by Ann Bridge
The clouds that slowly came apart The deepening evening glow
And on the blue hills opposite
The freshly-fallen snow?”
“It was a very bad poem,” said Miss Glanfield.
“To me, no—because it was so true. Then it went on about walking up to Ried, on our way back to Murren. Do you remember the wild raspberries in the wood? And losing our way in fog on the Petersgrat?” He recited again—
“How, when the light was almost gone
We found the path begin—
And then the food, and warmth, and light,
And comfort of the inn?
Your brother was with us. How he swore!”
Miss Glanfield’s bright look dimmed a little.
“What became of him?” Nils went on. “Where is he now?”
“He was killed in France, just before the Armistice,” Miss Glanfield said. “I added another verse,” she said slowly, “afterwards.”
“Please say it,” Nils said.
Still slowly, Miss Glanfield did as she was asked.
“Oh, do you remember?
For I cannot forget
I see you walk beside me now—
I hear your laughter yet.
Though you lie cold in Flanders,
What was it then you said?
‘I know I shall remember this
Long after I am dead.’”
That brought Gloire back into their company again. The bright tears stood in her eyes. Into the succeeding silence, neat and brisk, walked Dr. Crowninshield, humming a little tune; at the sight of the stranger she checked her tune, and stood still.
Gloire sprang up, animation returning to her face.
“Dr. Emmeline, this is Mr. Nils Larsen, of the I.L.O. Mr. Larsen, this is Dr. Emmeline Crowninshield.” (Gloire had retained the outstanding American virtue of giving full and adequate introductions.)
Now it so happened that at no point had either Gloire or Susan Glanfield mentioned Larsen to the old Doctor. Since they were usually all three together, at meals and in the evenings, Miss Glanfield had hardly had a further opportunity of talking about Gloire to the old woman; they had smiled together, benevolently and pleasedly, over her Albanian appearance and the way in which she had settled down to Albanian life, but that was all. Now the pale old eyes glanced keenly from face to face, after she had shaken hands and expressed her pleasure at meeting, in evident speculation as to what this man might be doing in Torosh.
Miss Glanfield was, as usual, competent.
“Mr. Larsen is an old mountaineering friend of mine,” she said, “and a friend of Gloire’s too. He came to look her up.”
“Well, we’re quite a party here, as you see,” Dr. Crowninshield said, sitting down on the edge of her brass bed. “I’m the doctor in charge!” Her eyes still ranged over the three faces; like Miss Anne, she was wondering which of the two women in the room had really brought Larsen to Torosh. “Do you know Albania?”
“Yes—I have been here several times. I have heard of you—naturally—though you have not heard of me,” Larsen said, smiling. “It is a pleasure to meet you at last.”
Valentino entered at this point, with cheese and raki, and a whispered communication to the old Doctor. Larsen’s advent had put the Lek-Gionajs in a minor jam—with the guest-room a sick-room, where was the new (and well-remembered) male guest to be accommodated? Would he accept, Valentino whispered to Dr. Emmeline, a small room by himself, which could be cleared, and perhaps take his meals with Lek-Gionaj and the men? Or, if he wished to eat with the ladies, should Lek-Gionaj eat with him there? Would the sick lady mind? For it would be an obvious breach of hospitality for his host not to eat with him.
Dr. Crowninshield resolved this difficulty with her customary New England firmness. Conversation was now flowing again, and it was clear to her that Larsen was on excellent terms with both her fellow guests. Today, on his arrival, she told Valentino, he would of course lunch with his host. He should be given the small room to sleep in, so as not to disturb her patient overmuch: but, for the other meals during his visit, he would with Lek-Gionaj’s permission eat with them here in the guest-room. He would wait on the Kapidan in a few minutes. When the servant had gone, she told Larsen what had been arranged.
“I have a sleeping-bag; I can camp outside,” Larsen said.
“I don’t imagine you’ll be allowed to do that—anyhow come along now and meet your host,” and she took him off.
