The Salzburg Tales (15 page)

“To work, Master of the Day,” called out the schoolboy.

The Viennese Conductor called upon the Police Commissioner, who began to speak.

 

R
OTTENHILL
lies by Furrow-St.-William, Saint Suzannah, Upper Fork, St. Martin-on-Gridiron, Pilgrim Hill, Friar, Hegel and Tyr, chief village of the parish of Thirteen Churches; the geography's
clear. There the peasants in holy superstition make offerings to the saints on their namedays, at the beginning of harvest, at seed-time, at lambing-time, at milking-time, at œstral time, at snow-time, in summer to bring the rain, and in winter to break the frost, indeed at all times of the year, and above all at Christmas, when a bright star shines over the mangers and sheep-pastures.

Deacon Odilet was last year, and for many years before, deacon of Rottenhill, and although thin, tubercular and in his fiftieth year, he had the respect of the peasants. He had certain peculiarities which perhaps even endeared him to as strange a collection of men as ever cultivated the soil. He shut himself up in the attic he tenanted at the farm called
The Belated
, and rarely appeared except when the sun was down and lights were low, or the day rainy, on account, he said, of his weak eyes; but it was probably that he was naturally addicted to melancholy. He dined not, wined not, wenched not, stole not, blasphemed not; he prayed frequently, looked no man straight in the eye, canted rather than spoke and did his own washing. All this brought him very little income, but it brought him a certain wholesome reputation in a centre of civilisation where the favourite motto is the following: “A poor man is honest, if he says, Good-day, and fine is the weather: A rich man's straightforward at night, when he and his doxy lie together.”

Odilet was honest, and it was with no misgivings that the elders of the congregation sent him on the usual rounds to take up the offerings from the smaller churches of the parish.

Odilet practised exorcism for the farmers of the district, likewise, as a sideline in religion: at nightfall, he abstracted the cakes, grains, liquors and pence laid out on roofs and stoops for the conditionally good fairies of the countryside, and thus preserved the people in their childlike faith. Over the fairies who abstracted the cheese from milk yet in the udder, he had considerable power, and likewise over the weeds they inhabited: it was he who stole sheep at midnight and returned them, with a sanctimonious face from some retreat of his own, the next week, and was paid for it: he who, as a goblin,
transported the rich man's bull to the peasant's cow overnight and returned it before daybreak, after the goblin was paid. He ministered in private to the secret godlets of the countryside, the beneficent springs, the whispering stones, the enchanted swards, the vocal trees of malevolence, and purveyed the requisite amulets, philtres and balms: he knew the good and bad mushrooms, he divined with a rod or twig, he located the dead: it was he who found a prehistoric bone by High Hill and saw a spectre in Poverty Gully. To this handyman of the occult nothing in the land was strange; it was as if he had been cradled in a niche of the Stone of Prophecy and suckled on the wooded bosom of the hills.

A poltergeist last year visited a farming couple who employed a number of workmen, among whom was a superstitious, delicate, halfwitted foreigner who scarcely spoke the language. The police assembled, the family fled, the poltergeist remained and gave star performances: the priest exorcised, but Odilet alone conjured the sprite. From that time on, his revenues slightly increased and this led to the downfall of his constitution and morals. He began to drink; only a little, but enough to make him a curious and fearful creature to meet at night, as he pursued his Meander to its fountainhead. The crow of illfortune was then seen several times on his house; a peasant woman shouted a curse at him and several of his cows died. Like all prophets he was liable to become a victim of his own hocus-pocus. He drank more.

The parson, an inactive person mummified in theological libraries, who savagely swallowed every book that came his way, and got as drunk periodically with atheism as with mysticism, left his hideous parishioners and their loathed parish to anyone who would manage them: that person was Odilet, who managed well enough. The parson laughed at the rumour that came to him of Odilet's oddities, and cultivated his curiosity in stagnant cynicism.

