The Salzburg Tales (6 page)

There was also there a Chinaman, the F
OREIGN
C
ORRESPONDENT
of a French newspaper. He spoke five languages, and all without a foreign accent. He had studied in Universities in America, France and Germany. He was a passionate patriot, but he said little about his own country in Western European society, preferring to talk about his childhood when he had lived in sheltered calm. He had a high forehead and round eyes with arched brows like the warriors in old paintings; he wore European dress. He spoke in clear tones like a clapper falling on thin ivory; his red mouth smiled sweetly though with melancholy, and everything he said came out with compressed visionary epithets, as if his imagination flowered impetuously, quicker than the tongue. He expected many more years of trouble for his country: this cloud sat over all he said and thought. He sat shining and neat in black clothes and shining shoes, with smooth hair and bright eyes, resembling a newt or other smart black water animal, or
a legendary dragon very small, carved on an urn of genii from the old tales.

Next came sliding and bustling across the centre of the place, from beneath the archway, a small-footed man with a thin face. Whenever the centenary of the birth or death of a great composer of music approached, he flew about the world with propaganda, forming committees, cajoling Departments of Education and of the Fine-Arts, flattering musicians, bribing publishing companies, engaging publicists, writing, speaking, wheedling, persuading, his head swarming with wily, original schemes for making the world take an interest in Haydn, Brahms, Schubert, or whatever other musician was a hundred years born or dead. It was he who first conceived the idea of finishing the
Unfinished Symphony
, and he who wrote and distributed to schoolmasters, mayors and representatives of the people, the “
Few Thoughts on the Place of Music in the Home and in the Market-place
”, in which he worked the threads of patriotism and the family, public education and private sensibility, Schubert and the wares of gramophone companies. He had a fine ear, long with a large orifice, and he sang in an angelic falsetto which resembled at will a wood or string instrument, or a desert voice rising through the sharp edges of the sand. He knew many thousand themes from the master musicians and many peasant songs and single strains picked up here and there on the earth: he had as friends all the musicians and was able to make a child understand a theme. He loved to sit in a large audience and be moved with its emotions, as if his heart was a silver disc recording an orchestral piece. He was as sympathetic as a nervous beauty to his hearers and endeavoured to enchant all by showing the glittering facets of his talents. His eyes with animal intensity and sagacity, blue and oval, darted left and right: he got into his seat with the movement of a bird settling into a thick tree, disappearing in the crowd. His clothes had cost him a great deal but seemed unsuitable to his movements and habit of mind: he should have worn a smock, or Persian trousers. His shoe might have concealed the long tip of a seraphic wing or the long toe of a satyr's
foot. When Death approached in the Miracle Play, he shuddered and cast his eyes discreetly from side to side to see how the audience took it, and when the heavenly bells and voices rang out, his eyes sent out points of light and his dark-veined thin hand played delicately from the soft pale wrist on which was a gold chain. He had a dark crafty profile, like an ancient Venetian, with a long, pointed nose and thin lips; he was as attentive as a lizard. He hummed ever and again to himself like syrinx when the tide is rising in the reeds. He was full of tales as the poets of Persia: he unwound endlessly his fabrics, as from a spool the silks of Arabia. He was a publicist, a salesman, but of so peculiar a sort, specialising in the centenaries of famous men, that they invented a name and called him T
HE
C
ENTENARIST
.

There was near him, amused by him, sitting with the five millionaires, youngest of the six wealthy men that the other guests in derision called the
Gold Trust
, a very thin young man, with a long Dutch nose; a B
ANKER
he was, from London. He had a sea-going yacht, three motor-cars, a house in Grosvenor Square, a house in the country, three racehorses and twelve servants: he gave five hundred guineas for a horse-race and a silver cup for polo, and he went each weekend to France to get the sun. But in town his chief amusement was to go to the pictures with his wife seven times a week. He abhorred the opera which he thought was noisy and the theatre which he thought old-fashioned and wordy. He lived in the depths of his house alone with his wife; and they went about as inseparable as twins. He dined off an omelette and a chop badly served by his lazy and spoiled French chef, and sipped a glass of bad, red wine from a bin in the pantry furnished by his thief of a butler. He knew his servants robbed him but could not bear to sack them (he said), because they would thereby lose their jobs. He did not like to go to friends' houses to dine for he could not understand the sense of their flippancies and their high-church passions drove him mad; and he never entertained, for he liked to live at home with his wife alone.