They did not see him again till after the siesta, when Gloire, bringing up Miss Glanfield’s tea, encountered him downstairs. “Let us go for a walk,” he said at once.
“In just twenty minutes,” Gloire said; “I have to give Susan her tea and bring the things down again. Do you want some tea?”
“No, thank you,” he said, smiling at her busy-ness; he watched her as she went upstairs, carrying the tray, her tunic swinging round her knees.
When they set out, Gloire led the way. They took the Torosh track for some distance, and then turned out along another of the spurs of hill running down from Mali Shënjt, which projected far out into the valley; from its further end one could just see the tower of the church at Torosh, sticking up over an intervening ridge—across the valley, to right and left, spread the great white slopes of the opposite hills, flecked with black vegetation. The pinkish stony soil was warm under their feet, the air was full of strong aromatic scents from the stunted pines and low-growing sages and junipers; the light on the slopes was growing rich at the end of the afternoon. Where the ridge fell away steeply below them they sat down on a sun-warmed rock. Nils took a long look at his companion.
“I like to see you so!” he said. “Tell me, are you happy here?”
“Yes,” Gloire said slowly. It was the fact that for the past two or three weeks she had found herself content and happy as she had seldom been since her schoolroom days; and, oddly enough, her life at Torosh reminded her of them. Old Dr. Emmeline had a restful governessy way of telling her what to do, and Gloire found to her own surprise that she enjoyed both this, and the old woman’s rather rare commendations. But besides being “bossed around” there was the general atmosphere of benevolent approval from both older women, which she found strange and pleasant, and the novel sense of usefulness. She had in fact begun to learn that it is really quite as agreeable to be liked and needed as to be admired and envied.
“Yes,” she repeated, turning to Nils—“it was a thoroughly sound thing to tell me to come here. I did hear High Mass on Whit-Sunday at Torosh,” she added, inconsequently.
“So. And what did you think of that?”
“Oh, it was just like you told me it would be, only more so. The clothes were perfectly marvellous. Outside, when the women stood under the church, they were like a sort of static ballet.”
“And inside?”
“Inside was terrific. I’ve never known anything like it in any church I’ve ever been in.” She remembered his words, or some echo of them, but she wasn’t the sort of person who used words like that. “It was so real it was pretty frightening,” she said, and left it at that.
Nills nodded. He was satisfied.
“I am glad you think it was right to come,” he said.
“Oh gosh yes. I began to think that quite at the beginning, when I rode on that ridiculous pony into the wood at Rësheni, and the nightingales were singing like crazy things, just as you said—and the first night at Shpali, I knew you’d been right.”
“And why did you know?”
“Oh, because it was a lovely place, and I felt so good, walking all day that way. And Susan said something just as we got in that brought it all out. You know how she always expresses everything that happens.”
Larsen smiled. He was familiar with Susan’s expressiveness.
“What did Susan say?”
“She said we felt so good because we’d been travelling all day in the old way, like people in the Bible, and Marco Polo, and all that,” Gloire replied, airily. “She
said doing that did something to you. I didn’t understand when she said it, and I didn’t have time to ask her, then—but now I know,” she concluded.
“And what does it to you?”
“Oh, you must ask her that! I can’t define those sort of things—I’m not an expresser! Susan can define anything; she hitches things together so that they mean something quite different, too. Isn’t she grand?” she said, turning to him.
“Yes, very grand.” But he was not really thinking much of Miss Glanfield, he was thinking how enchantingly pretty Mrs. Thurston was, tanned and strangely dressed and animated. He wanted her to go on talking. “How did you meet her? You have not told me this yet,” he said.
“We met on the boat, going down to Cattaro; I thought her fantastically queer then, because she insisted on my seeing all manner of things, and told off a most comic little man called George to show me round. Then when I got down to Tirana we met up again.”
“And you arranged to travel together?” Larsen remembered Warren Langdon’s remarks about Miss Glanfield’s mercifulness and thought he would like some details.
