and that Joce, her lover, had been a party to all this: and that further, the death of Cok was exceedingly suspicious, that he had complained of continuous and increasing pains before death and had slowly died, as if by poisoning, and that the doctor who attended him was willing to testify that Henna had asked him to give Cok arsenic in such quantities as would cause him to die quickly.

The brothers, Leo and Meir, sons of Cok, asserted that on the night of the death of Cok, when they were in the country on business, Joce had been admitted by Henna, by a curtilage adjoining the house, where Cok's treasure was concealed, and had there taken an amount equalling fifty thousand schillings' worth of gold and
silver, gold and silver cups, a book of Priscian, De Constructione, an ancient Logic, some clothes of Cok, rings, girdles and pieces of gold which the brothers knew that their father had owned, household linen, plate and cutlery, some pictures and some bowls of mazer-wood, and had caused the said treasure to be carried by night up the river to a place where the said Joce resided, and that there the treasure had been divided between them; and that since the burial of their father, Henna had lived with Joce openly as she had discreetly before, so that it might be seen that Henna had every reason of interest and sentiment, to see Cok laid by.

In reply, Henna stated that the two brothers, Leo and Meir, sons of Cok's first wife, Elena, had been jealous of her from the day of her entry into their father's house, when she had been confided to his care, as his ward: that being a virgin, they had approached her with dishonest proposals, and when she had refused, they had turned against her and had ever since vented their spite on her. That Cok had altered his will of his own volition after his marriage to her, that formerly it had divided his whole treasure and belongings between Leo and Meir, but that now he made a codicil to say that the third part of all he possessed should be divided equally between Henna and the child that might be born of their marriage, and that if the child should miscarry or come to grief after birth, she, Henna, should have the whole third part, provided always that the child was Cok's child, and furthermore, that the same should apply to any child born within nine months after Cok's death.

Henna testified that Cok was a sick man, old and infirm, of a very hard temper, and suspicious, so that he sometimes listened to the counsels of Leo and Meir, whom he disliked, and sometimes not. That Cok had died in great suffering as the result of an internal disease, but not by poison, unless it were administered by an unknown hand, and that the arsenic had been administered to him by the doctor's prescription and no more than the doctor had prescribed, but that towards the end, Henna, out of pity, had besought the doctor to give him so much morphia as to end his pain.
The doctor had refused her, but had understood that her entreaty arose out of pity for Cok and not out of villainy, but the doctor would testify against her now, for he had become a creature of Leo and Meir.

Henna further testified that she had had a child, Cok's son, within a year after their marriage, and that it had been born overseas, in Turin, at the house of a friend, Cok being present, and that the child had been brought home for a few years and then sent overseas again to Turin, and had stayed there till its sixth year, when it had been brought home again and had stayed in the house of a merchant named Valentino, and had there died and been buried in the town in which he lived.