Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  SINGING WATERS

  A Novel by

  ANN BRIDGE

  For

  RACHEL

  With Love

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  As the train, leaving Domodossola, corkscrewed its way through the gorges and began to emerge into more open country, Nils Larsen put down his book and turned to look out of the window of his sleeper. The countryside was still on a tilt, and harsh with cliff and rock; but there were steep small fields, and scattered sparsely among them, in groups, there were also houses. These Nils considered with the surprise which never failed to overtake him at the beauty of Italian rural architecture. Nothing could be simpler than the houses themselves, solid, with flattish roofs of brown pantiles; but their severe shape, and the way they were grouped—above a bridge, round a church, high on a bluff—gave them a quality that was profoundly satisfying. “Extraordinary!” Nils muttered to himself—“They can’t put a foot wrong in architecture! And yet in politics—my God!” He began to recall the small houses of the people in other countries which were politically less tiresome than Italy; the brick villas of Southern England, the untidy shacks of the Eastern States, the prim squalor of French villages, even the rather tedious brown reiteration of Swiss chalets. Oh well, there was nothing wrong with chalets, aesthetically, he thought, for Nils had a quite passionate admiration for the political genius of the Swiss, and wished to defend them even from his own thoughts—but they had not got what these houses had got, insanitary as they certainly were, the firm authoritative stamp of actual beauty. Why was it? How come? These houses—there, look at that lot, standing together above that great sweep of retaining wall—hadn’t been designed by architects or arty people; peasants had built them for peasants’ use, with no thought but to get a good strong house perched where there was space for it, near other houses for company if possible; and the result was this succession of perfect groups, satisfying the eye and the soul. One saw such beauty in Spain, one saw it in Mexico, and occasionally in French Catalonia; was it then a Latin gift?

  A handbell resounded outside in the corridor. Nils, hungry, took up his book and his pouch of papers, and began to make his way along the train towards the restaurant car. In the next coach he overtook a woman, also in search of breakfast, evidently; he could only see her back, but the cut of her black dress, the set of her hat, her gossamer stockings and high-heeled shoes, to say nothing of the enormous size of the patent-leather handbag tucked under her arm, proclaimed the extreme of fashion; the fragrance of an expensive scent filled the corridor behind her as she passed. Nils sniffed it a little derisively as he followed—he had not much use for fashionable expensively-scented women. This one had a good figure, though, supple and elastic; and as they passed through coach after coach he was struck by the way she walked. The train, curving through still hilly country, swayed a good deal—it was hard to keep one’s balance. But this fashionable woman, perched up as she was on those idiotic heels, kept hers amazingly; her supple body gave to each lurch of the train, paused, and recovered itself with what Nils recognised as great muscular strength, and a trained power of balance as well. So mountaineers and ski-runners walk—funny that she should walk like a mountaineer, in those clothes. In spite of himself Nils became interested in the woman, and began to look forward to seeing her face. She must be English or American—no other race had those slender thighs, and the long smooth sweep from shoulder to waist—except a few Hungarians, of course. Nils had a theory about these three nations—that their characteristic figures were due to the fact that for generations, for centuries, the women had joined the men in their field sports, riding and walking for pleasure unencumbered by heavy loads; a particular social system had produced a particular physical type. But this woman was tall for a Hungarian, he thought. Would she be beautiful?

  As he asked the question, he got a sort of answer to it. They were at the end of one coach when a man came round the corner from the next, walking fast; he checked on seeing the woman and politely flattened himself against the panelled wall to let her pass; drawing herself up to her narrowest, she slid past him with averted head, that yet sketched the faintest gesture of acknowledgement of his civility—the man for his part both bowed and frankly gaped after her. Nils grinned to himself. The other man thought her beautiful, anyhow—and that faint movement of her head was the typical gesture of the beautiful woman, mechanically acknowledging the accustomed tribute of bows and stares. “If she turns out to be really beautiful, she will be an Englishwoman; if she is only tolerably good-looking, she will be an American” Nils said to himself, still grinning; he was familiar with that skilful trick of well-bred, well-dressed American girls of acting the part of reigning beauties so well that they were accorded the treatment due to beauty itself.

