Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  “What’s that?” Miss Glanfield asked.

  “Some sort of consumption, I should think.”

  “Ridiculous to send an animal like that,” Colonel Robinson grunted. “Sure you don’t mind walking, Susan?”

  “No, I like it, Dick.”

  Their road now wound uphill a good deal more steeply than before; it was also very hot, and they were grateful when the track plunged into a wood, which like that by the Lesser Fani rang with nightingales. The road—to give it its courtesy title—was here a good deal more roadlike than the single-pony track on which they had so far travelled; it was at least six feet wide, and fairly smooth—it would almost have been possible to drive a Baby Austin along it. At the moment, Colonel Robinson said to Gloire, they were on the main direct route from Ndërfanden to Scutari. “We’re climbing to the Malsi ridge now; then we go along it for a bit, and drop down into the valley to Shpali. That’s where we spend “the night.” Colonel Robinson was dutifully endeavouring to make himself agreeable to Susan Glanfield’s unwanted guest.

  Gloire for her part was also anxious to make herself agreeable to Colonel Robinson. Carelessly egotistical as she was, she was not really obtuse; she had realised from the outset that she was being allowed to come on this expedition as a favour, and in the last few hours she had also realised that the relations between Miss Glanfield and the Robinsons were pretty close, so that the presence of a stranger could hardly fail to be a restraint. So, without real humility, but as a practical measure, she was doing her best.

  It was not brilliantly successful. Without in the least meaning to be tiresome, she produced a comment on the track.

  “It’s extraordinary that this should be a main road, isn’t it? I mean, one wonders why they don’t have real roads, like other people.”

  Her usual flat careless drawling tone again gave her words, to Colonel Robinson, a critical note which she had not intended.

  “One doesn’t wonder if one knows the reason,” he said rather shortly. “Here in the North, not to have roads was a matter of settled policy for the Malissori. Where there were roads the Turks came in strength, and the country was Ottomanised and corrupted, and local institutions interfered with; where there weren’t, the Turks either didn’t come, or came in such small numbers that they could easily be dealt with.”

  “I see,” said Gloire. “But now—”

  “In four hundred years a settled policy becomes a national habit,” he went on, brushing her interpolation aside. “The Turks haven’t been gone twenty-five years yet, remember, and this country is fearfully poor. It can’t do everything at once.”

  “The Italians want to build roads for them, don’t they?” the hapless Gloire pursued—she vaguely remembered Warren’s having said this, but for the moment had unluckily forgotten what she had heard about Italian policy towards the gendarmerie.

  Colonel Robinson stared at her for a moment.

  “I daresay,” he said, and stopped.

  “Susan!” he called back. (He couldn’t stand much more of this.) “Come along here. We’ll be getting a good view in a minute.”

  Miss Glanfield strode forward and joined them. Sure enough, in a few moments the track emerged from the wood, and flattened out on the summit of a narrow ridge; on their right they looked down into a deep wooded valley, with a grey river tumbling in the bottom of it, and much higher mountains than any they had yet seen rising beyond; to their left they looked away over lower hills to the flat country, golden and indistinguishable in the afternoon sun, a blaze of indefinite glory. The air up here was strong; Gloire and Miss Glanfield both breathed deep.

  “Goodness, it is lovely, Dick. What a glorious place.”

  “Yes, it’s pretty good,” said the Colonel, appeased.

  The track wound along the ridge just below the crest, which rose on their left, for the most part of bare coarse reddish soil, from which large paler blocks projected at intervals. But these were not the only feature of that barren ridge. Out from the ground here and there sprang great tufts of huge silvery leaves, as thick as velvet—from the centre of one or two of them rose even more silvery furry flower-heads, still tightly in bud, so that their clubby immature branches looked like silver coral. There were others too—groups of graceful plants with shallow dark-purple flowers, rising on very slender stalks from flat rosettes of wrinkled dark-green leaves; and near these, arranged by Nature with the most skilful art, big tufts of some low-growing plant with minute leaves and large wide-open flowers of a very strong and vivid rose-pink. Miss Glanfield exclaimed, and sprang up the bank; she did not at once pick anything, but stooped, looked, examined; then she unclasped a knife from where it hung at her belt, opened it, cut a clubbed stem of buds from the centre of one of the silvery plants, and to Gloire’s surprise and horror, proceeded to break it to bits, examining each piece with great care.

