Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  “Oh, you’re not together then? Sorry—I thought you were. Have you been in Ragusa too, then? I didn’t see you about.”

  “No—I was in Cavtat,” said Mrs. Hanbury repressively.

  This moved the little woman to transports of excitement. “In Savtat? Were you reelly? Did you meet Susan Glanfield? They say she’s staying in Savtat,” she said eagerly. “You know, the writer.”

  Mrs. Hanbury looked steadily for a moment at the little woman. “No, I didn’t meet her,” she said blandly. She went on with her lunch; Gloire thought she looked rather amused about something. But she did not think about it, because she was pondering where she had heard the name Glanfield recently—quite recently. Oh yes—he—the man in the train—had quoted that poem; that was by a Miss Glanfield, a girl who climbed. But she had not connected her at the time with Susan Glanfield. Of course she had read her books. But it might not be the same.

  At Gloire’s suggestion, she and Mrs. Hanbury had their coffee on deck; both recognised their common desire to escape from their fellow-travellers. “God, what a ghastly woman!” Gloire said, when they were settled in two chairs.

  “The suburban middle-class is the most dreadful of all modern social products,” said Mrs. Hanbury, rapidly, as usual. “They have neither the country virtues of wisdom and solidity, nor the quick wits of the town. They are neither gentle nor simple, they have no interests. Doctors say that the women in the suburbs get all sorts of neuroses from sheer boredom.”

  “Do you think country-people have so many virtues?” Gloire asked—she was rather struck by meeting this echo of the Swede’s theories.

  “Oh, surely—isn’t it well recognised?” Mrs. Hanbury replied.

  It was pleasant on deck—they were within the Bocche now, and in shelter, so that the wind was much less strong; there were gleams of sun on the hills, turning them from cold blue to a warm cream; and now and then the small towns on the shore were caught by the bright rays and illuminated, so that they stood out sharp and clear, like little pictures. Gloire practically never asked questions about anything but hotels; but Mrs. Hanbury, without being asked, told her the names of the places they passed, and any facts of interest about them, and Gloire listened passively and quite contentedly—it passed the time, and Mrs. Hanbury had a very agreeable voice. She seemed to know a lot—probably that was why she was so careless about her clothes. But as they moved deeper and ever deeper into the long fiord, even Gloire began to be impressed; the mountains grew higher and more bare, crowded in closer and closer above the water; the steamer nosed its way between them, on and on—there seemed no end to this voyage. When at last Mrs. Hanbury pointed ahead to a cluster of roofs, overhung by a steep grey shoulder of rock, and said “There’s Cattaro,” Gloire felt that Cattaro lay at the very end of the world. It looked sinister. She said so to Mrs. Hanbury.

  “On, no—it’s a lovely little place, and there’s a lot that’s worth seeing,” Mrs. Hanbury declared. “You might go round the walls this evening, and do the churches tomorrow morning before you start.”

  “Do they talk any known language? Or how does one find out where things are?”

  “Well no—that is rather the trouble; they only talk Serbian, mostly. It is not like Ragusa or Split. Unless you could get hold of George,” said Mrs. Hanbury. “Yes, you must get hold of George,” she said, suddenly energetic, sitting up, and opening her handbag. “George will probably meet the boat anyhow,” she said, scribbling on a card—“and he does speak English—of a sort.” She smiled as she said that, with a rather delightful look of interior relish, as if she enjoyed thinking of George’s English.

  “Who is George?” Gloire asked, half bored and half amused at being thus organised by another stranger.

  “George is Cook’s local representative. I forget what his other name is, or how he came to learn English. But it’s quite adequate, and he’s a tower of strength; he knows where everything is, and adores showing people round. You treat him as a friend, and then give him a tip! There,” she said, taking up her despatch case from the deck beside her, and slipping the card into an envelope—“Give that to George; if he isn’t at the boat, tell the porter at the Slavia to send for him.”