  They reached the restaurant car at last. It was fairly full, and the head steward, seeing them enter together, ushered them to the only vacant table for two. The woman sat down, propping her huge bag against the window, and without so much as a glance at Nils began to study the menu—Nils, putting his pouch on the floor, at last was able to take a look at her face.

  What he saw, when he did so, for the moment drove all thoughts of whether she was beautiful or not out of his head. He was appalled by a sense of latent misery in it. This was such a shock that he examined her more carefully, wondering just what had given him that impression. Her actual expression was not one of misery; it was rather of a slightly vacant discontent, such as he had often seen on the faces of very fashionable women in restaurants in many capitals—women whose way of living had given them habitually the cream of material life, the best food, wine, clothes, and jewels, leaving them, it seemed, at last with nothing but a slightly supercilious distaste for these things. He had often wondered, since they continued to wear the clothes, decorate themselves with the jewels, and consume the food and wine, whether this distaste was genuine or merely assumed in order the better to impose themselves on those who ministered to them—waiters, vendeuses, and the men who paid for it all; a grin usually came over Nils’ rather severe wide legal mouth when he saw one of these women, recalling Margery Sharp’s immortal vignette of The Disgusted Lady in The Nutmeg Tree. It was perhaps part of the protective mechanism of those who live always in the public eye—not in the sense that statesmen and royalties do, whose actions are of some public importance, but in the curious modern fashion by which the politically obscure rich live mainly in public, being forever seen, forever described and photographed—the vulgar competitive publicity of “Society” where the capital S denotes its complete divorcement from human society at large.

  But in the case of the woman now sitting opposite to him, he felt that it was more than that; his first swift impression was not mistaken, he was sure, though he could not justify it by anything definite. As she ordered coffee, orange juice and toast in a bored weary tone from a grovellingly subservient waiter, he now turned his attention to her actual features. No—not really beautiful. Or was she, actually? It was a curious face, short and very square, with a wide white forehead, rather prominent cheekbones, and a neat short nose that was just not ignobly too small—the slightly flaring nostrils gave it sensitiveness and some distinction. Her hair wa
s of so beautiful and strange a colour that it was certainly natural—a very dark gold, stuck smooth and close to her small head, with green shadows between the faint perfect waves; her eyes were dark gold too, like deep topazes, with the same illusion of green in them. The mouth, distorted as it was by the supercilious expression, was nevertheless fairly good; at least it was of a respectable size. Nils always looked for size in features, disliking and despising the petite and the miniature as unworthy and unwholesome. Well, yes—for all its oddness, the face was sufficiently near to beauty for her to be an Englishwoman, yet it was more a Central European type; but the cosmopolitan perfection of her dressing, lying all over her thick as lacquer, gave nothing away as to her nationality; she had spoken to the waiter in very good Italian. She belonged obviously to a good, as well as to the merely expensive class; her pearls were real, so were the diamonds on her breast and her left wrist. Nils was too widely experienced to fall ever into the common error of supposing that no Englishwomen dress really well; on the contrary, he knew that when, admittedly unusually, they turned their attention seriously to clothes, they dressed superlatively. But, as he ate his breakfast, he was forced to admit that he had no idea from what country this ultimate product of material civilisation sprang. They became completely international, these women, dressing in Paris, London, and New York; having their hair and faces arranged in Paris, London, and New York; living in huge hotels and eating in the most expensive restaurants in Paris, London, New York, Nice, Vienna, and Budapest; and in all these places dancing, attracting stares and men, playing bridge and being discontented. In spite of his original impression of her misery, he looked at last with undisguised hostility at the woman across the table, as she sat staring vacantly out of the window, dangling a piece of toast in her long scarlet-tipped fingers. At that moment she happened to turn her head and glance at him. His feeling must, unpardonably, have been visible on his face, for he saw a startled look of astonishment appear in her eyes before, with a brusque movement, she turned to look out of the window again, while a slow blush, visible behind the faint careful make-up, crept over her cheeks, her temples, and even the white forehead.