  “Something rare?” Colonel Robinson enquired.

  “Not rare, I don’t think. I’m practically certain it’s Verbascum olympicum. But it’s interesting to see it growing where it belongs.”

  “It turns into a great candelabra sort of thing later on,” the Colonel volunteered.

  “Yes, with rather small yellow flowers.”

  “That’s right. Robina calls it a mullein.”

  “She’s quite right,” said Miss Glanfield, smiling.

  “What’s the purple thing? It’s frightfully attractive,” said Gloire.

  “Another verbascum—phoeniceum. They have them in gardens at home; our nurserymen have bred them into all sorts of pinks and creams, but I imagine this purple is the type. What frightful fun to find them!” said Miss Glanfield.

  “And this little pink chap?” the Colonel enquired, catching this botanical infection, in the way the most uninstructed people often do—specialised knowledge of concrete things is curiously alluring.

  “A phlox, I think, but I can’t be sure. I must have that,” said Miss Glanfield, picking a few small sprays. “Where’s that man with my tin?”

  The man, with Mrs. Robinson, Fran, and the other two ponies appeared almost immediately; Miss Glanfield took the tin, installed the new specimens in it, and they proceeded on their way. The flowers gave everyone an interest and an occupation. Both Gloire and Colonel Robinson started to pick whatever caught their attention, and bring it to Miss Glanfield—a maroon and white vetch, a very furry sulphur-yellow clover, a kind of hawkweed—and Miss Glanfield either gave a running commentary on what it probably was, or exclaimed that, oh, that was lovely! That was quite new to her. The pony-men were deeply interested; so was Fran; Mrs. Robinson called from her pony to say that they were asking if the lady was a doctor?—because if so, she must be about to cure some very strange disease, for most of these herbs were of no ordinary medical value whatever!

  But Miss Glanfield’s ranging eye did not confine itself to flowers. The track was now much harder and stonier than down in the wood, and the largest stones had been flung off it and lay in a narrow border along the valley side—mostly thin flattish shards of the pale rock, looking for all the world like broken pieces of coarse crockery. Scanning these as she walked along, Miss Glanfield suddenly stooped and picked something up; she turned it in her hands, and gave a startled exclamation.

  “What have you got now?” Colonel Robinson asked with tolerant amusement.

  “A skull, of all things!”

  “Nonsense! Here, let me see.”

  She handed it to him. A skull it was, beyond any doubt—the jaw and nasal bones had come away, but there was the flat shallow bowl of the cranium, with the serrated lines of the joins.

  “How very peculiar,” Mrs. Robinson observed. “Are there any other bits?”

  They grubbed and poked among the shard-like stones, but nothing else came to light.

  “Do you suppose it’s modern?” Gloire enquired.

  “I’ve no idea. I shall send it to the British Museum when I get home, and find out,” said Miss Glanfield, as with an expression of intense sa
tisfaction she stowed away the object in her haversack.

  “I do like that,” she observed as they again walked on—“to find a human skull lying by the roadside, just like that!”

  Colonel Robinson burst out laughing.

  “Really, Susan, you have most peculiar tastes! Why on earth do you like it?”

  “Because I like the feeling of being in a place where people are killed quickly, in the open, and perhaps not even buried— just left lying about.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser! I can’t see why you should like that.”

  “Oh, don’t you? Don’t you like people to be rather brief and casual about life and death? I do. We make such a hideous business of it all; being ill in nursing-homes, with rapacious matrons and cold-blooded nurses, and flowers, and friends coming to see you! Such a fuss. When it’s time to die, die!—and quickly, and as naturally as possible. If people were left in their homes they would die in half the time, with their own reverent loving incompetent people about them—and it would be much nicer, and save no end of money!”

  Colonel Robinson laughed again, but his wife protested.

  “I think that’s very unjust, Susan. Nursing-homes and hospitals do wonderful work.”

  “Yes, I suppose they do, Robina. I don’t mind people going to nursing-homes to be cured—that’s sensible. But I do disapprove of the modern attitude that you can’t do the simplest thing, like dying or being born, in your own house. Why, good God, women go into nursing-homes to have their babies now!”

