The Salzburg Tales (56 page)

My house is a comfort to me. It stands on the lower slopes of the hill. All that country is hilly, and some of the villages are called “-cote” which means they say, a hill, or a hilly upland, or at least the side of a hill, thus, Eastcote, Westcote, Northcote, and so on. It also means a cottage, they say, and a lot of the houses thereabouts are called something with “-cote” in it too. So when we wanted to give a name to my house, we wanted one with “-cote” in it, to show it stood on the side of a hill: we thought of Downcote, Greencote, and things like that: my second brother thought those were too romantic, and wanted to call it Mildred, or Martin; but we could not decide at all. Then my eldest brother, who likes a joke, said, “Call it Overcote.” The next time I came home I saw nailed on the fence, a rough piece of board with “Overcote” painted on it in white paint. The silly fool had put it up there for a joke: it is still there, for my brother would not let anyone take it down. Everyone does not see the joke, and when they do, they begin to laugh: my brother says gruffly: “What's the matter?” but he is pleased. He likes a joke, silly jokes they are often, but sometimes they are not bad. One summer, when there was no rain at all, all the gardens were withered, and the shrubs did not flower, or only flowered to be burnt brown. When I came home I saw that my brother had made the finest roses bloom in our garden, and I got on to the garden path before I saw that they were paper roses. Everybody in the village used to crane their necks and wonder how we got such fine roses without rain, and without using a watering-can, and how they kept so long; but almost no-one knew they were paper roses, until, of course, they had bloomed for above a month.

But my youngest brother is brainy: it is a pity he did not have a University education: he would have gone a long way, been something great. He often says strange things to me: “You read a lot, sis: what do they say is beyond the solar system?” Then he asked me about Einstein, and I explained to him as best I could, not very well of course: he understood that too. He is a day labourer, and gets jobs digging fields, washing floors, carpentering, or anything. He is very handy and has a regular knack: he puts clocks in order, can fix up a basin or a sort of rough W.C. he invented himself from an illustration he saw, or do a bit of painting very neatly. He sells bits of fretwork for Christmas. He saw in a paper that it is impossible to square the circle. I didn't even know myself that it couldn't be done, and I've been on the Continent and in America, and he finds it out there, in the village. He went to the new schoolmaster, made him explain, and when he heard what it was, he said: “I can do that,” and he worked it out for the bottom of a well, and sent it in to the paper. But he said: “They won't take any notice of me, sis: I don't know the lingo to put it in.”

That's what I mean, have what brains you may, there is something you can't get hold of; you must know the technical language, and then you must know what is behind it all. He should have gone to the University: my father did our brothers no sort of good.

He likes to read in an old encyclopaedia I sent him home once, Bert, our youngest brother. He sits there until late at night, by the kerosene lamp, in his dirty corduroys covered with mud from the field he has been digging, reading the articles. Once when I saw him, a sudden thought struck me: you know, after you have seen a thing for a long time, its meaning suddenly strikes you. I thought: “That's quite sad, in a way!” I meant, you know, in the sense that they talk about the struggle for knowledge.

He got a book on engineering out of the lending library, and he got one on hieroglyphics: he wanted to learn Egyptian grammar just because he saw it in the lending library. But, a funny thing— one time I went home, and I was stripping his bed, and I found
a crumpled old piece of paper with hieroglyphics written carefully on it. When he came home for lunch I said: “What is that, Bert?” He blushed, and tried to take it from me, but I hid it in my dress. Then he grabbed me by the elbows and started jigging me round the room, the silly fool, laughing fit to kill himself, and singing: “It says, We ALL hate the Old Man, We ALL hate the Old Man!” But I wouldn't mind betting they were Egyptian swear-words: for that's what boys always go for first, when they learn a language.

We are a devoted family. They are good boys, and don't run after the girls. But my eldest brother is a bit morbid and goes to the public-house to get drunk pretty often. You would think a school-master would have done something with his sons.