  Nils was very much ashamed. It was permissible to despise spoilt discontented ladies, but not to be rude to them. He wondered what he could do to make some amends—while he was still pondering various gambits, she reached for that enormous bag and took out a malachite cigarette case and a long malachite cigarette-holder, bordered round the top with rose diamonds; both the bag and cigarette-case, he noticed, bore the initials G. T., the one in gold, the other also in diamonds. However here was his chance; he whipped out his lighter, and as she fitted a cigarette into the holder he leant forward assiduously, saying “Permit me.”

  With a cold glance at him she said “Thank you,” lit her cigarette, and looked out of the window again.

  Nils however was not going to leave it at that—that was insufficient. He recognised that he would probably, deservedly, be snubbed, but he was going to say something else; his willingness to risk the snub would in itself constitute an apology. Following her glance out of the window to where Lago Maggiore lay spread shining in the morning sun he said—“The Borromean Islands are very picturesque, aren’t they? I wonder who Saint Charles Borromeo was? One sees the islands so often, but one never hears anything about him. Do you know?”

  She half-glanced at him, faintly surprised again, and then turned back to the window. For a moment he thought she was going to do the thing thoroughly, and not answer at all, but after a perceptible pause—“He was a Cardinal,” she said vaguely, without turning her head. “He was made one when he was twenty-three and became Archbishop of Milan forty days later. And when there was plague in Milan he gave all his bedding to the sick and slept on the floor.”

  “But you know a lot about him,” he said, surprised; “usually it is so hard to find out about saints.”

  “It isn’t really,” she said in her flat, bored voice—“there’s that book, you know—a sort of Almanach de Gotha of Saints.”

  Nils didn’t know, and didn’t really want to. He was thinking about her voice. She had no definite accent of any kind, but the intonation was not quite English—it very faintly resembled the American tone, as distinct from the accent.

  “I should like to get onto the islands,” he said, wishing to make her speak again, “instead of always rushing past.”

  “They’re not worth it,” she said, still looking out of the window—“They’re frightfully dull.”

  “Oh, have you been on them? That is very interesting—I have never met anyone before who had been on the Borromean Islands.”

  She looked at him again, coldly, for a moment, and then picked up her bag.

  “We used to go there for picnics when I was a child,” she said, rising. “It was very boring.” And again sketching the faintest gesture of a bow, she walked out of the restaurant car.

  When his bill was brought Nils asked the steward, whom he knew well, as he did all the attendants on the Orient Express, if he knew who the lady was?

  “She is not with you, then, Signor Larsen? I thought you were together.”

  “Now, Francesco, when did you ever know me to travel with a lady?”

  The man laughed. “Quite true, Signore, but one must make a beginning! No, I do not know this lady—I have not seen her before.”

  “She said she had lived here as a child. Find out her name, will you?”

  “Certainly, Signor Larsen. And does Signor Larsen desire to sit somewhere else at lunch?”

  “No, no—put us together again,” Nils said, putting a tip into the man’s hand.

  During the morning the steward came along to Nils’ sleeper to say that the sleeping-car attendant reported the lady’s name to be Mrs. Thurston, that she was travelling on a British passport, had “a mountain” of luggage, and a maid in the second class; they were going to Istanbul. Not diplomatic—the labels were ordinary labels. She was going to lunch at the last service. Nils for his part had got out his papers, and read some reports on the labour situation in Sofia, which he was going to investigate for the International Labour Office at Geneva. When he had finished with these and made some notes, he lowered the window and sat in the full draught; it was the beginning of May, and the air was warm and sweet, with a rich Southern sweetness. Would that poor discontented creature enjoy a thing like that, he wondered? Probably not—it would disarrange her hair.

