Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  Why had she come? Well obviously, because of that man in the train, the Swede, Larsen or whatever his name was; but why should she have paid so much attention to what he said? She frowned at the ceiling, over this unusual exercise of examining her own motives. Really, because he had talked to her so oddly. He had seemed in some curious way to know about her, even before he asked. How peculiar of him to ask, too! But then he was very peculiar. Only, in spite of the strange views he had on things, she had had the feeling that he really knew something that might help her—if anything could help her, ever again. It was queer, that—it had just kept on coming over her. Because really!—any other man, she would have told where he got off for saying half, a quarter, to her of what the Swede had said. And the only direct advice he had given her, actually, was to go on climbing, and to go to Albania. And she had been mad enough to come, and now look where she was!—and probably Albania would be worse. Oh well, Warren would be here tomorrow, and would take her to the Legation for a bit, where it would be clean and she could get a bath, anyway.

  She got out of bed, switched off the light, ran back, and lying down in the dark, tried to sleep. Outside, irrationally and inexplicably a bird began to sing—at midnight. Gloire listened, and realised that it was a nightingale. A nightingale in a city—how insane! Larsen had said they sang all day and all night in Albania. Well damn Larsen anyway, letting her in for this.

  Aoh! That was something crawling! She felt for her torch, ran to the door, switched on the light, and threw back the bedclothes. Was that a scuttling flat form? How revolting! Shivering with chill and disgust she got into bed again, and pulled up the repellent bed-clothes. She would leave the light on for a bit; then she might catch the brute if he came back. She lit another cigarette and again lay staring upwards.

  That Swede—his notions were quite mad. Look at this appalling room, and that awful toilet! Plumbing was a good thing, anyway, and she wished to God he could see this place! But though she fought with him in her thoughts, there persisted that odd idea—that he had known what was wrong with her, that he knew something that could have helped her. What was wrong with her? For the first time Gloire consciously asked herself that question. Oh, she didn’t know, except that she minded so awfully about Tony still, and so hated a world in which such a horror could have happened to him. She shut her eyes, to shut out the unbearable vision of Tony up in that little tent, with his broken ankle, and the blizzard screaming outside, and help not coming and not coming—then opened them again. She saw Tony now as she remembered him, with his eyeglass and his little fair moustache, trudging up to a hut, bent slightly under his rücksack; saw him on steep rocks, clambering like a great cat, swift, deliberate, sure; saw him, in old tweeds, going into one of his cottages of which he was so proud, talking with easy courtesy to the miner’s wife, making little jokes—and the woman so at ease with him, bluntly friendly, civilly direct about repairs or anything. What had that man said about souls at ease liking the forms of courtesy? Well that was true, anyway. And Tony was like those landholders the man talked of; he did have the tradition of obligation. She hadn’t been able to understand it, when she first went to England; she had chafed under it, as under all those other traditions which governed his life; she hadn’t been able to see the point of it all. Somehow that Swede had made her see the point better than she ever had—tying it all into history that way made it make more sense. But she didn’t want to go on thinking about Tony, she thought, moving restlessly—usually she managed not to. Damn the Swede, churning all this up.

  Without warning, thunder crashed violently overhead; a great clap, and then a long rolling peal, reverberating among the mountains—as it died away she heard the nightingale again, singing louder than ever, as if in rivalry; and then another and another tuned up. Idiotic birds! And where were they? The Serbia was in the very heart of the town. She got up and went to the window, threw open the Venetian shutters, and leaned over the sill. The air was strangely sweet. The nightingales were still singing like mad, but somehow now their city song was less insane, it was even comforting. Where the devil were they? It was too dark to see. They couldn’t be sitting on chimney-pots, like starlings!

