The Salzburg Tales (48 page)

When they arrived at the summit, Willem inquired of their guide whether they could descend into the crater. J. van Hoven, with a delicate nose and throat, was already giddy with the thick air, and the guide said that descent was impossible. Willem walked to the edge and suddenly gave a cry: his pack had fallen down into the crater. He engaged the guide to go down with him, only to the foot of the rock, to get it, and agreed to pay before the descent the
double fee of forty lire. Van Hoven energetically opposed this folly, but without avail. However, Willem, touched, came and kissed him in the Continental fashion on both cheeks, and said, smiling a little palely, “Live well, friend!”

Willem and the guide descended. Clouds of steam and sulphurous fumes filled the basin and issued from cracks beneath the feet of the man waiting. The heat was almost unbearable, he coughed continually, and his head was reeling. He heard a shout about ten minutes after they had left. Presently a guide came along and said: “Do you want a guide?”

“No, I am waiting for a friend who went down with our guide,” said van Hoven.

“Is it possible that anyone has gone down?” said the guide. “It is very dangerous!”

J. van Hoven waited fretfully, opening his watering eyes from minute to minute to see if the guide or Willem could be seen climbing back: he hallooed down. A moment or two after he heard through the whistling, bubbling and blasting a distant prolonged yell, followed by a man's shouting. The strange guide came back and said to the Dutchman, “An accident has happened!” Greatly excited, he hopped round the edge of the cliff, shouting down, and presently got a response. They conversed in rapid shouts for a minute and then the guide turned to van Hoven and said: “Sir, sir, what terrbile t'ing: you friend fall in cratere, you friend is dead.” He crossed himself rapidly and called on efficacious names for help. The first guide was standing before the Dutchman, looking very scared.

“Where is my friend?”

“Sir, sir,” said the guide weeping, “he picked up his bag and ran towards the mouth of the volcano. I ran after him, but I could not see, it is like a furnace and the ground is full of cracks: it is extremely dangerous to go to the crater at all, and I could only get a few steps. Suddenly I heard a dreadful cry, like a man who is being stabbed to death, and though I call, I get no answer any more. I could get no
answer more, your friend went suddenly mad, I think, and fell into the volcano: Santa Maria! Santa Maria!”

Poor van Hoven fainted and found himself halfway down the mountain on the Vesuvian railway when he came to himself. When he reached the bottom he hurried to Torre del Greco, to the Villa Ginevra, and found a stranger there, Helena's husband. He related his tale. The man was extremely affected; but he had not much time, and presently they went to the Campo Santo with an official party for the disinterment of the body. The party proceeded to the chapel, unlocked by van Hoven, trod down the faintly smelling verbena lying on the pavement, and those officiating raised the lid of the sarcophagus. They raised it upright and peered in: a dreadul smell rushed out—the body lay without any other envelope but the winding-sheet. The husband fell against the wall of the chapel, but one of the party, with a cloth at his face, called out, “There is a snake there!” They all peered in again then and saw in the obscurity, bright orbs shine here and there, and a greenish metallic snake which lay in an S-shape on the bound bosom. J. van Hoven said, “It's not a snake: it's Helena's emeralds.”

The husband put in his hand, drew back with a cry, found he had been scratched merely by the clasp of the necklace, and soon gathered out of the folds of the shroud all Helena's jewels and her two mirrors. Under the skull of the body, they found a silver box in which was a paper. This paper contained Helena's will, by which she left “her jewels and goods to her husband to whom they belonged, her heart to Willem, and her immortal soul to Him that took Willem's”. With this was another paper, with an address of Willem to the dead: “When I first beheld you, I was a candle-flame, small, feeble, yellow: when I heard your voice, I was a small, dry flame, skipping over the dry grasses and licking the dry earth: when you came near, I was a mighty conflagration, rushing through the forest, driving before me the terrestrial and aerial myriads of darkwinged and fur-footed dreams: when you embraced me, I was a
river of blue fire, running, running down from the mountain-top in the night. You died, my heart and bowels are consumed. We will float in a cockle-shell of vapours over the oily sea of hell, burning forever and tormented with yelling sulphurous winds and vortices of fire three thousand feet deep, and arrive purified of this calcined flesh, on the farther misty shore, and sleep forever in the cold cave of eternal night.”

