Read Online The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead - Free Book Online

(those ten years, she had sat at a typewriter); she speculated about love and its thick mystery; she recalled breaths of the supernatural which had blown on her cheek, and the great strokes of luck which had passed within a hand’s-breadth of humble workers she had known. She knew clerks who had made immense sums, even a thousand dollars, by intercepting a private telephone call passing between heads of firms and accountants who had correctly calculated a firm’s position from a disguised balance-sheet; she knew telegraph girls who had predicted European wars. She could not understand why these darlings of fate had not afterwards had a brilliant career and had their names in the papers, or had not at least become heads of their departments; she supposed it was due to a freakishness of their star, to pernicious anaemia in the seat of ambition.
    She had once, she remembered out of forty years, drunk a very fine drink in a German family, curaçao, she believed, with cream and orange-juice, and in her opinion, no drink could be like that, not even champagne; but she had never tasted it again. Very coy she had been, on first going into Germany, when invited by a girl to take beer in public; but coming out, she had slapped down her money ata bar in the French railway-station and said, “A bock,” and laughed, with her sister, to think what they would say at home in England, to that. Workmen had offered her another and she had accepted out of comradeship.
    Then she had long winter tales. She had gone home to a new apartment late at night, in a storm of rain or snow, and found the window open and seen an apparition weeping on the mantelpiece— long afterwards she had learned that a girl had received a letter from her mother, dead immediately afterwards, in the room. She had tales of cats gone mad with hunger in cellars, running up the walls in frenzy and clinging to the ceiling, their red eyes glaring in the dark; and of seeing her dead grandmother’s ghost, many a time, sitting in the corner darning ghostly socks in a flowered work-basket; of seeing an immaterial personage passing by the hearth leading a great greyhound, the night her mother died. She had once slept in a students’ hostel in a foreign land and awakened to hear a coach driving up with the jingling of bits and the sounds of passengers getting down; and had been astonished at the survival of coaching in this land. Later in the night, someone had walked from a door in her room to her bedside, crying; she thought it the girl next door and had comforted it. But in the morning she had found that there was no door there, but a gas-meter; and that no coach had arrived. Returning that way months later she had heard that an old passage had been discovered, covered in behind the gas-meter, and in this passage a man had been murdered who had come by the coach in the old days. She knew, too, country girls, the daughters of clergymen and honest as the day, who had seen past generations rise in the wayside grass, and children who had seen bloody hands appear on plastered walls in haunted houses. All these tales she told in a quiet musing tone with no sign of nervousness: she told about the old bridge that collapsed near her home and a fatal cardparty in the village, the discovery of an adultery by dreams; and a hundred curious things such as the Society for Psychical Research used to discuss solemnly. She told it so naturally, with such an airof belief, that the hearers at hot midday, gave a shiver of surprise and superstition. Behind her lay the ghostly tradition of English literature, the genius of the Brontës, the popularity of Scott and the mad gifts of Protestantism, but she did not know it. When she had told her tale, she would blow her nose in a cheap lawn handkerchief with machine-made lace and say, “This was given me by a man I did work for, an Under-secretary,” and add, “I often think if I could tell these things to a writer