by Ann Bridge
“Gracious! Who on earth can that be?” exclaimed Miss Anne—as the car approached the couple the occupants recognised Miss Glanfield and Mr. Hickson.
“Mercy! What a sight she is!” Miss Anne exclaimed again. “And she’ll be terribly late.”
“We’d better give them a lift,” said Warren; with some trouble he forced Cyril to stop.
Miss Glanfield came straight to the car. She was rather a sight. Her stockings were stained with mud and water; her linen dress was creased where she had kilted it up, and splashed with mud, as indeed was her face; she carried a rather damp bunch of wild flowers, in which long trailing sprays of the purple clematis were conspicuous—in spite of this, she was somehow radiant, with her tanned face and brilliant eyes and smile.
“Want a lift?” Warren enquired.
“Oh, that would be lovely. But you’re in all your glory, and we’re in a most terrible mess,” said Miss Glanfield.
“No, come along in. Hickson, you have my seat,” said Warren, getting out; he let down the two small seats, and he and Miss Glanfield sat on them.
“That is good of you. Fm afraid we’re a little bit late,” said Miss Glanfield. “We’ve been birding.”
“You’ve been what?” Miss Anne asked.
“Looking at birds. The marsh is an incredible place for birds,” said Miss Glanfield, “and Mr. Hickson knows where to find all the nests. We found a black tern’s nest, and a short-toed lark’s.”
Gloire looked at her in astonished amusement. This was not at all her idea of a well-known writer—neither her muddy and dishevelled appearance, nor her eager pleasure, as unaffected as a schoolboy’s, in the nests of short-toed larks. She didn’t know whether she really thought it tiresome, or rather nice.
“You’ve got terribly wet,” said Miss Anne. “Aren’t you afraid of taking cold?”
“On this hot day?—oh goodness no. The pelicans,” Miss Glanfield went on, turning to Warren, “are too enchanting! Did you know that they sail? I didn’t.”
“I certainly did not.”
“Well, they do. There were a lot of them, thirty or forty, sitting on a bank by the water, so we stalked them—that’s how I got so fearfully muddy,” said Miss Glanfield frankly. “And when we were quite close they saw us, and lumbered off down the bank and paddled a little way out, and then they turned their backs to the wind and spread their wings a little, like a swan does when he’s angry, and just sailed away up the lagoon, like an armada!”
“Miss Glanfield is a close observer,” put in Mr. Hickson, who had hitherto remained perfectly silent—“I had never noticed before that they sail instead of paddling.”
“What’s that you’re carrying?” Warren enquired.
“Flowers, Mr. Langdon—don’t you see?”
“They look like weeds to me,” said Warren.
“Oh no—look at this delicious clematis—it’s obviously montana, only purple instead of white. I’m going to try to strike some cuttings, though it’s pretty hopeless while they’re in bloom.”
At the Legation—indeed some distance short of it where they were held up by previous arrivals—Miss Glanfield sprang out.
“Will you excuse me if I go on ahead? I must change like lightning.” She slammed the car door and hastened off, followed by Mr. Hickson.
“I call that a most peculiar woman,” said Miss Anne.
“Why?” Gloire asked, for some reason roused to opposition by her tone.
“Well at her age, to go paddling around in a swamp after birds, and getting late for a party that’s given for her, seems to me very peculiar,” said Miss Anne imperturbably.
“She’s an enthusiast, Anne,” said Warren. “You’re allergic to enthusiasts.”
“Why no, Warren—not for a cause; you cannot say that of me,” said Miss Anne. “But to be so enthusiastic just over birds and a whole lot of muddy weeds seems to me strange in a middle-aged woman.”
“It is unusual—but I don’t know but what I rather like it,” Warren said.
