Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  “That’s probably true enough,” she admitted, “though I’d never thought of it that way before; but Americans don’t like rank being a fixed thing—they like every man to have the same chance.”

  “And have they not, in England? That is the great strength of English society, the fluidity of rank. If a man performs great public services he is made a peer, and so brings new blood into the aristocracy. When I was at Oxford—yes, I was there—I had my punctures mended at a little cycle shop in Long Wall Street, and boarded my little dog there—Mr. Morris, the owner, who mended my punctures with his own hands, was glad enough to get five shillings a week for her keep. Now he is Lord Nuffield, and sits in the House of Lords, and wears the ermine.”

  “That’s only one.”

  “Nonsense! There are many. Look at the Archbishop of Canterbury—he was a son of the manse, and went first to the village school. Look at Lord Weir! Look at all the Wills and Coats peerages! Almost all these were first working-men or tradesmen, and now are noblemen. In a republic they would get no reward but their wealth; in a monarchical democracy they get an intangible reward, indeed, rank—but a very potent one. Their rank carries with it the tradition of obligation, of service, of responsibility; and so potent is this tradition that with very few exceptions, in one generation or at the most two, they feel and behave as do the old aristocracy, and their children acquire the same ideas of service and gentle behaviour.” He looked back at her and smiled quizzically. “A gentleman is not a bad thing,” he said.

  Some thought darkened her eyes and twisted her mouth.

  “Of course not,” she said impatiently. “But we—Americans—don’t like privilege. You can twist it all round as much as you like, but there is something in equality.”

  “There is something,” he agreed gravely—“but one wants to be quite clear which forms of equality are real and possible, and which are not. There can be, and should be, absolute equality before the law. That is vital—and in Sweden and in England, where judgeships are not political appointments, and judges are incorruptible, that exists—as most oddly, it does not exist in America. In England you cannot pack a jury or buy a judge, and the rich man or the political boss has no better chance before the law than the poor man. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial could not have happened in England, or anywhere in Scandinavia.”

  “People harp so on Sacco and Vanzetti,” she said petulantly. “It was only one case.”

  “Yes. But it shocked the conscience of the world. Quite humble people, here in the Balkans, heard of it with horror and dismay. You see they had taken the American claims to equality and liberty at their face value; but this one case tore down their simple illusions, because the injustice to two poor men was too manifest, too plain. So they began to wonder, and to ask of those who returned—and they found out the truth about American equality before the law, that often it is really just words, like an advertisement. They do not understand about advertising, here.”

  “Were you ever in the States?” she asked abruptly.

  “Oh yes—many times, and for long periods,” he said. “That is why I know about equality over there. But look—shall we go on considering what forms of equality are real and possible? Because there is a second one, very important—indeed I should have put it first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The absolute equality of the human soul before God. That is a reality.”

  She looked at him in surprise, as if to see if he were serious.

  “I don’t see what that has to do with equality here on earth,” she said at last, slowly.

  “It does not surprise me that you do not,” he said—“for it is a truth, a concept, that has been largely lost sight of in communities which concentrate on the theory of social equality. But, first, it is literally and indisputably true, as true as man’s physical nakedness at birth and death; and secondly, where it is realised and felt—as it is here in Europe—as an actual part of man’s daily life, it has a profound effect on the social structure. It removes, almost completely, any sensitiveness about social inequality; for the peasant who is profoundly conscious of his relation to God, and knows that it is identical with the relation to God of his local Count or Prince, does not worry unduly about his relation to his social superiors. “We are all men,” he says happily. “We are all God’s children, and He is our Father.” And resting in that security, that fundamental and complete equality, he gladly and gracefully touches his hat to the landholder, or kisses his hand. What does it matter? All souls have equal value, and God is our loving Father. Why then not kiss the Durchlaucht’s hand? It is the custom, and it is pretty and gracious; it is a part of good manners; and the human soul at ease, as European souls are at ease, likes and enjoys the grace of good manners. You will not find here that edgy hypersensitive uneasiness which seeks to prove that ‘I am as good as the next man’ by discourtesy, by refusing the polite salutation, by the gruff reply to a civil request.” He smiled at her. “You know of what I am thinking,” he said.

  She sat in silence, frowning a little.

  “Yes, I do know,” she said at last. “I love the politeness in Europe when I come back. But—Americans don’t like to be servile.”

  “And must courtesy be servile? The peer is polite as well as the peasant, remember. Is that servility?”

  “No—of course it isn’t. And we don’t think it servile when it’s the peer.” She paused and frowned again. “But you fox me by suggesting that God has anything to do with it.”

  “God has to do with everything,” Nils said gravely. “It is the loss of the sense of God, in daily life, that causes such unhappiness in America, in spite of all its many religions.”

  “Do you call America unhappy, then?” she asked, her eyes very wide. “Why, they think the world of happiness. ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’—it’s in the Declaration of Independence.”

  “I know. Most strange, that seems to us.”

  “Why?” she asked rather defiantly.