  But George was at the boat. When the steamer had worked her way alongside the quay, on which stood a small crowd, for the most part rather garishly dressed in peasanty clothes, Gloire went down the gangway alone, looking hopefully for the uniform of a porter from the Slavia, while Mrs. Hanbury stood above at the rail, not far from the two English passengers. Gloire felt a little forlorn—she could see no sign of a porter; she was to be left alone, it seemed, at the end of the world, among a strange crowd of swarthy people of an alien race, speaking a strange tongue. She stood waiting, while her luggage came ashore, and a thin stream of local passengers, carrying bundles, passed up the gangway. Suddenly she heard Mrs. Hanbury’s voice, upraised from above—“There he is!—there’s George, there, in the straw hat. George! George! That lady has a note for you—will you look after her?”

  A small thickset man in a blue pin-stripe suit and a boater, at this identified himself as George by taking off the hat, bowing and calling back at the pitch of powerful lungs:

  “Yes, sure, Miss Glanfield! Oh, pleased to see you, Miss Glanfield! But why don’t you get off and come to Cattaro again, eh? Where do you go, now?”

  “I’m going to Albania this time, George. I’ll come back soon—next year, I expect.”

  “That’s right—come back—soon as you can. When do you write us another book, eh, Miss Glanfield? All right. Goodbye; I look after the lady.” And he came pushing through the crowd towards Gloire, who during this interchange of greetings stood fascinated, watching now her new acquaintance, Mrs. Hanbury, so suddenly metamorphosed into Susan Glanfield, the novelist, and now the faces of the suburban couple. On the woman’s, incredulity, indignation, and finally a sort of eager triumph appeared in succession—Gloire saw her turn and begin to move towards Mrs. Hanbury, who, waving, fled.

  “Poor devil—what a trip she’ll have!” Gloire thought to herself, for once grinning as honestly as a monkey. “Anyway it was true—you can’t meet yourself, I guess.” And she turned to greet George, holding out Mrs. Hanbury’s envelope.

  George proved to be all that Mrs. Hanbury had said. He took the note and put it in his pocket, shook hands, and asked for her luggage. Mrs. Thurston’s luggage was as usual almost painfully obvious—the green and white boxes had already attracted a curious and admiring crowd. But George had bad news for her—the Slavia was not yet open. No, not for another fortnight. She would have to go to the Serbia, in the town.

  “Is it good?” Gloire asked gloomily—she thought she remembered that Mrs. Hanbury had said something disparaging about it.

  “Oh, all right, quite all right,” George replied cheerfully; “anyway it’s the only one. Come, we take your stuff and fix a room, and then have a look round, yes?”

  “That will be perfect,” Gloire said, with a faint mechanical smile—she was automatically beginning to put the charm machinery in motion on George, on whom all depended. The green and white luggage was piled onto a hand-cart, drawn and pushed by two wild-looking youths with little round brimless hats or caps, like pill-boxes, stuck, as if gummed, to the side of their heads, and embroidered shirts; the splendid strength of their loins and thighs showed through the thin cheap cloth of their European trousers—the strong springy movement of their insteps and ankles seemed unhindered by their cheap and broken European shoes. Gloire and George followed them through an arched gateway in an immensely high and thick wall, and found themselves in a sort of open square, from which streets branched off—but they were the smallest streets Gloire had ever seen, not more than wide enough to allow the passage of the hand-cart.

  “No cars inside the wall,” George proclaimed; “streets are too narrow. No horse-carts either. It’s a small city; we don’t need them.”

  Gloire smiled again, this time unmechanically; she wondered
if her Scand, Larsen, knew Cattaro? It would be right up his alley, she thought—a whole town arranged to dispense with any traffic larger than a wheel-barrow!

  The hotel, when they reached it, was a large, gaunt, unprepossessing-looking building; Gloire waited on a sort of small terrace, flanked by oleanders and bay-trees in tubs, while George, by shouts, summoned a dark wild-haired woman in a long skirt and a black and white spotted apron. They disappeared into the interior; the young men and the luggage followed; Gloire lit a cigarette and looked at the cracked paint on the window-shutters, the unpolished brass door-knobs, the torn lace curtains in the lower windows, with distaste and misgiving. She shrugged her shoulders a little—it was only for one night, anyway. But how was she to let Warren Langdon know where she was? He would have left Tirana by now, and she had no idea where he would be spending the night. She had better telegraph to Tirana and tell them to forward it.

  George reappeared. “I got you a fine room, Mrs. Thurston. Running water, a fine bed; very nice. You be all right. Now, shall we see Cattaro, eh?”

  “Won’t you have a drink first?” Gloire said.

