The Salzburg Tales (29 page)

He went out quickly, thinking of the streets of his native town, the courtyard of his father's house, the sports-ground where the boys exercised and his friends, especially of Ailu, a dear friend, who was like a brother to him. He did not look back and he soon came into the twilights which preceded the dark region. So quickly he went that he did not observe someone who was descending, and he was obliged to step aside hastily to avoid a collision. It was a soul which had just left the earth. When the youth looked closely, because the shade smiled at him, he saw it was his friend Ailu. “Are you dead, Ailu?” he said, and burst out crying. Ailu said to him in the faint voice that still remained to him:

“Your mother came to me in dreams and wooed me to the underworld.”

“What misery!” said the youth: “Ailu, it was to save me she did it: she beguiled you down here, so that I could get back to earth. I wandered into that cave out of curiosity and would have had to stay down here, if someone had not come down in my place.”

“You are my brother,” said Ailu: “it is very natural I should come in your place: if I had known the whole business, I would have come, just the same.”

And he hurried on through the twilights, while the living youth mounted towards the surface of the earth. The people who knew him in the upper world found him changed as if he had been absent ten years. The next day the youth went back to the cave, resolved to go down into the land of the dead and join his friend Ailu; but he found the cave stopped with a great fall of earth and rocks. That cave was never heard of nor penetrated again.

But (the Centenarist continued) most priests and tale-tellers have imagined hell as the place of fire and torture depicted on many a church-door and in many a religious painting: as, in the Cathedral of Bourges, where simpering and grimacing men and women are driven by demons with faces in their bellies, hams and elbows, towards a boiling cauldron. This hell is the hell of many religions. There is the North Buddhist legend of Avalokitesvara, who came to show the damned the way to Nirvana. It was prophesied that he would bring all misery to an end, even the torments of the hell Avichi, the region of the
prêtas
and the Kingdom of Yama. Powerful lights were projected from his body which lit up with their brilliance the thousand worlds of the universe and even the flaming hells, and caused at his approach all misery, evil and fear to die as the plants shrivel up at the approach of a flame. After him came a soothing shower to calm those too exalted by his splendour, and those tender things that might be wilted by his light. He came over the seas and mountains and approached the terrible gulf in the high mountain ranges which is the entrance to hell. There is a city built on a
precipice of black glass; down its roads of black glass, clouds roll all day between the houses. Above this gulf eagles and vultures forever circle high in the sky, to seize the daring who might try to scale the black walls: on the other side of this region, shepherds feed their flocks and monks potter about their monasteries, ignorant that they live on the brink of eternity.

There, taking a leap from the top of the cliff, which is five thousand feet high above the first hellish fogs that roll, he plunged towards hell, and the glass walls flamed with a thousand reflections of light as he fell. As he approached, the groans, shrieks and the ravings of those gone mad in the torments grew less, ceased; till, walking on the bubbling lake of fire as firm ground, he entered the hell Avichi. All beheld him as an earthly prince, but a giant in stature and splendid in majesty, clothed in light and surrounded by a thousand swords and a thousand angels. When they perceived him, their pangs ceased altogether; as they continued to gaze, their wounds healed and those who had lost their reason became sane. Sweet breezes took the place of flames in that dreadful cavern, the immeasurable cauldron of iron burst and spread over the cooling soil as a pleasant stream from which flowers arose, and the sea of fire changed into a pool whose shores were out of sight, where lotus flowers sprang in myriads and canoes glided without human hands.