  “Don’t think I am trying to provoke you,” he said gently, “or to make fun of what you revere for the sake of making fun of it. It is much too important for that. This is a question of a true or a false conception of life. That phrase about men’s rights—not their duties, you remark—is at the root of so many misconceptions, because it is in itself a misconception. Learning can be pursued, and overtaken; virtue too”—he smiled—“and truth. But happiness, the Blue Bird—that has always eluded those who pursue it, and mankind has always known that it does, and must. Here, we know this; the veriest peasant, whom you so despise for his ‘low standard of living’ knows better than to pursue happiness directly. What can we think, what can you expect us to think of a nation which inscribes so irrational an aim practically in its constitution? Listen—” as he saw her face darken with vexation—“it was said long ago ‘The good man is happy though crucified’. Is that what the Declaration of Independence means?”

  “No,” she said shortly,—“it means what it says, that people have a right to try to be happy.”

  “And you think they are happier there than here?”

  “I—yes, I think so. They have more chances of it, anyway—more leisure, more freedom, and much more comfort.”

  “Ah!” He pounced on the word. “Comfort, yes. Things again! Shall I tell you what those words have really come to mean? ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Comfort.’ But happiness has escaped their grasp, to judge by all the usual signs.”

  “What signs do you judge by?” she asked, fitting another cigarette into her holder. He lit it for her.

  “I judge by a people’s conversation, and their current writing, and the faces of the old,” he said. “In America I find few evidences of happiness in any of these. And your own young writers make no secret of the national unhappiness. One of your poets said to me over there, only a few weeks ago—‘I don’t get it. You’re all living on a volcano, and yet every place I go in Europe, I see such happy faces.’ I asked
him, to see what he would say, what you asked me a moment ago—did he, then, think Americans unhappy? And I thought his answer so important that I wrote it down.” Nils pulled a small note-book out of his pocket, saying—“I have a very bad memory,”—and turned the leaves.

  “Ah, here it is.” He read—” ‘We are a most terribly unhappy people. Spiritually, emotionally and sexually, we have lost our way; politically we never really knew it. We do not know what we want, nor where we are going. So we just grasp desperately at the things we can get—wealth, comfort, amusement; we have built up a great structure of material luxury to keep out the empty spaces of the spirit, as our forefathers built stockades round their communities to keep out the perils of the wilderness. We keep the radio going all the time to distract our empty hearts. We console ourselves with clever mechanical gadgets as a homesick child consoles itself, desperately, with toys. But in fact we are the most unhappy nation on earth. Most of us don’t realise it, and would die sooner than admit it; but we are, and you have only to read us to see it. Our art—which is almost all writing—gives us away, as Art always does give away the truth. It is our very unhappiness which gives us this obsession about happiness. You don’t have it, over there—the obsession, I mean— because you have the thing itself.’”

  He closed the little book, and replaced it in his pocket. “That was an American speaking,” he said, and sat back and took a sip from his glass.

  To his immense surprise, she put both her hands up to her head in a gesture of real desperation; and spoke in a high-pitched tone, pouring out her words in a flood.

  “I don’t get it either! I don’t see why you have to pick on America, and go for our gadgets just because we want to be happy, and like comfort and clean ways and cars and victrolas! Everyone in Europe isn’t so happy, anyway! Why can’t you let America alone? It lets you alone.”

  He saw that she had had more than she could take—the discussion of unhappiness, or something, had got under her skin. He pondered making some soothing reply, and turning the conversation. He had preached at her, unpardonably, anyhow. Then he looked at her again. Her white hands still held her white forehead, the scarlet-tipped fingers interlacing across her dark gold hair. No, he thought; this is desperately serious, and for some reason it is serious for her; to try to make her understand is really more important than her being hurt and angry. I will try.

  But first he took up the bottle and refilled her glass and his own.

  “Put down your hands,” he said simply—“and drink some of that. So—” as she did as she was told. “Now, I will try to tell you.”

  “For almost the whole world today,” he began slowly, “the great problem is how to combine mechanisation on the scale on which we now have it, with the good life. Human life has run on on much the same lines for four thousand years—sowing and reaping, spinning and weaving, cooking and eating food; loving and marriage, birth and death, the pursuit of knowledge, the creation of beauty, the service and adoration of God. And till the nineteenth century it has run at much the same tempo, the same pace. The one great shake-up before that was the discovery of the printing-press, which made it possible to disseminate ideas much more widely and more rapidly than before. That, we have to some extent assimilated; man has adjusted himself to literacy, up to a point.

  “But since the beginning of the nineteenth century have come also the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, the telegraph, the telephone, and the wireless; and these have altered the tempo of human life, and made at once it immensely more rapid, and infinitely more noisy than ever before. At the same time the invention of machinery and the flooding of the world with mass-produced goods have modified many aspects of human life: for instance man’s sense of dependence on the soil and the weather—which reminds him daily of his dependence upon God; and also the workman’s intelligent knowledge of what he is making, and his pleasure and pride in the work of his hands. Pleasure is of God—and any loss of pleasure is in itself a loss of part of man’s dignity, and of that happiness which comes unsought. All this is having spiritual and psychological and nervous results, and mankind must adjust itself to the new conditions, or perish. We have not yet had time to measure these results fully; what we do already see is that cancer, crime, and nervous maladies are on the increase, in less than three generations.