  George would. They sat at one of the little tables, whose paint was disfigured by spots of rust wearing through it; George ordered in a strange tongue, vermouth for himself, slivovitz for Mrs. Thurston.

  “Does anyone speak English or Italian in this hotel?” Gloire asked.

  “No, Mrs. Thurston—sorry, no. Mrs. Miskitch, she speaks German.”

  “Oh well, that’s all right—I speak a bit of German. Who is she?”

  “She’s the proprietress, Mrs. Thurston; this is her,”—as the wild-haired woman reappeared with the glasses on a cheap tin tray. “Mrs. Miskitch, hier Mrs. Thurston.”

  Gloire bowed and spoke a few words in German. Mrs. Miskitch seemed to understand, though she looked dour and made none of the conventional hotel remarks about hoping the visitor would be comfortable. This was perhaps as well, Gloire thought, since she was convinced that she would not be comfortable in the least and knew herself for a bad liar.

  After their drinks they went sight-seeing. George duly suggested the walls, but Gloire, after one look at the way in which they shot almost vertically skywards up that cliff of rock above the town said no, not the walls. They visited various churches, including the one with the portrait of Our Lady. Without, its dome gave it practically the shape of a haycock, and it was really not much larger; within, the gloom and mystery were cool and soothing, though Gloire was too ignorant to be much impressed by the small wooden panel which was S. Luke’s alleged portrait; George illuminated it for her with a stump of a candle from his pocket. After they left each building he would say, briskly,—“Now we see so-and-so; Miss Glanfield say we must see this,” and hustled her off to another church; Miss Glanfield must have got a lot onto that card, Gloire thought. What an odd person, to take so much trouble to make a total stranger see a place thoroughly. An enthusiast, she supposed, with a shrug. Or another missionary, like the man in the train. How very odd if she were really his Miss Glanfield, the mountaineering friend of his youth.

  But Gloire was much more struck by the town itself than by any of the churches which George dutifully showed her. The buildings were high and thoroughly urban, in extraordinary contrast to the narrow streets, hardly more than paved passages, in which they stood. And it all looked very poor. There was nothing but the cheapest manufactured trash visible in the shop windows—cheap textiles, cheap belts and shoes, cheap unfashionable men’s hats, cheap cosmetics. Only the food shops, with their cheeses and sausages and wicker-bound stone jars of vermouth and slivovitz looked at all appetising.

  It all looked so dead-alive, too. Men, strong and athletic-looking, like the youths who had dragged her luggage to the hotel, sat about in the squares, talking or smoking, but doing nothing else; women, hatless or with handkerchiefs on their heads, stood at doors or in knots at the street corners, gossiping and idle. Gloire did not realise that this was that slower tempo of life of which Larsen had spoken; work, and hard work too, was in fact done in Cattaro, but it was not done all the time, and now, in the evening, the little city was at leisure. And not spending any of its leisure rushing home by train or bus, because it was at home; nor in hastening to the cinema or some place of amusement, because in the first place there was none, and in the second, the citizens of Cattaro were still sufficiently amused by leisure itself, and by the age-old pleasures of talk and gossip with neighbours and friends. Gloire for her part felt it all very depressing—it was “small-town” to a degree; it held nothing of the things she valued. Stares of course followed her, but she felt that they were not, as in the great cities where she was at home, a tribute to the perfection of her appearance, but just the stare of the savage for the stranger—any stranger. She remembered how in Paris her French and Viennese friends used to refer to anything raw or backward or uncivilised as “Balkaan”—well, this is it, she thought; now I know what they meant; Cattaro is Balkaan all right.

  Long before George had come to an end of the sights he wished her to see, Gloire cried off, and suggested more drinks. They had these at a café looking out onto the big square near the city gate. Gloire asked, in her flat drawl, why the streets were so narrow.

  “Lack of space, Mrs. Thurston. There is so little room here between the hills and the water, and anyway we had to get the houses inside of the walls, for security.”

  Gloire was vaguely alienated by this.

  “The shops aren’t very good, are they?” she said.

  “No, Mrs. Thurston, they ain’t. Not like the shops on Regent Street or Fifth Avenue.”