Now, during the latter six months of last year, that part of the country was greatly disturbed by a series of impudent burglaries. The mayor received deputations, the deputy was harassed in Parliament.
The police questioned every farmhand, servant and inferior help about the district; and every waif and stray that appeared was regularly arrested, questioned and released. The burglaries continued. Savage dogs appeared on all the farms, watch was kept at night, the small arms and ammunition shops in the nearest towns did business. Yet if watch was relaxed for one night, or the chief of a household was absent a moment, a raid was sure to be made.

The women were nervous, and the men thought of forming a committee of safety. Odilet, in a private daze, took no notice and buried his pug nose in beer.

The police had received a description of the burglar from various persons who had crossed him on his way to and from raids. He was tall (or of medium height), a young man (or perhaps fifty), wore a cap (and sometimes being bareheaded, was observed to have thick, wavy chestnut, and thin yellowish, or a fringe of grey, hair): he loped along like a greyhound, or stumbled frequently as he walked, as if in haste, carried a load with him, or looked bulky about his person, was straight as a poker, and seemed rather gone in one leg. He had searching dark eyes which looked at one angrily, and likewise pale and indescribable eyes: he both walked boldly out in the open, to divert suspicion, and crept furtively along in the shadows. Out of these details, a general notion of the burglar had formed in the minds of the population, so that sometimes during a week many persons would see him, in various parts of the country, but always in disadvantageous positions, as when alone crossing the woods. Especially, he seemed to lurk about Poverty Gully, a narrow, austere gully with rocks of granite and porphyry and rolling scree grown with weeds.

When Christmas approached the police were asked to be especially alert.

Odilet alone had never seen the burglar and refused to partake of the general illusion: when asked for his opinion of the man's traits and character, he remarked that nothing was certain and that the man had never been properly seen in a clear light and by a dependable observer. This was put down to jealousy.

On Christmas Eve Odilet set off on the usual rounds to collect the offerings of the churches, chapels and shrines, for the poor of the parish, the restoration of the churches, and the minister's salary. He received a few small offerings on his own account, for instance, cakes, ale, cider, homebrewed brandy, and other insubstantial expressions of goodwill. The collection took him a long time, with these calls in between and what not, especially as many of the offerings were in kind and had to be packed into his sack: there was an old pair of pewter candlesticks, a dish, a pair of stockings, an old coat, a canister, and various things which might comfort the hearts of the poor and were useless to their late owners.

Late at night, after the star of Bethlehem, so-many-million light years away, had by the foresight of God blazed on Christmas Trees and in the dreams of children, and on the pressed earth floors of churches, and on the white foreheads of cows, and the sacred hour was past, and the angels were inaudibly singing, he started for home.

Meanwhile, in various parts of the country, the police, wishing to be home with their children and wives, kept their eyes open and saw many a lurking shadow and many a starting shade, many a bush lift itself from its roots and many a tree instantly wave its arms and then regain its former stillness. The earth creaked, the fences sighed, the brittle ruts cracked, distant sounds were magnified as in a microphone. A stray dog seemed a wolf, and a bat an owl. They were startled out of their skins by the patrol, and he who had on his beat the farm of
The Belated
, which stood between the cemetery and the Great Battle Oak, on the way to Poverty Gully, sweated his imagination to keep the farmer's Christmas tip and Christmas morning grog before his mind's eye. The house slept, but not so the Great Oak nor the cemetery.

The policeman started from one of these black waking nightmares that make the last hours of a vigil endless and horrible, to see a hobbling shadow moving on the opposite side of the road. The personage approached rapidly but as if burdened, he was tallish,
he wore a cap. The policeman, acting almost automatically indeed, although afterwards he recounted in admirably logical detail his perceptions and conclusions, pointed his gun and called to the person to stop, at the same time rushing into the middle of the road. The unknown stopped. The policeman's knees shaking, scarce bore him. The unknown, dropping his burden, began to run, but in an embarrassed way as if he were gone in the legs, and the policeman triumphantly leaped upon him, fired his gun into the air and had the pride and joy of seeing a light spring up in the farmer's house.