If he met a pretty girl, he looked for a rich husband for her to marry: if he was amused by a journalist he mentioned his name to
some cabinet minister to get him influence: if he thought an author hardworking and mild, he would think about his case, telling him, perhaps, that he could work quicker if he took the stories out of the Arabian Nights and simply changed the names, and local colour, such as the degree of heat and the type of costume. He had stolen his brother's shillings when they were in the nursery together and had only been beaten by his brother's squirrel secretiveness. He never read a book; and he had passed through the costliest and most famous schools of his land and all their bosh (he said) had fallen off him like water off a duck's back. But in banking he knew all that he should know. His natural ingenuity was so complex and so wakeful that if a clerk made an error of two pence he made four pence out of it; if the world was prosperous he promoted gambling-circles, rotary movements and publishing houses, lent money to liberal professors and ne'er-do-weel geniuses and made fortunes in speculation in fraudulent inventions exploited on the exchange; and if the world was black and most men were ruined, he laid in stocks of fat, flour, and cotton, speculated in armaments and cheap shirts and got back his money from the liberal professors now turned conservative. If a king lay at death's door, he bought a bolt of crape, if a peasant girl in adolescent delirium saw the Virgin at her furrow's end, he started an omnibus line. He understood only one thing, Profit; he thought all men thought as he did, and that their bank-balances were the measure of their brains. He would risk half his fortune on a throw, turn head-over-heels in the air in an aeroplane, tell anyone in the world to go to Hell, laugh at princes and throw tax-collectors out the door, but he suffered excessively from toothache because he feared the dentist's chair: and he was convinced that his luck depended on numbers, events, persons, odd things he encountered; his head accountant was forced to wear the same tie for six weeks because it preserved a liberal state of mind in the Government in a difficult time: his chauffeur was obliged to carry for nine months the same umbrella, rain, hail or shine, because the umbrella depressed the market in a stock he had sold short.

There was with him a S
OLICITOR
from London. He liked to walk in the City on a sunny morning swinging his cane and rubbing shoulders with the crowd in Throgmorton Street. He loved a little chat, with a legal joke and a neat personality, and a little cup of tea. He lived at Streatham and always wore light clothes, although his income was not large, because he was blond, delicate and palefaced. He acted the male lead in private theatricals in a Y.M.C.A. Literary Club and played tennis on Saturday afternoons. In the train in the morning, he read the exchanges, recommended a purchase of Witwatersrand, asked why the Government was riding the fence in the present crisis, and knew the sporting news. His highest ambition was to come by a great deal of money one day and go shares with some reliable client in a bill-broking business. He wrote genial solicitor's letters, leaving not a single knot to catch his foot in, and even in conversation his remarks were without prejudice. His clients' secrets were inviolate with him, but if a wealthy client had a well-cut suit and told him a good joke he would let the brush tail of a strong-scented affair peep through his thicket of discretion. His integrity was spotless; and he always saw that his clients were properly protected. His knowledge of the law was exact so that he could circumvent it with grace, but it was necessary to ask his services with a merry smiling countenance and a round, periphrastic style. He kept a little diary at home, neat as a sandwich bar, where he noted the events of a life spent among the great, fruity with sagacious little aphorisms. He strolled out on Sunday afternoons with his wife along the hedges and explained the masonic ritual of his business.

