The Salzburg Tales (49 page)

Rachel moved a step or two off, and now, snowy-skinned, in the full starlight, said, “Lilias, the horses are waiting down on the bridle-path at six. We will ride all day tomorrow, and at night sleep in the dry cave.” At hand a horse whinneyed through the aromatic summer dark.

“As we stood here, it occurred to me that that mountain has the appearance of a sloth,” said Lilias. She looked down the vertiginous glooms of the cliff.

In the night, in the oppressive heat, sheet lightning shuttered in and out of the whole eastern sky, revealing the somnolent head of Mount Solitary, rough and bestial. Thunder pealed on the distant horizon towards the sea; it reverberated through the hills, and the mountain laughed in his stronghold.

In the morning when they arose at six o'clock, the sun had leaped over the eastern ridge, and shone clear on a new-washed world, but the valley was full of clouds, and only the crest of the lonely mountain, rosy, jutted into the sky. They set off, and soon penetrating the stratum of clouds, found themselves in a submerged glen whose dreary silence was broken by water dripping from overloaded boughs, the scurry of a startled bird, and the jingle of the bits as the horses shook free their sopping wet manes. It was impossible to calculate time, except by the waxing of their appetites. After their lunch-time halt, the bushes, which had loomed formlessly a yard ahead, became more distinct and the fog yellowish. With the heavy dropping of water from the trees they seemed to hear irregular footfalls in the bush. The path, steep
and winding, appeared endless. Drugged by the thick air, blanketed with untimely cold, each sank into her own reflections, and voiced from time to time, as if in soliloquy, the miseries and boredoms of life. A wild sobbing cry rose through the cloud at some distance, a voice like that of the curlew, which freezes the blood at dayfall by marsh, lagoon and waste; perhaps some migrant fowl, desolated to see the clouds covering its pasture grounds.

Rachel's horse stumbled on the slippery scree, shied at a black trunk appearing suddenly round a bend, reared and trumpeted. Rachel went pale and laughed: “We are almost at the top: let's take it at a dash!” They could now see two hundred yards ahead.

Lilias, shaking herself out of her torpor, plunged ahead, along the path now only slightly inclined, but before she had gone five hundred yards cried out and reined in her snorting horse. The edge of the cliff lose abruptly across the path.

“We've missed the road,” she cried to Rachel.

“It's five hundred yards lower down: you passed it,” said Rachel firmly.

“You didn't warn me? I heard nothing.”

“I intended to follow you where you rode.”

Lilias turned her shallow, inexpressive eyes, wide-set above broad peasant cheek-bones, to her companion, looked at her steadily, recognised in her eyes the liquid enamel of anguish, turned her horse and rode slowly up the true path, saying, “You should have warned me I had to do with a Valkyrie, for I am none.”

When night came and the clouds had risen far into the sky, parting here and there in a white moon-glade, a rapidly whirling funnel of vapours rose over the mountain. Up this the motor-car lights flew as they wheeled. The companions rested at the mouth of their cave and looked over the valley, inundated with night. Thunder rolled again, and cloudy griffins clung once more to the rocks and precipices. Wild voices and lights gathered over the mountain from the echoing walls of the distant bluffs with their villages, and flew up
the cone of the thickening sky. A wind began to blow, dividing the warmer air; goblins played various melodies on the peaks, and the raven-winged couriers of the storm flapped like waves against the cliffs. At one moment they heard a song from a camp of young men on holiday, or perhaps from the wild Browns. Rachel pushed a knife under her pillow and her sharp teeth appeared for a moment in her sharp gipsy face. Lilias, yellow, almost Mongolian, plaited her long and beautiful hair before a piece of cracked mirror.

As they lay sleeping in their sleeping-bags, it seemed that the fearful music of eternity, ponderous and fluted, was blowing about the ledges. The horses champed and jingled, and the trees of the summit blew softly over them all, as the hush-hush of the distant sea. Into their dreams intruded the occasional neighing of the horses, and the great indolent breathing of the mountain.

As they went down, in the morning, in the fresh air rich with the violent smells of sub-tropical flora, they looked at each other, musing.

“Remember yesterday?” said Rachel with a shudder.

“Let's forget horrors,” said Lilias. “But I assure you, you'll not get me up that mountain again: it's haunted, I think.”

“Even I don't glory in that height as I used to.”