Underneath this was written in a changed hand: “She has given me her heart, and we have gone to the mountain.”

The firm charged with the preparation and packing of the body informed the husband that a marble pebble in the shape of a heart had been placed in the body on the left side, the flesh heart having been removed, as it appeared.

Johann van Hoven understood what Willem had carried in his pack.

The husband cried, “What a terrible thing! The man was a ghoul: Continentals are so corrupt!”

The funeral director who came to make this announcement, took off his hat, and said, “What a grandiose deed!”

T
HE
company was disagreeably affected by this story. The young women kept asking, “Is it true: is every bit true?” and commenting on the story amongst themselves, stupefied that such people could exist in such a sophisticated age, where everyone has a sense of humour.

The Old Lady said, “To die is no joke: it is scandalous to think of young people of that sort throwing their lives away, but you never can tell nowadays: the world is so upset”; and the middle-aged women said, “When people lose their religion, you can depend on it, there is no depending on them, they are like rudderless ships.” The Musician sighed, and the Festival Director remarked, “They had a magnificent sense of setting: I can well imagine all that—it is as if I had been there and seen it myself. I know that part of the world so well, Death is in that pure air, and as you say, immortal anonymity:
I shall tell you one of these days what I conceived standing in the Temple of Jupiter at Pompeii—but after, after!”

“Satan won the heart of mankind when it was recounted that he fell into a bottomless abyss from a heavenly height,” said the Schoolteacher. “It is a natural impulse of living creatures to throw themselves from the height, men, swine, and lemmings obey a fiendish Piper and dash themselves off a cliff: they say even foxterriers sometimes go melancholy mad and commit suicide in that way. I know it: I could tell you an incident—when people stand and stare at mountains and say, ‘It is grand and awful,' they already hear the wicked voice of the abyss.”

“Will you tell us some story of that kind?” asked the Viennese Conductor gracefully. “It will be a new thing for us to hear something from your island, so far down in the southern seas that its voice scarcely ever reaches our ears.”

“It is midday,” said the Schoolteacher. “Improvisation is not my forte: but I will think it over and tell you a tale when we meet again.”

“This afternoon, and in the Capuchin Wood, then,” said the Broker: “I have to leave Salzburg to-morrow on account of the movement in the markets at present; and I must sit once again on our hill.”

 

T
HEY
stood on a single rock hanging over the gorge where the winds forever blow up and up, and rise lightly through the grasses. Bottle swallows flew below them, twittering, and bats, soft as a ball of soot, fluttered around. Night descended over the ranges and mountain flanks, and the Milky Way began to shine in a wilderness of southern
constellations. In front lay the red, isolated mountain, barren, waterless, with head cleft, and low foothills couched in woods. A blasted monolith with giant hexagonal splinters straddled the ridge, which fell abruptly into the tributary gully of a triangular valley system, girdling the mountain, and stretching many miles eastward.

“The old path is destroyed,” said Rachel. “Last time we climbed Mount Solitary by a path ascending from the bottom on this side, and, reaching the cleft by the ridge, cut footholes to the top. My friend twisted her ankle; we were held up two days and would have lacked water, but I went to the hut where the outlaw Brown lives, and got permission to use his tank. From the top, on a clear day, one can see the Pacific.”

They looked down and still saw the rolling ravined bottoms, full of tree-ferns, eucalypts and patches of burnt-out scrub.

“We will follow the same path tomorrow. I have heard of a new path for the descent: we strike off to the left and reach more shortly the Burrogorang Valley; there, where you see a clearing glimmering in the forest.”

Lilias looked down at the night assembling and massing in the gullies. It was there in its cohorts; its sentinels were climbing to the eyries of the cliff, it reconnoitred in the lofty escarpments. It was there in the clefts and scoriations of the precipice: it was running, instantly and languorously, with the movement of irresistible floods over the endless sky. The trees with slight noises settled down to sleep, and their full summer foliage thickened the transparent dark. Lilias smiled at Rachel's dark aquiline profile; where the black line of the frontal arcade frowned, the pupil, like a beryl, swam in a yellow pool, brilliant with fatigue and passions; and the slight line of down made darker the upper lip. Rachel turned her face, and nothing was visible, but a voice came from close at hand to Lilias out of the sweet dark of the wild:

“I am glad we have taken this ride alone. It is four months since we were alone, and much water has flowed under the bridge. I have
had days of struggle, and many sleepless nights. You will think I only call you when I need consolation.