Then all arose from their postures of agony, and their chains fell off, leaving their naked bodies whole. Hell became a place of joy, and even Yama the king showed reverence to the heaven-descended one. “What if it were only a moment's respite,” think the damned, “we should still praise him and rejoice.” But the hero instructed them in the notions of righteousness, and leading them on through the gardens of morality and the fountains of the law, taught them all that was missing before in their imperfect minds, and in the end, after many trials, they were able to enter Nirvana. What a solace is this history! It seems that hell is not eternal and that, at the end of time, suffering will be relieved …

“Yes, and before,” said the Schoolboy, “if we leave these old yams for the idlest of our idle days, as now, and go out explorers for the earthly paradise. Why, these brilliant visions of hell are made out of the thousand pinpricks, backaches and disappointments of the wretched millions of the earth. The theory of hell works backwards: the wretched imagine a hell infinitely horrible to console themselves for the sufferings of this life. That is how it arose, your hell, and not out of the volcano, the priest's smoky mouth, or the oppressed dreams of one who over-ate.”

“He is a very nice boy, that boy,” said the Old Lady in an undertone: “my boy was like that when he was young. Now, of course, he is settled down, and has three very fine children, and one of them is a genius, I would say, and I say it quite impartially.”

“Do you know of anyone who has lately been in hell?” said the Festival Director, dreamily, no doubt speculating on some new stage-setting.

“That, too,” said the Centenarist. “I know a poet who takes drugs and has ruined his imagination, which is haunted by pools of blood, entrances to morgues with icicles hanging on the keystone, palefaced ladies, horses in winding-sheets and bulls whose hides are covered with craters like the moon's; and his sleep at night is interrupted by shrieks, heavy sighs and long mutterings. I know a man who went mad and who now has to listen till the end of his days to the garrulous follies or the shrieks of madmen who have imagined more than they can bear. I know a close-knit family where the grave dissensions of the husband and wife, over an inheritance which was disputed by the husband in secret, have ruined the children's health and their chance of making a marriage, and where the youngest screams at the nightmares he sees in his sleep—”

“Ugh,” said the Frenchwoman: “how horrible! I don't want to hear those things that you can read any day in the daily paper, but a real horror: frighten us, startle us, but tell us something true, nevertheless.”

“A young man I knew,” said the Centenarist smiling, “went to the war, gay, inventive, always whistling and jollying the girls, always ready to do a vaudeville turn, and he returned sick, silent and timid, and lives in the shadow of a big, bustling wife who makes believe he is a baby and has no idea of the boy he used to be.”

“You don't like wives,” said the Public Stenographer: “I am very observant, I have noticed it before.”

“You must not hold that against me,” said the Centenarist: “to begin with, I never had a wife, so I cannot be an authority on wives.

“And then there was a philosopher I knew in New York, who is world famous and very much loved. Sometimes when I went out from the chess club, at five o'clock in the morning, when the milkmen were rattling round, the street sweepers were out, and the first workmen with picks and shovels were sleeping on the benches waiting for work to begin, I would cross Central Park and there meet, walking gently and thoughtfully, in the light of the rising sun, my philosopher. One day I said to him, ‘Why do you always get up so early? You are an old man, you need sleep: and I see that you have become frail in the last few years.' He shook his head, clasped his hands behind his back, and after a few moments, he said quietly, ‘I get up every morning an hour earlier, to have an hour free to hate my wife.'

“But he was a philosopher; he is not like ordinary men, and I am quite convinced that most men are very, very fond of their wives. But to return to my war veteran. The journalists writing of war veterans always say they have been ‘through hell'. This was my friend's descent.

“He was badly wounded in a retreat and was left with the dead in the trench. When he came to himself, he drank some brandy he found in a flask near him and dragged himself a long way without meeting a living creature. When night came on he found himself near a shed with a locked door, and he decided to shelter there for the night. Meanwhile, he had noticed all around him in the earth, which was torn up, a frightful smell of decaying flesh; but he was exhausted and could go no farther. He managed after a long struggle
to break the lock off the door. The door swung open, a violent smell rushed out and half a dozen sacks fell on him. Pulling at these bundles he pulled away a hand, an arm, and thrust his arm into something pulpy, which he found to be the belly of a man. He was lying there crumpled up under the bodies of soldiers which had been stacked there hastily during the recent retreat. He crept a little way from the shed. The next morning he was discovered by a peasant who brought a cart and carted him a long way over the blasted land, until they came in sight of a building with the red cross painted on it. He felt solaced, my friend, at the sight of the building, and was astonished to hear as they approached, terrible shrieks and shouts, men's voices sobbing and crying out ‘God!'