“It wasn’t quite so easy as that,” Gloire said. “I had the most frightful time fixing it. At one point I was just about in despair! Her trip was fixed all right, with the Robinsons; but that old General hadn’t any more gendarmes to spare, and he told Warren I couldn’t go along because I wasn’t everybody’s old friend! I didn’t feel I could very well ask her to take me—even I wasn’t brash enough for that!”
“What then did you do?”
“In the end I did exactly that!” She looked amused. Larsen, watching her face, recalled vividly the sulky misery on it that had shocked him in the train as they looked out on Lago Maggiore and the Borromean Islands.
“It was rather queer, that,” she pursued. “The Carrutherses were giving a cocktail for her, and on the way over we met her on the road; she’d been bird’s-nesting in the marsh, and she was in the most fearful mess, all over mud, even her face!—Miss Anne was shocked to death. And wildly late, of course. We gave her a lift, and somehow, she was so nice and natural, not minding being so dirty and odd, it made me feel maybe I could ask her. So I did, just like that.”
“And what did she say?”
Gloire walked on to her fate, artlessly.
“Oh, she asked why I wanted to go, and I told her you said I should; then she said—‘Well, I think you ought to go,’ in that quick way of hers; and she fixed the whole thing. And here I am,” Gloire said, with obvious satisfaction.
“This is interesting,” Nils said thoughtfully. Gloire’s recital had given him a good deal of food for thought, both about her and about Miss Glanfield. He sat silent for some time, smoking—looking now at Gloire, now at the hills opposite, and the valley slowly filling with shadow. Gloire sat silent too, perfectly content; it was good to be sitting there with Larsen, looking at these lovely hills that she was learning to love. She would have liked to tell him just how far she felt she was beginning to understand what he meant by European civilisation—as exemplified by Mme. Lek-Gionaj and Lisa, and the household life. And by Lek-Gionaj too. Groups of men frequently turned up at the Kapidan’s house; food was cooked for them, and they were closeted for hours with Lek-Gionaj. From Dr. Emmeline she always learned who they were: sometimes members of his own clan, but often of some other—he was the recognised chief of all the Catholic clans, and their problems were brought to him for advice and solution. She had watched the earnest faces grouped in the courtyard, and Lek-Gionaj’s own anxious face, creased with thought, as he weighed and dealt with the difficulties of his people; she had realised his patience and his concern. Once he had had to go down to Tirana to represent their point of view to the authorities; this had been a very important occasion, and every one went about looking serious till his return. Gloire had in fact been seeing the aristocratic principle in action. But she couldn’t possibly describe all that, she thought; only there were one or two things she must tell him, somehow; she owed that to him.
Shouts and barkings on the slopes high above made them turn their heads—the two rivers, the brown and the white, of goats and sheep were flowing down the mountainside towards the fold, towards food and security. They watched them in silence. But the Swede seemed to know that she had more to say; he turned his gaze back from the flocks pouring down the pine-clad slopes to her face, and said, smiling a little—
“Well, Gloire?”
She blushed at her name, but pursued her intention.
“Do you remember,” she began, “what you said in the train about doing things with your hands giving virtue in some way?” Nils nodded—he kept his eyes on her face. “I thought that just funny, then,” she said. “I suppose because I’d never really seen anyone working with their hands much, except my maid, washing and fixing my clothes. But I have seen people doing that now—and I believe I understand what you mean.”
“What have you seen?”
“Oh, all manner of things! We took some coats down to the braider at Torosh the other day—you know, those white woollen affairs that don’t fasten, that Mme. Lek-Gionaj wears? Maria had woven the stuff and they got cut out and sewed up here—but those fine, fine coloured patterns round the neck and arm-holes and on the hip-seams that look like embroidery are really a very fine braid, in all colours. And we stayed awhile and watched the old man stitching them on. It was fascinating. And then of course there are all the other things they do— spinning and weaving, and baking the bread. Do you know how they bake the bread, up here?”
Nils did know, but he said—“Tell me.”