  At Milan he got out and bought a couple of papers. From 1935 onwards the Italian press had been vitriolic against the English, the French, and the League of Nations in general—now, a year later, it was still the same. Addis Ababa had fallen, the Emperor Haile Selassie had just fled to England; sanctions were still in force, but half-heartedly; ham-strung by the proposals of the Hoare-Laval Treaty, in spite of the vigour with which the British public had repudiated these, and the Foreign Secretary’s consequent resignation, sanctions no longer “had what it takes”. Meanwhile the Italian press was trumpeting about its new Empire, breathing out defiance against all other nations, and boasting of what its “eight million bayonets” would do when the time came; there were threatening or tendentious articles about Yugo-Slavia, Albania, and the Adriatic Littoral generally. The papers were disagreeable and dismaying reading for anyone of peaceful and sensible views on international relations; on any man of taste the vulgar bragging and boasting could only produce a quite emetic effect. Nils grunted as he read, and finally threw the cheap ill-smelling sheets down disgustedly, and leaned out of the window again—the poison of greed, ambition, and vulgarity had not tainted the Italian air, and the houses and small towns of the Lombard plain were as delightful as those he had seen up in the mountains that morning. No vulgarity here—and none among those peasants working in the fields. How had it come in to the mental life of the nation to this odious extent? It was a quite un-Italian characteristic. He thought of Italy’s past, and the flowering of art and literature and the graces of actual living in her small Re
publics and tiny city-states, like Florence and Pisa and Siena. No vulgarity there either, though there had been vice, crime, and small wars a-plenty; it had only come in, seemingly, since Italy became one nation, and went on to aim at being a great power. It wasn’t only Mussolini who had introduced it; it had begun with d’Annunzio’s lecture campaign, from 1915 onwards. Tremendous, those speeches of his—made, like those of Demosthenes or Pericles, in the open air, to crowds of students and citizens; terrific power, shattering invective. Nils remembered the Master referring to Nitti as “Questo leccosudice Bolognese”. But it was about then that wealthy Italians started having “Per la Piu Grande Italia” stamped on their notepaper, which was a perfect example of the crudest vulgarity.

  A Greater Italy—was there some connection, then, he wondered, between size and vulgarity? The sharp contrast between the elegance of the little city-states, and the blatancy of a United Italy looked as if there were. His mind ran rapidly over Europe, surveying the various nations. Plenty of blatancy and boasting in Germany certainly—while the little countries, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, his own Sweden, Finland, were all quiet, modest, efficiently democratic, civil-spoken; and except Finland, all monarchies. Even Britain, great power as she was, showed no vulgarity in public life—was that because, for all her Empire, she was geographically a little country too?

  He wasn’t sure about all this. What was vulgarity, anyway? Any form of ostentation, of course; not wealth itself—he remembered the modesty and simplicity of many great American millionaires, like J. P. Morgan, Junior, carrying his cigarettes round in a paper packet—but the display of it, a sort of indecent exposure of wealth. Any form of pretence: the poor or poorer aping the rich, the ill-born giving themselves the airs of the great, typists trying to dress like film stars—oh those cheap high-heeled shoes, the sham jewellery, the greasy hair dressed à la Dietrich!—and, also, weak and not very heroic nations, like Italy, pretending to be great powers and prating of their future feats of arms. Yes, the essence of vulgarity seemed to lie in the pretence at being, or the attempt to be, something that one really was not, with the resulting lack of ease and dignity and taste. Peasants were never vulgar—on the contrary, they had ease and dignity to a high degree. And ease and dignity, though no one praised them in the modern world, were real values, conferring incalculable benefits on their possessors; because they were the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual balance, a poise, a being adjusted to and at home in one’s universe, and satisfied with it. Why were people always trying now to improve the material condition of peasants, without giving a thought to what they might be taking away by so doing? Because, he supposed, the modern world, even the humanitarian and philanthropic side of it, thought wholly in material terms.