Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  Her eyes became far-away as he spoke, looking past him from the train window to the visible mountains without. “Oh, I guess they do,” she said, without shifting her gaze.

  Nils pursued her mood.

  “The heights of granite and the grassy steep

  My spirit in a magic fortress keep

  Where in the silence, singing waters start,”

  he quoted.

  She brought her eyes back to him.

  “What’s that?”

  “A poem.”

  “Do you know the rest?”

  “No—just those lines stuck in my head.”

  “I don’t wonder. They’re true all right. Who wrote it? Do you know?”

  “A girl,” he said. “A girl who climbed, and was always homesick for the mountains when she was not among them.”

  “An English girl?”

  “Yes. But it is a long time since she was a girl. She will be a middle-aged woman by now.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “I did, when she climbed. It’s years since I saw her.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Glanfield—Miss Glanfield.”

  She frowned a very little.

  “I seem to know the name, but I don’t know why. I don’t think I met her climbing,” she said, with an obvious effort of memory.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t. I believe she stopped climbing years ago.”

  “Why?—if she loved it?”.

  “She married,” Nils said. “But now you must eat something,” he said as the steward appeared. “Here is the menu.”

  It was curious how at that, at the business of choosing her food, back came all the artificiality and exactingness which had become her second nature. She questioned each dish, with an air of dissatisfaction—would the trout be fresh, would the risotto not be oily?

  Nils at length gibed at her openly—“What a fantastic fuss you make about a little food!”

  “Fantastic? I don’t see why. I like food to be nice.”

  “So do most people. If you were arranging a dinner for friends with fine palates, in a good restaurant, your fuss would be reasonable, laudable. But just for yourself, in a dining-car on a train, where all the food is edible and none is delicious, why bother? Why bother yourself, and why bother the waiter?”

  “The waiter doesn’t mind,” she said, rather half-heartedly.

  “No—he likes it; because of your clothes, and your pearls and your rings! But it is a false pleasure; and it wastes his time—and yours.”

  “I don’t mind wasting my time—there’s nothing much to do in restaurant cars anyway.”

  “In this restaurant car, you might be talking to me!—which gives me a real, not a false pleasure,” he said, rather to his own surprise. He realised that this evening, that was true.

  She smiled, a little unwillingly.

  “You like scolding, I suppose?” she said.

  He laughed. “No—though I do it so much. You seem to provoke that, somehow. But I like it more when we just talk.”

  She looked at him as if puzzled.

  “You are very odd,” she said.

  “In what way?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Things that everyone else takes for granted, you are so serious about—and preach sermons on. Like food and machinery and civilisation.”

  “Aren’t food and machinery and civilisation important things?” he asked, amused.

  “Oh yes—only most people just leave them alone! Anyway they aren’t very interesting.” Her expression brushed them aside. Then it changed in some subtle way—not so much to interest as in the direction of something sly, almost cajoling.

  “Tell me more about Albania,” she said, putting her elbows on the table.

  “Are you going to Albania?”

  “Not directly—I don’t suppose so. I think I’m going to Istanbul.”

  “Don’t you know?” he teased.

  The weary discontented look came into her face again.

  “It doesn’t much matter where one goes,” she said; with a curious dead bitterness. “But tell me about Albania—why you think it so worth seeing.”

  “First, it is very beautiful,” Nils began. He was rather pleased that his remark about Albania had stuck. “The mountains are so beautiful, and the great lakes, Scutari and Ochrida; and just now, the nightingales are singing in the woods all day and all night. Then the people are handsome, and have a special charm which is recognised all over the Balkans; and in the country—which is most of Albania except Tirana and Durazzo and Scutari—every one is in fancy dress! That is very unusual and delightful today.”

  “Don’t they wear costumes in the towns?”

  “Less. But in Scutari, yes—a lovely costume, with aprons and embroidered shawls or veils. And on the Sunday after the Ascension—that is about three weeks from now—all the peasants come in to Mass from the country round about, in their most glorious dresses. That is the time to see Scutari.”

  “Are they very religious, then? I thought they went in a lot for murdering and brigandage and all that.”

  “Not now—not much. The King has made great reforms, and the Gendarmerie run by the British really does keep order. That is a wonderful thing, what a few men, who know how to rule and have the unselfish tradition of ruling, can do with a backward people! But religion—yes. Even before the reforms, when there was much murder, religion was a part of their life, a most important part. In Albania, still, it is as it was all over Europe in the Middle Ages, the Age of Faith. Among the Moslems it is something the same. And it gives a great form to their way of living, savage as it would seem to you.”

  “Oh, are some of them Moslems still?”

  “Yes, indeed—as in parts of Yugo-Slavia. Burrel is Moslem, but Mirdita and parts of Mati are Christian—Roman Catholic. Franciscans, the priests are mostly. Devoted men. At Torosh there is a great church, and a mitred Abbot. That is another thing to see—High Mass on Whit-Sunday in the church at Torosh. Again, all the people come from miles around in costumes of very great beauty, and fill the church with the glory of their clothes and of their conscious devotion. It is one of the most splendid sights left in the world.”

