The Salzburg Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

manuscript with the modern instances as a cynical and even comic gloss. She said she believed in a Divinity not in God. Liberal, rationalist, philanthropist, she called herself, and she remained as foolishly credulous as a girl of fifteen: she had read all the white, blue, green, brown and yellow books published on crime, war, drugs, prostitution and atrocities, and she still believed in the sacredness of patriotic passion and the perspicacity of private interest. She thought these evils which she read about but never saw, could be stamped out by strong-minded old ladies with fat pocketbooks. She always wept when clergymen and publicists spoke of the welfare of man. She presented with the same equanimity to the jovial misses of her school, the system of Bergson and the little flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. She now nodded to her friend, recommended a German liner for Ireland, said she had heard the Falls of Schaffhausen were much spoiled, and all the time under the fortress, now in shade on this side, and the mountainpierced sky, the sun and the breeze seemed to repeat to her the simple poetical ideas of the play of “Jedermann”, which she had just read. She spoke German fluently and listened attentively to the remarks of the bands of young people, so that she could use their words as an illustration of the ideas of modern youth abroad, when she gave her address to the Headmistresses’ Association in her own country.
    There came in next the P OET . He was tall, spare and ill, with hollow cheeks and eyes. He liked to rake through muck for a jewel: he exalted things like himself, useless and attenuated in form. His expiring sensibility preferred obscure verbal tingle-tongle to intelligibleverse, suggestiveness of syllable-sequence to the banality of grammar, phantoms flying out of a dark cloud to the bright, close-embroidered visions of reason, with their everyday woof and warp. To stimulate his dying talent and hope, he proclaimed the advent of mathematics into poetry, when symbols would serve for concepts and kill rhetoric. He published manifestoes proclaiming a gentlemen’s revolution, the virgin birth and the divine right of an aristocratic, analphabetic, table-rapping soul; he protested against the cult of the working man, although he made use of those portions of his vocabulary which permitted him to shock and mystify. With a feverish ear for assonances and puns and a moribund imagination he tried to pierce the clouds that hung over his lethargic soul, or to transform them into shapes of fantasy. He borrowed phrases from all the sciences and religions, he got his colours from the plush, chalices, laces, windows and stone angels of churches and tried to revive his appetites with ever wilder perversities. He was a man deathly sick; he had struggled all his life against extreme poverty and he retreated from it farther and farther into the night, bringing up in his dreams images of bounding youth and female beauty as a last hunger for life; and in despair, ruined with drugs (which he had first bought to calm neuralgia) wasted his days and nights without knowing their number nor the seasons that passed over his head, in the luxurious apartment in which a wealthy patron kept him. When they asked him to tell a tale, he began in a lively way, but soon his voice dropped and he pointed to his companion, a pale, lively boy, also a poet, who had remained unnoticed till that moment. Beside the seats stood a band of school and college girls, travelling through Europe in their long vacation. They imagined that, in general, the real was the contrary of the apparent, for they had all suffered gross deceptions when very young. They were atheists, anarchists and hard as nails, they said; they were profane, sacrilegious and low at one moment, and the next, obscure, lofty, and as technical with their artistic and psychological terms as a magician’s apprentices wrinkling their brows in the smoke of his devil’s