The Salzburg Tales Page 2

  Quotations from Christina Stead’s essays ‘Ocean of Story’ and ‘A Writer’s Friends’ are taken from Ocean of Story: The uncollected stories of Christina Stead, edited by RG Geering (Viking/Penguin, Ringwood, 1985). Hazel Rowley’s Christina Stead: A Biography (William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1993) continues to be an invaluable resource. Michael P Steinberg’s The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1990) informs part of my discussion. I have also drawn on Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake, edited by Margaret Harris (The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2005), and Christina Stead’s A Web of Friendship: Selected Letters (1928–1973), edited by RG Geering (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992).

  Contents

  THE PROLOGUE

  THE PERSONAGES

  THE FIRST DAY

  The Marionettist

  Guest of the Redshields

  Don Juan in the Arena

  The Gold Bride

  The Centenarist’s Tales (I)

  THE SECOND DAY

  The Deacon of Rottenhill

  The Death of Svend

  In Doulcemer

  Silk-shirt

  The Centenarist’s Tales (II)

  THE THIRD DAY

  The Mirror

  The Sparrow in Love

  The Divine Avenger

  The Triskelion

  Lemonias

  The Centenarist’s Tales (III)

  THE FOURTH DAY

  The Sensitive Goldfish

  The Amenities

  A Russian Heart

  Fair Women

  The Centenarist’s Tales (IV)

  THE FIFTH DAY

  The Prodigy

  Gaspard

  Morpeth Tower

  Sappho

  The Little Old Lady

  The Centenarist’s Tales (V)

  THE SIXTH DAY

  Antinoüs

  To the Mountain

  On the Road

  A Colin, a Chloë

  The Centenarist’s Tales (VI)

  THE SEVENTH DAY

  Speculation in Lost Causes

  The Death of the Bee

  Day of Wrath

  Poor Anna

  The Wunder Gottes

  Overcote

  The Centenarist’s Tales (VII)

  EPILOGUE

  The Prologue

  SALZBURG, old princely and archiepiscopal city, and its fortress Hohen-Salzburg, lie among the mountains of the Tyrol, in Salzburg Province, in Austria. The river Salzach, swift and yellow from the glaciers and streaming mountain valleys, flows between baroque pleasure-castles standing in glassy lakes, and peasant villages pricked in their vineyards, and winds about to reflect the citadel rising in its forests, single eminence in the plain. The river divides the city, leaving a wooded mound on either hand, rushes noisily under the bridges between Italian domes and boulevarded banks, and rolls out, placid, fast and deep, towards the Bavarian plain and the rainburdened evening sky.

  Yesterday morning, the city flashed like an outcrop of rock-crystals in its cliffs by the river: in the evening, rain-clouds sat on the Kapuzinerberg and the Mönchsberg and squirted their black waters on the town and beat down the mild leafage of the woods. This morning the clouds rolled away with troutside gleams under a fresh wind, and the river, risen a foot in the night, and roaring like the wind, is again calm and yellow. And now, on this last day of July, the townspeople look at the red walls of the naked Tyrol far off and at the giant peak of the Untersberg, like a hatchet in the air, and all their conversation is that they hope it will be fine for the first day of the August festival, the great event of Salzburg men.

  Now the streets are full: bands of German students in blue linen coats with rucksacks and staves lope through the town at a round pace, counting the monuments and ignoring the tourists; foreign women in summer dresses peer in jewellers’ windows full of Swiss clocks and edelweiss pressed under glass, foreign gentlemen buy tufts of reindeer hair to put in their hats, and trout-flies; the milk-wagons are busy, the elegants sit in the cafés and drink coffee with cream, and the men going home from work on their bicycles glance thirstily in the low leaded panes of beer-cellars on the Linzergasse, and see severe Berlin merchants and tall blond American college boys drinking good Salzburg beer. A stage has been put up in the Cathedral Place for the Miracle Play of “Jedermann”, German bands are playing Mozart and Wagner in all the cafés, the Residenz Platz is packed with visitors waiting to hear the Glockenspiel at six o’clock ring out its antique elfin tunes, tourists pop in and out of the house at number nine, Getreide-gasse, where Mozart was born, musicians and actors are walking and talking under the thick trees on the river-bank, and even the poor people in the new pink and blue stucco houses, built in a marsh on the Josef-Mayburger Kai, look at the red sunset and count busily for the hundredth time the little profit they will make on the Viennese lady who has rented a room from them for the duration of the Festival.

