The Salzburg Tales (35 page)

“That old gentleman is a master of the amenities!”

The young couple took a flat more suitable to Isidor's financial status, and went to Paris to pass away the time agreeably on their honeymoon. When they visited Notre-Dame, Sara bought a large candle for twenty-five francs and lighted it in front of one of the dirty statues at the entrance: and she dragged Isidor to look at a remarkable carving of a dead man in his grave with worms crawling over him.

“There is the double mystery of life,” she said: “Love and death, the candle that lights the dark cellar of life, and the paving-stone that bears down the corrupted breast-bone.”

“Or there,” said Isidor cheerfully, pinching her elbow, “is the double miracle of the church: it sells the faithful candles so that they can see better the accumulated grime of their saints: and the faithful seeing the dust, account it a shade of pity, and likewise pay a handsome living to the saint.”

“You are shocking,” said Sara. “These are good people, earnestly believing in good and giving their money to the poor.”

Isidor laughed agreeably and nothing displeased them during the first month or two. After they returned to London and were married, Isidor took up his affairs and Sara stayed at home, as she had done in the Perez house, and looked ardently out of the window at the dull events of daily life, wept over some cat run over in the street, dressed magnificently to eat dinner with her husband, and looking, some romantic hour, at the accustomed pictures on the wall, or listening to the music of the gramophone, wept and said:

“Life is mysterious and great.”

At certain times in the month she became restless like a leopard and paced up and down through the house from end to end and floor to floor. The servants dreaded these times and joked unpleasantly about them. She would change all the pictures on the wall, alter a room from salon to dining-room, and from dining-room to bedroom. She juggled with the furniture and became more and more absorbed with herself as a woman of destiny, a creature of volcanic passions, and nothing she or Isidor could do satisfied her increasing vanity. She invited great numbers of young men and women to the house from Chelsea and Bloomsbury, often appeared at the private theatres in striking costumes designed by herself, cut her hair to give her a wild, fatal look, arranged theatrical entrances before her guests who were chiefly interested in her caviare and smoked salmon. She lit the house with coloured candles, gave away her belongings, bought land in the country, and invested in savoury adventures, like an orchard for growing fruit for liqueurs, and a piggery. Once she even sold a great number of her husband's carefully acquired pictures to buy a famous but run-down estate in Monmouthshire which was being sold for very little. There were a hundred bedrooms, and no electric light. She then felt herself a chatelaine going into a decline with a ruined keep, an unstocked trout-stream and many acres of fallow field, and she began to speak sentences with a dying fall, reflecting the decay of the noble estate. Isidor, startled and sometimes
embarrassed by these incidents, nevertheless remained tranquil and bought more paintings and more learned books: he entertained their friends charmingly and visited the Continent for a few days each month. His affairs continued to prosper, and he allowed his wife to enjoy her escapades and her attempts at the rehabilitation of the decayed estate, which had become her chief hobby. He introduced the wife of one of his friends, Mrs Lewisham, to their society, and this woman, a peaceable, mild blonde, became Sara's closest friend. Between them, they succeeded in bringing Sara to her senses on many and many a wild occasion. Then she would close her eyes, smile wistfully and say:

“When one is born a Gipsy, in an overcivilised society, these escapes are necessary.”

If Isidor chided her, he would find her after a few hours wrapped in a Medea-like melancholy.

“You are not well, my love?”

“My body is well, but my mind is never well, for I understand things that we must not understand if we are to live happily; even love—at the bottom of the greatest passion is a feeling of horror and an icy and hopeless boredom: under the flitting, delusive flame is the jet of marsh-gas.”

“Come, come now, baby,” Isidor would say imperturbably, “is that what you think of me?”

“I love you,” would answer the wife, “and, what is a curious thing with a person drawn by so many cross-currents as myself, I love you with the simplest woman's love, a peasant's love; but the deeper my feelings, the more I am oppressed by this feeling.”

