The Salzburg Tales (10 page)

A small handbook on the table explained that by pressing buttons in the entry I could change the wallpaper and curtains, or cause a series of spot, flood, and footlights to play, so that the aspect,
perspective and size of the room would alter entirely. If I wished, the walls would slide back, leaving me enclosed in a pavilion of glass, transparent from within but not from without, so that I might ruminate in privacy on the rich and rolling demesne.

In a small glass-and-metal bar, fruits, soft and alcoholic drinks, coffee and mineral waters, cakes and comfits, bromides and sedatives, and bouillons in hot flasks stayed to comfort the wakeful guest. But I will not attempt to indicate the infinite advantages of this room: time can destroy but cannot compass them.

I sat in an easy chair with adjustable back and foot and placed one dangling foot on a small brass knob planted in the dais on which the bed stood. The platform immediately rose and the bed, all in a moment, sank into the ceiling without a trace, while the floor, perfectly carpeted and unencumbered permitted me to stretch my legs, when I felt kinaesthetic. On reading in the book of directions that the walls were soundproof, I took up a violin which lay on a table of calamander wood and silver, and began to play the Chaconne of Bach. A moment after finishing, I heard a light tap, which, I imagined, was on the shutters. I loosened these, but only the tempered wind was there. I looked forth. A rolled-up ladder was attached to the balcony, and at a careless tap of my cigarette, it unwound and invited me to descend directly into the park. The full but cloudy moon shone irregularly on the cockscombed glades, rounded knolls, ideal vistas, terraces and wildernesses sweetly artificed, which appeared momently along the serpentine paths; and here fountains, a well of dark sound, a jet of snow, and there watercourses, dulcet with pools, resonant with pebbles, with flute and lyre, descanted in the woods. In an hour I returned, wound up my ladder, closed the shutters and thought of sleeping. I had begun to undress, meditating lazily, when again I heard a soft rapping, louder than before. “Surely,” said I, “that is something, within the wall, a clickbeetle, or death-watch, a rat running over the beams, the hot-water pipes vibrating.” But I said: “Come in.”

A maître d'hôtel immediately entered the room through an invisible door in the wall, served by a secret passage. This mode of access was to avoid the embarrassment a guest feels at hearing a
passepartout
turned in his lock: moreover, since the passage was overheated, aliments could be conveyed along it without turning cold. The man had a silver-backed tablet in his hand, and, addressing me with a mathematically modulated courtesy, he asked if I would take anything on waking in the morning, and whether it should be tea, coffee, cocoa, or some other thing I might suggest. I said I would take tea.

“Ceylon, China, Russian or Indian tea?” he asked delicately, with pencil poised.

“China tea,” said I.

“Black or green?” he asked.

“Black,” said I.

“And of what flavour: Pekoe, Orange Pekoe, Congou, Oolong, Soochong, Pekoe-Soochong, Poochong or Bohea?”

“My mother liked Soochong,” said I.

“With, or without, an admixture of dried tea flowers, or jasmine flowers?” he continued.

Said I: “With jasmine flowers.”

“Now may I trouble you,” he said politely, “to know whether you like it hot or cold, and with or without lemon, or milk or cream, and sugar?”

“With milk and sugar.”

“As to the milk,” said he, “will you have whole milk, skim milk, condensed milk, buttermilk, cream or whey?”

“Whole milk,” I said, much taken aback.

“Should it be, sir,” he said, “from the Guernsey or the Jersey herd?”

“Guernsey,” I cried.

“Then as to the sugar,” he said, “will you have cane sugar (white or brown), beet sugar, palm, maple or sorghum sugar?”

And when I replied: “White cane,” he inclined and inquired: “From Cuba, the Philippines, Queensland or Natal?”

“Cuba, then,” I said, thinking that no more discrimination could be required, even of a guest of the Redshields.

Sensing my fatigue, he asked softly: “May I suggest the Province of Camaguey?”

“Even so.”

“Good, and as to form, loaf, granulated, crystallised, or soft?” he asked; and I replied: “Loaf!”

“Now, sir,” he said, in a firmer tone, “what will you eat?” In haste I replied, ere he could begin his inexorable enumeration: “Bread and butter.” But the words had not left my mouth before his ingeniously insinuating vocables were upon me with, Wheaten bread, corn, oats, barley or rye bread, gluten or protein bread, and if wheaten, as he took the liberty to suppose, whether that made from spring patent (high protein), ordinary spring patents, clears (first spring), soft winter straights, hard winter straights, hard winter patents or hard winter clears, and whether new baked, or old, hot or cold, and whether crumb or crust, and in what form, whether Danish, Swedish, German, French or English (for example), and, my choice being made, whether aërated or salt-rising bread, and in what shape, plain or fancy, tin, cottage, twist, roll or crescent?