“This is my landscape,” said Lilias, as they rode easily through the flowering pass. “I want to get old as quickly as possible to take my ease. I sleep as much as I can and work as much as I can. Last year my ankle became stiff: this year I feel rheumy, my blood is certainly running colder, and I cannot work late at night. With good luck I shall be in a year or two perfectly resigned, and I will be able to enter the warm and indolent country of my heart.”

“But when you were young you must have wished …”

“Let's not talk of days so old. What fine weather!”

A gunshot in the valley rolled among the mountains, the great beast grunted in his stronghold, and the birds flew up in a cloud.

T
HE
Master of the Day then turned to the Translator.

“You live among literary people, you are always translating books: you must know hundreds of tales inaccessible to us: your life must be an Arabian Nights Entertainment.”

“Literary people are two dimensional,” said the Schoolboy, with scorn.

“You can decide,” replied the Translator, and began.

 

W
HEN
Colin came to London at seventeen, leaving the South Downs and Phyllis, it was said everywhere that he was a young man with a future. His first book, come out in the Autumn, and called “The Vale of Arun”, was collected, in its first edition, by the cognoscenti.

Chloë, curd-browed, pink-cheeked, in Liberty silks, served tea on St. Valentine's Day, her birthday, to her invalid foster-parents and a few friends, and mentioned Van Dongen, Lawrence and Proust: to Kisskass the middle-aged ceramist she seemed a perennial adolescent, preserved for years and imperceptibly deteriorating in calve's-foot jelly: to Colin she seemed a Muse.

They exchanged for two years quiverfuls of pen-and-ink passions, birds singing in trees in the square and patches of scarlet in ferns on cliff's-edge. They went out on Sundays and picked wild flowers whose names they knew to the number of a thousand, declaimed in the ignorant woodland, made country couplets in the mushroomy thicket, went down ducal valleys following trout-pools full of Spring freshets, trod the snow in crusty Winter cracking ancient meaty chestnuts; and the conversation always turned wilfully, pleasantly, skilfully to Colin's advancement and the sweetness of mutual aid. Colin's second book had a gallery of characterless, gold-skinned
women moving in domestic chiaroscuro, distilling incompetent charm; but behind all was the tantalising shape of some dark child, some graceful servant, some country-girl. Chloë' had the key to that gallery alone, Colin said: but at night she was oppressed with dreams and was haunted by an unknown face.

London is an old hag, dowdy, trinketed, smelling of whisky, but with an Isis bosom still and the unexpected tricks of an ageing passion: here comes a young man fresh from the country, full of green sap, with breezes in his hair; she invites him to her salon, gives him cakes and cocktails, is affected and seeks a handkerchief in her bosom, begs him to feel how her heart beats (still young in a body too soon old), rings for the maid, relents, pays tribute to his sympathy and invites him to the supreme feast on a day when he will arrive to find the drawing-room full of half literary London. And the elderly Lavinia of Colin's sorrow, on this day retired to her study visibly emotional on the arm of an old violinist, while the guests smiled in a sophisticated fashion and Colin dashed down his cold tea-cup and went outside into the Spring air, white to the hair and bitter, bitter and biting: to his river-grass nose the hyacinths in the square had the choking, dusty odour of faded paper flowers.

Chloë, between a literary broil and a scandalous limerick, remarked over her fancywork, in a thin voice:

“You know, I'm collecting Colin's early efforts for my cunabular catalogue: here are the first pages of ‘The Vale of Arun'”.

And after reading a few pages aloud with sighing cadences, she said:

“That spontaneous fusion of emotion and expression comes with the first bloom of youth: is it genius, is it innocence—who knows? He was so fresh and credulous when he first came up: will he become facile or great? Will he replace Lawrence? All of us, his friends, are trembling with anxiety. In London there are so many influences for good and evil! The wildfowl, ignorant, from the waters of his native valley, do not go astray on the bare hills, but man has
not sufficient instincts for his needs: a young country boy can easily go astray.”

Phyllis, phthisic, came to town: she was eighteen, Colin was twenty, and their parents thought the engagement had lasted long enough. The night Colin kept those two meek sisters an hour late over coffee, describing with suggestive smirks his conquest of the brilliant old lady in her salon, and the exquisite odour of hyacinths, Chloë tucked Phyllis into the cretonnes and lavendered linens of her own bed with tearful kisses, and told her to be patient. Chloë cut lunches for their walks in the bluebell country, and found cottages for the long amorous holidays of the pair, by the sea; she sent Phyllis medicines and Colin fine editions, and spent the Christmas before their marriage sewing a silk trousseau for the bride. She sighed and said, as she sewed, “She is getting much worse: they say she cannot live long. She is such a child—I doubt if she knows what she is undertaking in marriage.”