  “Can one stay there? Is there a hotel?” she asked, casually.

  Nils laughed.

  “My dear young lady, no! Not in Torosh.”

  “Where do people stay, then?”

  “In tents, if they have them. If not, they sleep in the open. One does not find any of your cosmopolitan ‘confort moderne’ in Albania, thank God! If one travels, one takes a tent and a camp-bed, and food and cooking vessels, and sleeps where one pleases, under the stars. Actually at Torosh, those who know Prince Lek-Gionaj can sometimes stay with him.”

  “But how do you cart all the doings around? You’d need a lorry!” she said, wide-eyed.

  He laughed again.

  “A lorry would not be much good to you,” he said, “for there is no road for wheeled traffic to Torosh. There are only two real metalled roads in all Albania.”

  “How does one get about, then, with all these beds and things?”

  “With a horse-caravan, of course—and men to lead them.”

  “But it’s like Africa!” she ejaculated.

  “Really it is more like Asia,” he said. “You see there life as it is described in the Old Testament. And it has great beauty and power.”

  “Virtue, I suppose, too?” she said mockingly—“women using their hands.”

  “Exactly that” he said gravely, looking full at her. “There one does see, still in its untouched vigour and purity, the life that has been fundamental to European civilisation, that still is fundamental to it—peasant life alongside the life of the aristocratic landholder, the fellowship of the soil. And that is important to see, because it is the source of the inner strength of man, instead of its destroyer, as the life of the city is.”

  She frowned a little over this pronouncement.

  “You’re mad about cities!” she sa
id, and pondered for some time. “But—all that you’ve just said, about the spirit and the life of the soil,” she went on presently. “You said the aristocratic landholder was part of it. I thought the landed aristocracy were considered an anachronism everywhere, nowadays. Don’t you believe in equality?”

  “As you use the word, no!” he said. “Not even in the equality of opportunity. The State must attempt to provide that, of course, as a moral obligation, and to satisfy men’s consciences. But neither I, nor the Albanians, nor anyone who knows anything about breeding animals believes in equality, if he uses his mind.”

  “What on earth has stock-raising got to do with it? It’s a political and social question, surely?”

  “Do you think the man in the Argentine who pays four thousand guineas—that is twenty thousand two hundred dollars—for a Scottish yearling bull really believes that all bulls are equal?” he asked, looking at her with a sort of bland quizzicality. “If he does, why does he not breed from any old bull, instead of paying that fantastic price and having the creature brought thousands of miles across the ocean?”

  She laughed, a little unwillingly.

  “He’s paying for pedigree stock, of course, to improve his strain. But we were talking about human beings.”

  “I beg your pardon, we were, and are, talking about equality,” he retorted, “a thing Nature does not know. But let us talk about human beings. Do you really think that the offspring of two drink-sodden slum parents, say a Bowery bum and a Bowery broad, however carefully you bring them up, are likely to be equal physically and mentally to the children of the fifth generation of substantial Vermont farming stock, or some of the Montenegrin or Albanian mountaineers?”

  “Of course not—no. But we want to eliminate bums.”

  “Admirable. But you have not eliminated them—not only so, but the modern trend is to increase rapidly and steadily the class from which they chiefly spring, what Rebecca West calls ‘the mindless, traditionless, possessionless urban proletariat’. And you pretend that they are the equals of these others. That is a doctrinaire falsehood, and the stock-breeder knows it.”

  “You really believe in aristocracy then?”

  “Certainly. I do not see how a sensible man, who has been in contact with it, can do otherwise. This is unfashionable today, but we live in a very credulous and a very ignorant age and moreover a whole hemisphere, which for nearly a century has been out of contact with aristocracy, is beginning to tell the world that it would be better without it! That is not true, any more than mental and physical equality is a reality; but those who have never seen aristocracy, and therefore know no better, believe it; and also those seize greedily on this false creed who have most to gain by it, the urban proletariat who, having neither traditions nor possessions, wish to exalt themselves by bringing all men down to their own level. And since they are many, and have the franchise, and governments want votes, they are encouraged in this dangerous folly both by catch-penny statesmen and by the Press.”

  She laughed a little.

  “You are a reactionary! But tell me, what’s the use of the aristocracy anyway? What good do they do? Most of the ones I meet are just play-boys.”

  “I said the aristocratic landholder, remember. As for the ones you meet—I had better not say what I think about the people you probably habitually meet! But I think they are not all aristocrats, I think they have very little connection with the land, I think South Americans and transatlantic millionaires figure largely among them, dépaysés urban internationals, also mindless and traditionless,—though not possessionless. To me, such people are the wealthy equivalent of bums!”

  She laughed aloud at the earnest, almost savage way in which he brought out the last words.

  “My God, you’re not so far out!” she said.

  “Wait a moment—I wish to answer your question.” The steward was clearing the table and bringing coffee; Nils spoke to him in Serbo-Croat, asking some question, and in a moment small glasses were brought, and a special bottle from which the steward filled them, carefully.

  “What’s this?” she asked, sipping.