“They do it in the strangest way! They put the dough, rolled out flat, on a great clay platter on some hot embers; and then they put a thing like an iron meat-dish cover, huge, that’s been heated in the fire, right over it, and pile more coals up around that; and that bakes the bread. And they take such a pride in all they do—the Princess breaks a piece off, after the baking, and smells it, and tastes it—and if it isn’t right, well! There is something to all that, I guess—making your own things, and knowing if they’re good or bad. Why, even I sniff my wash when I bring it in!—it smells so fragrant when it’s dried in the sun, on the junipers.”
“Had you never washed anything before?” he asked, curiously.
“Oh, just rinsed out a pair of stockings, if I was away for a night or two, and hadn’t Fraser with me. But”—she hesitated—“I laughed at you in the train for saying ‘virtue’, and I want to take that laugh back.”
“Thank you,” he said. He looked at her thoughtfully, wondering how much she really did understand, how far the change had gone, and—rather astutely—how much of it was due to Miss Glanfield, who clearly had inspired her with an enthusiastic affection, and how much to her close-up of Albanian life.
“So you like the life here?” he asked her.
“Yes—in a number of ways. There are a hundred things I’d want to change—I think the way they mew the babies up in those cradles is just frightful; they can hardly breathe! And I still like plumbing! And I loathe the flies. But—” again she hesitated—“oh well, they have got something. And they really are happy—I give you that! I wanted to tell you—and to thank you. Because but for you, I’d never have come. And actually I have been rather happy here.”
Nils was extraordinarily pleased. A warm feeling flooded him. He took her hand.
“My dear, I am very glad. You need to be happy.”
Colour came into her face, tears into her eyes.
“I could do with it, I guess,” she said, with an attempt at lightness. “It’s funny the way you and Susan seems to have understood, right from the start, what I did want. No one else has.”
“Not the old American?” Nils asked, letting go her hand.
“Well, if she did, she hasn’t done a thing about it, except order me around! But I like the way she does that, actually. She’s grand,” said Gloire. “The way she works and slaves for all these people here is just nobody’s business.”
Shadow had come up now, and engulfed the rock where they sat, and a cool air was rising from the valley; the pinnacles of Mali Shënjt glowed with a clear rose behind them. Nils glanced at his watch, and stood up.
“We should go back,” he said. He took her hand again and pulled her to her feet. “Come.”
He dined that night with Lek-Gionaj—it seemed indicated. Later, at the foot of the stairs, he encountered Mrs. Thurston coming down carrying a cup.
“What is that for?” he asked, pointing to it.
“Susan’s milk. I always take her up a hot night-cap last thing,” she said, as they went out. They paused in the courtyard, under the great southern stars; a glow came from the kitchen windows opposite—the air was sweet with all sorts of aromatic scents, and a gust of sheepy odour came up from the fold below.
“Did they fix you a room?” Gloire asked.
“They offered it, yes, but I prefer to sleep out of doors. The Prince knows this,” he answered.
“Don’t let the wolves eat you!”
“No—they will not. We shall walk again tomorrow, no?” he asked, looking at the pale shape of her face, and the glimmer of her white skirts in the darkness.
“Yes, surely. Goodnight,” she said, starting towards the kitchen door.
“Goodnight. Till tomorrow, happiness!” he called after her.
“‘You will suffer!’ is what Madame says on these occasions,” she called back, laughing.
Chapter Fifteen
“Well, how is the patient today?” Larsen asked next morning, when Gloire had ushered him into the big room, and flitted off again about her household affairs.
“Marvellously impatient! Dr. Emmeline took a look at my let this morning, and she thinks it would really be safe for me to go down in a few days, if we can rig up a sort of sling for the foot, for someone to carry, and go rather slowly.”
“This is excellent.”
“Yes. I ought really to be getting home. It’s too wretched that I’ve missed Ochrida and the whole of the south, but it can’t be helped. And besides, I feel I ought to leave as soon as possible—it’s been so frightful for the Lek-Gionajs having us foisted on them for such ages.”