The Salzburg Tales (18 page)

“That's Stepan Nyiregyhaza,” said Sophie.

Charles and Sophie Hodd invited us to tea, for we still had plenty of time to see the rope-dancer. We stopped the car in the middle of the street. A surprising thing happened: to all the doors men and women came running. Venetian blinds and shutters were opened in the upper stories of the small houses and the lace curtains of cottages moved under the touch of a hasty inquisitive hand.

A flock of geese moving senatorially out of a yard squawked and scattered, and a fat, dwarfed woman, exceedingly dark, with suffused complexion and a marked moustache and beard, carrying a canvas and some brushes, trotted into the road. She grinned widely at us and stopped dead in front of the car. She called out in a naïve voice,

“Charles! Sophie! You have friends! How nice!”

She scrutinised us with eager, beady eyes and suddenly squeaked,

“Why, it's Dr Field: I know you, you see! I know you have a wonderful collection of pictures! You will be fascinated to see the gallery Stepan and I have hung—only a little one, of course, but all local pictures and new talent. There are some old names too: I guess you came to see the colony, Dr Field!”

Charles said stiffly,

“Field, allow me to present to you Mrs Nina Nyiregyhaza.”

The woman laughed delightedly:

“Why, he knows me, if not at first hand, at least by reputation. Everyone has heard of Nina Nyiregyhaza: and Stepan too (my husband). And you, Dr Field, are
very known
in New York, at least to a certain circle where they collect pictures! Jim Shark the critic, your dear friend, you know, said he would bring us up to see your collection, but the day we picked was the day you closed your library to have the pictures valued.”

I said, “Are you sure you're not mistaken? This is all a great surprise to me.”

She did not hear, for she was calling her husband.

“Stepan, Stepan, come now when I call you. It is Dr Field, the famous art-collector. He would like to see your pictures!”

At this point Charles Hodd interposed and carried us off to his own house.

I said, “What a gifted woman!”

Sophie said with joyful venom,

“No lie, no coincidence, no fantastic connection is big enough to choke her, no moment too fleeting for Nina to sell something in it!”

Charles was furious:

“Sophie, we should like some tea. We have not much time to drink it and get up the hill.”

Someone began calling Sophie through the window; she said,

“It is Nina!” and went to the window and shouted,

“Nina, I am busy: wait till I come down.”

The voice came again,

“Dr Field! Dr Field!”

I opened my eyes in amazement, and laughing, went to the window.

“Dr Field, do you want to pop over a minute, while Sophie is making the tea? Our gallery is very known. Picasso came to see it. Some of the artists are particular, of course: you have to go to their houses to see their pictures, but we have a lot of authentic ones left under certain conditions. Ours to dispose of at any price: a bargain, I assure you—” and she named a number of known and unknown painters.

She spoke very loudly and again the indescribable emotion took hold of the shutters, window-curtains and doors of the cottages. The village was all ears. Stepan, who had lingered in the watchmaker's shop, came sturdily towards us, flushed a little in his haste. He said something to Nina, and after hesitating, she waved her fat little hand gaily and went with her husband, Stepan, into her own house.

Yet before we had finished tea she had run into the Hodds' great paved living-room where we were sitting, saying,

“Charles, they say you just got a big letter from your publishers: I hope it's good news!”

“Yes, thanks,” said Charles.

“Is there anything the post-office doesn't tell you, Nina?” said Sophie, pleasantly.

Nina said, “Sure, Sophie, don't get cross. You're all nervous today to your friends. I hope Charles got the big contract with Steele & Steele.”

“He did,” replied Sophie, “a $1,000 contract and $250 advance without putting pen to paper. We can pay the plasterer, thank goodness.”

“Ai, I'm so glad of that, Sophie! He told me this morning it's a bit long to wait: his wife's sick and the Bibbets moved out today and the Watsons last week without paying him. I told him, Sophie, that Charles is not like an ordinary workman, he doesn't get regular money, but he gets a lot all at once.”

“Leave him to us, Nina, can't you,” shrieked Sophie.

“Dear, dear,” said Charles, and put his hand to his silver plate.

Nina Nyiregyhaza looked a little startled, and after an agreeable word or two, ran out of the house again.

