Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  She laughed, a little reluctantly.

  “You know too much!” she said. “Of course hand-made things are better and more expensive, but I don’t see what that has to do with scrubbing floors.”

  “Much,” said Nils. “I tell you the work of the hands is a two-way. You can’t define the merit of real lace, but you can recognise it, and that it comes from the work of the human hand. It has a virtue and a value that the machine cannot give. And in the reverse direction, working with the hands gives to the worker some virtue and power that cannot be had any other way.”

  For once she seemed interested.

  “And you mean that people work, over here, to get this virtue, as you call it?”

  “Not consciously—no. Europeans work because they always have; but instinctively and fundamentally they like work, and take a pride in a floor or table well scrubbed, and in bread kneaded or linen washed with their own hands. What is wholly absent from their consciousness is any sense that manual labour is beneath their dignity, or a hardship; and there is very present too a distrust of machine-made things, and a contempt for those who cannot use their hands with competence and skill.”

  “That seems a frightfully uncivilised attitude, to me,” she said. “Why use your hands to wash things if a machine will do it as well? Surely the whole point of civilisation is that machinery will do most of the work for us?”

  “Good God!” Nils said. “What a conception of civilisation!”

  “It’s a very ordinary one,” she said defensively.

  “It is a false one,” he said severely, “based on a very common modern confusion of thought between civilisation and mechanisation. Has it not occurred to you that there can be such a thing as a highly mechanised barbarism?”

  Evidently it had not, for she fairly gaped at him when he said that.

  “Mechanised barbarism!” she said. “You have the strangest ideas.”

  “Civilisation is an affair of the mind and the soul, and of human and social relationships. Machinery is incidental to it,” he said. “By itself, it gives nothing and takes away nothing—it entirely depends on whether society controls it or is controlled by it. But do not go on imagining that ice-boxes and electric washers and a jade-green telephone by your bed are the marks of civilisation, or have anything to do with it at all.”

  She considered this, frowning a little. Evidently what Arnold Bennett called “the intolerable effort of conscious thought” was an unwonted exertion to her. At last—

  “Then you think there should be no machinery?” she said, a little contemptuously, as one who throws out a reductio ad absurdum to crush an opponent.

  “I have not said so, but upon my soul, I sometimes wonder if we should not be better without it. No—as things are, it is only that we should be careful not to let machinery swamp life. That we should be sure, when we are confronted with a fresh mechanical contrivance, that we are not losing more than we gain by adopting it.”

  “What could we lose? What sort of thing?”

  How curious it is, he thought, how she swings to and fro between genuine interest in a new idea, and lazy contempt for it.

  “The printing press,” he said, “has conferred untold benefits on mankind by spreading great literature and noble ideas; but universal literacy in Britain, for example, has robbed a nation of its power of memory, or almost; and the daily press in America, with its flood of columnists and commentators, has utterly debauched the power of independent thought in a people naturally shrewd. That is an example of both the gains and the losses, and that is why I said that it is a question of control. So too many electric washers and sweepers mean that women lose the use of their hands, as too many cars mean that people lose the use of their legs. Women’s hands should not be empty; there should be vessels in them, or brushes, or needles! There is something sterile about empty hands, or hands which only hold cards!” he said with sudden contempt—“as there is about empty wombs. In both cases women are in the wrong relation to life—and so they are nervous, restless, miserable. They take up culture, they take up Causes, but Life passes them by. They gain the whole world—on the radio—and lose their souls. And what shall a man—or a woman—give in exchange for his soul?”

  He spoke at last with real passion, and this time it was she who looked at him, in speculation. It was all quite new to her, this, he could see that; and while half the time she resisted these strange ideas, his conviction—probably in conjunction with his evident interest in her, that expressed itself so unusually, without gallantry—drew her back, each time, to question a little further, to consider the novel view of life that he put before her. She sat looking at him, turning her huge rings on her white fingers—then, with a sudden movement, she dropped her hands into her lap. Nils was touched by the childish abruptness of the gesture, and a little flattered that his words about empty hands should so have gone home; it was almost a gesture of surrender to his argument. But he said nothing; he waited to see how she would tackle the thing in words, which for all her apparent sophistication she used so incompetently.