O
N
the seventh evening, the company was in full evening dress in honour of the first performance of “Der Rosenkavalier”. Some of the guests who strolled in on the first day and made themselves known to the audience of “Jedermann” had already gone, to Innsbruck, to Vienna, to other cities of Europe; and new guests had appeared, who had fallen quietly into the habits of this lively, ephemeral society of friends. Tonight, they were in no mood to listen to tales; but after the performance, they were too flushed and gay and pleased with their costumes to go to bed, and they collected round the Centenarist in Tomaselli's cafe and exacted some amusement from him, before they went home through the dark town to bed.

I
N
a castle by the gloomy lakes of Babiagora between Hungary and Poland, my grandmother when a girl served as a lady's maid to a rich noblewoman, of middle age. It was well known that there was a secret chamber in the house, but no-one could locate it, and the many tales of mystery and apparitions which circulated among the
peasants and servants, late at night, or by their firesides, seemed to be without foundation. There were some ancient chambers hung with tapestry where mice and bats squeaked, and the old canopies that covered the beds and reached to the ceiling made the bedrooms sometimes forbidding, but only strangers felt uncomfortable there.

My grandmother was a lively and inventive girl, obliging and confiding, she had won the affection of the master of the house, but not of the mistress, who was lazy, insolent and self-contained. But my grandmother was dying of curiosity to find out the truth about the secret chamber and she risked discovery many a time, tapping and examining the walls and trying at all the doors. She could get no plan of the house, but she calculated the sizes and heights of the rooms and went outside to see if there was any space left over. Soon she thought of marking the windows so that she could see if there were any windows she had not had access to. The master and mistress were away for lunch one day. She went round the house opening all the windows wide, on the second floor, and when she went outside and circumambulated the house, she discovered that she had left closed three windows together. She started back towards the house to find in which room these windows were, when she ran into her masters on the drive; they seemed flustered and immediately began to scold her and all the household because the windows had been left open on so fresh a day of Autumn. She had little opportunity after this to explore, although one night she was discovered by the baron examining a wall covered by a great tapestry that hung above the stairhead. The baron pinched her thighs, laughed at her and made an attempt to take her to his own apartment; this adventure cured her of wandering at night.

Some time after this there was an outcry in the corridors at night. Running upstairs with two other young servants, she saw in the corridor, unlighted except for the moon, a hideous creature, about four feet tall, with large phosphorescent eyes, a high nose and a bony forehead, in a thin drawn face. It was clothed in a woollen suit of
some sort. It seemed to have no legs or arms; its hands hung from its shoulders and its feet were fixed to its buttocks. The creature was gesticulating with its hands, speaking a jargon unintelligible to the servants, and occasionally sighing heavily, while around it the baroness and an old manservant were fussing, trying to persuade it to go along the corridor. My grandmother and the two young servants were sent away and, within a week or two, had all three been dismissed for some minor fault. My grandmother then concluded that the creature was a monstrous member of the family, perhaps the baroness's brother or child, which had grown up out of sight of all men, and was kept in the secret chamber. Some years later, when she was far away, she read in some sensational paper of the discovery in the Babiagora lakes, of a lake-monster which had been washed up on to the shore, dead; and which had been sold to a circus. The picture of the monster reminded her strongly of the apparition in the castle: but whether they were one and the same, or whether she completed her sketch of the apparition from the picture, I don't know. Doubtless, however, some of the ghosts of haunted castles, which scare strangers but live peaceably with the tenants, are these unfortunates born monsters.

There are the old servants, or last survivors of some decayed line, hoboes, also, who lodge in deserted houses, and go at night from window to window with candles: there are poltergeists imagined by the malicious and insane, and by property-devaluators: and bogies on the payrolls of conspirators, moon-shiners and counterfeiters who report for work as regularly as we do: and there is the overwrought imagination starting at every floating cloak on every clothesline, and people who jump out of their skin through too long frequentation of Mr Poe and Mr Leroux. But I heard a quaint ghost-story which belongs to none of these classes.

