The Salzburg Tales (55 page)

But if he ever got something more serious, quick, he sent the patient off to another doctor. He did not like trouble, Theodor, and so he used to sleep every afternoon, and when the first train came through from Koenigsberg, he would not go down to see it. He was angry because he heard the canaries cheep at the engine's whistle. In the evening when he was playing cards and everyone wanted to talk about it, “What is it?” he said; “A very simple thing, I'll explain the principle to you in five minutes, but not now, not now. There is no wonder in it”; and he got angry when he heard the Polish servant girl repeat what she had heard the townspeople say, “
Ein wunder Gottes
!”

Poor Theodor! When he had lived in that house twenty-five years, his wife, Eugenie, wanted to move to a better house. A fine lady, Eugenie. She sat all day before a table, with a d'oyley, and on the d'oyley, a cup of tea, and that is all she did in her life. They moved to a better house, more elegant, but with no back room; and poor Theodor had a stroke; he could not move. In the excitement Eugenie could not be bothered with the canaries, so they sold them, and eight months after poor Theodor died. After the canaries were sold, he used to lie there in the elegant salon they had, with rich cushioned seats and portraits of our old father who had been a town councillor, and mother, with a black silk wig on, and the pictures of our grandmother and grandfather; and his own picture and Eugenie's; and the picture of their children who were married and of his grandchildren. He would let his eyes stay in the room for hours
and never turn his eyes from all those pictures, to the fine curtains and d'oyleys Eugenie had bought. Sometimes he would have the servant bring him a volume of Heine from the booktable and he would laugh a little, but he was very quiet all day in the house, and it was as if he did not hear the canaries and thought they were asleep under their felt covers. Eight months after he died. He did not like the new apartment.

L
AUGHING
irrepressibly, the company rose, dispersed and slowly wandered downhill, and all through lunch-time, one heard people laughing suddenly as they recalled the tales of the Old Lady.

In the afternoon they found that the Public Stenographer was getting ready to leave Salzburg, to go on to England, and the Frenchwoman, in the absence of the Viennese Conductor, brought her to the salon and insisted on her telling a tale to the women before she left. The Public Stenographer flushed, and refused, at first, but she suddenly made up her mind to it, and sitting down, plunged into her story without a preface.

 

J
UDE
Martin, our father, was schoolmaster in our village, Sidbury-Nine-Churches. There is one church in Sidbury, and it has a Saxon tower, but you can see eight other belfries cropping out above the slopes and downs. The train does not run near there: it is very much the country.

My father was a free-thinker. He attended church every Sunday, coming in late to make a disturbance, and sitting in the front row to laugh and make remarks aloud about Darwin and Galileo to annoy the minister during the sermons. The minister prayed aloud
for the salvation of my father's soul, to his face, every Sunday. We were shamed by the conduct of our father, but some of the villagers laughed in private, when the minister would not hear of it. Father used to go to the back-room of the public-house after Church to prove the Government was wrong, and to prove there was no hell: and he would come home laughing provokingly, mimicking the villager who said, taking his pipe from his cracked yellow teeth: “Yes, but, schoolmaster, them volcanoes, where does the fire come from?” and to whom he replied: “The earth has a boil and the boil busts.” We never laughed at that, although we could not resist listening to his highly-coloured stories: we expected to see the walls crack some day at his profanity and irreligion. An old villager said to me privately, taking me aside after the service once: “It ain't right, Milly: it ain't me that wishes your father harm, but he should watch out: the Lord will remember them words some day.”

I remember the morning services on Sundays, the only days we were decently dressed, and wore boots and stockings. Mother put on her greenish-black dress with the pleated bodice and high collar, that we thought made her look so respectable: we were ignorant then. I remember the sun falling in through the clear glass, and the dust of my father's snuff hovering in the sunbeam, and falling on his greasy, greenish, alpaca coat. Our father always wore a dirty coat and neckcloth, and long, dirty, black hair, as a protest against respectability, I thought then, designed as all his being was, to annoy and irritate people. Now I suppose it was because he was poor, had six children and an ignorant village girl for a wife.

