Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  “We’ve found out where the Prefecture is—come on in, let’s go,” Warren said. Gloire was swept off again. Well, I have some chocolate, anyway, she thought.

  The Prefecture was situated in a street which at first seemed full of promise. Along one side stretched a row of yellow-washed houses, of which it was the largest; on the other lay some derelict buildings, among what Gloire would have called waste lots, liberally besprinkled with bushes. The moment Warren Langdon and Cyril had disappeared into the Prefecture she nipped out of the car and began to prospect. But she had reckoned without the inveterate curiosity of the Balkans. She had not noticed that there were many—or indeed any—children playing in that street, but suddenly she was surrounded by a mob of them, as she picked her way over loose bits of masonry towards the bushes—they swarmed round her, smiling, laughing, shouting, fingering her clothes. Desperate, Gloire took a high line. She left the waste lots, walked down the street, and turned at random into a shop. There were three women and a man in it. “Sbogom!”—God be with you—said Gloire; it was one of her two newly-acquired words of Serbo-Croat. Then, with a brilliant smile, she took the man by the shoulders, pushed him to the door, pushed him out, and shut the door on him. Turning to the women again—“Molim,” she said, which is the Serbo-Croat for “please”—and then by a diagrammatic gesture explained what she wanted. The women were quick—laughing, delighted, they applauded her; one of them led her out through the back of the shop and down a flowery garden to a little shed, overhung by some creeper in bloom; when she emerged, triumphant and unspeakably thankful, the woman handed her a blossom—with a sort of exasperated delight, Gloire saw that it was a passion-flower.

  She sat quiet and contented now in the car, munching her chocolate and great lumps of bread which she pulled off the end of Warren’s loaf. When he returned they drove off; leaving the town, they roared along a straight road in the gathering dusk. They were down in the flat country now, with the Lake of Scutari away to their right—once or twice, when the road rose over a piece of higher ground, they could see it for a moment, a metallic sheet of tea-rose pink, catching the glow from the west. At such moments, silhouetted against the water, across the flat lacustrian plain, great plants stood up, like black candelabra three feet high—asphodels, Warren told her they were; now in seed, but three weeks ago they had been a sheet of pale pink, the colour of apple-blossom. Some echo from her rather inadequate education rang in Gloire’s head at the word asphodel—things Tony had read to her came back too; the hereditary classical magic of Hellas, from which Europe can never escape, laid hold on her in that twilight hour, in that strange land—and a small thrill of exaltation ran through her. The dead walked through fields of asphodel—that much she remembered, and it was sufficient. They would, of course, walk through pink candelabra, faultless in shape, beside shadowed waters that yet glowed with a pale rose—perhaps Tony walked there now. Vaguely, she felt him possibly near.

  There was a longish pause at the frontier. Dark wild-looking men in uniform, with lanterns, scrutinised their papers, themselves; Warren got out and talked to them. Yes, the message from Podgoritza had come—and they were really the right people? And the lady was English, an English passport? They gutturally exclaimed the Albanian equivalent of “Tiens!” But at last the long barrier of pole and wire was swung back, and the Cadillac was allowed to proceed.

  Gloire never forgot that drive from the frontier to Scutari. Though she did not fully realise it at the time, it was the first instalment, so to speak, of the fulfilment of the Swede’s promise to her. It was by now dark, and their headlights lit up the road ahead of them with long wavering beams, piercing a deep blackness. In this blackness, suddenly, small lights shone—hundreds of them, red, and the size of large marbles. Even Cyril slowed down. Gloire leaned forward, puzzled by this phenomenon; and now saw curved shapes in pairs above the little red lights—they were approaching a flock of goats, being driven home from pasture on the lake shore. The drovers came in sight at length, as the animals surged past the car—wild figures, in a strange magpie dress of black and white, with dark wild faces, grinning or scowling in the glare of the headlights. This happened over and over again; the road was full of droves of goats and goatherds. And each time Gloire leaned forward to look, and each time when they had passed, sat back with a curious little rush of excitement. These were splendid faces and figures that loomed up out of the dark, wild, Balkaan, as they were; this was a splendid place, holding splendid scenes—she had never in her life seen anything so dramatic as this Albanian night, starred with the red eyes of strong-smelling animals. Splendid things should happen here. A deep satisfaction, greatly to her own surprise, held her; and she was still under its spell when they pulled up outside Colonel Robinson’s house in Scutari, where she was to spend the night.

