Singing Waters

by Ann Bridge

  Why, he asked himself again, remembering Milan through which he had just passed, and its factories and slums—why had the artisans in large towns so much less ease and dignity than peasants? Size again, he supposed; a village was of manageable proportions, like small states; small enough for human intelligence and goodwill to exercise some measure of control and direction, small enough for all the parts to be visible at once and so for all the individuals and classes in it to be fully and humanly aware of one another. Small industries tended to afford a better life to the individuals working in them than huge concerns. This was positive fact, not speculation; Nils had been inspecting mills and factories the world over for years, and here he was sure of his ground. He thought of the rural or semi-rural industries of Hungary and Yugo-Slavia, the single factory in the village, and the good life led by the workers in it. There might be no vita-glass in the windows, and the workers did not come to it in cars or on bicycles—they came on their feet, along the muddy or dusty village street, with geese on the grass by the roadside, and the village pigs going out in a great drove to pasture, and neighbours greeting them from the doorsteps. This was better than going in a tram through leagues of hideous brick, as in Bolton or Wigan or Turin; it was better even than bowling to work in mass-produced cars, like their compatriots in Pittsburg or Detroit. Better because these peasant artisans were all the time intimately conscious of their true relationship to the two ultimate bases of human life—the earth, our Mother, on and by whom we live, and our fellow-men. Equably poised in their relationship to them, too; poised in their universe, as the artisans in great cities somehow and deplorably were not. And no amount of model dwellings or electric washers or cheap delicious food out of tins could replace to the town worker that loss of poise and awareness.

  He had left the door of his compartment open to enjoy the rush of air; a gust of fragrance and a passing step warned him that Mrs. Thurston had just gone by. He rose and went after her. As he gathered up his pouch the thought struck him—“Is she vulgar?” Not sure, he thought; she is accustomed to a world where diamond initials are the normal thing—it may not be ostentation. Out in the corridor, there was her graceful athletic figure before him, moving with its beautiful strength, walking like a mountaineer—no, she is not; not fundamentally, he thought. She may live with vulgarity, and it may even have tainted her mind; but her body knows better, still has its share of the old wisdom. I wonder if she has borne children, or if her false modern values have prevented her. And again he wondered what her nationality was.

  She looked up with an expression of surprise when the steward showed him into the chair opposite hers.

  “It is a lovely day,” said Nils, firmly assuming acquaintance and the right to conversation.

  “It’s very hot in here,” she said, in rather drawling tones of protest. “I can’t think why they don’t have air-conditioning in these cars.”

  “For the reason, it is not necessary,” said Nils; “in Europe there is neither great heat nor great cold.” He beckoned the steward and asked him to open the top of the window. “Do you like air-conditioning?” he asked her then.

  She raised her eyes from the menu.

  “Of course. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Not I!” he said, firmly. “With air-conditioning one is too cold or too hot, always; I prefer to control the temperature in my compartment myself. And I like to be able to open the window if I want to. Did you open your window this morning? The air was sweet.”

  “The smuts come in,” she said, discontentedly. “They don’t in air-conditioned cars.” And she turned to the waiter to order her lunch. Now she will ask for something they haven’t got, Nils thought, and his grin appeared again—but recalling his misdemeanour at breakfast he suppressed it, and listened with a blank face while she expressed a wish for tunny-fish, which was not on the menu, as a hors-d’oeuvre. There was none. She pouted; the waiter was visibly desolated. That sort of lady should have whatever she desired, by rights.

  “Drink some wine with me, Madame—it is quite good!” Nils said. “Do you like red or white?”

  “Wine makes one so hot,” she drawled again, in exhausted protest.

  “Nonsense—pardon, Madame,” said Nils. He turned to the waiter and ordered his own lunch, and a flask of Chianti. “Since people in semi-hot countries, like Italy and France, habitually drink wine, it must be the right thing to drink in these climates,” he went on. “Have you not found in travelling that one keeps in health by eating what the inhabitants of any country regularly eat? In China, at least once a day rice; in Hungary, plenty of paprika; in Scotland, whisky. Do you not find this?”

  Now how will she answer that? he thought. She lives in international hotels and eats their international food, I will bet, and knows nothing of local diet.

  “I never thought about it,” she said, without interest. Then to his surprise she added—“When we were children we used to eat polenta in the peasants’ houses, but it was nasty as it was; it was only nice if you let it get cold, and then toasted it—then it was rather like corn bread, only soggier.”

  “How came you to be brought up in Italy? You are not Italian?”

  “No—my mother’s second husband was an Italian, so we lived quite a lot in Italy, till she divorced him,” she said. “He had a villa by Maggiore.”

  “That is how you came to picnic on the Iles Borromées,” he said with a smile; he said it really to gain time to make up his mind whether he could ask another question. He decided to risk it, and when she had given an uninterested “Yes,” he asked:

  “Was your mother American?”