Gloire had been seriously upset, both by the failure of her plan to go up to Torosh, and by Warren’s straight words to her. It was a long time since anyone had criticised her so openly, except for the strange Swede in the train; indeed but for him, no one had done it since Tony died—a thought which had produced a fresh burst of tears when she was alone in her room. She had had a real reason for wanting to go—the only person, since Tony died, who had seemed to know what was good for her, had told her to do that thing; and now she was to be prevented from doing it. An obscure sense of genuine frustration, of something serious to her being hindered, had made her weep very bitterly that Sunday afternoon. She had tried out the idea of appealing to Miss Glanfield, but in the end she had turned it down. It really wasn’t the sort of thing one could do—Warren would be maddened. Now, this afternoon, meeting her like that, all muddy and dirty and late, a little absurd, had somehow given Gloire the idea that after all it might be worth while, possibly, to try it on. People who were not afraid of being absurd themselves might understand absurdity in others, might be absurdly kind. Still undecided, she climbed the narrow stairs into the Legation.
In a surprisingly short time Miss Glanfield reappeared, full of apologies, and looking rather nice. Though she held herself so badly she moved well, with both strength and grace; Gloire, remembering Larsen, wondered again if she were his Miss Glanfield. I could ask her that, anyway, she thought.
But in the end she did ask her the other thing. Three or four cocktails just gave that reckless edge to her mood that made it seem possible. Most of the company were out on the terrace, and Gloire, seeing Miss Anne making discreet faces at Warren to indicate that the time was come to leave, and also seeing Miss Glanfield standing by the railing, for a moment alone, went straight up to her, and said with a sort of desperation—
“Miss Glanfield—Mrs. Hanbury—I hear you are going up to Torosh end of this week. I—I wanted most terribly to go there. But they say I can’t, because you’ve got Colonel Robinson and all the gendarmes. And I wondered if you would mind frightfully if I came too? I don’t think I should be much trouble. And it’s absolutely my only chance of getting there for Whitsun.”
Miss Glanfield looked at her. She was obviously very much surprised by this request. After a moment she said—
“Why do you want to be there at Whitsun?”
“Because a man called Larsen told me to.”
“Larsen?” Miss Glanfield sounded puzzled and surprised.
“Yes—a mountaineer.”
“Not Nils Larsen?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, do you know him? I used to, ages ago.”
“No, I don’t really know him,” said Gloire. “I just met him on the train. We talked, and he somehow made an impression on me. He told me to come and look at Albania, so I should understand European civilisation—so I just got off the train at Zagreb and came,” said Gloire, desperately frank.
Miss Glanfield, to her immense relief, laughed her rather noticeable laugh.
“How like him! Well good for you! Was that your only reason for coming?”
“Yes. I just cabled to Warren from Split and said I wanted to come.”
“One always wonders why people come to Albania,” said Miss Glanfield. “I wondered why you were coming on the boat.”
“So did I!” said Gloire. They both laughed.
“He told me I should see Torosh just at Whitsun,” Gloire pursued, encouraged, “because of the costumes then, and the service.”
“Yes, that is largely what I came for,” said Miss Glanfield. “I’ve been wanting to see that for twenty-five years—rather longer than you! And I wanted to see the Carruthers and the Robinsons—they’re all very old friends. But it’s amusing that you should have run into Nils Larsen, and that he should have sent you here.”
“He told me a bit of a poem of yours, too,” said Gloire, driven on by a slight discouragement at Miss Glanfield’s remark about the Robinsons, which might ha
ve been intended to freeze her out.
“Oh did he? What poem?” Miss Glanfield asked, without much warmth.
“Something about granite heights keeping you in a magic fortress, and water singing in the silence,” said Gloire—rather falteringly, for her.
Miss Glanfield said nothing for a moment or two. She turned away and looked out over the bay, up the line of the shore to where the small bare outline of the little hill stood up behind the town. Then she turned back to Gloire.
“Do you climb?” she asked abruptly. “Did you climb with your husband?”
“Yes, I did a good bit—two seasons in the Alps, and two short goes in the Pyrenees, at Whitsun.” Gloire was moved by the directness of the question. A ridiculous little thought darted into her mind, warming her strangely—if she lets me come, I shall be able to talk to her about Tony. No one has ever allowed me to talk about Tony. His friends didn’t like me, and no one else understood.
“Well, I think you ought to come,” said Miss Glanfield at length, in a decided tone. “I’ll see the General about it—I’m sure we can arrange it. What kit have you got—to wear, I mean?”
“I’ve got shorts,” said Gloire, delighted.