  “Another sort of slivovitz—better. It is much better, this, than any brandy you would get on the train.”

  “It’s delicious,” she said, truthfully. “All right—go ahead!”

  “One should always see events, or classes, to some extent in the light of the past, from the historical angle,” he said, choosing a slender cigar from a box which the steward brought—he nipped it carefully and lit it. “Peasants do this,” he went on, “because the memory, the history, is preserved among them—whereas in the towns, in a couple of generations it is lost. But it is foolish to judge in ignorance of all this—and among educated people, like you, unpardonable.”

  “I’m not all that educated. Go on.”

  “In those countries, you see, which have had a Middle Ages, the landed aristocracy in the Middle Ages performed several useful functions. They protected the peasantry round about, at a period when the State could afford no such protection; they put down highway robbery in their domains, punished the evildoers, decided disputes, and generally acted as law-givers—most of them held regular courts of justice; also they raised troops to defend their country in time of war, and armed and mounted them at their own expense. In fact they acted as the judiciary, the police, and the army for the mediaeval state.”

  “That’s interesting,” she said thoughtfully, her chin on her hand. “I didn’t know all that.” Her eyes were distant—Nils guessed that she was thinking of her mine-owning husband, who had spent so much on cottage bathrooms and pit-head baths. “But that’s the past—that’s all over now,” she said.

  “Nearly all—not quite. If you went to Albania you would see something of the same sort left. But to speak of the landed aristocracy as it is commonly spoken of today, with contempt, as though the ‘Old School Tie’”—he spat out the words savagely—“were something shameful; to assume, as the yellow press assumes, that all members of the aristocracy are just restaurant play-boys, like the modern rich of the towns, is to condemn oneself as ignorant, as ungrateful, and as ungracious. And do not forget”—he too leaned an elbow on the table and held a minatory forefinger out towards her—“that the very blood of these people still carries the inheritance of responsibility for others, of leadership, and their minds and hearts the tradition of it. These things are not nothing; they are a great enrichment to any society, to any nation; to turn one’s back on them is to be as foolish as a man who should eliminate all the pedigree bulls from his ranch, or the blood stallions from his stud. Look at Spain!—because of all the good blood she lost in the Inquisition. A second-class power, which was a great nation.”

  “Yes, I suppose Spain is that, now,” she said.

  “And the ‘classless society’,” he pursued, again spitting the words out contemptuously, “is not only crassly ugly, it is suicidal, and also it is false. There is no classless society, not anywhere in the world. Russia comes nearest to it, but even in Russia there are distinctions. Do the masses ride in cars? No—they ride in trams, or trudge along the pavement. Who then rides in those smart Russian-built limousines of which Moscow is full? The Commissars, the ‘spetsi’, or experts, technicians as we should say, the opera-singers and the ballerinas, the new aristocracy of Russia.”

  “State service and art aren’t a bad basis for an aristocracy,” she interjected.

  “Not at all bad—you are right. Great things may come out of Russia. The point is. that even there, is not this sacrée equality. In America also you have class differences, in actual fact, but there wealth takes the place of rank. I think it is a poor exchange.”

  “Why?—apart from its being less picturesque?”

  “Surely you can hardly ask that question seriously?” he said, leaning back and staring at her. “Very well, I will tell you why. The millionaire who rises from being a corner-boy has no traditions save those of corner-boys. It is true that from the safety of his ach
ieved millions he may endow a university to give others the education he missed himself, or a hospital because his ancient mother died of cancer; but how many of them feel a general obligation to serve their country, to go into politics or the public service?”

  “Mighty few,” she said. “But—”

  He swept her aside and went on.

  “Whereas the hereditary aristocracy of Europe—and this is particularly so in my own country, Sweden, and in England, and also in Hungary—have the tradition of responsibility and of public service. And this affects a society in many ways. It gives stability and strength, it gives experienced leadership, and it gives an example. Look!” he said, dramatically,—“I shall give you one small instance, one comparison; you can say it is trifling, but trifles can be very indicative of tendencies of great importance. In the United States, the little girls in shops and streets, the typists, imitate the clothes, the dresses—of whom?”

  “Film-stars, mostly,” she said, carelessly.

  “Of course. And to imitate them, they study their pictures in the papers. And what do they see? They see them lounging half-naked at Palm Beach, they see them drinking cocktails by bathing pools, they see them with their last husband or their next husband or their latest lover. But in England, for example, whom do such girls imitate? They imitate the clothes and dress of the younger peeresses, or the Royal Duchesses, like the Duchess of Kent. And how do they see them portrayed? With their children round them, or visiting a hospital or opening a school, or inspecting Girl Guides. Performing some public service—always service! Do you think this is without effect on the girls who see? I tell you, such things get in through the pores of the skin, and are of great effect. They colour the whole social outlook of a country, in both ways. In the one nation, the thoughtless and uneducated—and not only they!—admire and respect wealth and success; nothing else is held up to their admiration; in the other, where wealth and success are in fact despised, they admire and respect rank and tradition, the tradition of service. Which do you think shall do most for the moral standards of a nation?”