  Opposite the fortress, across the river, is the yellow-walled Capuchin convent in its tall wood. One has to pay a few groschen each day at the Convent Gate to enter the wood. Within the gate, transported there from Vienna, stands the little wooden hut in which Mozart wrote “The Magic Flute”. Higher up the hill is a fine outlook towards Bavaria, and on the crest of the hill in the grounds of an ancient house built of beams and hung with vines, in which the monks formerly dwelt, is a vantage-point commanding the city and its environs.

  In this wood the visitors to the August Festival walk often, and often sit long, in groups, listening to the innumerable bells of the town ringing through the wood, and talking, in the fresh mornings. The wood is tranquil in its brown hollows and full of sandalled Capuchin monks drawing wagons of wood, and woodcutters who have to take their carts and horses down the steep Calvary Way beyond the convent gate to reach the streets of the town. Sometimes by the covered well in the tall-wooded hollow are heard foreign voices relating sonorously the marvellous and dark and bloody annals of the town, or some long-spun story brought in their packs with them from overseas, while the soft Austrian breeze entreats the leaves in the tops of the trees, squirrels scrabble in the roots and wild violets and sun-coloured fungi fill the hollows. So passionate a love awakes in the stranger’s breast as he scarcely feels for his native land, for the incomparable beauty of these wild peaks, these rose walls two thousand feet in air and this mediaeval fortress hanging footless on an adamantine rock against the unweathered cliffs of the Untersberg: and as he walks, meditative, along some lowland or upland path, listening to the distant voices, the bells and the diminutive rustlings, he passes an old inhabitant with large brown eyes, sitting immobile on a log, who says politely in his sweet dialect, “Good-day,” as he would to a son of the city come from a foreign shore.

  The Personages

  A fresh wind blew in the woods, the pigeons massed in the Residenz Platz, tooting because the sky was bright, and the fountain dropped loudly on the weedgrown stones. The people went through an archway into the Domplatz where “Jedermann” of the poet Hofmansthal was to be played in the open air before the cathedral. Actors in medieval costumes ran about in the nearby streets and disappeared quickly in a little door at the back of the cathedral, or were seen leaning momentarily over the high cornices of the roofs of the Domplatz. In the courtyard of the fortress, high up in the air, tourists looking like flies or sparrows hung over the wall and peered at the Domplatz, trying to make out whether the play had begun, and whether many people had paid for seats. In the middle of the front seat sat the Archbishop of Salzburg, tall, plump and dressed in red, with white linen and white hands: he greeted distinguished visitors like a prince welcoming talent to his court. Near him on the same seat sat the superior from the Capuchin Convent and the Mayor of Salzburg; but these three great persons, who divided the town into three parts between them, told no tales in the Capuchin Wood.

  The FESTIVAL DIRECTOR came in from the Cathedral bare-headed, warm
with his last instructions to the actors. He bowed to the Archbishop and remarked that the pontifical sun shone on their labours, in a voice unctuous but constrained, for he was small and stout, while the Archbishop was firm, large and grey as a gravestone: likewise the sun shone in the Director’s face and made it red, and he was aware that the Archbishop did not give a benedicite for his style. Courteously he bent his head once more to the Archbishop’s chest and said, he hoped his Grace would applaud the Miracle Play of Everyman which they were about to put on again, and that, while indoors one tricked the eye with fat columns and a giant cornice to suggest boundless space, here his stage was two bare boards, for he had to present simple verities, and otherwise his theatre was exalted above fame by the redoubtable acts of Salzburg’s Princes of the Church. Meanwhile, the Director cast glances about him, conscious of whispers and of people standing on tiptoe to see him. He murmured discreetly to the Mayor the hiding-places of his actors concealed on the roofs and explained to a monk that the church-bells of the town would be silent now until the play was done. Then, he glanced over the audience, standing three-quarters on to the Archbishop still, with a gracious air which yet lacked polish, for he was a ready, practical man of elephantine dreams, who tried to give the imagination a footrest on earth: and he was always casting off from his thick, square shoulders set on his thick long torso, presentiments of trouble, of criticism and of failure. His eye grouped the audience quickly this way and that like the parting of thick hair with a comb. Here were the art patrons, rich amateurs, people of fashion, the Viennese, Berliners, New Yorkers, here the musicians, conductors and actors, there the poor, the townspeople from the boarding-houses, Cook’s tourists: beyond the rope were the Naturfreunde, and in the background some wretched of the town and peasants come in from the mountains wearing great black hats and bell-bottomed trousers, and monks and college students, and fishermen, and conscripts from the barracks down the river, and idling shopboys and shopgirls escaped for half an hour. Smiling, bowing and turning in the sun like a buoy in the bay, the Director backed away from the Archbishop and sat down a few seats away, waiting for the play to begin.

