The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online

Berliner (at which his wife sighed pleasantly), and answered the young Viennese woman beside her, who asked her in that liquid German certainly invented by the Rhine maidens, when the play would begin. This young Viennese woman was dressed in costly Swiss embroidery and embroidered gloves. Her bronzed hair was neatly curled; she wore a small crocheted hat: her little white and black shoes shone like snakes’ heads, with theirjet stones. She wore a wedding-ring and a necklace of crystals. She began to confide in the Berlin girl the social confidences and hurried conventional raptures of one who is a little fluttered and uneasy, and whose social station is not assured.
    â€œWhat a crowd is here this year! They say the American President’s financial advisers all are here: there are five millionaires … The first performance of ‘
Don Juan
’ this evening will unquestionably be brilliant! … I am here with my husband,” said the Viennese lady: “he has some business in the south,” and she licked her dark red lips and looked appealingly at her confidante. The Berlin girl’s practised eyes turned for a moment to her lapdog while she said to herself, “She is here with her lover, on an escapade”; then she prattled sociably on with an indefinite note of patronage: not indeed, for the escapade, but for the weak confidence.
    The afternoon shadows drew a little nearer. The Viennese beauty, young, appealing and lonely, drew a bizarre embroidered scarf round her bust and sighed.
    Stolidly, in the same row, but in the cheapest seat, with a sharp nose and weary and uncoloured face, with drab hair and a blue dress, a young woman clerk from Cologne shaded her eyes and read a French literary review. She raised her eyes patiently from time to time to the back of the stage, quizzed the elegants with the critical looks of an ambitious white-collar who has had to buy every luxury with soul-deadening parsimony; she was palely but precisely aware of a growing antipathy for a Jewish citizen of Vienna who sat beside her, in Tyrolean mountain costume, chortling at his fine seat, declaiming with a soft lisp and holding his wife’s gloved hand.
    There came late into his seat a thickset, cheerful D OCTOR from New York, who had just come from a conference in Constantinople on hay-fever. His teeth, his starched linen, his jewelled shirt-studs, his finger-nails and his shoe-tops all shone as he walked. When he talked, he often spread the square stubbed fingers of his small hand in a round gesture, and he had the shadowy smile of the Mona Lisa hovering unconsciously in the folds of his firm mouth. He wasvery rich; he loved art and music; he had at his home in New York a private gallery; he attracted to his home by cajolery and good suppers, twice a week, a trio of musicians with whom he practised quartets. He was so strong that he would keep them sitting there till their backs cracked, their wrists were sprained, their eyes dropped and they were obliged to kick over his music-stands by stealth to interrupt him. When he began to play his quartet, to pursue an indigent painter in whose work he fancied he saw a profitable streak, or to make a scatter-diagram of temperatures, his eyes shone and he became insensible to other things, like a figure of stone. He knew to the least detail the soft scenes pictured by Sisley and the dazzling suns of Van Gogh, but he would walk through fields and by streams and villages unconscious if the sun, moon or stars shone, or if his way was lighted by rainbows, northern lights, lightning or roman candles, for his walks only served to develop his theories on art and his dexterity in determining the coefficient of correlation between two sets of facts. He had taken up all his hobbies late, after a mild youth, and he went at them with the pleasure and abandon of a mastiff pup chasing chickens.
    There was also there a Chinaman, the F OREIGN C ORRESPONDENT of a French newspaper.