“Oh, you can’t wear shorts,” said Miss Glanfield. That’s impossible here. Haven’t you got any trousers?”
“I may have a pair of slacks—anyhow I’m sure I can fix that,” said Gloire, with unwonted eagerness. “Mrs. Hanbury, it’s terribly good of you!”
“Not a bit. You won’t be able to borrow slacks from your hostess, I fancy,” said Miss Glanfield, with what was practically a grin.
“And how not! Mrs. Hanbury—Miss Glanfield—oh, which do I call you?” said Gloire.
“Mrs. Hanbury, of course. The other’s a trade name.”
“Well, I don’t know how to thank you, anyway. This means a lot to me. It is most frightfully good of you to let me come along.”
“Oh, nonsense. I think perhaps we shall have fun together. Have you any Kletterschuhe? We might conceivably get a little rock-climbing.”
“Oh no, I haven’t,” Gloire almost wailed.
“Oh well, never mind. Bring some sand shoes or tennis shoes—you’ll want those to walk in anyhow, on these hot rocky paths. You’ve met the Robinsons, haven’t you?”
“Yes, they put me up in Scutari. She’s grand,” said Gloire, remembering that whisky-and-soda.
“She is. And she speaks Albanian well, so we shall be able to talk to the women,” said Miss Glanfield.
“Oh, is she coming too?”
“Yes rather. Well now,” said Miss Glanfield briskly, “I’d better go aboard the General and get all this settled. He’s not gone, has he? Oh no, there he is. We start on Saturday morning at 4 A. M. from here. I expect you’ll have to sleep here—I’ll talk to the Carruthers about it. I dare say they have a bed. The Robinsons meet us at Rësheni. Can you ride?” the writer finally asked.
“Oh Lord yes!”
“Good. Well goodbye, my dear child. I’ll ring you up when everything’s been arranged, but I’m sure it will be all right.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Gloire. “You really are—”
But Miss Glanfield was already threading her way purposefully through the throng in General Stanley’s direction, and in a moment Miss Anne came up and swept Gloire off to make their adieux to her hostess.
In the car going home—“Well, Gloire, you had quite an innings with our authoress,” Warren observed. “Do you like her?”
“Yes, she’s nice,” Gloire replied. She choked back an impulse to come clean to Warren and have done with it; it would be easier as well as more prudent to do it when they were alone, and let him cope with Miss Anne’s disapproval.
However, she told him as soon as they got in, when Miss Anne had gone upstairs.
“Warren, you may as well hear right away. I’m going on that trip after all. I told Miss Glanfield I wanted to go to Torosh, and she’s taking me along. She’s fixing it all up with the General.”
“Well, I be darned!” Warren ejaculated. “Aren’t you the limit?”
“No really, Warren dear, it’s all right. There’s no need for you to be lousy about it. I don’t think she minds and I do mind.”
“What beats me is why you want to go all that much,” Warren said, fanning himself with his hat.
“It beats me, rather,” Gloire said, with a funny little smile. “But I just do. Now look, Warren, stop disapproving and tell me where I can get some slacks, because Miss G. says I have to have them.”
Miss Glanfield’s host and hostess were not very encouraging when she informed them that she had agreed to include Gloire in the trip to Torosh. She referred to her as “the Thurston child.”
“You’re really incurably maternal and soft-hearted, Susan,” Sir Arthur said. “Child, indeed! She’s a spoilt hard-boiled little never-mind-what, if ever I saw one. And that ridiculous name! Imagine going on as an adult, calling oneself Gloire!”
“Yes, it’s an asinine name. I believe she had an asinine mother. She may be an asinine person herself—in fact in lots of ways I’m sure she is.”
“Then why in the world do you let her force her way in, Susan? It’s really ridiculous,” Helen Carruthers said.
“I think she may have another side. After all, she does climb—or did,” said Miss Glanfield slowly.
“Really, Susan, you are too absurd, the way you always assume that climbers are ipso facto repositories of all the virtues,” said Sir Arthur.
“Well Arthur, you must admit that mountaineering is one of the few respectable hobbies left in the world,” Miss Glanfield replied. “There’s no money in it, and it doesn’t advertise itself—except for the few unutterables who write themselves up, and they’re so few that they hardly count. On the whole, nasty people just don’t climb.”