  Colonel Robinson, of the Albanian Gendarmerie, was a tall gaunt Englishman of about fifty, with rather ferocious moustaches and a very quiet lazy voice; his wife, fortunately, had taken to Albania like a duck to water; she was Scotch, a large comfortable woman, who had turned her tumble-down villa in Scutari into a comfortable well-run Scottish home, but yet found time to plunge herself into welfare work in the town—she had first created, and now ran, a children’s clinic and a school of hygiene for Albanian women, raising the money God knew how. She was quite unperturbed by the arrival of her guests at 9.30 P.M.—she hustled Gloire upstairs to a small clean room, very unluxurious, but with hot water on the wash-stand, and fetched her, unasked, a whisky and soda to drink while she washed—“You’ll digest your dinner better if you take it a bit in advance,” she said. Gloire’s whole being applauded this sentiment. Refreshed, she went downstairs and consumed an excellent dinner—but by now her head was ringing with fatigue, eye-strain after the long drive, and alcohol on an empty stomach; she hardly heard a word of Warren’s highly local conversation with Colonel Robinson, and the moment the meal was over she thankfully accepted Mrs. Robinson’s sensible suggestion that she might like to go to bed at once. Snuggling between clean sheets, she fell asleep immediately.

  There was only one spare room at the Robinsons’, and Warren Langdon slept at the Excelsior, the local hotel. He came round to breakfast next morning bubbling with secret enjoyment, and over coffee he told them the cause. While he was dressing a note had been brought to his room from an Albanian merchant, a man of substance and an old and trusted source of information, begging the favour of an interview in private. “So when I’d shaved,” Warren drawled, “I had the old buzzard up.” The old buzzard, with a most pronounced visage de circonstance, had explained that he felt Mr. Langdon ought to know that great events were toward. Today, Sunday, was the twelfth centenary of the foundation of the Church of S.—, in the town, and for this celebration Bishop X., of the Franciscan Order, had come to Scutari to celebrate High Mass and to preach. But this was merely a blind for a high diplomatic intrigue. An English lady had also arrived in Scutari last night, by car, very late; she was a cousin of Mr. Anthony Eden’s, and she had come on a secret mission to meet the Bishop and discuss the future of the Catholic religion in Albania, and other important matters.

  “What a thrill!” said Gloire, who after a superb nine-hours sleep felt well, wide awake, and unusually interested in everything. “Who is she, and where is she staying?”

  Warren laughed.

  “She’s right here!” he said. “You’re the lady!”

  “Nonsense, Warren. Why, you brought me in yourself.”

  It took considerable explanation on Warren’s part, with corroboration from Colonel Robinson, to convince Gloire that in Albania there was nothing particularly unusual in such mistakes. The English lady had really come, both she and her passport had been seen in Podgoritza and at the frontier—it was a mere nothing that the well-disposed Albanian had failed to register the fact that she had come, so to speak, in Warren’s own pocket; and the making her a cousin of Mr. Eden was a typical primitive exaggeration. Mr. Eden’s was one of the few English nam
es known in Albania; and any wealthy Englishwoman was naturally supposed to be his relative, in a country where practically all the notable families were related to one another.

  All Gloire found to say was “Gosh!—how lunatic.”

  “Oh, something like that is always happening,” said Colonel Robinson. “Robina, you remember that wretched woman who came to stay at the Excelsior some years back, and got the huge bill? What’s this her name was?”

  Lloyd, Mrs. Robinson said—Mrs. George Lloyd. But by a very natural confusion the management of the Excelsior had assumed that she was Mrs. Lloyd George, and had charged her accordingly.

  “Anyhow, the least you can do, I feel, is to go and hear the Bishop preach at High Mass,” Colonel Robinson told Gloire. “And you will see some lovely costumes.”