  A flash of lightning answered her question. To her right, over a wall, a large ilex-tree stood in a courtyard, silhouetted in the fierce light against a tall house with pointed windows and a beautiful balustraded balcony. Blinking, Gloire just registered the astonishing beauty of that sudden picture. She waited while the thunder rolled and echoed for the vision to come again. It did—and this time, her eyes focussed in advance, she saw it more clearly—the exotic shapes of the windows, the rich carving of the balustrade, and the dark glitter of the great tree in which the nightingales, rapt and lyrical, carolled against all Heaven’s artillery. Something melted and broke in her, at that—while she still leaned from the window, down came the rain, heavy, steady, healing—a loosening of tension; and with it, to her astonishment, her own tears fell. God, you are an ass! Gloire adjured herself—she went back, switched off the light, and groped her way to bed. In a few minutes, lulled by the heavy swish of the falling rain, she fell asleep.

  Chapter Five

  Gloire’s mood of revolt against her expedition had lessened by the next morning, and she drank her coffee on the little terrace outside the hotel in bright sun and tolerable spirits. George reappeared, and took her round some rather indifferent antique shops. But before she left she had another panic. Eleven-thirty came, noon came, and there was no sign of Warren Langdon. Gloire walked down several times to the city gate, in case he should not know where to look for her—George pattered beside her, constantly urging her “not to worry, Mrs. Thurston. Everyone here know the Slavia, it’s shut; everyone here know where you are.” But in spite of this, by 12.30 Gloire was almost desperate. Stay another night in that hotel she would not, and yet if Warren didn’t come, where could she go?

  At a quarter to one, in despair, she had lunch—this too she ate on the terrace under the oleanders, and it was as good as last night’s dinner had been bad; delicious fish, faultlessly fresh, with some aromatic herb sauce, and an excellent salad. And while she was eating it, up the steps came Warren Langdon, in his seersucker suit, fanning himself with his Panama, and emitting gloomy apologies. He had slept at Scutari, on purpose to be in good time, and had taken the lower road, by Budua, to be earlier still; but the road had been pretty well washed out by last night’s storm and it was all they could do to get through. Now they would have to hustle to make Scutari tonight, as they would have to go right over Mount Lovcen. Gloire said she wanted to go over Lovcen anyway, and hadn’t he better have some lunch, as it was right here? So Warren Langdon finished the fish and gulped down some wine, while George mobilised the youths and the hand-cart, and carried Gloire’s luggage off to the car. And a few minutes later Gloire sank, with a sense of returning to civilisation, into the deep back seat of the Cadillac; Warren stepped in after her, and the linen dust rug was spread over their knees by the chauffeur. This, Gloire felt, was much more like. Albania, seen this way, might after all not be so bad.

  The Mount Lovcen road is, as Warren Langdon said, really quite a phenomenon. Immediately behind Cattaro it rises from sea-level to close on five thousand feet in thirty-two hairpin bends, looped to and fro across the face of what is practically a precipice. It is superbly engineered, but the Cadillac was a long car, and at most of the bends it had to take two bites. Gloire’s sense of luxury and safety lessened considerably as Cyril, the White Russian chauffeur, repeatedly backed his machine to the very lip of the road to make the turn; backed it moreover not at a cautious creep, but with a vigorous rush that sent the gravel spurting from under the broad tyres. “Can’t you make him take these curves more slowly?” Gloire was at length driven to protest. Mr. Langdon, who was smoking a cigarette in a long, stained ivory holder, merely laughed his deep laugh.

  “Oh, Cyril knows this road,” he said. “And it’s no use talking to him. He just has his own ideas.”


