The Salzburg Tales (21 page)

At that moment, the devil in the shape of a merchant passed by on a camel. The Roman matron cried, “Uproot my son for me and I will buy a dozen bolts of cloth from you.” The devil pulled at the monk and being unable to shift him, tugged at the cliff in which the cave was, with all his might to uproot it; but an archangel put his foot on the top of the cliff at that moment so that it was immovable. Petulantly the devil turned to the Roman woman and flipped her back home with a snap of his fingers, so that she found herself standing with her servants on the Appian Way; and he himself hurried off to the house of a magician who had called him.

As soon as they were both quite out of sight, an angel appeared at the mouth of the cave where Archelides lay, and called to him, “Archelides, get up and pray, for God has preserved you from temptation.” Archelides, who had been as cold and hard as a statue fallen from its niche, felt his body get warm again and his heart begin to beat strongly; his eyes opened and he leaped up like a locust and began praising God …

“As strong as him in resolution,” continued the Centenarist, “was St. Conus who jumped into a hot oven rather than say goodday to his mother, after he had taken a like vow.”

“Do you mean to say that he was blessed for being a doughnut?” exclaimed the Solicitor.

“Thus, it took God, an archangel and a saint to withstand a Roman mother,” said the Italian Singer, mildly.

The Centenarist shook his head, and said: There are many ways of being saintly. There was Andrew the Slav, called Salus, servant to a rich man of Constantinople, called Theognostus. Theognostus made Andrew his steward and notary, because he spent his nights studying the law. At first Andrew was gay and sociable, although emotional; he would sing, play, recite verses and go out in the evenings with young women: but he suddenly changed entirely. He became slovenly,
gloomy, dull, and pious; if he made up verses at all, they were longwinded histories of saints, or obscure compilations of the names of angels and devils. When Theognostus remonstrated with his steward, Andrew said, “The cloak deforms the body and the body the soul. Away with the one and the other: what has sanctity to do with soap? I will make myself a clod, a fool for Christ's sake, humble myself below the humblest, growl and scratch like a dog in the street, and leave my mending in God's hands.” Then he neglected himself, never washed, spoke in a growl, ate the coarsest food, the leavings of the table, the droppings of birds and animals, and once, having seen a wolf in the forest, where he walked raving to himself, vomit a green, glutinous mess and forthwith eat it again, he did the same and disputed with dogs and wolves for their vomit. He slept at night in a dog-kennel, was spotted with the bites of vermin and striped with the scratches of animals and the eruptions of disease. When questioned, he answered with a stupid look, idiotic smile and senseless phrase. But he did not neglect his work and devoted himself so earnestly to the interests of Theognostus that that good man could not dismiss him. He did all this so that men would know he was a fool for Christ's sake alone, and not out of infirmity. To show what was in his mind he began every sentence he spoke, whether it was reasonable or nonsensical, with the name Jesus. When questioned about the rent of a certain farm, he answered, “Jesus, my good master, I evicted the farmer and have put in a most reliable man who has accepted the whole mortgage”: and when asked how he felt in the dog-kennel in which he slept, he said, “Jesus, it's cold, but it's nothing to the coldness of men who have hearts of ice”; or else, chanting, he would say, “There's a pot, a straw and a chain for my store, and my neat little cottage has earth for the floor, Jesus.” When the town boys came and tied tin cans in his long matted hair, or threw mud at him in the streets, or when women crossed the street to avoid him, holding their noses, for he stank violently, he looked at them through his hair and laughed heartily, like a man who is sure he has the secret of living.

When Andrew died one night, at the age of thirty, in a fit of convulsions on the straw of his kennel, a sweet odour filled the house; the kind man, Theognostus, tracing this odour to its source, found Andrew the Slav lying dead in the kennel. He wrung his hands, but the kennel suddenly shone with so bright a light that no-one could see its contents any more; a light even sprang from the earthenware dish from which Andrew had been used to eat: in the centre of this light shone brighter than the rest the words, “SALUS, SANCTUS” …

“To think,” said the Solicitor, “that Theognostus might have ruined the whole thing by putting Andrew's Slavic head under the pump.”