  “It seems to me that you’re trying to put the clock back,” she said at last. “I—ordinary people—feel that cars and ice-boxes and less drudgery for women are a good thing. Leisure is a practical thing, anyhow—not like this virtue of yours.”

  “What do you—and the other ordinary people—use your extra leisure for?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know—well, for amusing oneself, or reading. Women in America today have all sorts of interests, clubs and lectures and so on, that they couldn’t have if they were drudging around all day.”

  “And what about their flavour, their tang, their individuality? Do they create their own beauty, in dress or in the home, or in music? Or do they get it mass-produced, by mail order, from Sears Roebuck, and over the radio?”

  She laughed a little.

  “They do dress a bit alike,” she admitted. “Oh, I don’t know—I don’t really understand what you mean by this virtue of yours.”

  “Why don’t you take a look at European civilisation? It’s obvious you never have,” he said.

  “On the contrary, I know most of Europe very well,” she said, indignantly.

  ‘The big cities, where the life is purely cosmopolitan—yes, I daresay,” he answered, allowing his scorn to come into his voice. “That is not fundamental European civilisation, though. You must look for that elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Albania,” he said, really at random.

  “Albania? I thought that was just a wild savage little country,” she said in surprise.

  “It is small, and it is wild, but you will find what you are looking for there, if you allow yourself to see it,” he said, getting up. “And do get over the idea that size has any value or merit. It is the enemy of most of the best things in the world—it is the enemy of the good life.”

  He bowed and walked out of the restaurant car, leaving her seated at the table, looking after him.

  Chapter Two

  Back in his sleeper, Nils sat looking out of the window, watching the panorama of the plain of Lombardy sweeping by, the tall slender lines of poplars, like rows of green quill pens, swinging round at sharp angles as the train passed them. The fields were tidier, better tilled than fourteen years ago—one had to hand it to Mussolini for that, he admitted. Gradually the irritation that he had felt at the end of his conversation with Mrs. Thurston subsided, and he began to wonder why he had been irritated at all. Even if she belonged—as she did—to a class and a type that he disliked and despised, it was not her fault that she had betrayed her characteristics so thoroughly: he had manœuvred her into lunching with him, and had forced her to talk. Yes, he had been unreasonable and boorish again, thought Nils remorsefully. He lit a cheroot, and went on thinking about her.

  He felt that in some odd way they had got onto terms, not of intimacy, exactly, but of truthfulness. That sometimes happened in trains, he knew, who spent so much of his life in t
rains. That was common enough; but what was really odd was his impression of the way their conversation had followed, not the obvious surface lines which it might have been expected to take, but the subterranean ones of her secret preoccupation or need. That the need existed had been guess-work at first on his part, but she had confirmed the guess by pursuing something, he wasn’t sure what, in their talk; coming back, time after time, and even when arguing, to, as it were, look for something or contest something. What was she looking for? What was the source of her misery? Had her husband, whom he was convinced that she had loved—the mine-owner—gone sour on her in some way? Had she had a child and lost it? She was too young for a child to have gone sour on her—that was a tragedy of the forties, and he would be surprised if she had seen thirty yet. But if her husband had just plain died, there should not have been this cynical discontented misery—the simple loss of a beloved mate had usually something tranquillising about it, setting the mourner in a sort of withdrawn calm. She was not calm, and not withdrawn; in spite of her lack of interest, she lived very much in the market-place. That was the pitiful thing about her—somehow she was essentially unplaced. Nils found himself feeling a pity that surprised him for this strange woman, and above all for her spiritual homelessness.