  After the Festival Director came the VIENNESE CONDUCTOR, with another Conductor from Munich. The Viennese Conductor was like a tasselled reed, with shoulders and hands spreading outwards, delicate hips and a soft, long, feline stride: he sometimes took shorter steps and sometimes longer as if to show that in him the passion of rhythm was constant but tidal. He looked this way and that as he bowed obsequiously over his companion’s conversation, smiling to himself on the side, as if he had a tiding of joy in his sleeve, and gathering in the ladies’ glances; it might have been harvest-time and he a reaping-hook. Bowing, with long bright looks of adulation, he acknowledged the distinguished guests, and stooped with manner consciously rich and theatrical to the Archbishop, for whom he did not give a fig. He took the hand of an aged prima donna and looked as if he would faint from excessive admiration; and then he walked on indifferently, dropping all this behind him, like a dolphin in the waves, going on from easy conquest to easy conquest, speaking of violins and sunshine, of Max Reinhardt and overtones, of Mozart and Apollo, easily, wittily, with everything said in reverse in order to amuse. He was thirty years of age and had conducted orchestras since the age of six. He delighted especially in chamber concerts where the atmosphere was intimate and the women were near enough to study his attitudes, how he swooned with ecstasy one moment and closed his eyes wearily at another, how his eyes sparkled when the soft theme rose on the strings, and again, how he snapped his fingers quickly, impatient to hear the quick tread of the bows getting through the thicket of notes in soldierly unison: now he waved them off with both hands, entreating them not to assail his silken nerves with such boisterousness, now he bowed to them, and scooped them out of the basin of the orchestra, then he smiled like a lover to one, and gave a snaky look to another; he gathered them in his arms like a woman gathering chickens in her apron, he danced up and down on his toes as if he were a reed alone bearing the tremendous harmonies of the wild. At the end, turning from the performers, he bowed like an Eastern prince to the audience, as much as to say, “This is what I draw out of mere things of catgut, wood and silver,” and when the stormy applause arose, he at once, with the same bright look, and an abnegatory gesture, deplored it and deferred to it—“Are we not here for the cause of art alone—for the soul, not for the laurels”; and all the time he smiled to himself as if to say, “My little ones, you ignorant pusses, my tympanum vibrates like a film of air, all this is a thousand times more exquisite to me”; and then he turned to the orchestra and made them rise with the gesture of a good host who leaves no one in the shade, and thanked them himself, disregarding their amused glances and bluff haste to be packed up and gone. He was a wonderful actor of concertos.

  These two conductors then passed up a side aisle and sat into their places like two bars of music well-fallen.

  After them came the ITALIAN SINGER, a gentleman of fifty years or more, with a ravaged wrinkled face, like a mask of tragedy carved in wood; he wore a blue silk shirt and a gold bracelet. When he spoke it might be in a whisper, or cavernously, or gruffly: the ear was at first repelled by the harsh voice and soon after was surprised and seduced by its rich, tormented and varying tones. He seemed to be weeping internally even when he broke into his slow, great smile of an Easter Island idol. He was a famous singer and had once been the rival of the greatest singer in the world. For years the balance went up and down between them, but into his clear, farsounding notes came whisperings and rich lachrymose overtones; disease marched on him in full array. Yet even now, thrilling and deathly to hear were the infernal rustlings of his great stage-whisper. The sun silvered his smooth, black hair and his low, satanic forehead. He had an antique cast: one would have said some giant warrior who had kept watch on the walls of Carthage. His melancholy great eyes, deepset, scaled the castlewalls as if pursuing a bird of prey into the air. His large mouth drew down the curtain of gloom; but in an instant the scene was changed with his brilliant teeth flashing at a pretty neighbour. He bowed gravely to the apostolic damask.