At the beginning Isidor had been impressed by the sensibility and profundity of his wife's feelings, not to mention her dramatic gift, but the vividness of a first impression can never remain: one familiarises oneself even with works of art. Isidor's friends were also usually impressed by Sara's melancholy and her philosophic obliquity: but Isidor had often to shake himself to be sure that he had not fallen into a trance and was not hearing himself talk.

He lived quietly now, content with the amenities of his present luxurious life and demanding little of his friends: he even lost some of his original ambition and moral fire.

At the age of thirty-six he died suddenly. The day after his death when Sara sat dressed in the deepest hues of mourning, she received a visit from her friend, Mrs Lewisham, come to console. This lady entered quietly and composedly, but when she saw Sara crying, she began to cry. Sara took her into the room where her husband lay, ready to be buried that same day, and at the sight of the dead man both women broke out weeping afresh, and Sara began to speak about Isidor.

“He had a golden heart and he was very ambitious, and so cultivated—nobody was more cultivated. He liked most to sit by himself absorbed in his problems: he would pace about the room until early in the morning, thinking out the true explanation of movements in the Exchanges; or he would spend seven evenings in the week at the Chess Club, not coming home until four in the morning: and again, he would get up early at six o'clock, to walk in the park and look at the workmen going to work. He had such a deep appreciation of the roots of things! He was born very poor, and that gave him, he used to say, ‘a different economic orientation'.

“You must have seen yourself, Mrs Lewisham, that he was emotionally endowed; and although, of course, business takes up a man's energies, he appreciated me properly: he knew me—yes, I am astonished even now, when I think how well he knew me: I suppose I have the soul of a child: yes, I am a child, I know myself. ‘Poor Sara,' he used to say, ‘think of what you are saying: people will misunderstand you—you have a good heart and you do not think what you are saying.' He was so kind: and he told me, you are a good wife, the best of wives. Our history (you know it, don't you?) was tragic, and we had so much to make up to each other. When I met him, it opened a new world for me: it gave me a new emotional orientation.

“Look at him there: how lovely he looks: how kind! I don't know how I shall go on: only that lonely part of me will go on living, that
lonely part of the soul which even a husband cannot reach, the simple and childlike part which is the heritage of the child in us women. Yes, that is the tragedy of married life, that with the person to whom you are the most attached, you still feel yourself, at times, a complete stranger. You feel that too, Mrs Lewisham, yes, yes, I know you are unhappy with your husband. And I was happy, and it was the same thing, think of that and understand what I have lost. What is sadder than the eternal difference, the eternal misunderstanding between the sexes? It makes you feel that the whole of your life is wasted.”

Mrs Lewisham who had listened silently to this, blew her nose, and still very sad, but with a cheerful gleam, nevertheless, let her eyes linger on the dead man's calm face and said:

“Yes, a difference—but all the amenities of life are in that difference.”

“The amenities?” said Sara surprised: “Now perhaps you are right: it never occurred to me, but now that you say it, I feel you are right. And my husband was so fond of the amenities.”

S
OME
of the guests present had known the personalities referred to in the Solicitor's tale, and several had new details to add; so they sat there in the wood till the sun was high up and very hot and the noises in the town below announced midday. Then they went down the hill with lively appetites, agreeing to meet in the afternoon in the Mirabell-garten, before the open-air theatre. But the Viennese Conductor found them changed by this talk of the city and of their financial interests, he found the guests galvanised, as if they had spent the morning over their portfolios and their bankbooks; their eyes were brighter, their voices gayer and they were no longer docile, nor in need of amusement. They insisted that if the Master of their tongues desired any tales in the afternoon, he should first tell one himself. To this he immediately agreed; and when they were once more assembled, under the thick trees of the Mirabell-garten before the sparkling fountain, he began his tale.

 

O
NE
afternoon it was excessively hot and France sat in the garden knitting a blue silk coat. The pool of the garden glittered, crickets whirred, a rich mushroom smell came out of the mould of the flower-beds, and the breeze brought down pollen from an acacia tree.