  The train ran into Venice across the lagoon, paused for some minutes, and ran out again. Nils watched from his window, as they returned to the mainland, the tracery of spire and dome etched on the silver sky above the silver water. He noted too, with angry disgust, the shallow flat domes of the huge petrol and oil containers, built into the landward shore of the lagoon, in apparently endless numbers. “That’s it—stick them down within half a mile of Venice, and then curse your enemies for vandals if a stray bomb hits St. Mark’s,” he said sourly to himself.

  Now as they swung eastwards along the coast, Murano, Burano, and Torcello stood up, small isolated etchings in blue ink over grey-blue water; to the north, from the window of the corridor, he could see the distant mountains sweeping down towards the sea. As the train neared Trieste he rose and stood in the corridor to look at them; now they were close enough for their distinctive colour to be visible, the cold pearly tone of the limestone, and beside the track the small brilliant lime-loving flowers appeared—grape-hyacinths, scillas, minute irises, and silver-leaved starry little objects, pink or white or yellow. Nils didn’t know what they were, but his heart rose in him at the sight. Always, as he approached Trieste, he experienced the same excitement from the first sight of the Karst, the great limestone ranges which run down from the Karawanken almost to the borders of Greece; this was the first touch of South-East Europe; the breath of Slavdom blew off the limestone, and from the valleys and plains beyond streamed out the sense of antiquity that enfolds all lands still partly Eastern. Beyond those white ranges, he reflected happily, lay the Old Testament.

  He and Mrs. Thurston dined together after Trieste, as the train climbed up into the silver-white hills. Francesco and his dining-car had gone, a Yugo-Slav head-steward reigned in his stead; the menu was in Yugo-Slav and rather poor French. The new steward, however, also knew Nils of old, and greeted him with warmth; moreover he reacted to Mrs. Thurston’s appearance exactly as the previous one had done, and urged her to take an aperitif.

  “What are all these things?” she asked Nils, as the man poured out a string of names.

  “Have some slivovitz—it’s the most happy-making drink there is,” Nils said; and he spoke in fluent guttural accents to the steward, who bowed appreciatively. Mrs. Thurston may have supposed that he was merely ordering the drinks; in fact he was telling the man that they were not to be hurried, and might wish to sit through both services.

  “What language are you talking to him?” she asked, getting the malachite cigarette-case out of that huge bag, and fitting a cigarette into the be-diamonded holder. She did this in an easy unaffected way, this time, and spoke with a sort of friendly interest such as she had not so far shown. Nils was pleased.

  “Serbo-Croat,” he said, lighting her cigarette for her. “You don’t speak it?” (He had taken that risk with some confidence.)

  “No.”

  He lit a cigarette for himself, and then, the slivovitz arriving, raised his glass to her. “Prost!” he said.

  “Here’s how!” she responded, raising hers.

  “What,” Nils asked, indicating the flamboyant golden initials on the black bag, which, as before, was propped against the window, “does the G. stand for?”

  She looked faintly surprised.

  “Gloire,” she said.

  “Like Gloire de Dijon?”

  “Yes,” she answered, smiling a little, “Silly, isn’t it?”

  Nils actually thought it was.

  “Parents have very bizarre ideas about names,” he said non-committally. “Did your mother call you that to celebrate some event, or did she guess in your cradle that you would end up glorious?”

  “Neither. She read it in a book. I used to be fearfully ashamed of it when I was small, but now I’ve got sort of accustomed to it.” the owner of the name said.

  “Later on of course they will be able to call you Old Glory,” he said, grinning.

  “Oh, cut it out! I had plenty of that at school,” she said energetically.

  “Would you call your own daughter by such a name?” he enquired. “I mean, people sometimes learn, and sometimes they do not.”

  “Definitely I shouldn’t, if I had a daughter. That much I have learned.”