The minister would pray in a loud severe voice sent over my father's head, but whenever he came to this point, “
to the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the same
,
by his infinite goodness and mercy
”, my father would sneeze regularly, and the motes of snuff danced madly in the sunbeams; and our mother would blush deep, deep, for she never got used to her husband's being an outlaw. Father would recite the Lord's Prayer, without kneeling, in a falsetto high-church twang, which made the little boys giggle: he lathered them if they
giggled in school. When it came to the Anthem, my father stood up and sang out full and clear, in his strong baritone: in singing he was not a mocker, for it suited him to sing.

We got the idea that our father was a wicked man and one likely to lead our minds into error. In school, when he was supposed to teach Scripture, our father would read the Epistle of St. Jude, for example, “…
Even as Sodom and Gomorrah
…
Likewise also these filthy dreamers that defile the flesh
,
despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities
”, and he would teach the children that Sodom and Gomorrah were rich, independent cities full of free men, and that they were destroyed by accident. I don't say he believed what he said, but he had to pretend to be smart, and always up to everybody's game, even when it came to what he read in books. I don't know what he didn't teach those children, all to excuse himself for having a dirty coat, and calling out in Church. But fortunately, they didn't understand: they all left school too young to get influenced.

After church, our mother would take our hands, and hurry home to make dinner. Father stood about the churchyard to speak to the minister, or turn his back on him, just as it suited him, to take snuff and look for Patsy Blake.

Patsy Blake was a village girl, fifteen years old when he first took up with her, an ignorant creature, but pretty and bold, the sort that men seem to admire. Our father put her in charge of the infants' department to teach the little ones their ABC, although she had left school when she was twelve and had never known anything. It was just to keep her near him and to stop her from seeing the boys. The whole village knew that there was something going on between my father and Patsy Blake; we knew too, even the little ones; but our father was one who somehow never cared, and never got punished or ostracised like anyone else.

Patsy Blake came home with father every Sunday to dinner, and mother waited on her hand and foot. She sat in her chair laughing with him and flirting with her eyes, while mother carried the dishes in and out. We said to mother, “Don't wait on her.” Mother pretended
nothing was wrong, but she would stay a long time in the kitchen between meat and pudding, wiping her eyes on the oven-cloth, till father called out to her for the pudding: then one of us would go to help her and would pretend to jostle in the passage, so that we would have time to wipe the flour off her eyes. Those two were never ashamed. We used to say to mother, “Mother, it's all right, it's only father's way: there's nothing between them:” but we could see things were wrong. I don't say they were guilty, but our mother died fifteen years ago and father married Patsy Blake in a year. I am sorry for her now: he treats her as badly as he did the other, and sits whole days in his chair, reading his books, answering in rude superior language when she speaks, laughing in his snobbish way at jokes she can't understand, eating what she brings him without a word.

Father shoved his children into any class at all, at school, and often sent us home to do any job that occurred to him. His sons he shouted at angrily all the time, degrading them before the other boys, calling them “thickheads” and “donkeys” and the girls he ignored altogether: the better for us. The three boys left school at twelve, but he kept the girls on to fourteen so that we could teach.

I ran away to London when I was fourteen, got a job as a nursemaid, and studied French and German. As soon as I could, I sent for my two younger sisters, and got them to study, so that we could go into business together.

In 1914 I got a job in Antwerp, and took my sister with me, sure I could get her a job: both of us went over the very week war was declared. There was nothing for us to do, and we could not get back: so we sat round with other foreigners. Every day in the park, my sister met a German and, talking together, I suppose they took a fancy to each other. I did not see much in him myself: he was rather stout. She was the beauty of the family: we knew she would marry. She went to see him in the internment camp and it was kind of agreed that they should marry when he got out. Whether she married him to keep her word, or because she fancied it, I don't know. You think you know a person all your life, and you don't know the first thing about them.