But now I arose quietly from my thrice-sprung seat and said in a soft voice: “Nothing it is to me, if maître d'hôtel you be, or fiend or dream, or the three: but take my word, I am only a poet, and I cannot cope with the verbal resources of your universal larder. Let me only not starve! Thank you, good night!”

At these words, the butler, flitting, gave a soft submissive smile, like one, too courteous, that has not been well understood: he bowed himself to the wall and suddenly disappeared. I shut my eyes and drew a bottle at random from the automatic bar, and soon after falling asleep, dreamed I saw Gargantua pouring from an everrunning bottle the active ferments of a monstrous digestion.

You can well imagine that when I reached home again, and my mother asked me: “Well, did you eat well at the Redshields? At least,
I suppose they have pure food, if their servants are not thieves,” I was in a position to rejoice her heart.

“N
OW
, the Poet's tale was well chosen,” said the Broker, “to sharpen our appetites. I call a man a true artist who knows the hour and the subject so well; and a fine cook, who makes the hors d'oeuvres piquant and too brief. Can you cook?” he asked the Poet.

“Yes, but only an orange soufflé,” answered the Poet. “But my mother is a genius for fish-sauce. She is only four feet ten high and can never succeed in killing a fish, and as I cannot bear to hit a fish on the head, we have no fish at all and no fish-sauce.”

“Why,” said the Frenchwoman, “what difficulty is there in killing a fish?”

“My mother told the fishmonger that. She said: ‘Two hours I was there, with a fish fifteen inches long in a pot, a carp, a river-fish; and two hours I was hitting him with a wooden spoon, but he would not die: I had to fight with him, and at last I put him in the pot almost alive. Even in the water he kicked, my goodness, such a tiger you never saw, and I had to lie down afterwards, exhausted with fighting that fish. But he was well cooked, with wonderful fish-sauce: never, in a restaurant they make such fish-sauce: I make it with butter, and they, with margarine; poison.' She asked me, for I was there, carrying her bag, ‘Isn't that right, Peter? Was it nice or not, my fishsauce?' and when I said, ‘Wonderful, Mama,' she told the fishmonger, triumphant: ‘You see, I tell the truth: you'll never see such fish-sauce in your life. But Peter won't kill a fish and I can't fight all day with such giants,' and she smiled. But she worries, my mother, for fish is good for the brain, and she thinks I should eat fish perpetually!”

“Our mouths are watering,” said one, “let us go down to lunch.”

“But let us come back this afternoon,” said the Frenchwoman, “or to the Mirabell-garten, before the play begins, and the Broker will amuse us with a tale.”

“I will gladly do that,” said the Broker; “I was in Spain this year and saw a bull-fight, and I said to myself, looking at a splendid
matador, ‘Don Juan was certainly a bull-fighter.' So I imagined last night's opera in a new setting.”

“You must tell us that,” said the Poet; and they went down the hill.

 

T
HE
burning sun shines on his black curls in their lustrous prime as he makes his way towards the arena of Seville, Don Juan, on an Easter Monday. His mantle of hyacinth silk, his red velvet doublet, his gold chain and the knots and ribands of Ahura-Mazda, his black barb, attract a little attention even in this thick current of peasants in outlandish dress, of thieves, pickpockets and touts, orange-sellers, sherbet-mongers and cocoanut-toters, of citizens extravagantly got up in swords and ruffs, of foreigners of all nations trying to outdo the natives, of the new rich, hangers-on, sycophants, court favourites' favourites and people in the know, importing foreign fashions, of rich and poor ecclesiastics alike lording it around, of servants of the Inquisition, footmen, messengers, prostitutes in red, yellow and blue, masked ladies out for adventure, and the barefaced daughters, painted and perfumed, of the dissolute, speculating broken-down town classes, and of calèches, hand-chairs, hacks and mules, all setting towards the Plaza.

