Free The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead Page A

them examining the few letters he received. At last he said to them:
    â€œYou must not come after me like watchdogs, you poor things: I am not going to run away. Peter ran away at ten, Cornelius did the disappearing trick when he was thirteen: I am seventeen already. There has to be one stay-at-home in the family. When my scholarship is done in Vienna, I will be back here as quick as my legs can carry me. Why not? A sculptor can carve anywhere: a sideboard for the Archbishop here, a Potsdam nymph for a brewer in Munich, a mermaid at sea, a Christ up in the mountains: and anything will serve him, a tree-root, a stone, gold, silver, copper or chalk! Why should he leave home? His workshop is everywhere, his models in all the streets.”
    In Vienna James lived quietly in a boarding-house, going to a students’ dance or a beer-garden once a week and covering his extra expenses by carving for the trade. He did chandeliers with figures of trolls and reindeer, panels with fruits and flowers, dryads and bacchuses in wood for beer-gardens and wine-cellars, religious figurines. His work, shown each year in students’ exhibitions, did not win any praise, but he was complimented occasionally on comic figures done to order. At twenty-six he was prepared to return to Salzburg, when he fell in love with a girl studying applied arts in the school, and married her at once. He got work with a firm making fashion mannequins, and his wife endeavoured to get contracts for interior decoration. But they did not prosper and they began straightway to have children.
    Their eldest daughter Anna did not walk until she was seven. James made for her a lot of little wooden dolls with comic expressions. He came in from his attic workshop at night, when the children were in bed, bringing in some new puppet, to tell them a new chapter in an endless story that he made up as he went along, one which sprang naturally out of the events of their daily life, with incidents he read in the newspapers, and memories of his childhood pieced in. He could imitate marvellously the rain on the roofs of villages, and the rain on the railway station at Vienna, with the chatter of the travellers underneath: if they closed their eyes, he could make them hear the wind rising in a valley, a motor-horn approaching round a winding road and scattering a barn-yard; a shepherd yodelling on the mountains with the echoes catching his song. Then he would act for them, with his wooden dolls, “Faust”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, fantastic pieces, a “Hexentanz”, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, and many other ancient themes. He lost himself in his performances, keeping his little daughters up late at night, till their flushed cheeks were turned to the pillow and their eyes suddenly closed. He often interrupted himself in a scene to find himself alone awake.
    They went one Saturday to a marionette show, and a week afterwards, Anna, the wife, said:
    â€œJames, you could make a living as a marionettist, if the worst came to the worst: that man’s puppets were sticks compared with yours.”
    James replied:
    â€œI have been thinking of it—if you don’t mind, Anna! And you could paint the scenery.”
    After three months of preparation, they began to give shows on holidays, and were successful. The daughters were brought up in the business. Two of them learned music so that they could provide an orchestra, and the others attended to the accounts, the wardrobe and the manipulation of the strings.
    I N the four corners of the auditorium stood four large pieces of sculpture done by James for his examinations. There was a gypsy-girl dancing—she had the face of Anna, the art-student. Then there was a wrestler overcome by a boa-constrictor, the bust of a middle-aged man with a nondescript face and fourth, a piece, called “The One-man Band”, which showed a laughing lout, in circus clothes,