“You are mockers tonight,” said the Centenarist stroking his short beard, “and in no way fit to hear the history of saints. Yet I was anxious to tell you the history of Albert of Bergamo.”

“Friend Centenarist,” remarked the Frenchwoman,

“I am a true believer: whatever the Church admits, I admit: I have seen miracles at Lourdes. I can say no more. Let us hear about St. Albert of Bergamo.”

“In a few words: Albert was a farmer of Bergamo, a good farmer who got better crops from his furrows and more eggs from his fowls than any farmer in the district. He was therefore persecuted with night-raids by his impecunious neighbours and lawsuits by the spendthrift nobleman of the province. While he was a young man, strong as a bull, he cheerfully stood up to all these assaults. But at the age of twenty-eight he married a handsome woman with a slight moustache and an uncontrollable temper, who kept the house ringing like a cooper's yard from morning to night; who received all the neighbours in to drink with her, leaving her work to servants, and letting her husband's affairs go hang, with the utmost effrontery.

Albert then vowed to take a pilgrimage to Rome, hoping that the saints would take pity on him and take the devil out of his wife, but he delayed his pilgrimage from season to season, always thinking that he would go after the sowing, after the harvesting, after the
vintage, after the building or the new barn, and so on and so on. One spring day some pilgrims went past his house. Among them were some young Christian girls, gay and joyful, singing provincial songs to celebrate the return of spring and the beautiful face of their young Adonis of a Lord. Then Albert set out, and when he got out of sight of the house he straightened his back and realised that he was not an old man yet. On the way to Rome, he suffered a change of heart, and knew that he had been hitherto half-pagan. He was made Christian by a miracle and vowed his life to Christ. When he returned he went to Verona and there died in 1279…

“What was the miracle that changed his heart?” asked the Frenchwoman.

“Who paid the rent while he was away, if his wife was so wickedly idle?” said the English Poet.

“That is the miracle,” replied the Centenarist.

“He had word from a schoolmaster in Bergamo, who caught up with the pilgrims, as they went along, that his wife found the rent on the bedroom windowsill every quarter-day, brought no doubt by pigeons or an angel: and she sent word to him that he might stay in Rome for ever and dress himself in a frock, if he wished to, for she had plenty of husbandmen willing to cultivate her farm.”

“Then,” said the Old Lady, “when she was abandoned, she left her bad ways and became a good housewife: I've often seen that.”

“Doubtless,” said the Centenarist.

“No,” began the Old Man, shaking his head and taking out his snuff-box, “your stories somehow always turn ribald. Let me hear something respectable and natural tomorrow, some tale about people with good hearts and natural sentiment. An old man can't afford to go about with these cynical, salacious remarks in his ears. And yet, don't think that I was a mollycoddle in my day: I travelled all over Europe from Constantinople and Teheran to Amsterdam in my youth. Every year I took a month off, and every year I went to a different country. I saw every sort of woman, every sort of businesshouse, every religion. It leaves me with something to think over now,
it is a real pleasure: but I don't like to hear ribald ideas from others: that upsets my ideas. Mr Centenarist, we will go and have a double kummel and a cigar, and you will tell me in private some moral tale to sleep on.”

“Willingly,” said the Centenarist. So they all went off to bed.

I
N
this way ended the second day of the Tales.

 

I
T
rained in the early morning of the third day. When the Salzburgers got up they saw broken clouds clinging to the trees of the Capuchin Wood. The valley was invisible and even the fortress appeared like a cloud on the other side of the river. The sounds of the town came muffled through the thrashing rain and the roar of the swollen river. Some visitors wandered along the banks of the Salzach for a while, but shivered when they came to the ragged plantation of pines, and returned to the old town where the Juden-gasse and its shops and archways and the marketplace were busy with workers, market-women and shoppers, cheerful in the rain. The Viennese Conductor found himself about mid-morning in the “Bazar” with a great many other guests, and remembered his functions, but he waited to see if the spoiled, discontented crowd there that day wished to hear any tales at all. They presently heard the Mathematician arguing with his friend, the Centenarist, about the individuality of talent. The Centenarist said:

“You will find that everyone can tell music of 1790 from music of 1850, while few can guess the musician correctly, even when students of music: I will bet you cannot tell some of Cimarosa from some of Mozart, for example. Why? Because every man of talent is a social being, he can only think in the idiom of his time: and the man of genius, successful and recognised, is he who is so fortunate as to
be born when his society has reached its full flower; or he who is so apt as to express in a grandiose way, like Scripture, the little notions of high society!”