Sometimes, in a jolly mood, Colin still wrote Chloë titbits of the sky, air, ground-larks, reed-warblers, which came his way and were part of his emotive stock-in-trade, and wound up some country excursion with a comparison of Chloë to a windflower, a daisy “tricked out in dainty petticoats”, called her “a maze-treader of the heart, confused and charmingly wistful”, and would inscribe in his own hand on some virelay pulled on handmade paper on a private press, some genteel thought with characteristic quirk.

When Colin and Phyllis were married, Chloë got a little pale and went about with a churchly young fellow who taught ethics to the poor and collected insects. Colin down in the country loitered for weeks without writing, weak with discouragement and ennui: sometimes he wrote tenderly of pregnant mothers and children, sometimes he wept, walking bitterly by himself in the fields, and thought of “The Vale of Arun” written in the innocence and faith of the angels.

During the winter Phyllis and her newborn baby died, and Colin, coming up to London, peremptorily broke off Chloë's friendship with the insect-collector and bound her for good, fruitlessly and
hopelessly, to his single life. This he did by means of love-letters of perverse cunning, exquisitely excruciating like the sounds of a violin, solos to be played on a sensual, timid and solitary heart. On the St. Valentine's Day of her fortieth birthday, he wrote his last letter. Chloë died, by accident, shortly after, and now cares no more for her troubles than you and I, and Colin only is left to mumble them over when he wants a pathetic undertone in his modish literary essays.

 

C
HLOË
—It seems to me that you still hear the sound of the waters that were running through the valley of Arun twenty years ago. It is a long time since they reflected the sky for me and heard my irresolute footfalls in the grass. The year began, the birds mated, the snowdrops sprang, the wood heard the fledglings crying, your love flew towards me fresher after a frozen Spring: all nature was stirring and I even, a dullminded man, felt a new impulse: you knew the poets and I was intoxicated with the Word. Time leads us over lawns and pricks and the heart knocks each moment louder on Death's yielding door: first one she, then another, flitting, seemed for a moment habited like Time, but you have remained, an unwilling sister to the doorstep.

Here is St. Valentine bringing you your fortieth year. I ought to give you something too, especially this year, for something has unsettled me lately, and you come to trouble me at night: your face, white as a smile in the dark, hovers above my bed and turns a sorry, understanding glance on my night-thoughts. It seems to me that I owe you something. They say only the generous can owe gratitude: me it irritates—I shall pay you in full. Why didn't you marry the daddle-headed insect-collector, or join the china-cabinet of Kisskass the elderly collector of clays? Instead, you let me ruin your life, you clung to my bad tempers, my irritability, my vanity and dull pomp, and for want of love you fell into the embraces of the blackskinned Venus who wrestles with women in hired rooms and under the
shades of patriarchal fourposters alike, in the locked and curtained secrecy dangerous to chastity, in the morning full of suspect odours as a tropical hothouse, who presses her bulbous breasts over the soft paps half-blown, her mouth over the fugitive suffocating mouth, her heavy sterile belly streaming with juices over the thin hips, cold as a silver jar, of the solitary weeping in her pillow-slips, the Venus who at her multiple touches makes flower from the steaming skin the thousand different roses of sensuality and from the inspired prophetic imagination spring a whole creation of beasts, plants, tentacles, gargoyles, figures of potency and imps which hang in the accomplice sheets.

Long ago I saw you wander in the banyan forest, and stepping over the margin of bulrushes sink in the torpid lake, thick with lilystalks and curdled with watersnakes: in this sacred wood you fled from even the shades of men, finding their charms pale beside the horrible attractions of the wood's inhabitants. You preferred their bestial companies roving with shouts in the enchanted borders of the wood, you plucked the fatal asphodel and the long-leaved nepenthes. Soon at the end of every city-street and in each court and area you heard whispering and saw red lamps, and your forested creatures sprang up with footfalls and scurrying. Then, tired, you looked in the surface of the lake, to see if you could see the crescent moon shine, sword of Diana the cruel: and looked again to see if there was no Diana but the light of a lamp in a window or a hand beckoning you out of the thicket.