  “But isn’t that a good thing?” enquired Gloire, who was indoctrinated with American ideas on the subject.

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s a most pernicious thing.”

  “Oh, why?”

  “Because it’s artificial and unnatural. Babies ought to be born in the same room as their fathers and grandfathers—but anyhow in their own homes, where they belong, among people to whom they are personally important, to whom they mean the future,” Miss Glanfield pronounced with her usual rapidity and decision.

  “But people’s homes are so unhygienic,” Gloire objected. “In the States, no one dreams of having a baby at home. They all go into hospitals—the doctors prefer it.”

  “I know. And the baby is swept away from its mother and put in a hygienic cot in an air-conditioned ward with fifty other babies, and nurses in masks—in masks!—feed it on processed milk, and its wretched father, for the first three weeks of its life, can only peer at it through a glass pane in the door! I know!” said Miss Glanfield. “But how you can expect a baby produced like that to turn into a normal human being, or its parents to be real human parents, I cannot see.”

  “You ought to be an Albanian,” said Colonel Robinson.

  “Are the birth conditions here frightful?”

  “Pretty bad, especially up-country. They’re getting better, but very slowly. That old Dr. Crowninshield has done a bit to improve matters, and so has Robina, as a matter of fact.”

  “I know.” She dropped back a pace or two and walked beside Mrs. Robinson, laying her hand on the pony’s sweating quarters.

  “Look, Robina, I want to get this clear—I don’t want you to think I’m crying down all you’ve done, because I think it’s splendid. I’m sure it’s frightfully important that people should be as hygienic as they can in their own homes, but not this ghastly brave new world idea! Birth is part of life—rather a vital part, really,” she smiled. “And if you divorce birth from the normal home life and routine you are creating a false attitude towards it—in the parents, in the other children, and in some mysterious way in the infant itself, I really believe. You may think this nonsense, but I don’t think it’s an accident that later on these hospital-born, nurse-fed children, at bedtime, instead of shouting for their Mummy to come and tell them a story or sing them a hymn, as ours do, hustle her out of the room so that they can switch on their private radio and listen to ‘Steve and the Redskins’, or whatever the bedtime programme is on their particular net-work! That may be modern and it may be hygienic, but it isn’t how you make human beings, or people who are going to be any good at adult relationships.” Now she turned to Gloire, who like Colonel Robinson had fallen back to listen.

  “I had a great argument with one of your gynaecologists, the last time that I was in the States,” she said. “He took the line that if by ‘hospitalising’ births you could reduce infantile mortality by ten or even five per cent, it was worth doing. I said No—it was better to have ninety or even eighty-five per cent of fully developed human beings, than a hundred per cent of incomplete ones. We didn’t agree!” She laughed.

  “Well, that’s one point of view,” said Colonel Robinson.

  About half a mile further on the track divided; the rather large one on which they had been travelling since they left Ndërfanden dipped down to the left, and a much smaller one branched off to the right. This was their road to Shpali. It kept level for a few hundred yards, still holding the crest of the ridge; at the point where it began to drop they came on two gendarmes, who stood at the salute as Colonel Robinson approached.

  Another little ceremony was gone through. The two newcomers, who were the Shpali gendarmes, recited their little verse—a sort of oath of loyalty, Mrs. Robinson explained, to their ruler and officers. They fell in behind Colonel Robinson, the Ndërfanden gendarmes stepped forward, saluted, recited the oath in their turn, wheeled round, and though only two in number, marched off on their return journey as smartly and impressively as a whole regiment. The pack-animals had not waited for this performance, and were again out of sight; escorted by the two new gendarmes, the walking party set forward again.

  Downhill, steeply, the track plunged through a wood of high trees. A spring bubbled temptingly from under a bank—Gloire went to it to drink.

  “Here, wait!” Colonel Robinson called to her—“it may not be good.”

  “But I’m thirsty.”

  “I can’t help it.” He spoke to the two Shpali gendarmes. “Sorry, Mrs. Thurston, but this one isn’t good. We’ll come to a good spring in about half an hour.”