  “This is the great modern problem for the whole world,” Nils went on—“this process of adjustment, this question of how to combine mechanisation with the good life, the healthy mind in a healthy body. And here in Europe, because we are ancient nations, habituated to thought and valuers of tradition, we realise instinctively that mechanisation may not be an unmixed blessing, and that if the adjustment to it is too rapid, it may spell disaster. It is not yet certain that it may not spell disaster anyhow. I, who inspect factories all over the world, know, what the turning from being a field worker into being a factory hand does to a man! And so in Europe, where the process of swamping the individual life by the mechanised life has not yet gone too far, we wish to control it, to put on the brake. We are, some of us, very vividly aware of what is at stake, of what we are in danger of losing, and so we are on our guard. We feel that we must defend ourselves from false gods.”

  The moderation of his tone, and the breadth of his statement, had calmed her down—he had seen that while he spoke. But at his last words she raised her eyebrows.

  “False gods! Isn’t that rather strong?” she said. “Even in America we don’t worship showers and ice-boxes yet.”

  “Are you sure? I am not sure,” said Nils, with that funny Nordic simplicity of his. “If I saw and heard, in America, the same emphasis laid on purity of administration, on business integrity, on scholarship and thoroughness, and on the graces of humility and modesty as I see and hear laid on them here in Europe, I should think that you worshipped those things! But I do not. The resounding claims, in America, are not made for things such as these, but for central heating and Pullman trains and labour-saving appliances and cars for all. It looks as if those were what America most values, most aspires to. ‘Wheresoever a man’s treasure is, there will his heart be also.’ Tell me, where is America’s treasure?”

  “Oh, how would I know? But I still don’t see that you can prove that there’s any harm in gadgets.”

  “Not yet—I tell you, there has not been time to prove that definitely. It is the importance which is attached to them that we feel to be certainly injurious.”

  “Why? What has it got to do with Europe, anyway? Why can’t you let us alone?” Her voice was petulant again.

  “That is what we ask,” Nils said, smiling. “Do you constantly find European publicists talking and writing about ‘the European Way of Life’, or about raising the standard of living in America, or about the ‘backward nations’ of the United States?”

  He paused and looked at her; she laughed, a little unwillingly.

  “It is America which will not let the world alone,” Nils pursued—“which holds up its way of life as the ideal for every nation, and seeks to impose its own standards of living—which many people think ridiculously and unwholesomely high—on others, partly of course in the search for markets. If it were openly stated that it was just a search for markets, that would be one thing, but it is not; by a tremendous propaganda campaign this materialistic conception is held up as an ideal, as somehow part of liberty, and above all, as a form of happiness. To search for markets is legitimate, but to make a virtue of so doing is not. Most of all it is a crime to dress up salesmanship in the garments of philanthropy, and to try to drag spiritual values into advertising. Those are false gods indeed, debasing ones—and we who see their falsity have the duty to protect ourselves from them. That is the one unforgivable sin, the sin against the light.”

  She sat drumming her fingers on the table; her expression was half-disconcerted, half-resentful. It reminded him of her dissatisfied face at breakfast, and an impulse came to Nils to ask her about herself. He did not usually yield
readily to impulses, and now he argued with himself that it was getting late; that his strictures had clearly upset her; that if she was not tired anyhow, she must certainly be tired of him—that as she was going to Istanbul, there was all tomorrow, and he had far better leave it for tonight. But the impulse did not yield to argument; she sat silent, frowning at the table, her pretty profile reflected in the window against the darkening landscape outside; he continued to sit watching her, and suddenly he said—

  “Let us leave the nations, and their happiness. You—forgive me, but why are you so unhappy?”

  Up went her eyebrows; her whole face went on the defensive.

  “Why in the world should you think I am?” Her voice was colder even than at breakfast.

  But Nils, having yielded to his impulse, went ahead with it like a tank.

  “Oh, your face! When I first saw it, more than the beauty, I saw the misery! And you are not one of those who cannot be happy, for when we spoke of mountains and of climbing, there was joy in your face, as in the face of a bride.”

  The defensive expression lessened, but for a long time she sat silent, looking rather bleakly at her hands. Nils waited—he had shot his bolt, but he was surprised to find with what anxiety he was waiting to see if she would answer him.

  “When I climbed mountains, I was a bride,” she said at last. She reached for her bag—Nils gave her one of his cigarettes and lit it for her. Blowing out smoke—

  “Yes,” she said rather tonelessly. “You’re quite right—I was happy then. Incredibly happy. But it’s all over now, and there isn’t anything left that’s worth bothering about.”

  “Why is it all over—please?” Nils asked.

  “I should have thought you’d have known,” she said, with rather dreary surprise. “He was killed climbing. Oh, I don’t grudge that on the mountains,” she said with a sudden furious energy—“but I do on the men who left him to die! I hate all men, I think, now. Damn them, damn them!”