  Hitherto she had opposed a sort of dreary blankness, like that of the worst type of English debutante, to all his gambits; at the pertinacity of this question he could almost see the feminine in her rouse itself to a skirmish, even with such an unworthy opponent as himself, a big sub-blonde man in the early forties, not dashing in either face or dress—but a man, and displaying a certain persistence of interest in her.

  “Yes,” she said, with a gleam of amusement in those green-shot topaz eyes. “I suppose the divorces gave you that idea?”

  “No—your voice,” he said.

  She looked annoyed.

  “You are not going to suggest that I have an American accent?” she said, pronouncing the word like an Englishwoman.

  He smiled.

  “No—it was the intonation; what the French call ‘l’accent tonique’. I noticed it this morning. But since we are discussing your ancestry, may I also ask if your father was not English?”

  That pleased her, as he had guessed it would. There is a curious element of glamour which in America and on the Continent of Europe still hangs about an Englishman, unglamorous as they may seem to their countrymen and to themselves. The gleam of amusement appeared in her eyes again.

  “Yes. But what made you think that?”

  Can I possibly tell her? he thought. Yes, why not? It is not rude, if it is a little enterprising—and he told her how he had followed her along the corridor to breakfast, unable to see her face, and of the meeting with the man, and how he had decided that if she was beautiful she would be English, and if she was not, American.

  “So, when I sat down and saw you, I decided that there was an English strain,” he added.

  She laughed, with a slight blush.

  “Very neatly turned, if it is only half a one,” she said.

  “Have a glass of wine,” said Nils, taking up the Chianti flask—he couldn’t stay the course long on those lines, and wanted to make it clear that he didn’t intend to try.

  “Thank you.”

  “But you have lived in England too?”

  “After I married, for a while—oh, I’ve lived more or less all over the place; America, Italy, England,” she said vaguely.

  “Which did you like best?”

  “They’re all much the same, I think,” she said. “I mean, some things are better in America—the trains, and train food, and the baths;
you get better meat in England, of course, and better wine in France. And for scent and clothes Paris is really ahead of anywhere else.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. She was really very pretty while she talked; she moved her lips beautifully with each syllable, though the sounds were so undistinguished, and her toneless voice if anything rather ugly—speech took away that distorting line of discontent from her mouth. But her lack of interest was fantastic.

  “Those are all material things,” he said—“baths and trains and food. But what about the people?—the inhabitants of the countries? Which of those do you like best?”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot of difference in people, actually,” she said, still with that vacant look. “They all do much the same things. Italians talk more than Americans, and Americans more than Englishmen. English people play the best Bridge, I find.”

  He looked at her with severity. “You astound me,” he said shortly.

  “Why on earth?” she said, startled.

  “Either you are lying, or there is something strangely wrong with you,” Nils said. “In each country there are other variations than baths and food, and how much men talk! There are differences in the social structure, the intellectual outlook, the emotional tone; and they are interesting and very important. Anyone who knows three countries well must be aware of these things unless he is congenitally cretinous—even poor peasant emigrants from Central Europe are aware of another mental atmosphere in America. You are not a cretin—so I do not understand how anyone can speak as you do unless they are mentally diseased.”

  She had a great capacity for lack of expression—deliberate, he had begun to think—but at this attack she looked at him with genuine astonishment. Then—

  “Perhaps I am mentally diseased” she said, with a cold little laugh. “Are you a doctor?”

  “No. It would distress me to think that,” he said, eyeing her.

  “I just don’t happen to be much interested in people, that’s all,” she said. “I suppose people have a right not to be interested, if they don’t want to.”

  “In the sense that they have a right to commit suicide, yes,” said Nils. “But all the churches, and the laws of most nations, hold suicide to be a crime.”

  For the first time, she spoke with energy. “I’ve always thought that a perfectly damnable law,” she said. “What business is it of the Church or the State, if someone is through with life and wants to pass out?”

  So I was right at breakfast! was Nils’ first thought. Aloud he said, rather slowly—“I imagine the legal position based itself formerly on the State’s need of man-power and woman-power, so that to deprive one’s country of a healthy person was a crime against the State. That is perhaps a little out of date, since so many countries now suffer from overcrowding and unemployment. But the Churches were and are thinking of the soul. Self-annihilation must always seem an unworthy thing—selfish, cowardly; a denial of one’s duties and responsibilities to others, a denial of that glorious thing, courage, for one’s self.”

  She played with her rings, in silence; Nils watched her dropped eyelids. He noticed that her eyelashes were very thick and dark; artificially curled, but not blackened. Her eyebrows were not darkened either, though they were plucked. At length she looked up at him, with a small smile.

  “So you think I’m committing mental suicide by being bored most of the time?” she said.

  “If you are speaking the truth about the extent of your boredom, I mean exactly that.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be speaking the truth?”