  Gloire was quite willing to do this—the costumes in Scutari were one of the things the Swede had told her about, so to High Mass they went. The large church was crowded to the doors; the women sat on one side of the aisle, the men on the other; they went up to the front where Gloire, separated from Mr. Langdon and Colonel Robinson, found herself surrounded by a cloud, a foam of white veils. It was like being at church with hundreds of brides, she thought. She was vaguely aware, as the women stood and knelt, of full dark trousers or short stiff black skirts standing out from the wearer like a bell, wide-sleeved silken shirts or bodices, and gaily-striped woven aprons; but what impressed her were the veils. The women of Scutari, on festive occasions, cover their heads with short veils, falling to the waist or below at the back, of some filmy white stuff, chiffon, lawn, or muslin, most delicately embroidered—the one immediately in front of Gloire was as fine as a cobweb, and “worth mints”, her appraising eye told her; under it she could see the gleam of pearls from the embroidered fillet round the woman’s forehead. And when they knelt, she was struck by the beauty and devoutness of the white folds, falling so soft and yet so severe from the bent heads, so that each woman looked like a mediaeval Madonna in some noble religious painting. Well, the Swede had been right about the costumes, anyway. It was fantastic to sit in a whole churchful of people in fancy dress.

  After Mass they strolled about the town. It was all less Balkaan than Gloire had expected, but she was struck by the contrast between this rather handsome modern city and the beautiful and archaic costumes which, Mass over, filled the streets as if with flowers or butterflies. Now she could see the beauty of the woven aprons, and the richness of those pearl-sewn bands round the forehead, more clearly; and here too she saw the poorer women, who instead of the veils wore hand-woven red and white striped shawls over their heads. Ravishing!

  Colonel Robinson, as they turned into a side street, pointed to the wall at the corner and said—“Seen that, Langdon? That’s the latest.”

  Gloire and Warren Langdon both looked where he pointed. On the wall, in black letters on a small panel of white paint, the name of the street had been neatly inscribed: Rruga Kolonel Herbert; but this had been crossed through with a heavy black brush, and above it was another panel with the words: Rruga Generale Graziani.

  “The bastards!” Warren ejaculated. “They’ve done that in Tirana too.”

  “Oh yes, it’s going on all over the place. It’s all part of the same scheme, and we’re sitting down under it, as usual!” said Colonel Robinson bitterly.

  “Who was Colonel Herbert?” Gloire asked.

  “The best friend Albania ever had—Aubrey Herbert,” said Warren, with a warmth so unusual to him that Gloire looked at him in surprise. “They wanted him for King instead of William of Wied, but he wouldn’t take it. He’d have made them a grand King, too. I’m not much on Kings; but this was a country that needed a King, if ever country did.”

  “But they’ve got a King now, haven’t they?” Gloire asked vaguely. Warren looked quizzically at her.

  “My dear, yes; so much even England and America knows!—Albania has a King.”

  “Well, what’s he like?”

  “Oh, Zog’s all right,” said Warren, but without quite the enthusiasm he had shown for Colonel Herbert—he pronounced it Zahg.

  “He’s really doing pretty well, you know, Langdon,” Colonel Robinson observed, “considering the pressure that’s put on him, and the total lack of support he gets from anywhere outside.” The two men drifted off into Albanian politics, but Gloire soon stopped listening; it was too technical for her. She was thinking of what George had said, sitting outside the café in Cattaro—was it really only the day before yesterday?—about Italy. “You see what you see when you get down into Albania,” he had said; well, she hadn’t been in Albania twenty-four hours yet, and already she had seen that highly significant alteration of the name of the street.

  She reverted to the subject when she and Warren, after lunch, were driving on down to Tirana.

  “Why do the Italians want to get a foot in here? If they really do?”

  “You bet your life they really do!” It was funny how Warren Langdon, the career diplomat, echoed almost the very words of George, the Slav courier. “As to why they want it—and they want the country, not merely a footing in it—there’s a whole complex of reasons. Do you really want to hear, Gloire?” he asked, turning to look at her with a certain incredulity.

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” she said, rather vexed. It was odd, but she did.

  “O.K., my dear. You shall. Well, it’s partly this infernal idea of empire and expansion,” Warren said—“but there’s more to it than that. Strategically, this coast is pretty important to Italy. It’s only around forty-seven miles across the Straits from the Bay of Valona to Otranto, and Valona is a superb natural harbour. A hostile fleet in there could hurt Italy a lot. Then there’s flat ground for airfields all down the coastal plain here, from the Drin—we’ll cross it in an hour or so—to the Vijosa. So far only one has been made—the one at Tirana, which the Ala Littoria operates. But this coast in hostile hands could be a real menace to Italy.”