  “Oh, do you know the States?” she asked. “Is that where you learnt English?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Thurston,—New York and London; that’s where I was. New York is fine. London is fine too. Rich. But our shops, now; they are poor, and poor stuff in them; because we are a poor country, Mrs. Thurston. We haven’t much industries. If we could get capital we might start some industries. But capital ain’t easy to get. That’s why our Tourismo is so important to us. Miss Glanfield, she’s a good friend to Yugo-Slavia; her books double our British and American Tourismo, and British and American tourists, they pay best. Not always bargaining, like Germans and Czechs.”

  “Why do you want industries?” Gloire asked. She was thinking of the man in the train, and his strictures on industrial life. Was this comic little man, George, going to give him the lie?

  His answer surprised her.

  “We want arms, Mrs. Thurston—arms and planes and ships, but we can’t make them ourselves. If we had a steel industry we could; we got the iron and we got the coal, but we’ve not got the industry. Not like the Czechs—look at the Czechs! They got the Skoda works; they can make arms, all they want, and sell to other people—to you in England, even. We can’t make them, and we’re too poor to buy all we need.”

  “But what do you want arms for?” Gloire asked, again vaguely irritated—the little man was so desperately in earnest, in his cheap suit, with the perspiration shining on his dark excited face; she was a little repelled.

  He stared at her for a moment, at her question, as if he were looking at some unrecognisable animal. So that Swede had stared at her once or twice in the train—Gloire felt her colour rising. But George was answering her politely enough; more politely than the Swede.

  “Italy, Mrs. Thurston,” he said. He jerked his arm out behind him. “There sits Italy just across the water, coveting our country and our ports, so she can make the Adriatic an Italian lake! A lot she take already. Trieste, Pola, Fiume—those all belong to our people; Slovenes mostly. Zara is ours, but she take that. She publish books—maybe you buy some in Split or Dubrovnik, they shove them in the Italian book-shops—like “L’ Italianità del Littorale Adriatica”; got up splendid, with fine pictures. People buy them for the pictures, and believe all that rubbish. Because the God-damned Venetians were all down here way back, we don’t, we Slavs, want them here now. We threw them out. But that�
�s the claim they make.”

  “But that’s just books, about culture and all that. They don’t make that claim seriously, surely?” Gloire asked, as usual slightly incredulous. She had in fact bought and read the handsome volume on the Italian-ness of the Adriatic Littoral, in Split.

  “You bet they make it seriously, Mrs. Thurston. You bet they mean to do it, when they think they’ve got everybody used to the idea. You say you’re going down to Albania—you see what you find when you get there! Italians in everything. They run the Army there now, training them they call it. Training!”—George, regrettably, leaned aside and spat. “The British, they do train people,” he pursued. “They make a swell job of the Albanian Gendarmerie. But now the Italians try to make the Albanians throw them out of that. Who runs the Albanian air-service? The Ala Littoria. Who’s developing the copper-mines? An Italian company. Oh, they want Albania all right; once they get those two ports, Valona and Durazzo, they can bottle up their damned Adriatic Lake; and even if we have a bit of a merchant fleet, they can stand over us.” George leaned back in his chair, breathing heavily; he mopped his brown forehead with a gaudy silk handkerchief and gulped down his slivovitz. “The British are a grand people,” said George, “but they don’t notice much. Not till it happens to them. Reckon they’re such gentlemen, they don’t know what scabs some other nations can be. I like them a lot, but Jeese, do they drive me mad, being so blind?”

  In the Hotel Serbia at Cattaro, that night, Gloire Thurston had a really violent reaction against the impulse which had sent her on this wild-goose chase to look at Albania. It is curious how irrationally some places seem to us evil and intimidating—but if they do and one is alone, the effect can be almost overwhelming. Gloire was nearly overwhelmed by the Hotel Serbia. All those ideas she had had, coming down the final lap of the Bocche on the boat, about Cattaro being the last place in the world, came back to her as, shrinkingly, she unpacked the minimum, and laid it out on sheets of tissue paper on the unsavoury toilet table—the drawers, with their refuse of old hairpins, stale powder, and loose wisps of hair, she shut again with a shudder. God! it was ghastly, she thought, as she put on a wrapper over her nightgown and got into the horrible bed, arranging a scarf on the untempting pillow. She lit a cigarette and lay back, staring up at the unshielded bulb which hung from the fly-blown ceiling. What a fool she had been to let herself in for this.