The Salzburg Tales (8 page)

“For hungry Armenians, American bread;

For sick Armenians, an American bed;

An American winding sheet for the Armenian dead.”

After this, he became private secretary to a man who invented a new type of female screw and thus made millions, and when the millionaire retired to his estates, our friend entered the office of a large broking and banking firm on Wall Street and devoted himself there to the various branches of high finance, that is, literature, the fine arts, the entertainment of senators, and duplicate book-keeping by high-powered electrical Lunar machines. On fine days he cut up ticker tape and threw it out of the window so that Tammany Hall would be able to justify the salaries it gave its street cleaners which were from 5,000 to 10,000 dollars a year for casual labour; and on wet days he went about putting gilt edges on South American certificates. He was a tall, slender gentleman with chestnut hair; he was educated at Groton and at Harvard, and wore a real pearl stud and the sign of Phi Beta Kappa on his watch-chain. He had an air of extreme refinement, although he spoke German with a perfect accent, and it was rumoured that he would be admitted to the Tennis and Racket Club. But, in private life, as they said in the magazines which gave his biography, he loved only big game fishing and exotic literature. When he spoke, his bright, brown eyes rolled, his tongue wallowed through a heavy swell of epithets and he had a jolly, rollicking style among men. He was a man whose feet were on earth, and who liked the smell of earth.

And there was last of all, a T
OWN
C
OUNCILLOR
of Salzburg, a very pleasant, honest and cultivated man, to whom everything must be ascribed: for he accompanied the men they called the Gold Trust, and the American Broker, and others into the Capuchin Wood the next morning. When they reached the outlook over the city and sat down, he began, by accident, to relate the history of a humble man who had lived in Salzburg and been a friend of his; and that was the first story told.

 

T
HUS
they sat and were charmed and frightened and had their morals repaired by the Mystery of “Jedermann”, which I will not trouble to relate for it is now very well known. But as the play went forward they got to know Everyman, who with husky voice, thin face and kind but troubled eyes, went through his vanities and disappointments and gained salvation; his Sweetheart, a beautiful gay young woman with a wreath in her hair, who feared death; his Mother, a devout, singleminded lady in a nun's bonnet, who got up before dawn to pray for her son; and Everyman's Thin Cousin, who sang so sadly the Song of the Cold, Cold Snow. Thus they sat and listened, and for long after the sun had set, the birds had finished flying round and the chief actor had gone home to gargle his throat, the soft mountain shadows, the galleries and old streets, the restaurants and cafés, the quays and rooms full of company heard the cry, “Everyman, Everyman,” shouted, shrieked and sung in the voices of his angels and devils calling from the airy terraces of the Residence and the foul hellish depths.

The golden afternoon passed magically into the starry evening, which called forth the musicians in evening dress and the women in long silk and velvet gowns and the searchlights lighting the Cathedral and Residence. The sky rained soft airs only while the wild voice of passion, the tender murmurs of seduction ran through the opera-house, hung with painted cloths and flushed faces. In this
way everyone's imagination took flight. When sleep came, they were ready for celestial adventures. Imagine their disappointment when in the morning, thick grey rain swept over the fields and hills and seemed likely to wash the town into the furious yellow river. There was no going out, except in raincoats and high boots, and nothing to do but to sit in the cafés and read the “Frankfurter Zeitung”. So they all began to collect in the well-known cafés, the “Bazar”, “Tomaselli's”, and they got to know each other.

Now, the weather soon broke again; the sun shone with such brilliancy that the town looked as if it were made out of glass. The visitors began walking by the river under the thick chestnuts, and climbing the hills and spending days among the lakes and mountain ranges of the Tyrol. Through the town itself, never ceased the procession of the curious, the students and the lovers of music, who went backwards and forwards over the bridges between the old and new town. On that day a party from the “Hotel Austria” went up into the monastery wood on the Kapuzinerberg in the morning to listen to the bells of the town and rest for some hours on the wooded height.