We looked round the great room on the first floor of the cottage. The stone walls were newly-plastered, white and clean. The several low square windows had leaded panes. There were no curtains, but the woodwork was painted red. A great family bed stood in an alcove: copper saucepans, a candlestick, a large three-legged pot, a stool, a child's divan and a large packing-case turned into a dresser, completed the furniture of the room. Outside, in the stone entry, a staircase led up to Charles's workroom, furnished with a table, a chair and two sets of unpainted shelves. This was their home, the idyllic retreat which they had so often described to their friends in their letters, the charming, snug content that appeared in their several articles. The afternoon sun flooded the white-walled village street, where cats strayed over the vile-smelling gutters. Around the blue peaks rose shining: through a break in the hills, the great fertile plain appeared. Charles followed our glances and smiled,

“It is lovely, isn't it? People come here from every corner of the earth!”

Sophie, who was making toast over the fire, looked down into the village street and laughed to herself,

“Do you know, they say that Nina puts out saucers of milk for every cat in the village and all night long they jump backwards and forwards over the fences and vines, quarrel and sing canticles and leave their kittens there. The neighbours complained to her about the noise the cats made at night and one night her yard was full of old boots, rolling pins and broken crockery. When she cannot give away any more kittens, she sends Stepan to throw them over the cliff there. There should be quite a pile of little bones at the bottom!”

Charles had been talking softly, ignoring his wife's anecdotes:

“…a ne'er-do-weel from the Tennessee mountains, oxycephalic, with a perpetually glazed and inflamed eye, a hard drinker, always tugging at one or other of us to kick over the traces and roam round the world with him (he had loafed round the world once on cattleboats and wool-ships). They had a child here. For a year Algie stagnated, doing some painting as they all do, even the blind and armless, here, staying in his wife's skirts, eating and smoking up the allowance her father sent her, thinking she was at the Beaux-Arts. The summer came on and he ran a high fever. He went away. The wife and child ran up bills all over the village. The cottage was seized. Nina sold it a few weeks ago again to two women who call themselves “gentlewomen” from Wiltshire: they paid twenty thousand francs for it without seeing it, and came down here to paint. They can't paint for nuts, but that's all one. Now their income has failed and they have to go straight back home. The cottage is in the market again: that's three times Nina's sold it.”

Sophie began laughing heartily at her own reflections:

“The peasants say (they hate Nina because she bought their cabins cheap from them when the village was decaying and she made a lot of money on them, selling them to the artists), the peasants say that Nina has a can full of
gros sous
in her sitting-room, a sack of francs in her pantry, two-franc pieces in a box in the entry, ten-franc silver pieces in a bag made out of an old pair of breeches sewed up
at the ends, in her bedroom, and a pot full of twenty-franc pieces in her closet. But she has a china vase containing two or three cinema tickets and a ten-franc piece in full view in the kitchen, where the back door is, coming from the garden, and a coarse soapstone clock, so that a burglar will steal those and look no farther in the house.”

Charles remarked,

“We had Giekine, an anarchist poet turned out of Belgrade, his native city, fifteen years ago, and living in misery in foreign lands ever since. He became a painter in Paris at the age of thirty-five under the encouragement of P. who incautiously told him he was a genius: that detestable word! He had his exhibition, and his manifesto, found two dozen or so sanguine patrons, and had a picture accepted by a man in the rue la Boétie. It was at this moment that the Nyiregyhazas invited him down here. He came as Nina's guest, bringing with him an innocent, a girl of sixteen he found in a working-class family in the suburbs of Paris, who followed him like a lamb, without surprise, into unspeakable depravities. The Nyiregyhazas were induced to give him a thousand francs, taking in return a load of nightmarish canvases, as a speculation. Giekine went straight back to Paris by the night-train, taking the girl, and bought opium. When the couple had exhausted the cheap hotels (where they left their luggage in gage), the hospitals, relief-wards, soup-kitchens, the angels in cafés and the accidental suckers of the Montparnasse pavement, Giekine put his wife to work getting money, first from women to whom her sick childish face appealed, and then from men. Dying of hunger and craving, he began to haunt the homes of his old patrons and of the rich art-dealer of the rue la Boétie. They got so nervous at his aspect, as he crawled past them in the shadow of their familiar streets, with his drawn and burning face, that they complained to the police and he was deported. The girl, ill and deranged by misery, came down here and demanded Giekine's pictures to sell: the Nyiregyhazas refused, although they had discovered that the canvases had little value. She insulted them, made a great scandal and threw herself over the cliff. With the kittens.”