  Next came two women. The first was a FRENCH-WOMAN, tall, slender and fair, from the south of France, and boasting in her veins an English blood that sprinkled the soil at Poitiers. Her hair was yellow and curled, and her high nose looked out between her fine cheekbones, like a thorn between two buds. Her eyes were blue and clear as water, her skin was golden with a brown shade beneath, and her lips were full, small and prettily painted. She was dressed in a costume of black and white silk in small stripes like hairs laid close together, with a belt of red leather and silver. She wore high-heeled black slippers and the finest silk stockings ever seen; they were of pewter grey. She wore a blue fox fur and a pair of white gloves, and when she took off her gloves, which were always clean, she had on a silver chased ring for a wedding ring and a platinum ring with a diamond as large as a shoe-button, for she thought she might one day have to fly in some sudden uprising of the farmers, or some political disorder in the south, or in war, or pestilence; her family was so old that they had seen every kind of trouble. When she spoke she spoke excellently, with a firm, caressing voice; to everything she said she gave an aphoristic turn; her conversation disarmed the jealous, dismayed the dull and sharpened with salt the wit of the witty. She was a very good Catholic and met the Archbishop with frank pleasure. She had already visited by eight o’clock in the morning every Catholic altar in the town. She had been to Lourdes, to Lisieux and Rome and to all the famous places of pilgrimage, travelling richly like a great lady, to fall on the stones of some obscure chapel and receive a wafer from some hasty priest. Yet she always had a tolerant smile for unbelievers and jested smartly with those who laughed at her piety. Whatever was brought against the fathers of the church, the scholarship, beliefs or promises of the church, against local credulity or pontifical honour, she turned against the accuser with the sharp thrust of a tongue for debate. In company
she had no equal; she was benevolent and polished in repartee, in anecdote pithy and wise, and in her tales, circumstantial and rotund with a long line of development and a sentimental conclusion. There was nothing she loved so much as to be with her dressmaker or her friends. When she was with her friends, who were of all classes and temperaments, she forgave them all their errors and she exerted herself to amuse them. When she sat mistress at a table the wines were numerous, course followed course with succulent fleshes, subtle sauces and new garnishings, and compliment followed compliment with fresh blandishments; at the end she had always some little flask of liqueur brought from her own vines, dated and named and tended at home, which kept her guests sitting hour after hour from evening till daylight, without anyone noticing where the hours had flown.

  With the Frenchwoman came a DOCTRESS, a Scottish woman from Inverness, jolly, fresh-complexioned and round, tall, with a small waist and wide bosom; with ginger hair and russet eyelids and eyes like cats’-eyes. Her hair was long and loosely wound on her round head. She wore a brown straw hat with flowers in it, a brown, yellow and cream dress amply draped without much fashion, small shoes of kid, with copper buckles, and long kid gloves. She was perhaps thirty-eight years old, and gay, lively and affectionate to the companion of the moment. She liked to be with men, she smoked cigarettes and drank milk, laughed heartily at all that was said and told plenty of lively stories herself: but if she did not think enough attention was paid her she showed the spitfire under the skin; a grain of mustard-seed under her tongue put a scornful tang into what she said: she would have liked to be honey-voiced but she was too impatient: her voice would break in the middle of a flattery and she would snap her fingers and say no more. She had got her degree in Medical School after several failures. She had gone into the Government medical service, gave lectures in schools to embarrassed adolescents and taught nose-blowing to kindergartners. She went round the country with a pair of calipers and a measuring stick, taking the height and cranial capacity of schoolchildren. She liked pretty little girls but detested little boys with their ink, their coils of string, their stamps and smells. She expected to go on in the Department until the age of retirement, for she did not think of marrying, although she was a pretty woman and liked a house of her own. Her most sentimental amusement was to walk in the evening with some middle-aged man of distinction with black or silver hair and white linen and clothes of a good cut, and listen to his sonorous sentiments, dispute his personalities and agree at bottom with all he said. The stars made her salty, but they made her wise. She opened her eyes in the dark like a cat; it seemed that an immense affectionate understanding could have sprung up in her cold bosom, but that was only her comfortable fat. She was like the Frenchwoman in this, that she had strong prejudices she liked to discuss publicly; and she liked tales: but the Doctress preferred scandalous stories and her ideas came out of a slipshod imagination, with an evident intention of pleasing only herself, whereas the Frenchwoman far exceeded any other woman there in the telling of tales.