There was a D
ANISH
W
OMAN
, a bookbinder in Paris. She had bright blue eyes and a large nose; her large head was covered with curls. She talked all day and recounted hundreds of tales, mostly improbable, like a female Munchhausen: she was usually gay, but sometimes a weird melancholy fell on her, like the gloomy shades of the north. She loved cats and bright-coloured leathers, dyes and gilt. Her workshop, though in a cold and dirty apartment in a
tumble-down building by the river, was always humming with talk, hammer-taps, the creaking of presses and the roaring of flames in the stove; and was as cheerful as the common-room of the knights in heroic times, when they lived and slept by the fires and their swords jingled. The walls were covered with papers she painted and dyed, and with pictures of Copenhagen, and caricatures by her pupils. She was lively as a trooper at night, and drank wine, beer, punch, champagne, vodka and every strong drink they had at the table, until she rolled under it. She was as free as a brother with men; but she was modest, she blushed if a man looked at her boldly, was faithful to her husband, and would stare for hours at modern books, with their naked men, women and truths, red, gay, astonished and abashed.

With her was a young A
RCHITECT
, a gentle creature, modest and shy, whose restless fingers designed without end, even as they tapped on his knee, and who covered his walls, trunks, letters, easels and restaurant tables with the motifs of his irrepressible fantasy. He had built in Russia where the workers' cities are made of glass, aluminium, stone and tile, and in Amsterdam in the garden-cities, and in Paris where they build houses of glass and each stone is chiselled by hand, and in New York where they tear down twenty-five storey buildings in which the heating is expensive to put up thirty-five-storey buildings in which the heating is more scientifically planned, and in Hollywood where the porches must frame beauties and the bathrooms are designed for Houdini; in seaports where the tiles must be wavy bendy to correspond with the waves of the sea, on mountain-tops where the beetling walls must fit in with the craggy scenery, and in wheat-growing areas where the silos, towering in the fields, must look like a mightier cathedral. He had blossomed out, in his morning sun of success, and was the darling of poets and rich amateurs. His curly black hair fell over a white and red face, and his heart was simple, although he wrote cryptic verses. He danced like a feather; when by himself he capered, sent up darts, and sang, for he liked to be alone; but when he worked in a room with other
draughtsmen, he was bemused, putting down his first strokes with diffidence as if afraid to spoil perfection, until the plan burst out in final clarity, like a rocket in his forehead.

An O
LD
L
ADY
was there because her third husband had been a conductor in Vienna, and dying, had left her with plenty of money and a taste for elevated society. She took scores to every performance, always turned over the page before the conductor and nodded over the last page. She wore a long gold chain and a lorgnette and an expensive hat made of satin, feathers, straw and tulle, all mixed and mummified together: no one could imagine what octogenarian designer and what antediluvian stock of unfashionable materials had been drawn upon to make her hat. Perhaps the old lady, this Frau Hofrat, designed her own hats, or had them made by her maid, taken over from the service of some ex-Empress. She was dignified at table, took mineral waters and powders, and was pleasantly condescending to the young. She cleared her throat often, and wore a high white lace collar and a chased gold band which supported her old dun throat.

There was an O
LD
M
AN
who liked company and joined in all the conversations to show he was a spark and an accomplished trifler. He dressed with coquetry. His thin, bent head nodded every few minutes like a tremulous head of oats, and the skin hung down on his neck. He wore soft gloves; his handkerchief and thin silver hair were perfumed with a thin, fine scent. His shoes were polished like glass and his clothes pressed every morning by a valet who travelled with him. When he was at home he exacted a special service of his five sons: each one had to call on him at his home, in a morning coat, wearing a flower and a bowler hat to pay his father his respects and kiss the hand of his mother. The old man had disinherited his youngest son, a Liberal Deputy, who refused to do this. Abroad, he treated everyone with caressing condescension but he was cold to waiters. His manners were so fine that one would have thought they had been invented specially to suit his frame: he wore them like a handmade shirt next to his skin. He thought estates were bestowed by divine mandate and that those born to high estate should show that
God had chosen well. Not even the wines, painters and racehorses he fancied, gave him the pleasure that he had from contemplating a fine family-tree; he imagined that he could tell noble birth even in a monster, if a monster were born in a great family. He allowed that it was inoffensive for a beautiful woman or an artist, low-born, to climb out of their natural sphere, because, on the one hand, women's empiry is always brief and rarely disturbs an inheritance, and on the other hand, artists are like the alchemists his fathers kept, who spun money out of thin air, sunshine, spoof.