Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland-1

The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories 作者：卡森·麦卡勒斯投票推荐加入书签留言反馈

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To MR. BROOK, the head of the music department at Ryder College, was due all the credit fetting Madame Zilensky on the faculty. The college sidered itself fortunate; her reputation was impressive, both as a poser and as a pedagogue. Mr. Brook took on himself the responsibility of finding a house for Madame Zilensky, a fortable place with a garden, which was veo the college ao the apartment house where he himself lived.

 No one ibridge had known Madame Zilensky before she came. Mr. Brook had seen her pictures in musical journals, and once he had written to her about the authenticity of a certain Buxtehude manuscript. Also, when it was beiled that she was to join the faculty, they had exged a few cables aers on practical affairs. She wrote in a clear, square hand, and the only thing out of the ordinary in these letters was the fact that they tained an occasional refereo objects and persons altogether unknown to Mr. Brook, such as "the yellow cat in Lisbon" or "poor Heinrich." These lapses Mr. Brook put down to the fusion of getting herself and her family out of Europe.

 Mr. Brook was a someastel person; years of Mozart mis, of explana<bdo>?9９ｌiｂ?</bdo>tions about diminished sevenths and minor triads, had given him a watchful vocational patience. For the most part, he kept to himself. He loathed academic fiddle-faddle and ittees. Years before, when the music department had decided to gang together and spend the summer in Salzburg, Mr. Brook sneaked out of the arra at the last moment and took a solitary trip to Peru. He had a few etricities himself and was tolerant of the peculiarities of others; indeed, he rather relished the ridiculous. Often, when fronted with some grave and ingruous situation, he would feel a little iickle, which stiffened his long, mild fad sharpehe light in his gray eyes.

 Mr. Brook met Madame Zilensky at the Westbridge station a week before the beginning of the fall semester. He reized her instantly. She was a tall, straight woman with a pale and haggard face. Her eyes were deeply shadowed and she wore her dark, ragged hair pushed back from her forehead. She had large, delicate hands, which were very grubby. About her person as a whole there was something noble and abstract that made Mr. Brook draw back for a moment and stand nervously undoing his cuff links. In spite of her clothes -- a long, black skirt and a broken-down old leather jacket -- she made an impression of vague elegance. With Madame Zilensky were three children, boys between the ages of ten and six, all blond, blank-eyed, aiful. There was oher person, an old woman who turned out later to be the Finnish servant.

 This was the group he found at the station. The only luggage they had with them was two immense boxes of 藏书网manuscripts, the rest of their paraphernalia having been fotten iation at Springfield when they ged trains. That is the sort of thing that happen to anyone. When Mr. Brook got them all into a taxi, he thought the worst difficulties were over, but Madame Zilensky suddenly tried to scramble over his knees a out of the door.

 "My God!" she said. "I left my -- how do you say? -- my tick-tick-tick --"

 "Your watch?" asked Mr. Brook.

 "Oh no!" she said vehemently. "You know, my tick-tick-tick," and she waved her forefinger from side to side, pendulum fashion.

 "Tick-tick," said Mr. Brook, putting his hands to his forehead and closing his eyes. "Could you possibly mean a metronome?"

 "Yes! Yes! I think I must have lost it there where we ged trains."

 Mr. Brook mao quiet her. He even said, with a kind of dazed gallantry, that he would get her another ohe day. But at the time he was bound to admit to himself that there was something curious about this panic over a metronome when there was all the rest of the lost luggage to sider.

 The Zilensky ménage moved into the house door, and on the surface everything was all right. The boys were quiet children. Their names were Sigmund, Boris, and Sammy. They were always together and they followed each other around Indian file, Sigmund usually the first. Among themselves they spoke a desperate-sounding family Esperanto made up of Russian, French, Finnish, German, and English; when other people were around, they were strangely silent. It was not any ohing that the Zilenskys did or said that made Mr. Brook uneasy. There were just little is. For example, something about the Zilensky children subsciously bothered him when they were in a house, and finally he realized that what troubled him was the fact that the Zilensky boys never walked on a rug; they skirted it single file on the bare floor, and if a room was carpeted, they stood in the doorway and did not go inside. Ahing was this: Weeks passed and Madame Zilensky seemed to make no effort to get settled or to furnish the house with anything more than a table and some beds. The front door was left open day and night and soon the house began to take on a queer, bleak look like that of a place abandoned for years.

 The college had every reason to be satisfied with Madame Zilensky. She taught with a fiersistence. She could bee deeply indignant if some Mary Owens or Bernadine Smith would not up her Scarlatti trills. She got hold of four pianos for her college studio a four dazed students to playing Bach fugues together. The racket that came from her end of the department was extraordinary, but Madame Zilensky did not seem to have a nerve in her, and if pure will and effort get over a musical idea, then Ryder College could not have doer. At night Madame Zilensky worked owelfth symphony. She seemed o sleep; no matter what time of night Mr. Brook happeo look out of his sitting-room window, the light iudio was always on. No, it was not because of any professional sideration that Mr. Brook became so dubious.

 It was in late October when he felt for the first time that something was unmistakably wrong. He had lunched with Madame Zilensky and had enjoyed himself, as she had given him a very detailed at of an Afri safari she had made in 1928. Later iernooopped in at his offid stood rather abstractly in the doorway.

 Mr. Brook looked up from his desk and asked, "Is there anything you want?"

 "No, thank you," said Madame Zilensky. She had a low, beautiful, sombre voice. "I was only just w. You recall the metronome. Do you think perhaps that I might have left it with that French?"

 "Who?" asked Mr. Brook.

 "Why, that French I was married to," she answered.

 "Fren," Mr. Brook said mildly. He tried to imagihe husband of Madame Zilensky, but his mind refused. He muttered half to himself<bdo></bdo>, "The father of the children."

 "But no," said Madame Zilensky with decision. "The father of Sammy."

 Mr. Brook had a swift presce. His deepest instincts warned him to say nothing further. Still, his respect for order, his sce, demahat he ask, "And the father of the other two?"

 Madame Zilensky put her hand to the back of her head and ruffled up her short, cropped hair. Her face was dreamy, and for several moments she did not ahen she said gently, "Boris is of a Pole who played the piccolo."

 "And Sigmund?" he asked. Mr. Brook looked over his orderly desk, with the stack of corrected papers, the three sharpened pencils, the ivory-elephant paperweight. When he glanced up at Madame Zilensky, she was obviously thinking hard. She gazed around at the ers of the room, her brows lowered and her jaw moving from side to side. At last she said, "We were discussing the father of Sigmund?"

 "Why, no," said Mr. Brook. "There is o do that."

 Madame Zilensky answered in a voice both dignified and final. "He was a fellow-tryman."

 Mr. Brook really did not care one way or the other. He had no prejudices; people could marry seveimes and have ese children so far as he was ed. But there was something about this versation with Madame Zilensky that bothered him. Suddenly he uood. The children didnt look at all like Madame Zilensky, but they looked exactly like each other, and as they all had different fathers, Mr. Brook thought the resemblaonishing.

 But Madame Zilensky had finished with the subject. She zipped up her leather jacket and turned away.

 "That is exactly where I left it," she said, with a quiod. "Chez that French."

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