“I only know that when I get a letter from you, I must be ready to put on my hat and go out on some business; debts, or sickness, or papers to deliver, or a friend to be stirred up, or disappointment or desperation—and all to be cured within the hour! Fortunate that you sometimes ripple my mill-pond!

“Your students, friends, and I drown many a care drinking at your mill-pond, and it is inexhaustible. None but I has seen the fine rain fall that fills it. Do they sometimes, in a moment of lassitude, ask what can be your life, and for what reason you have always this firm and smiling courage?”

“Sometimes,” Lilias admitted, smiling faintly.

The pines crowding to the edge began to sigh with interruptions. The plantation of pines and oleanders, and of foreign trees, beeches and oaks, creaked slightly, and a boy and girl, arm-in-arm, began to walk over the pine-needles.

“We are of an age. The turbulent fresh torrents of youth are still too loud in their ears for them to hear the subterranean river, whose rushing gets louder to us year by year. How the time flies! I, that was twenty, am thirty-five!”

“I am thirty-six,” said Lilias affectionately, nimbly.

“You have one reward, in the loneliness advancing upon us. They have an affection for you, your pupils: they hold on to you after years of separation. You have long letters from them about their homes, their ambitions; you continue to console some. Soft breezes of affection blow towards you.”

“Such airy nothings content me? Some prefer more solid sorrows and grosser joys.”

The lights of motor-cars turning into a road-house near, wheeled over the rising and gambolling mists of the valley. The Japanese lanterns of the dance-hall, and the headlights of the cars, strung out across the lawny plateau. From time to time they saw two small
lights moving on the isolated mountain, perhaps from the lair of the Browns, and below, the red and yellow eyes of a cart threading the umbrageous valley road.

“This is the finest outlook in all the Blue Mountains,” said Lilias. “How restful to sit on this rock all day, dreaming under the white sun, blinded by the sandstone cliffs, blinking at clouds passing over the sky and flying down the mountain sides and up the valleys, changing colour with the country, as an octopus takes local colour sliding over the mottled sea-pastures. The hills are submerged in luminous haze. When the sun rides at noonday amid the cymbals and trumpets of that bewildering hour, and his hoof plucks, as a plectrum, the taut strings of the wilderness, thousands of new excited voices arise, the flesh vibrates with the tremors of the land, and our faces pour with sweat, as the trees with their gums and resins, the bushes with their saps and the rocks with their mossy waterfalls. Between half-shut eyes one looks at the children bathing naked under the bridge, the clipped garden of the Japanese Consul which rolls lanterned with fruits and flowers down the side of the abyss, and the great house of the shipping magnate with its awnings, set opposite Mount Solitary rising from its surfy foothills. Far away the eye flies like a bird through the opaline country, there, beyond the crest of Mount Solitary, where all is now wet vapours and night.”

“You were here all Christmas month with Ruth?” said Rachel.

“Yes; as you know.”

“There lies our way tomorrow. We will travel the whole day and sleep at the summit in an old cave at night. I am glad we are alone: there is much in my heart to tell you. When Ruth is here, she separates us, watching with her avid light eyes, wayward with fancies, conjecturing what our lives may have been, and will be. At twenty, the mind is thin and vain still.”

“Twenty is not ripe old age!” Lilias laughed gently. “And you at twenty had more promise. I remember you were always impetuous and angry: you had plans in your head for twenty years: where is that
courage gone? But life is so simple to me: I look neither forward nor backward: each year brings me surprises: I am pleased with the modest and docile landscape slowly moving past me. Ruth showed me a queer picture, a print of an etching of Goya. A middle-aged woman, not wearing a ring, like you and me, struggled between a sloth and a black horse, each waiting to make her his prey. But I could not abide that etching. Is one not allowed to sleep in peace?” She laughed again.