Free The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead

told.

The First Day
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    T HUS they sat and were charmed and frightened and had their morals repaired by the Mystery of “Jedermann”, which I will not trouble to relate for it is now very well known. But as the play went forward they got to know Everyman, who with husky voice, thin face and kind but troubled eyes, went through his vanities and disappointments and gained salvation; his Sweetheart, a beautiful gay young woman with a wreath in her hair, who feared death; his Mother, a devout, singleminded lady in a nun’s bonnet, who got up before dawn to pray for her son; and Everyman’s Thin Cousin, who sang so sadly the Song of the Cold, Cold Snow. Thus they sat and listened, and for long after the sun had set, the birds had finished flying round and the chief actor had gone home to gargle his throat, the soft mountain shadows, the galleries and old streets, the restaurants and cafés, the quays and rooms full of company heard the cry, “Everyman, Everyman,” shouted, shrieked and sung in the voices of his angels and devils calling from the airy terraces of the Residence and the foul hellish depths.
    The golden afternoon passed magically into the starry evening, which called forth the musicians in evening dress and the women in long silk and velvet gowns and the searchlights lighting the Cathedral and Residence. The sky rained soft airs only while the wild voice of passion, the tender murmurs of seduction ran through the opera-house, hung with painted cloths and flushed faces. In thisway everyone’s imagination took flight. When sleep came, they were ready for celestial adventures. Imagine their disappointment when in the morning, thick grey rain swept over the fields and hills and seemed likely to wash the town into the furious yellow river. There was no going out, except in raincoats and high boots, and nothing to do but to sit in the cafés and read the “Frankfurter Zeitung”. So they all began to collect in the well-known cafés, the “Bazar”, “Tomaselli’s”, and they got to know each other.
    Now, the weather soon broke again; the sun shone with such brilliancy that the town looked as if it were made out of glass. The visitors began walking by the river under the thick chestnuts, and climbing the hills and spending days among the lakes and mountain ranges of the Tyrol. Through the town itself, never ceased the procession of the curious, the students and the lovers of music, who went backwards and forwards over the bridges between the old and new town. On that day a party from the “Hotel Austria” went up into the monastery wood on the Kapuzinerberg in the morning to listen to the bells of the town and rest for some hours on the wooded height.
    The Town Councillor led the party to the various vantage-points of the wood, and when they came to the path where the fortress appears through the wind-parted branches, they sat down to rest. One of the men asked if Salzburg always lost its sons to Vienna and the great cities; in replying the Town Councillor brought in the tale of the Marionettist.
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The Salzburg Town Councillor’s Tale
THE MARIONETTIST
    W HEN winter came round, James’s mother would look out at cloaked figures making tracks in the snow along the Nonnthalgasse beneath black Hohensalzburg, and say:
    â€œI dreamed last night that Peter and Cornelius knocked at the door on a day like this. They were wrapped up in so many rags that I did not at first recognise them. They looked at me a moment, asked me for something to eat and then fell down flat on their faces like empty clothes. Even in my dreams, you see, I know they are not here. Perhaps they are far away: perhaps they are in the next town. Who knows if they have a crust of bread, my poor boys!”
    James heard his father and mother listening at the door of his room at night and he had to cough when he entered the breakfast-room in the morning, so that he would not surprise