“Well, now,” said the Mathematician, “Cimarosa and Mozart were not made by a passage or two, a bar or two. I am sure I can tell the difference between them, if you take a page of one and the other, just as I can tell whether I am hearing Chopin played by de Pachmann, Schnabel or Brailowsky. Their style is a suit of acquired habits, but the suit is cut to fit the body. A masked mummer crouching to deform himself, taking eccentric steps and acting a part, will do it differently from six others in a ballet, and that is a more rigid idiom than the language and ideas of the age. But it is not a question of mumming either, or of interpretation: we are saying—a composer writing the music that pleases him, satisfying his own desires, assorting the ideas presented to him in his own way: you pretend that he is not distinguishable from some of his contemporaries?”

“Yes,” replied the Centenarist. “I don't deny that real talents are touted by courtiers, kings and publicity agents, as well as fakers and lickspittles: but I say, first that it is a matter of chance whether real talent is chosen, or trampled under in the mud. It is a question of importunity, opportunity, temperament, public fancy: there are ten good men drowned for every one that survives on the crest of the wave. I deny that the majority of hearers who have thick ears, can tell one from the other. Label some intricate, bombastic mediocrity, Beethoven, and you will have admirers of official culture raving, swooning. I say that the eminence of a talent is usually a pure chance and there must be many ignored talents who have an equal right to fame, if only for a small part of their production. I deny the unmistakable hallmark of personality, the unquestionable superiority of everything done by a man of genius.”

“God,” exclaimed the Mathematician, “how with your cunning you manœuvre me into greasy mud so that you can push me into a pothole. You begin with the materialist thesis, as if you would put me under Whitehead's banner, and then I find you are going to say
that village graveyards are full of mute, inglorious Miltons. You have the nefarious doctrine of equality which young lawyers are taught in law school; that is, that so many guilty are considered innocent all their lives that the murderer has a right to the same defence as the innocent, and that no-one knows what social pressure was exerted on a man to commit a crime. So you are going to tell me that every man has the same right to a publicity agent!”

“Yes,” said the Centenarist: “because recognition is won, not given, it is not now a king's accolade. It is the price of the clack, the price of a billboard, while before it was the price of a court suit and a protector. The history of the arts and sciences must be really like the history of music studied by Newman's madman, a history of rests or hiatus. A man has a right at least to the chance of recognition.”

“Why do you prepare the centenaries of Schubert, and so forth, then?” asked the Broker: “why don't you promote the centenary of Tom Mud?”

“I am a business man: I have to earn my living,” said the Centenarist: “I sell best-sellers.”

The Mathematician intervened. “You are talking about public fame, but we were talking about the finger-prints of men of genius. No-one is pretending that Newton, Bacon, Descartes descended from Heaven pure of social influence, causally immaculate Lohengrins. But Croce says correctly that the distinguishing mark of genius is the intensity of composition, the compression of ideas, the multifold functions forced out of a single symbol, the irrepressible flowering of variations, the continual gushing of themes. Now that quality, expressed by Mozart in a certain way and by Beethoven in another, according to their diseases and protectors, left its mark on everything they wrote, it is the dullness of our ears and not the intermittency of their talents which prevents us from recognising them in every bar.”

“We cannot recognise them so, whatever the reason,” continued the Centenarist. “I say culture is an official pattern, an Academy taking its patent from the ruling classes, even if it wears no gowns:
much great talent is buried in arts and pursuits and styles which are not considered elegant.”