  “No, the question is rather—Why should you speak it, to me? There are plenty of reasons why you should not; reticence, a wish to conceal, or affectation.”

  “And which do you think is my reason?”

  “Affectation,” said Nils promptly,—“if you are lying, that is. But I think you are in part speaking what you have come to believe is the truth. I mean, your mind has lied to you, first.”

  When he brought out the word “affectation”, so pat and brisk, she laughed out loud, a real genuine laugh.

  “You are a most extraordinary person,” she said then, her face still gay from her laughter. “Do you always talk like this to people in trains?”

  “No—I very seldom talk to women in trains at all. If I get into conversation with a man, we talk politics. I have never talked so to anyone in a train before—but then I have never before met a mental suicide in a train,” said Nils, also smiling.

  Her face darkened at the word—really it was getting quite expressive, he thought.

  “Suicide isn’t a joke,” she said, coldly.

  “My dear lady, to whom do you say it? If I didn’t think mental suicide, even, a crime, a tragedy, why do you suppose I have, so unwarrantably, been lecturing a total stranger about it?”

  “I can’t think why you have, anyway,” she said, more naturally than she had yet spoken.

  “I think it must be because interference is my profession,” he said, with a smile.

  “What is your profession? They don’t have professors of interference yet! Are you”—suddenly she looked suspicious— “some sort of Gallup Poll person?”

  He laughed. “No no—I can reassure you. I am on the staff of the I.L.O. So I go about interfering with factories and working conditions all the time.”

  “What does I.L.O. stand for?” she asked, getting out a cigarette.

  Oh God, oh God, Nils thought—there you are! She knows three countries and two continents, and she has never heard of the I.L.O.

  “International Labour Office, at Geneva,” he said.

  “Oh—a League of Nations thing,” she said, looking vacant again.

  “Where do you get your money from?” Nils asked her sharply.

  “Land!” she said triumphantly—“land in England!”

  “There isn’t much money in land in England today,” Nils said thoughtfully. “Are you sure there isn’t any coal on it?”

  She laughed. “You’re too sharp! Yes, there is coal on it, as a matter of fact.”

  “And how much do you know about your miners’ lives and conditions of work? Have you ever been down a mine?”

  “No—but all that is controlled—there are inspectors and things,” she said. “Their houses are all right, too; the two villages are models, as a matter of fact; people come from all over the place to see them. There aren’t only the best pit-head baths in England, but each cottage has its own bathroom, and a stove that heats the water. And the coal is free, of course.”

  The funny energetic pride with which she said all this was in extraordinary contrast with the lackadaisicalness of most of her speech. She loves, or did love her husband, Nils thought—and the mines are his.

  “English labour conditions are ahead of any others in the world, of course,” he said.

  She raised the fine eyebrows.

  “Ahead of American ones? When most of them live in those poky little houses, with brick floors that have to be scrubbed, and no washing machines, and walking to work?”

  He smiled.

  “You are thinking in terms of material things, as apparently you always do,” he said. “I was really thinking of the others—wage rates and the way they are regulated, the machinery for settling industrial disputes, and above all the power of English Trade Unions and their sense of political responsibility. It all goes so smoothly, with so much good will and mutual self-respect. There is nothing like it in the world—certainly there is nothing like it in America as yet. Though we in Scandinavia are not so bad,” he added with a touch of complacency.

  “I don’t see what good power and political responsibility do, if people still have to live under horrid conditions and scrub dirty floors,” she objected.

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “How curious that is,” he said—“You live in Italy, you have lived in England, and yet you do not understand Europe at all. In Europe we don’t think labour a hardship in itself; only excessive labour. In fact we are more posi
tive; we know, and have retained our knowledge, that working with the hands is a good thing for anyone—it confers virtue and power.”

  “You do say extraordinary things! How can it confer virtue?” she asked, with slightly mocking incredulity.

  “Manual labour is a two-way thing,” he answered. “Have you any real lace?—perhaps your wedding veil? I know that young women no longer wear lace.”

  “I have some very lovely lace, as a matter of fact,” she said.

  “Machine-made?”

  “Of course not—Duchesse and Point d’Alençon.”

  “Real Point d’Alençon?”

  “Naturally,” she said scornfully. And then began to laugh. “I see where you are taking me! But that’s rather different. Lace-making is an art.”

  “Excuse me, no,” said Nils. “In Nottingham or Lille they could copy your Duchesse lace, in exactly the same pattern, in the same fine linen thread, on a machine. The Point d’Alençon, no—that must have the needle-point on it. But the machine-made would not have either the beauty or the money value of the other. You and I both know exactly what we mean by ‘real lace’—we mean hand-made lace. And those absurd shoes of yours are made by hand, and so, I would wager, are your underclothes. I fancy your stockings, your suspender-belt and the seams of your dress are the only things on you sewn by machine.”