  “But Albania could never threaten Italy—it’s so tiny and behind-hand,” Gloire said.

  “Quite right, my dear. But what lies in there?” Warren gesticulated inland at the blue shapes of mountains rising on their left. “Yugo-Slavia,” he said with emphasis. “Italy is always looking over Albania’s shoulder at Yugo-Slavia.”

  “Why should Italy and the Jugs be so afraid of one another?” Gloire asked, thinking of George again.

  “That’s a long story too, but it all hangs together. After the World War Yugo-Slavia got—well, some people think she got a bit more than her share,” Warren pronounced. “Anyway she got most of the old kingdom of Montenegro, where we were yesterday—with Cattaro, which is another swell harbour, and she got the Dalmatian coast right up to Fiume. That is a potential menace to Italy too. But what made the Italians so sore was that under the Pact of London—the secret treaty made in 1915, under which Italy came into the war—they had been promised the hinterland of Trieste, and Fiume, and a whole strip of the Dalmatian coast, as well as Valona and quite a bit of land round it.”

  “Who promised it her?”

  “Britain, France, and Russia.”

  “But was it theirs to give away?” Gloire was wide-eyed.

  Warren laughed.

  “Well, no, maybe it wasn’t. But it had all belonged to either Austria-Hungary or Turkey, and both were enemies, so they reckoned it a fair deal to divide it up. Those were the bad old days,” Warren pursued, “and I guess the British aren’t very proud of the Pact of London! Anyway the mere existence of it rotted up every attempt to settle the Adriatic question at the Peace Conference, especially where Albania was concerned. These poor toads have old Woodrow Wilson to thank, as a matter of fact, that they weren’t just divided up and handed over in three bits to Greece, Yugo-Slavia, and Italy. He put his foot down.”

  “Well, so what happened?”

  “Another little private war between Albania and Italy, in 1919 or 1920—I guess it was 1920. The Albanians tried to throw the Wops out, and
the Wops tried to dig in. But they couldn’t make the grade, then. Their troops in Albania were rotten with malaria, and the reinforcements in Italy were rotten with Communism—they didn’t want any more fighting, and the whole Italian nation, for once, recognised an unjust cause when they saw it. The troops refused to go and fight, the stevedores refused to load the ships, the railwaymen refused to handle the trains. The whole thing broke down, and the Italians had to withdraw.” Warren fitted another cigarette in his stained holder, lit it, and proceeded with his exposition.

  “But fifteen years of Fascism have cured all that,” he went on, blowing out smoke. “No Italians think for themselves any more, or question the Tightness of the Government’s actions. And the Government is getting going again. They want this country and they mean to get it.”

  “Will the Albanians like that?”

  “Like hell they won’t! The people spit on the ground when they hear the word Italian!”

  “Then why does the Government do things like changing the street names? And is it true that they’re going to throw out the British officers from the Gendarmerie, and put in Italians?”

  Warren turned round and looked sharply at her.

  “Who told you that? Mrs. Robinson?”

  “No. I heard it in Cattaro, as a matter of fact.”

  Warren blew out more smoke. “Ill news travels fast,” he said. “Don’t talk about it here, Gloire. I’m afraid it may happen, but it will be a disaster for the country if it does. They’ve done a superb job, these Gendarmerie officers.”

  “Yes, but Warren, if they have, why throw them out?”

  Warren didn’t answer at once. They were bowling along through flat green country, rather marshy; hills rose on their left, blue, and dark with the shadows of clouds—to the right the flat greenness spread away to the horizon, beyond which, invisible, lay the Adriatic. Among the reedy marsh were small patches of grassland, on which stood tall pointed wicker erections, like huge baskets ten feet high—they were full of hay. The road was very bad—Cyril swung the car continually to avoid holes in which you could have buried a dog. Now and again they passed small houses, very tumble-down, and thatched with rushes, with projecting eaves which made them look almost like the huts in a kaffir kraal. The whole effect was of a poor, very backward country.