The sun snorting on high spreads his ribbons across the azure arena, and throws down his vermilion and foamy white on gloomy walls, bannered grilles and balconies. The earth, spread with this brilliant living carpet, stinks like a distillery, with the cabbage-stalks, garlic leaves, rotten bones, fruit-skins and general refuse, trodden underfoot, and the stagnant gutters. The Arab perfumes of the women rush in strong gusts up the nostrils of the hero: he palpitates with this old pleasure, exciting like the smell of blood to him, the
clash of swords, the pan-pan of a guitar, the rustle of curtains, and the clackety-clack of a horse, running through the lovelorn streets of Seville at dawn.

The churchmen pass him with the faces of epileptics, hypocrites, butchers, self-torturers and Emperors of the Moon. There goes the son of the Corregidor, flaunting on his arm the emptiest head and heart in town, Maria Anna, dancer and comedienne from the theatre at Madrid. An impudent fellow, that lad, but protected by the Chief Inquisitor himself: a boy with a long and lousy future of crime and peculation.

On all sides comes the plebs, even shepherds and beggars, streaming in from the country, who have stolen, sold themselves, begged, borrowed, tattled, murdered and done anything you like to get a cheap place at the fight. The hour is near. The walls have long been plastered with bills in all colours announcing that this
Festival of Bulls
is under the patronage of the Archbishop and the Commander, and there is an excessively bloody picture of a bull tossing a picador and a horse into the air. The advertisement appeals to the merciful as well as to the bloodthirsty heart, for the “proceeds from the bull-fight will go to the rebuilding of the dormitories of the Convent of Mary of Seville.”

Don Juan reads the notice, and “The dormitory walls were strong enough,” he says to Sganarelle, “some twenty years ago,” and his mind goes back to that time of his youth when he attempted to carry off one of the nuns. A procession of nuns coming back from an Easter service passes them at this moment, and he tries to look under their bonnets to see if his inamorata is among them, and how she looks after twenty years' service to Juan's great rival among the virginities, the ascetic Syrian Don.

As he passes through the street leading to the Plaza he recognises with a grave salute a forlorn woman in black, whose black eyes follow him. It is Donna Elvira with wild and pallid face, like the ghost of that splendid and beauteous Spain which was still living when Juan lay in his voluptuary's cradle, and which is now passing
away in the throes of madness, iniquity and superstition. No doubt Elvira holds a knife in her dress to repay an unkind thrust of the other night. But her hand trembles and tears once more stand in her eye: even now, he triumphs.

At the entrance to the arena, “Don Juan, Don Juan, bravo!” shout the people, and those who are too poor to get into the show, crowd near, with savage elbowings and strokes of their knobbed sticks, to see one of the heroes of the day, and try to size up, even at this distance, the chances of the combat. They have followed the bulls in from their pastures, belabouring the fierce beasts, and coming to blows among themselves, about their points: now their blood is feverish, and they'll have no blood to cool it—tantalising hour. Then, for he has a reputation as a breaker of God's laws and man's, Juan hears lewd compliments from the grinning whitetoothed loafers and low smart-alecks, and the cries, loud kisses and unblushing language of the lusty women.

He looks the sun in the eye with his black eye, as look the bull, the eagle and the serpent: he looks towards the arena packed with the terrible and ridiculous crowd, and the thrill that goes through his body is the annunciator of victory. “Don Juan! Don Juan!” it seems to him the bells ring in their full peal. The band plays Spanish martial music, mournful and wild. Monks press about the entrance now, selling indulgences, rosaries, crucifixes and relics, all the products of the godderies, charms against the evil eye, charms for matadors. A poor knight who enters these lists with trembling (for his purse's not his honour's sake), buys one gratefully and asks a monk to bless him. A monk offers a charm to Don Juan who kicks him away: the bagman of salvation mutters, but the crowd pushes him away, vociferating and laughing. “Don Juan! Don Juan!” the bells ring with rising, interweaving clangour.

Is the sun dimmer? Is there a threatening undertone in the last volley of bells? Did the martial music call up from far off the rumble of a battle? Did a thunderstorm growl? Was there a hostile murmur in the crowd? Don Juan looks behind at his train: Sir Sganarelle,
the poor knight, who serves him with fidelity and jibes, and jibs like a brother, some humbler gentlemen in their finery, the runners in fancy costumes as Persian soldiers, his body-servant, a groom in a red shirt. All is in order. Let the ladies look. A beauteous fighter of bulls; and pride!—the pride of an old grandee, the pride of a King's favourite, one would say a Medina Sidonia! A most noble master of the horns, a signal coucher of lances: quick, quick, let's not miss the fun, Don Juan's entering the arena!