We all saved up for our sister's trousseau and gave her a fine one. She promised to send me a long letter telling me all that happened on her wedding night, for I was thirty-five then, and I felt a bit silly not knowing those things. She wrote me and told me all that happened up to ten o'clock, and then she said, “The next morning …” It is like that with all things: you can never know what you most want to know. It is like being in the Secretariat of the League of Nations at Geneva. There you sit in a big room, and the building is full of doors leading into inner sanctums of all sorts. You get old and you never find out what is behind everything: you have an idea that languages are being carried on under your nose in a secret code. I don't say it is so. Here I am fifty, anyhow, and I don't know what marriage is: and they say it's a woman's whole existence. Well, my nights aren't spent in bed. I often work at the office until two or three o'clock in the morning doing rush jobs for which we are paid double. We work in the biggest cities in the world, for there there are always people who want you to work at any time of the day or night and who will pay you double for it. Then, we are secret: we can do the minutes of a Commission of Special Inquiry, and the secret papers of the witnesses, without either side knowing what we have in the office. Then, the office is never shut, the men say: “Those stenographers aren't afraid to work, they don't watch the clock, because they don't have boys waiting for them at six o'clock.” So you get work: and we've been able to save up enough between us, in our lives: our old age is provided for. I also have a house I built at Sidbury, which I rent to my three brothers, who are not married. Every time we get a holiday we go back there and live in our house. We have gone back each year, from Antwerp, Berlin, Geneva, Paris and New York, to rest, and to get new clothes, for we can only get the things that really suit us in Birmingham. When we go home we live in my house. My brothers live alone. They never build a fire in winter and they never change their clothes or clean the house. When we go home we wash their bedclothes for them, and their clothes, and clean the place up, and cook for them. They like having
us home, and we like to be where we were born, and where we will live in our old age.

Sometimes, Patsy Martin, our stepmother, comes over to my house, when my brothers are out, and we say: “Stay for the day, stepmother,” but she is afraid that father will know she has been. He is old now, and he writes to us all, to Paris, New York, Berlin and so forth, to come home and make friends with him.

But how can one make friends with a man like that? It would be friends one day, and enemies, and “donkeys” and “blockheads” the next. It is perhaps wrong to speak that way of a father: but he let his children wander out all over the world, and never a word to stop them, or say goodbye, glad to get rid of them. Now he thinks it romantic to sit in his chair and write sentimental letters about his being a poor old man alone, hated by his children: and he asks his daughters if they are not ashamed to bring down his grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. But he has strength enough to go to church every Sunday, and bait the minister, and say loudly in the Litany, “
That it may please thee to forgive our enemies
,
persecutors and slanderers
,
and to turn their hearts
:
We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord!
” and to laugh at his son, if he sees one of them outside, and say, “
What a clodhopper
!”

We never go near our father, although he lives only a quarter of a mile away. You can't forgive the things he does. For example, one time I went home, our brother Leonard came to meet me, and stopped on the way home at the public-house to get some beer. A labourer, one of our friends, saw me sitting in the trap Len borrowed to fetch me, and went along and told father I had come home. Father came down the road while I was sitting there, came up into the trap and kissed me, and asked me to wait for him while he went inside to see Len, for he had so much to say to me. He went into the public house and stayed an hour: Len came out and said he had not seen father. At last I went through the bar, into the back yard, but no one had seen father, and at last, they told me he had gone home half-an-hour before. I went to my house, and when I passed, I saw him sitting on the verandah of his house. When I went by, he laughed
and called out, “How long did you wait for me?” The next day he sent me a lachrymose letter, asking me to call and see him, saying that I was treating my old father shamefully. He can write a good letter, too: but I can't read his letters any more, they are so touching, you almost begin to be sorry for him, and they are so insincere: he is all the time laughing up his sleeve at you if you come; and he cries if you stay away. So I haven't seen him for nearly six years now, although I pass his house on the way to mine.