A physician, in a family of physicians, died and left his skeleton to his son. He told his son to have no superstitious fears, because he would never haunt him nor any member of the human race as long as the skeleton was permitted to live in the living quarters of the
family and to be present at consultations. The son and family, far from superstitious, smiled at this last jest of the old free-thinker, and in accordance with his whim, had the skeleton set up and placed in a closet in the doctor's consultation room. Everyone came to think about it as a somewhat cheerful relic of the old man. Many years after, the son fell sick, and during his convalescence spent some months at the seashore. In his place a young locum tenens was brought in. The young man prided himself on his modern technique and especially on his success with women patients. He asked permission to remove the skeleton to the attic during the doctor's absence, and the family permitted it. Then curious sounds were heard in the attic: the skylight was repeatedly opened and shut, boxes bumped about and there was all night a rattling sound as if large dice were being shaken in a large dice-box. The locum tenens begged no-one to take any notice—it was only the wind, he said, or the rats: and, in secret he asked the mistress to keep an eye on the maid, a foreign girl, a little feeble-minded, but cunning and very devoted to the master. However, the maid came crying to the mistress one morning and complained that she had not slept all night on account of soft, strange noises in the attic room next to hers. At length they all went in a body, opened the attic door, and perceived that the bones of the skeleton lay all in a heap, but that nothing else had been moved. They put the skeleton together again, installed it in the cabinet downstairs and polished the brass knob on the cabinet door. After that nothing happened. A few years after that, the family decided to move out of their old house into a fashionable apartment uptown. During the packing the skeleton was carefully boxed and shipped off with the rest of the furniture: but there was no room for it in the new apartment and it was left in its box in the basement with other superfluous things. Then they began to hear footsteps on the stairs at night, noises in the basement, the movement of the heavy basement door, and the sound of soft complaining in the consultation room. Also they observed that coal was disappearing at an abnormal rate. But whenever anyone appeared with a candle to see, he saw nothing:
although he sometimes heard steps running before him downstairs. The doctor, now an old man, smiled and said:

“It is father remembering his will again. We must have him up: much as I love him, I cannot pay for his lunches among the coal-sacks: we must have him up.”

The next day, the skeleton was put back in the consultation room, and the manifestations ceased.

The skeleton was passed on to the son of the family who was now a doctor and who religiously kept his grandfather's skeleton on view, rather pleased to have it as a proof of genial eccentricity in the family. But his son, a brilliant nerve-specialist, very hard-headed and business-like, unaware of the family tradition, perhaps, had the old skeleton demounted and, yielding to a sentiment of his wife's, gave it to a Y.M.C.A. lecturer in medical science. Immediately he began to notice disorders in his papers. Little death's-heads were scrawled on the cards in his filing-cabinet, his nurse complained that she felt faint every time she went near the corner of the room where the skeleton cupboard had formerly stood, and noises were heard all night in the consulting room. The doctor crept to the door of the consulting room one night and heard distinctly a voice giving a recommendation, as if to a nervous patient, and then heard pages rustling. He opened the door, switched on the light and saw one of his books lying wide open on the desk. Then footsteps ran up and down the stairs, and when he returned to his bed he saw quite well a skeleton, small and clear, on his coverlet. He went to see a brother nerve-specialist the next day, took sedatives and went off into the country, furious that his wits had given way to such vulgar visions. His mother wrote to him and told him the old tradition of the family. He laughed at it, and was disagreeably surprised, when he returned, to hear once more whispered consultations in his study at night, and to see the little bony gentleman sitting on his bedrail. They sent for the skeleton to the Y.M.C.A. lecturer, and although it was now dusty and brown, set it up once more in the study. This nerve-specialist's son …

“For the love of God,” cried the Musician: “is there no end to this frightful skeleton?”