  “No daughter? That is a pity,” he said, looking at her deliberately. She had come to the restaurant car tonight without a hat, so that the pretty shape of her small head was clearly visible, and the full beauty of that peculiar dark-gold hair. It was a very strange colour; like honey, he decided, when the bees have been sent with half-filled combs to the heather—not the blackish green of true heather honey, but a golden-green. As she met his glance with a rather mocking little smile, he went on—“A son, perhaps?”

  “No. I’ve no children,” she said shortly.

  Well, there was that established. But she didn’t seem resentful of his questions. He looked out of the window—up a side valley a great blunt-headed peak showed creamy in the evening sunshine.

  “There is some splendid climbing in these mountains,” he said. “Have you ever climbed here?”

  “No.”

  “But you do climb, don’t you?”

  “Now why should you think that?”

  “I’ll tell you afterwards. But you are a mountaineer?” he persisted.

  “Yes, I have climbed a good bit, as a matter of fact,” she said slowly, with a curious hesitancy, “but I don’t see why you should have supposed that I climbed.”

  He was puzzled by her stress on the “I”—she spoke as if it was natural that he should have supposed that someone else did.

  “I supposed it for a very simple reason. You walk like a mountaineer.”

  “But you haven’t seen me walk.”

  “Oh yes I have. I saw you walking down the corridor to breakfast this morning, and by the way you balanced yourself, when the train swayed—and even in those ludicrous shoes of yours!—I could tell that you were a ski-runner or a mountaineer, or both. But I thought, a mountaineer.”

  She laughed—but Nils had a curious impression that his explanation had relieved her in some way.

  “You drew a lot of conclusions from my back view walking along a train!” she said, with mockery—“my ancestry, and that I climb. Are you sure you aren’t a detective as well as a factory inspector?”

  “No—I am not. I am simply a little observant. And as I climb myself, I am familiar with climbers’ ways. Where have you climbed? In the White Mountains? The Rockies?”

  “No, in the Alps, mostly—a little in the Pyrenees.”

  “Do you know the North arête of the Grivola?”

  A strange look, happy and also visionary, came into her eyes when he asked that.

  “No—but I’ve always wanted to do it
. It is the most lovely line, isn’t it?”

  “It is. The purest curve in the world! Have you climbed in the Graians at all?”

  “No—only looked at them from the south side of Mont Blanc.”

  “Oh—have you been up by the Brenva? Or by the Col de l’Innominata?”

  “Neither—I’m not a tiger, at all! I meant from small things like the Aiguille Noire de Peuterèt or the Trelatête. Oh,” she said with sudden eagerness, “do you know the ridge walk from the Col du Géant along and down to the Col des Grandes Jorasses? It is such fun; like walking along the roof-tree of a house, a lot of the way—but you have literally one foot in Italy and one foot in France, because the frontier runs along there! And if you drop your matchbox, it only stops six thousand feet down.”

  She spoke with real enthusiasm, at last, and it added unimaginably to the beauty of her face. He looked at her in wonder. So she had known happiness and natural eagerness; that aspect was part of her too, as much as her misery and disaffection with life.

  “Yes, I have done it once,” he said. “But I don’t call that a ‘small thing’. You must have a good head.”

  “Oh, my head’s all right,” she said simply.

  They had emptied their glasses, and the steward was hovering over them to ask if he should serve the soup. Nils told him No, to bring some more slivovitz; it was very agreeable sitting there, with his companion in this happy mood, while the thin spring woods, the clear rushing waters and the pale mountains of Slovenia swam past, glowing in the evening light. Mrs. Thurston raised her delicate brows when the second round of drinks came.

  “Isn’t it very strong? You aren’t trying to make me tight, are you?”

  “No, only to make you happy!” he said, smiling very directly at her.

  Her bright look was suddenly dimmed.

  “Making anyone happy is a large order,” she said.

  “I know it. But mountaineers are a happy race. They know joy as others do not know it. Cold, hungry, exhausted, in danger, they still have some secret spring of satisfaction,” he pronounced, “and they carry it with them down, to the cities and the plains.”