  Warren Langdon was a long, lean New Englander, with a deeply-lined face, sunken eyes, and the curiously tragic expression that is characteristic of so many Bostonians, at once sensitive and impotent, but with a certain gauche charm—also typical of his kind. He had a soft low voice, very musical—the sort of voice that the English associate, if at all, with the South, but which is in fact very characteristic of old New England families; he was well-informed to the point of being learned, another New England trait which is little recognised abroad—he spoke French quite faultlessly. His gloomy expression was the outward and visible sign of a profound and rather helpless disillusionment—with life, and with the personality and prospects in this world and the next of Warren Langdon; these however he had by now—he was fifty-six—so fully accepted that he was far from being a gloomy companion; a rather acidly philosophical outlook caused him to take the slings and arrows, great or small, of fortune with considerable calm. Unless they affected other people; then he was deeply, overtly, and musically concerned. He had known Gloire from a child. Gloire always suspected him of having been at one time in love with her mother; she further guessed that he had not married her because, though immensely rich—Gloire’s grandfather had made sanitary fittings—she was a Middle-Westerner, and would not have gone down in Warren’s Bostonian circle. As a girl Gloire had spent enough time in the comfortable Langdon house at Wenham, Mass., to realise how rigid a control the normal Bostonian’s family and circle exercises on his private life, especially where his marriage is concerned. When Warren did eventually marry a Newburyport girl, poor, pretty, inbred, nervous and intense, his family, Gloire was sure, had been delighted. But the prettiness had not lasted, the intensity presently ceased to mask a certain lack of intelligence, the nervousness intensified; Gloire had been deeply relieved to learn that Melanie Langdon didn’t like Albania and had “stayed home” after their last leave. His sister was keeping house for him. Gloire remembered Miss Anne from Wenham days, tall, formidable, with pince-nez and gold chains and a warm heart; as definite and certain about life as her brother was hesitant. Miss Anne almost certainly disapproved of her, Gloire; but her rectitude and good manners had, and always would, prevent that disapproval from manifesting itself in any obvious way.

  Just above the last of the hairpin bends, where the road flattened out a little and turned inland, they ran into thick mist, white, cold, and clammy. “Oh, contwist it!” Warren cried, disappointed as a boy. “Now you’ll not get the view! I did so want you to get the view.” Gloire had wanted to get the view too, but there was nothing to be done about it; they drove on to Cettinje, the small derelict ex-capital of Montenegro; in the mist its pink and white houses, its former ministries and palace looked more derelict than ever. Then they began to descend, into country warmer and richer than the white sea-face of the range up which they had come; they emerged from the mist that shrouded Lovcen’s head, and the afternoon sun shone brilliantly on tumbling streams in steep valleys, with a wealth of shrubby growth between the rocks—among the pale green foliage of wild pomegranates, pale and vivid as green flames, the red flames of the flowers burned, astonishingly. Far below, through flatter land, a river wound, shining; further still was the silver gleam of a great lake—Scutari, Warren told her. He talked a good deal, telling her much that was worth hearing of Montenegro’s past and Yugo-Slavia’s present. But Gloire did not pay much attention. She was beginning to get sleepy, after her broken night, and now and again drowsed off.

  It was a long drive. Presently she found herself getting hungry as well as sleepy—the sight of men eating bread at a little inn by the roadside made her sharply aware of the fact. She glanced at the watch on her wrist—it was six o’clock, more than five hours since they had eaten.

  “Warren, have you any food?” she asked him, interrupting a long précis of recent Yugoslav internal politics.

  “Why, my dear, no—I’m afraid I haven’t,” Warren replied. “You’re not hungry, are you?”

  “Yes, starving. Haven’t you some chocolate, or something?”

  “Why no—isn’t that too bad? I’m most terribly sorry.” Warren was melodiously desolated. “I figured we’d get in to Scutari in time for dinner. It’s those darned floods made me so late.”

  “Well can’t we stop and get something to eat, somewhere?”

  Warren looked troubled. “I don’t think you’ll get much to eat anywhere before Scutari,” he said doubtfully; he leaned forward and consulted the chauffeur in Russian. The result was negative. “He says Scutari’s the first place,” Warren said resignedly, sitting back again.

  “Oh rubbish, Warren! There are these little estaminet places right along the road—look, there’s one now.”

  “Yeah, but you wouldn’t get anything there you could eat.”

  “I’d get bread,” said Gloire vigorously—opposition was stimulating her appetite.

  “And since when did you start eating bread, Gloire? What about your figure?” he teased her.