“He, he,” giggled Sophie: “that time Nina went to church every day for a week to pacify the peasants. Although she is far from being a Catholic she observes all the Catholic feasts and sends down gifts at Thanksgiving, in order to get in with the Cerfeuil.”

“With Nina, nothing is impossible,” continued Charles. “It appears she and Stepan went three times uninvited to garden-parties given by the Cerfeuil, the family living in the château. The Nyiregyhazas always stare at the château and the property, still unattainted by any mortgage, with uncontrollable longing: they stand in the middle of the street looking up, with their tongues hanging out. You can see them giving it side-glances, without thinking, while they are on other business. They love to paint, especially the château and its paddocks.”

Charles and his wife laughed. Sophie said,

“They go up to the Cerfeuil's back door for the sake of getting a smell of the soil. They'd lick it off their boots if they were asked to, to get a bit of it. Whenever the peasants here see the Nyiregyhazas toiling up the path to the Cerfeuil, they say, ‘Now, what poppycock are they going to recount to Madame?' and the cook or the gardener brings it down that afternoon, to the village, that the Nyiregyhazas went and asked Madame,—for her plumcake recipe, where the best pears grow for jam, on what day Easter falls next year, whether they could borrow an umbrella, where is the best veterinary surgeon, if she wanted a handsome Persian kitten, if she would like to accept a sketch Nina had just made of her orchard, if they could buy a chicken from Madame, whether she would graciously accept a signed copy of Stepan's latest book, the one banned by the English censor. When they had the garden-parties up at the château, the Nyiregyhazas went up each time in their best city clothes, saying they had heard that “Madame had a few friends, and they hoped they were not intruding!” Each time Madame sent the maid to give them tea and toast in the kitchen and they did not even get a glance at the garden, or so much as put their nose in the big salon.”

Charles, suddenly grave, remarked sadly,

“That incident had the whole village tormented with a malicious and hungry joy for three months!”

Sophie said tartly,

“Charles, you know yourself that Madame told me. ‘Ah, how vulgar, how vulgar,' she said: ‘wretched little mercenary folk, little upstart peasants,' she called them to my ears.”

“Because Madame Cerfeuil has lost money and they have made it,” said Charles in his melancholy mood.

“Nina actually went up once to ask Madame Cerfeuil if she could collect cathartic mushrooms in the woods,” said Sophie, with sparkling eyes. “Stepan is dreadfully constipated, and Nina scours the country for purges, mushrooms, leguminous plants, flax and physic nuts which she always has in the house drying. She gives him stuff from the drugstore late at night, hot strong coffee in the morning and rhubarb at midday, and senna tea in the afternoon, even when guests are there, saying, ‘Stepan, remember your …'

“Sophie!” said Charles.

“Nina once became enamoured of a sawny young artist she met in Paris, that she brought down here. Stepan waited hourly for the young artist to do the deed, so that he could get rid of Nina (they say) and even sent himself an anonymous letter. The morning he got it, he had not the courage to go straight up to her with it, so he went out to walk on the hills: but, O dear, in the hills he felt very uncomfortable: he had to ease himself and the anonymous letter was no longer useful for the original end. The same day the young artist returned to Paris to meet his mother, and Stepan has never had another chance.”

“Stepan is good, lazy and sentimental,” said Charles: “he dreams of naiads bathing in a streak of moonlight, of sunlight playing on the golden flesh of virgins as they jump over tombstones in their innocent fun, of beautiful idiots lying with their hair loosened and their limbs flecked with blood, of passions in the cornfields and of brutal, bloody, mercenary, peasant tragedies. It was he who first thought of teaching the peasants their old crafts and restoring the village to prosperity. He does not understand the age he lives in at all.”