“That’s all very negative.”
“Yes, Arthur. I’m not going to throw my positive pearls before cynics like you.”
“Now she’s called me a swine, Helen!” Sir Arthur complained. “What a guest!”
“Has she got a flea-bag and all the doings?” Lady Carruthers enquired practically.
“Not a thing. But General Stanley says that one of his fantastic Colonels has everything, including a tent as big as a Methodist Chapel, and he’s going to impound all that for her,” said Miss Glanfield tranquilly. “Oh and Helen, I’m frightfully sorry, but really she ought to sleep here Friday night, so as to be on the spot. Can you bear it? Is there a bed?”
Sir Arthur groaned aloud.
“Well otherwise Arthur, I shall have to leave at 2 A. M. instead of at 4, to go to Tirana and pick her up—and either you or Stefan will have to get me coffee,” said Miss Glanfield.
“No, of course she can have a bed. Don’t be absurd, Arthur,” said Lady Carruthers. “She won’t eat you. Let’s go and have coffee.”
“My dear, I feel that’s just what she might do, at any moment,” said Sir Arthur, getting up and opening the door.
“I think you’re an absolute toad, Arthur,” said Miss Glanfield, as they went out onto the terrace. “I think she’s very pretty, and very spoilt, and very miserable, and you ought to be merciful, not so hideously censorious.”
“My dear Susan, in our service the quality of mercy is strained to breaking-point all the time,” said Sir Arthur. “Sugar?”.
Miss Glanfield would have had some difficulty in explaining exactly why she had agreed to take Mrs. Thurston up to Torosh. It is always difficult to explain our habitual actions, just because they are habitual; and this was in fact the sort of thing she did almost automatically. She had a profound belief in education, and in the educational value of all such experiences as travel affords; she had an almost passionate love of knowledge, the more accurate and detailed the better, for its own sake; she adored accumulating small bright nuggets of fact, which she gloated over secretly as a magpie gloats over his useless and miscellaneous hoard. It really made her happy to find the nest of the short-toe
d lark, and to see black terns at close range; it made her blissfully happy to find and identify new flowers. (But she had to identify them—consequently she travelled about with a large accumulation of bulky botanical tomes.) It made her feel both expanded and enriched to see churches like S. Method’s, or to look at S. Luke’s alleged portrait of Our Lady. And because she felt all these things herself, with a simplicity which was undoubtedly curious in a mature writer she assumed that other people must feel them too; if it gave her pleasure and did her good to look at iconographic paintings, it must do the same for people like Gloire Thurston. So, in an almost missionary spirit, she directed Gloire—and many like her—to churches, pictures, bird sanctuaries, museums and Roman remains, regardless of the fact that what meant so much to her might mean little or nothing to others. And of course when she did happen on a genuine desire to go somewhere and see something, she naturally and unthinkingly aided and abetted it.
But in Mrs. Thurston’s case, there was more to it than that. The younger woman’s appearance and manner proclaimed her as belonging to a class of people whom Miss Glanfield sedulously avoided, because they bored her and she disapproved of them— their mode of existence seemed to her strangely and perniciously futile. She had organised Gloire’s sight-seeing at Cattaro, on the boat, quite automatically—she would, without thought, have done the same for the devil himself, if she had happened to meet him on a boat off the Dalmatian coast. But to include such a person in an expedition on which she set as much store as she did on the journey to Torosh was another matter. She had been immensely surprised by Gloire’s request; she recognised a certain urgency behind it, and, though less acutely than Larsen, she was vaguely aware of some hidden wretchedness in this pretty, ultra-fashionable creature. Miss Glanfield of course expected ultra-fashionable cosmopolitan people to be wretched, because she would have been wretched herself leading their life; but, unlike Larsen, she had been familiar with Tony Thurston’s tragic story; she had known him, and she was quite prepared to assume that his widow, however futile, must have known desolation. Why that should be linked with this desire to see Torosh she had no idea—Gloire’s few remarks about Larsen were peculiar and intriguing, but did not really throw much light on it. But plainly the urgency was there; and her natural impulse to mercy and pity caused her to say yes.