The Salzburg Tales Read Free Page A

talking under the thick trees on the river-bank, and even the poor people in the new pink and blue stucco houses, built in a marsh on the Josef-Mayburger Kai, look at the red sunset and count busily for the hundredth time the little profit they will make on the Viennese lady who has rented a room from them for the duration of the Festival.
    Opposite the fortress, across the river, is the yellow-walled Capuchin convent in its tall wood. One has to pay a few groschen each day at the Convent Gate to enter the wood. Within the gate, transported there from Vienna, stands the little wooden hut in which Mozart wrote “The Magic Flute”. Higher up the hill is a fine outlook towards Bavaria, and on the crest of the hill in the grounds of an ancient house built of beams and hung with vines, in which the monks formerly dwelt, is a vantage-point commanding the city and its environs.
    In this wood the visitors to the August Festival walk often, and often sit long, in groups, listening to the innumerable bells of the town ringing through the wood, and talking, in the fresh mornings.The wood is tranquil in its brown hollows and full of sandalled Capuchin monks drawing wagons of wood, and woodcutters who have to take their carts and horses down the steep Calvary Way beyond the convent gate to reach the streets of the town. Sometimes by the covered well in the tall-wooded hollow are heard foreign voices relating sonorously the marvellous and dark and bloody annals of the town, or some long-spun story brought in their packs with them from overseas, while the soft Austrian breeze entreats the leaves in the tops of the trees, squirrels scrabble in the roots and wild violets and sun-coloured fungi fill the hollows. So passionate a love awakes in the stranger’s breast as he scarcely feels for his native land, for the incomparable beauty of these wild peaks, these rose walls two thousand feet in air and this mediaeval fortress hanging footless on an adamantine rock against the unweathered cliffs of the Untersberg: and as he walks, meditative, along some lowland or upland path, listening to the distant voices, the bells and the diminutive rustlings, he passes an old inhabitant with large brown eyes, sitting immobile on a log, who says politely in his sweet dialect, “Good-day,” as he would to a son of the city come from a foreign shore.

The Personages
    A fresh wind blew in the woods, the pigeons massed in the Residenz Platz, tooting because the sky was bright, and the fountain dropped loudly on the weedgrown stones. The people went through an archway into the Domplatz where “Jedermann” of the poet Hofmansthal was to be played in the open air before the cathedral. Actors in medieval costumes ran about in the nearby streets and disappeared quickly in a little door at the back of the cathedral, or were seen leaning momentarily over the high cornices of the roofs of the Domplatz. In the courtyard of the fortress, high up in the air, tourists looking like flies or sparrows hung over the wall and peered at the Domplatz, trying to make out whether the play had begun, and whether many people had paid for seats. In the middle of the front seat sat the Archbishop of Salzburg, tall, plump and dressed in red, with white linen and white hands: he greeted distinguished visitors like a prince welcoming talent to his court. Near him on the same seat sat the superior from the Capuchin Convent and the Mayor of Salzburg; but these three great persons, who divided the town into three parts between them, told no tales in the Capuchin Wood.
    The F ESTIVAL D IRECTOR came in from the Cathedral bare-headed, warm with his last instructions to the actors. He bowed to the Archbishop and remarked that the pontifical sun shone on their labours, in a voice unctuous but constrained, for he was small andstout, while the Archbishop was firm, large and grey as a gravestone: likewise the sun shone in the Director’s face and made it red, and he was