“Someone came out from a building lying in the grounds and spoke to the peasant, and my friend said irritably, ‘What is that damnable noise I hear?'

“‘It is coming from the field hospital,' said the attendant.

“‘Is it a madhouse? I'm not mad,' said my friend.

“‘It's a surgical station,' said the attendant.

“All that day and night the abominable shrieking went on; sometimes there were many voices, as if a diabolical passion shook the entire building, sometimes one particularly, and then several, with the plaints of souls in torment, but much worse than anyone could imagine in his life. My friend said to the nurse, waking from the heavy stupor he had sunk into after being kept awake all night by the cries:

“‘In the name of God, what is going on over there? Are they shell shocked?'

“‘No,' said the attendant, ‘it sounds bad. This is a surgical station and we have no anaesthetics: we haven't had any for weeks. We are completely cut off: everything has to be done on the living flesh: most of the attendants have deserted, they couldn't stand it.'

“My friend's own operation was done likewise ‘on the living flesh'.

“He has been a sick man since that time. When one has seen those things, one is a changed man for the rest of life.”

T
HE
Banker said: “Is it possible? Who has ever heard of such a terrible thing?”

They all took coffee and liqueurs to forget the Centenarist's gloomy tale.

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

 

W
HEN
the Salzburg guests reached the Capuchin Wood at ten o'clock in the morning of the fourth day, they found the Banker there already, sitting on a seat with his wife. When he saw them coming up the path, he got up as if to make off through the wood, but when he found it was too late, he smiled and said to the Festival Director:

“Gosh, this is a nice wood here! I never came up before, because I thought it was a little bit of a tufty place full of woodcutters, and I didn't like passing the cadaverous cross they have there at the top of the ramp. It's picturesque, though, that cross, I suppose, for the monks. You should put it in one of your plays, Director! It would be a hit: it would be a real money-maker, that, with the trees, and you could stick in a bit of the convent wall painted yellow, with one of the Brothers in sandals.”

Then the Banker said good-morning to them all with much grace and good-humour, and was about to make an excuse to leave them, when he saw behind them the Master of the Day, who had come in late, and he cried:

“Good morning, Master of the Day—is that what we call you? How are the stories going? I see you've created no public scandal yet! It wouldn't be a bad idea, you know, to get a reporter here to hear what's going on, and then to have him write it up. It would make an interesting story, and boom the Festival!”

“It's a good idea,” replied the Viennese Conductor. “But don't run away from us like that: for you are the next one to tell a talc.”

“What, me? You don't think I know any stories, do you?” cried the Banker laughing. “No, I‘m going, good-bye.”

But the Viennese Conductor, a firm man in emergency, insisted on the Banker's staying to amuse them. The Banker said, in his clear, gay voice:

“What the deuce am I going to do? I had to write a composition in school, once, on ‘Some Books are Made to be Eaten', or some tripe of that sort, a remark by Bacon (the chap was inspired by his name!) and I got the lowest marks in the class. I'll have to make it up as I go along.”

The Banker sat down, consulted with his wife, stretched his thin legs and began to tell his tale.

 

H
ENRY
, the securities clerk, was born under the sign of Pisces, but he had not learned swimming, for all the water he had seen had been in London Pool and in the goldfish pond on the roof-terrace of the Bank of Central Honduras. The Bank of Central Honduras, I have no need to say, is the Bastille of the City: the humble citizen who passes its buttressed, unpierced walls, thinks of the mountains of gold under the mined pavement, and for a moment comes into his pale eye an imperial glint, the look of the slave-driver, the frontiersman, the dragoon.