The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online Page A

He spoke five languages, and all without a foreign accent. He had studied in Universities in America, France and Germany. He was a passionate patriot, but he said little about his own country in Western European society, preferring to talk about his childhood when he had lived in sheltered calm. He had a high forehead and round eyes with arched brows like the warriors in old paintings; he wore European dress. He spoke in clear tones like a clapper falling on thin ivory; his red mouth smiled sweetly though with melancholy, and everything he said came out with compressed visionary epithets, as if his imagination flowered impetuously, quicker than the tongue. He expected many more years of trouble for his country: this cloud sat over all he said and thought. He sat shining and neat in black clothes and shining shoes, with smooth hair and bright eyes, resembling a newt or other smart black water animal, ora legendary dragon very small, carved on an urn of genii from the old tales.
    Next came sliding and bustling across the centre of the place, from beneath the archway, a small-footed man with a thin face. Whenever the centenary of the birth or death of a great composer of music approached, he flew about the world with propaganda, forming committees, cajoling Departments of Education and of the Fine-Arts, flattering musicians, bribing publishing companies, engaging publicists, writing, speaking, wheedling, persuading, his head swarming with wily, original schemes for making the world take an interest in Haydn, Brahms, Schubert, or whatever other musician was a hundred years born or dead. It was he who first conceived the idea of finishing the
Unfinished Symphony
, and he who wrote and distributed to schoolmasters, mayors and representatives of the people, the “
Few Thoughts on the Place of Music in the Home and in the Market-place
”, in which he worked the threads of patriotism and the family, public education and private sensibility, Schubert and the wares of gramophone companies. He had a fine ear, long with a large orifice, and he sang in an angelic falsetto which resembled at will a wood or string instrument, or a desert voice rising through the sharp edges of the sand. He knew many thousand themes from the master musicians and many peasant songs and single strains picked up here and there on the earth: he had as friends all the musicians and was able to make a child understand a theme. He loved to sit in a large audience and be moved with its emotions, as if his heart was a silver disc recording an orchestral piece. He was as sympathetic as a nervous beauty to his hearers and endeavoured to enchant all by showing the glittering facets of his talents. His eyes with animal intensity and sagacity, blue and oval, darted left and right: he got into his seat with the movement of a bird settling into a thick tree, disappearing in the crowd. His clothes had cost him a great deal but seemed unsuitable to his movements and habit of mind: he should have worn a smock, or Persian trousers. His shoe might have concealed the long tip of a seraphic wing or the long toe of a satyr’sfoot. When Death approached in the Miracle Play, he shuddered and cast his eyes discreetly from side to side to see how the audience took it, and when the heavenly bells and voices rang out, his eyes sent out points of light and his dark-veined thin hand played delicately from the soft pale wrist on which was a gold chain. He had a dark crafty profile, like an ancient Venetian, with a long, pointed nose and thin lips; he was as attentive as a lizard. He hummed ever and again to himself like syrinx when the tide is rising in the reeds. He was full of tales as the poets of Persia: he unwound endlessly his fabrics, as from a spool the silks of Arabia. He was a publicist, a salesman, but of so peculiar a sort, specialising in the centenaries of famous men, that they invented a name and called him T HE C ENTENARIST .
    There was near him, amused by him,