The Town Councillor led the party to the various vantage-points of the wood, and when they came to the path where the fortress appears through the wind-parted branches, they sat down to rest. One of the men asked if Salzburg always lost its sons to Vienna and the great cities; in replying the Town Councillor brought in the tale of the Marionettist.

 

W
HEN
winter came round, James's mother would look out at cloaked figures making tracks in the snow along the Nonnthalgasse beneath black Hohensalzburg, and say:

“I dreamed last night that Peter and Cornelius knocked at the door on a day like this. They were wrapped up in so many rags that I did not at first recognise them. They looked at me a moment, asked me for something to eat and then fell down flat on their faces like empty clothes. Even in my dreams, you see, I know they are not here. Perhaps they are far away: perhaps they are in the next town. Who knows if they have a crust of bread, my poor boys!”

James heard his father and mother listening at the door of his room at night and he had to cough when he entered the breakfast-room in the morning, so that he would not surprise them examining the few letters he received. At last he said to them:

“You must not come after me like watchdogs, you poor things: I am not going to run away. Peter ran away at ten, Cornelius did the disappearing trick when he was thirteen: I am seventeen already. There has to be one stay-at-home in the family. When my scholarship is done in Vienna, I will be back here as quick as my legs can carry me. Why not? A sculptor can carve anywhere: a sideboard for the Archbishop here, a Potsdam nymph for a brewer in Munich, a mermaid at sea, a Christ up in the mountains: and anything will serve him, a tree-root, a stone, gold, silver, copper or chalk! Why should he leave home? His workshop is everywhere, his models in all the streets.”

In Vienna James lived quietly in a boarding-house, going to a students' dance or a beer-garden once a week and covering his extra expenses by carving for the trade. He did chandeliers with figures of trolls and reindeer, panels with fruits and flowers, dryads and bacchuses in wood for beer-gardens and wine-cellars, religious figurines. His work, shown each year in students' exhibitions, did not win any praise, but he was complimented occasionally on comic figures done to order. At twenty-six he was prepared to return to Salzburg, when he fell in love with a girl studying applied arts in the school, and married her at once. He got work with a firm making fashion mannequins, and his wife endeavoured to get contracts for interior decoration. But they did not prosper and they began straightway to have children.

Their eldest daughter Anna did not walk until she was seven. James made for her a lot of little wooden dolls with comic expressions. He came in from his attic workshop at night, when the children were in bed, bringing in some new puppet, to tell them a new chapter in an endless story that he made up as he went along, one which sprang naturally out of the events of their daily life, with incidents he read in the newspapers, and memories of his childhood pieced in. He could imitate marvellously the rain on the roofs of villages, and the rain on the railway station at Vienna, with the chatter of the travellers underneath: if they closed their eyes, he could make them hear the wind rising in a valley, a motor-horn approaching round a winding road and scattering a barn-yard; a shepherd yodelling on the mountains with the echoes catching his song. Then he would act for them, with his wooden dolls, “Faust”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, fantastic pieces, a “Hexentanz”, “The Sorcerer's Apprentice”, and many other ancient themes. He lost himself in his performances, keeping his little daughters up late at night, till their flushed cheeks were turned to the pillow and their eyes suddenly closed. He often interrupted himself in a scene to find himself alone awake.

They went one Saturday to a marionette show, and a week afterwards, Anna, the wife, said:

“James, you could make a living as a marionettist, if the worst came to the worst: that man's puppets were sticks compared with yours.”

James replied:

“I have been thinking of it—if you don't mind, Anna! And you could paint the scenery.”

After three months of preparation, they began to give shows on holidays, and were successful. The daughters were brought up in the business. Two of them learned music so that they could provide an orchestra, and the others attended to the accounts, the wardrobe and the manipulation of the strings.