  “Oh, cut it out, Warren. I tell you I’m hungry! If you haven’t brought a basket, or chocolate, or anything, I must eat bread. Tell him to stop at the next little pub place we come to, and get me a loaf.

  Mr. Langdon did as he was told, but without result. Cyril nodded, but merely stepped on the accelerator and made the car bound forward over the road, which had now deteriorated considerably; they shot past several inns, where the sight of men cutting away at long loaves exasperated Gloire.

  “Warren! He’s not stopping—he’s going right on. Make him stop.”

  Warren laughed gloomily.

  “My dear, if Cyril don’t mean to stop he won’t stop,” he said. “He’s that kind of a man. He just can’t believe you want to eat bread.”

  “I can’t think why you keep him, then,” Gloire said angrily. “I wouldn’t keep a chauffeur who wouldn’t obey orders.”

  “He’s the best mechanic between Belgrade and Athens—in fact you might pretty well say he’s the only one,” Warren replied pacifically. “I have to keep him. I’m terribly sorry I forgot to bring some food, Gloire—it’s my fault.”

  Gloire closed her eyes without replying, and sulked in silence.

  The reason for Cyril’s reluctance to stop presently became apparent. After consulting a large turnip watch of florid gold and enamel, in the Empire style, he leaned back in his seat, and still travelling at the same relentless speed, addressed his employer. It was now 6.30—the Albanian-Yugo-Slav frontier, beyond Podgoritza, closed for the night at 7.30; they would not anything like make it; would it not be a good plan to stop in Podgoritza, find the magistrate, and get him to telephone to the frontier post and arrange for them to be let through? Warren agreed. Gloire, when the new move was communicated to her, stared incredulously.

  “But haven’t you a laisser-passer?”

  “Sure I have—but that won’t help at these little places. You’re in the Balkans here. No, it’s a durn good idea.”

  Soon after seven they swung into Podgoritza, over the river bridge, and proceeded to seek out the magistrate. Gloire had by this time two urgent determinations, not one: to buy bread and if possible also chocolate, and to find a lavatory. Really Warren was too inhumanly vague, she thought. They passed a largish hotel, and Gloire suggested stopping there for bread; but Cyril had his own ideas. ‘They pulled up in a square, filled with the evening crowd; without a word to her the two men jumped out, one on each side, and vanished in the multitude. Unable to ask her way, furious, Gloire sat while the crowd condensed round the Cadillac, full of delighted curiosity. Before she had decided what to do, a tall man in a hideous Homburg hat stepped up to the window, and addressed her, to her immense relief, in American.

  “Say, you got a swell car—damn fine. Yank car, hey? You a Yank?”

  “Yes!” said Gloire, feeling unspeakably un-European.

  “Ah, fine. Shake!” said the man, thrusting a dingy paw through the window. “You know Omaha, Nebraska? I drive a taxi in Omaha six years.”


  “Yes, it’s a grand place,” said Gloire desperately, shaking hands with him. “Look—I want to buy some chocolate—can you tell me where to go?”

  “I buy you some fine chocolate—you give me the dinara and I get it pronto,” said her new friend.

  “No, I want to stretch my legs,” said Gloire, scrambling out. “If you could mind the car, and tell me where, I’ll go.” In her mind she was wondering if she would have time to get to that hotel, and back.

  However, she was again frustrated. The repatriated Slav from Omaha, Nebraska, was not going to lose a second of the company of this fascinating stranger; he detailed a companion to mount guard over the car, and led Gloire off, extolling the glories of America, and telling her how “up-state” Podgoritza was. Podgoritza was pretty up-state, at that, Gloire thought; however in a small shop, much to her surprise, she found quantities of a French chocolate made in Lyons. She bought six slabs—Heaven knew when she would get any more in this God-forsaken country-opened one and tried it. Still more to her surprise it was excellent.

  But it was impossible to shake off her new friend, so she went back to the car just as Warren Langdon also returned to it, a long loaf escaping from a sheet of yellow paper under his arm. He was accompanied by Cyril, for whom Gloire was beginning to conceive a positive detestation.