Free The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead Page B

with a top hat on his head, and his instruments and his monkey beside him. The family called this statue, “Uncle Peter”. It still amused them very much to hear that Peter had run away from home at the age of ten with an itinerant musician. James had last seen his brother with his face blacked, dressed in a top hat, a longtailed jacket, long trousers and white gloves, hurrying towards the station with the musician, and carrying his monkey and kettle-drum; and out of a secret sympathy for Peter he had kept the secret till the next day, and been punished for it. Cornelius too, had run away, when he was thirteen, had got down to Rotterdam and there got a berth on a tramp steamer. Neither of the brothers had ever been heard from again. They sometimes tried to imagine the fate of the two brothers, as they worked on their marionettes. James had the characters and text of a piece called, “The Pot of Gold”, which was as follows: Two brothers went out after adventure and were variously reported as lost by accident, or as beggars, while a third brother stayed at home and became an honest butcher. After many years the two brothers returned on the same day, one, full of tales of adventure and with a black bride, the daughter of a chieftain, and the other with a pot of gold, which he said was full of gold coins, and a patent of nobility in Persia. The butcher brother stole the black bride and the pot of gold in a night and ran off with them. He came back after a short time, shamefaced and annoyed, saying that the pot of gold had only contained pieces of lead and a few pieces of silver, and that the black bride was dumb, but very bad tempered with it. Then his brothers showed him that he had not stolen the real pot, which contained diamonds, or the real bride who was yellowish and not black. “For,”said the eldest brother, to the butcher, “we knew you would be overcome by temptation, and we wanted to let you down lightly,” and then they proceeded to tell him the devious and horrid ways they had come by their good fortune. But they did not often play this for the mother, Anna, had some sort of prejudice against it.
    James left home when he was in his thirty-eighth year. His wife and daughters cried, reported his absence to the police, and gave the performances that were billed for the week in order to avoid a scandal. After that they became quite accustomed to running the theatre by themselves. They made their living at it and were able to save money. The eldest daughter, Anna, crippled and thin, played the piano and ran the accounts. The second daughter, Rose, married a ventriloquist who had studied their situation and hoped to get control of the business. Soon after Rose’s marriage, a pleasant, thin, florid individual, slightly bald, walked into the theatre and asked for James, saying that he was an old friend: they said James had been gone more than a year. The youngest daughter, Juliet, drooped her lip and said:
    â€œPerhaps poor Papa is dead: we know nothing,” but the visitor laughed and said:
    â€œDead? Not he! I’ve been roving since I was ten years old. I’ve been in plenty of tight places, but I’m not dead. And where is Cornelius now, James’s brother?”
    â€œCornelius?” said the mother in surprise. “Cornelius, James’s brother, left home when he was thirteen: he ran away to sea. That is what we have heard.”
    â€œNo!” said the visitor, exaggerating his astonishment in a comic style. Then he executed a neat little dance of two or three steps, reciting:
    â€œThe stupidest of the three
,
    Is not the one you see!”
    and concluded by bowing to Anna and saying, “I am brother Peter!”
    Peter stayed with them two nights and then said goodbye affably, as if he had only been away from them for a day or two, andwould soon return. Going out through the door, he remarked kindly to Anna:
    â€œI’ll give the family’s love