I
N
the four corners of the auditorium stood four large pieces of sculpture done by James for his examinations. There was a gypsy-girl dancing—she had the face of Anna, the art-student. Then there was a wrestler overcome by a boa-constrictor, the bust of a middle-aged man with a nondescript face and fourth, a piece, called “The One-man Band”, which showed a laughing lout, in circus clothes, with a top hat on his head, and his instruments and his monkey beside him. The family called this statue, “Uncle Peter”. It still amused them very much to hear that Peter had run away from home at the age of ten with an itinerant musician. James had last seen his brother with his face blacked, dressed in a top hat, a longtailed jacket, long trousers and white gloves, hurrying towards the station with the musician, and carrying his monkey and kettle-drum; and out of a secret sympathy for Peter he had kept the secret till the next day, and been punished for it. Cornelius too, had run away, when he was thirteen, had got down to Rotterdam and there got a berth on a tramp steamer. Neither of the brothers had ever been heard from again. They sometimes tried to imagine the fate of the two brothers, as they worked on their marionettes. James had the characters and text of a piece called, “The Pot of Gold”, which was as follows: Two brothers went out after adventure and were variously reported as lost by accident, or as beggars, while a third brother stayed at home and became an honest butcher. After many years the two brothers returned on the same day, one, full of tales of adventure and with a black bride, the daughter of a chieftain, and the other with a pot of gold, which he said was full of gold coins, and a patent of nobility in Persia. The butcher brother stole the black bride and the pot of gold in a night and ran off with them. He came back after a short time, shamefaced and annoyed, saying that the pot of gold had only contained pieces of lead and a few pieces of silver, and that the black bride was dumb, but very bad tempered with it. Then his brothers showed him that he had not stolen the real pot, which contained diamonds, or the real bride who was yellowish and not black. “For,”
said the eldest brother, to the butcher, “we knew you would be overcome by temptation, and we wanted to let you down lightly,” and then they proceeded to tell him the devious and horrid ways they had come by their good fortune. But they did not often play this for the mother, Anna, had some sort of prejudice against it.

James left home when he was in his thirty-eighth year. His wife and daughters cried, reported his absence to the police, and gave the performances that were billed for the week in order to avoid a scandal. After that they became quite accustomed to running the theatre by themselves. They made their living at it and were able to save money. The eldest daughter, Anna, crippled and thin, played the piano and ran the accounts. The second daughter, Rose, married a ventriloquist who had studied their situation and hoped to get control of the business. Soon after Rose's marriage, a pleasant, thin, florid individual, slightly bald, walked into the theatre and asked for James, saying that he was an old friend: they said James had been gone more than a year. The youngest daughter, Juliet, drooped her lip and said:

“Perhaps poor Papa is dead: we know nothing,” but the visitor laughed and said:

“Dead? Not he! I've been roving since I was ten years old. I've been in plenty of tight places, but I'm not dead. And where is Cornelius now, James's brother?”

“Cornelius?” said the mother in surprise. “Cornelius, James's brother, left home when he was thirteen: he ran away to sea. That is what we have heard.”

“No!” said the visitor, exaggerating his astonishment in a comic style. Then he executed a neat little dance of two or three steps, reciting:

“The stupidest of the three
,

Is not the one you see!”

and concluded by bowing to Anna and saying, “I am brother Peter!”

Peter stayed with them two nights and then said goodbye affably, as if he had only been away from them for a day or two, and
would soon return. Going out through the door, he remarked kindly to Anna:

“I'll give the family's love to James, if ever I run across him.”

Then the mother, Anna, lifted her head and said what had been in her mind some time:

“At bottom they are all loafers: probably that scoundrel has a wife and children somewhere; and no doubt, several wives with several children.”

The legend of Uncle Peter amused them no more. In time they sent “The One-man Band” to the attic and replaced it with a large palm.

Once in the first five years they received a postcard from James, saying that he was working in Italy with a firm that supplied the export trades with modern art busts, and that he was making money. They did not answer the card which only gave a post-office address.