  It was that or more before they reached the second spring, where a shallow wooden spout fed the clear water into a hollowed tree-trunk. Colonel Robinson ordained a halt—they had a good stretch still to Shpali, he said, and another subsidiary ridge to cross. When the gendarmes and the pony-men drank themselves, after watering the animals, Colonel Robinson drew Miss Glanfield’s attention to a curious little ritual. Each man pulled a minute piece of rag from somewhere about his person, and placed it on a dead branch by the spring—the gendarmes unravelled a thread from the edge of their puttees for the purpose.

  “Yes, I see. What’s that for? Is this a sacred spring, like in Ireland, and are the rags votive offerings?”

  “No, nothing so devout. It’s pure hygiene.” He grinned at Gloire. “They always say you should never drink from a strange spring without placing a rag or a thread of your clothing close by, so that you may be saved from an illness that a change in water might cause. They’re very sensitive to water.”

  “But the rag can’t make any difference to the water—if it’s strange, it’s strange,” Gloire objected.

  “Well, they think it does: if you leave something of your own by the spring, it makes it a sort of neighbour, I suppose.”

  “It’s a nice idea, anyway,” said Gloire, anxious to be amiable—indeed as they lay resting on the ground by the spring both Robina and Miss Glanfield were aware of the general improvement in the tone, the feeling of the party. For one thing they were all experiencing the delicious lassitude of natural healthy fatigue after prolonged exercise in the open air. People who normally lead ultra-civilised and rather artificial lives are peculiarly susceptible to this, and the effect is increased when the actual exercise is part of a return to more natural conditions—really prolonged effort, eating little, wondering when you will come to water; and when too the modern organism is subjected once again to the great natural rhythm of the day: chill
at morning, noonday heat, the cool of evening—and to the necessity, by one’s own bodily exertions, of reaching a particular spot by nightfall. By Miss Glanfield all this was expected, and always delightful when it came; she lay saying little, for once, thinking how good it was, and comparing it in her mind with other rests by other springs, in Spain, in Anatolia, in Italy, in the White Mountains and the Tatra. To Gloire it was quite unexpected—that she should feel so actively content and happy when she was hot and sticky all over, and her hair must certainly be a mess, and her face worse, and all the muscles of her thighs and buttocks were sore from what riding she had done, was a considerable surprise. But she too had one thing to compare it with—rests by Alpine streams, coming down with Tony after some stiff climb, and flowers in the grass, the guides making little jokes, and the glorious sense of achievement, this same idle all-permeating happiness, this sense that life was good. Good in quite a different way to the vague muzzy feeling that everything was really more or less O.K., and the people one was with not so lousy as one had thought, that overtook one after a number of cocktails in the Ritz Bar—any Ritz Bar. Her present frame of mind owed nothing to White Ladies or Old-Fashioneds.

  She said something of this to Miss Glanfield a little later, when they had reached the valley, crossed another river by a rickety wooden bridge supported on stone piers, and were climbing the lesser ridge on the further side; tired as she was—and except for Colonel Robinson they were all a little tired, for they had been riding and walking for eight hours—she felt the strong lift of the muscles in her legs with conscious pleasure, as they breasted the new slope.

  “This reminds me of the end of a climbing day, a bit.” Gloire began, breathing easily through her strong young lungs. “I mean, it doesn’t look like it—there are no pines, only these green trees, and all the nightingales; aren’t they fantastic? But it feels the same.”

  Miss Glanfield looked at her with interest and approval. So perhaps she had been right after all, and there was another side to Mrs. Thurston. She made some sympathetic and encouraging response, while her mind ran on, thinking about the pretty creature at her side. The day had brought her to feel a rather heavy sense of responsibility for her. She had not realised in advance how much the Robinsons were going to mind this importation of hers. Miss Glanfield’s careless generosity, which had turned out so well for Gloire, did not spring from a real love of humanity, but from her uncalculating and simple desire to make everyone happy, and still more to furnish everyone within reach with the sort of experience which she personally valued. There was actually something egocentric about this simplicity, like a child’s passionate absorption in its own toys; otherwise she might have stopped to think about how the inclusion of Gloire Thurston in the trip to Torosh might affect the Robinsons. But she had not stopped to think. Now, too late, she realised what she had done, and decided that she must take the burden of the girl as far as possible on her own shoulders.