The farmer's son came running out with a gun, and between them, the two of them, on that dark and freezing Christmas morning, dragged the limp burglar, captured at last, to the police-station, some thousand yards away. The creature, in a raucous weeping voice, protested that he was not a burglar, that he was merely going home, that he was some other person, that the policeman and the farmer's son were cows and thieves: but he was drunk and they paid no attention to him at all; they were so overjoyed, indeed, that they did not even hear what he said. The policeman saw another stripe on his arm, the farmer's son figured out the saving now that their costly vigilance could be relaxed.

Between them they carried the undeniable proof of their capture's trade, a sack full of objects of all kinds, a pair of pewter candlesticks, a tin canister, for example. At the police-station before an oil-lamp they surveyed a miserable creature whose age and lineaments they could ill determine, covered in mud from knees to forehead, filthy, crushed, bleeding from hands and face, slobbering and weeping.

The farmer's son suddenly had an uncomfortable spasm. He listened to the burglar's clamour, and became convinced that the heroic adventure was a farce: the burglar said he was Odilet, and he was Odilet, he was indeed Odilet, Odilet drunk, fallen by the wayside, bleeding, staggering, fallen into the horses' trough, but ever bearing onwards and homewards the Christmas offerings for the poor and deserving. With annoyed apologies they set poor Odilet
outside the lock-up and watched him go staggering down the road. The policeman realised he had caught a chill: the farmer's son halfway home began to laugh irresistibly, to shout with laughter under the black sky. He laughed so much that he had to reel against a fence to hold his wind, and he hit himself on the chest, “Oh, oh, oh, ow, ow, ah, eeeeee!” A cow started to moo, a cock began to crow. Then began that long and devilish country symphony of the farmyard waking at midnight, when cock crows to cock, and dog barks in his lonely hole to dog, for hours without a break. Presently this all died down; the farmer's son was at home and in bed, and the policeman was spinning out fine his wife's sympathy.

After this fiasco, clearly, doubts were ashamed and hid their noses, the dogs were tired and laid their heads on the straw, the stars struggled over the sky in a fitful nightmare, and all was quiet; the patrol on the farther side of Poverty Gully could not even hear the hoarse whispering of the waterfall, dwindled to a thread in that dry winter.

This glen called Poverty Gully was situated within a mile of the war memorial which marked the centre of the village. It had been, in olden times, a smugglers' lair, but since the wars of 1908 had been overgrown and forgotten. The dense thickets had lately been partly cut away and the glen, though roughly grown and full of old butts and boles, was sometimes used for a Sunday walk, or youthful loves.

Plavnica, the policeman, was thinking at this moment on some such subject, when he heard a faint sound and imagined it was the fall, or the creak, of an elm by the glen path. It soon proved to be irregular soft footfalls ascending the slight mound that led to the glen. Plavnica stood aside cautiously, and saw a thin tall form topped by a cap rising slowly, and blotting out the sky. Plavnica's belt buckle clicked against his mantle button and his muscles sprang to attention. He thought, “The burglar hides in the Gully. I shall track him and arrest him on the spot.” His wits worked fast, and he was all preparedness. He would, having tracked the burglar to his lair, leave him there, if he showed any disposition to stay, and run for help to
block both ends of the glen: if that was not possible, he would try his chances alone with the desperate and cunning man.

The burglar, walking unevenly and nervously, changed his pack on to his left shoulder, as if wearied out with the weight, and presently had got down into the bottom of the Gully. The Gully was hardly large enough to hold a hundred men pressed close together: the path was not more than two hundred yards long from rim to rim, and it wound and hopped by the side of the stream and leaped and skirted rocks and trees. Plavnica approached the glen, heard the man grunt several times, and then perceived a small pencil of light open and sway along the path. As Plavnica had guessed, the burglar made straight for the old smugglers' lair, now planted with a table and seats. He seemed to put down his burden and resign himself to sleep with grunts and mumblings, and to undertake from time to time a melancholy soliloquy the sound of which reached Plavnica clearly, although the words did not.

Plavnica took off his boots and descended the hardened road in his socks. At a fair distance he put his boots on again and then ran down the road full tilt, his half-laced boots clopping, his mantle flying. At a distance of half-a-mile he blew his police whistle. No one responded; he had to go nearly to the village before he met with reinforcements.