France went inside to drink tea and someone rang at the front door. The maid said, “There is a beggar woman with two children at the door, who asks particularly to see you!” France went, peeping cautiously, and cried: “Maria!” They held each other a long time. Maria had developed, and her face was larger, firmer, plumper; folds ran down from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth, but she laughed broadly. They embraced again. They sat down and all began to drink tea in which raspberry jam was mixed.

France said: “What way did you come?” Maria laughed and showed her muddy shoes and the broken shoes of the little twoyear-old boy.

“Guess!”

“You did not walk!”

“Yes: and part of the way, we came in carts, wagons, cars, anything. People took us up.”

“You walked, Maria: what for?”

“I had no money, France. I just ran out of the house, like that. Suddenly I thought, I won't stay here any more. I took the boy and the baby and came away, without my coat, or any money, while my husband was out working on his new bridge.”

“What folly!”

“Yes, I am like that: suddenly a moment comes when something mysterious within says, Go now, or, Do thus, and I go, and do. I came to get work round the farms perhaps. I am strong enough to do that kind of work, and it is healthy for the children.”

“But your husband George? And your fine love-affair of three years ago?”

“George! He's in love with a young woman who writes novels and owns an estate, and they are always over there together, drinking vodka. Her father died from it and her sister committed suicide from it: and perhaps something will happen to George. Let him marry her and talk about Bakunin, or whatever it is, for ever.”

“But why did you come to Odessa? It is so far. And then, don't tell me, only tell me what you have been doing all these years. Do you remember how long it is since the day you entered the University, and we met? It is a pity you gave it up! No?”

“No, I can't tell. Now I am a mother, there is new life for me. Perhaps I shall even go back to the University if I save enough money. When I think of my studies!”

“That is why you came back, all the way from Nijni? How I admire you!”

Maria was silent. She looked out at the garden, humming and spinning in the light. Her face and mobile mouth changed as she thought of sorrows, something amusing, something cynical.

“France, you remember Ivan Soklow, the master of Russian Literature?”

“Yes.”

“That is why I came back. You remember, he said, Love me with the love of the head. I kept him in my mind's eye in all our struggles of the past three years, and his words encouraged me. I idealised him. I thought, now I am no longer a wincing schoolgirl he'll notice me; I'm his equal.

“On the way I had no regrets. I did not notice how far I walked except when poor little Ivan pulled my skirt and cried. The heart of the land is moving in the heat, you know, yellow and blue shadows jig as it breathes. Then the smells of this country! Yesterday morning I sat down in the ditch to take a stone out of my shoe. In front of me was a field of short barley full of poppies and marguerites. The tuft of grass I sat on sent up an acrid smell, and the breeze came walking
across the field in the heat, from down the hill. My head swam. The morning was crowded with little people, voices of the grains of barley, and the half-animate movements of plants. Ivan went to sleep on my hip, and I fell asleep.

“When I woke up it was still the same, and the light was so yellow that I could not see anything for a long time. It reminded me of the mornings here when we were at college, and before then, when I was a little girl. When I woke on a summer morning the sweet smell of white paper burning would be pouring into my room from the fire, where my father burned the old papers, manuscripts of the interminable novels he never published. Or the children would be digging in the garden, lopping branches off the trees, mending the fence, and chaffing each other in their high, vibrant voices; and I smelled the cooking in the kitchen. I thought of all that, France, and it seemed only a little while ago: a few weeks at most. There are some women into whom chagrin does not bite very deep. I am like that. Perhaps it is stupid, but I was always like that. My mother said, ‘She has no heart, that one' and at school the boys called me ‘the blackbird'.

“We walked along by the river and I made Ivan wash himself. They were trying to drive a donkey on board a barge: he would not go aboard, so I shouted to the boy: ‘Pull him on backwards, then he will think he is getting to land backwards.' They did so, and pulled him on by the tail. The boy said: Many thanks! ‘and I cried, laughing: ‘O, I understand donkeys.'