by Ann Bridge
What with the tetanus injection and the sedatives with which the old Doctor plied her, Miss Glanfield was completely inert for the first forty-eight hours, and there was little Gloire could do for her but sit beside the mattress and keep the flies off while she dozed. On the second day, she asked Dr. Crowninshield if she could spare a few yards of medical gauze.
“What on earth for?”
“I thought I would make her a kind of mosquito-bar on a frame—just to go over her head and shoulders.”
“Well, go ahead and make your frame, and I’ll see if I have gauze, enough for it.”
Undeterred by this scepticism, Gloire went down into the valley, cut some willow-wands, indicated by signs to Lisa that she wanted string, and rather ingeniously constructed a frame like a small cape-cart hood, about three feet each way, with an arch in front to go over the body. The old Doctor set it over Miss Glanfield and then smiled dryly at Mrs. Thurston.
“Aren’t you smart!” She rummaged in her metal case, and cut off a length of gauze. “There you are. Have you a needle?”
“Lisa will give me one, I guess,” said Gloire, pleased and feeling at home in this New England atmosphere. She borrowed a needle and thread from Lisa, with whom she was coming to terms very happily by means of signs and smiles, and completed her frame. When it was set over Miss Glanfield, that lady proclaimed it perfect. It was the greatest boon to be able to lie and sleep, eat, or even smoke, protected from the ever-present flies.
After Colonel Robinson’s departure the Prince and Pieter ceased eating with their visitors, so that the three women had the guest-room to themselves. Gloire proceeded to organise it according to her own ideas. She brought up hot water instead of cold in the copper jar, heated milk in the kitchen as required, and even brewed early morning tea in a jug.
By the fourth day Miss Glanfield was sufficiently recovered to require conversation. She chatted a lot to Gloire, and after supper, when the old American was with them, steered the talk round to how she came to be doctoring in Albania, a subject on which she was still curious.
“Why, I always wanted to be a doctor,” said the old woman, “from the time I was quite tiny—when other little girls were giving their dolls tea-parties, I had mine sick in bed, or else I was cutting them up! It worried my Mother terribly—she thought it morbid. And as a girl I was always reading every medical book I could lay my hands on. I decided when I was twenty that I would be a doctor, but of course over with us, in those days, that was considered just too bizarre for words. I had to wait till I was thirty to get my way.”
“How did you manage it?” Miss Glanfield asked.
“God managed it for me—my dear Mother died,” said the old lady calmly. “She considered my cutting up people even more morbid than the dolls. I just couldn’t do it while she was alive; but as soon as she was dead I started right in.” She spoke with a sort of determined relish. Both Miss Glanfield and Gloire were startled by this unusual manifestation of filial piety.
“And where did you take your medical school? Harvard?” the writer asked.
“No,” said Dr. Crowninshield with tremendous emphasis. “Never at the place which refused to admit Sophia Jex-Blake as a student! She was my idol. No, I went to Edinburgh, as she did. That was in 1900, and I graduated, of course, in 1905.”
“Oh, they had women medical students at Edinburgh as early as 1900, did they? I hadn’t realised that.”
“Yes indeed—there were quite a number around when I was there. Of course in those days we were taught in separate classes from the men, and had special wards set aside for our practical work—but we got our M.B., Ch.B., all right.”
“And where did you start practising? And when did you come here, and why?” Miss Glanfield asked, with her customary eagerness. The old woman smiled.
“Why, naturally I thought of beginning back home, so I went over and started in the poorer parts of Boston.” She paused, and began rolling herself one of the little Albanian cigarettes she had learned to smoke.
“And didn’t it work?” Miss Glanfield enquired.
“Yes, it worked all right. But I found I just wasn’t happy over there. I suppose I’d been in Europe too long.”
Both Miss Glanfield and Gloire pricked up their ears at this.
“What was wrong with the poor old States?” Gloire enquired drolly.
“I was sort of conditioned out of the American Way of Life, I guess,” the old woman answered.
“Was there too much prejudice?” Miss Glanfield asked.
“There was plenty!—but less than here. I got round that all right. No, I just felt I wanted to be where life was older. Anyway I came back.”
“And how did you come to pitch on Albania to work in?” Miss Glanfield asked.
“Reading Miss Durham, primarily. While I was in Edinburgh I spent my vacations travelling—I went to Hungary, and I liked that, but I always preferred places that were wildish and off the beaten track, so I went to Greece and Serbia and Montenegro, and that had got me interested in the Balkans. Then just around the time that I came back to Europe Miss Durham’s book on High Albania came out, and I read it at once—that would have been in 1909, I suppose—and it made me determined to see this place. So I came, and took a look round, and that decided me. In no other country I’d seen did the women and children need help so badly. I knew then, here was where I wanted to work, so I set to and got ready. I learned Albanian right away, and then I went back to England and took a course on children’s ailments, and another at the Royal Free on gynaecology, and I put in some months on studying malaria and semi-tropical diseases; and then I got my gear together and came out here and started in. And here I’ve been ever since. So now you know it all!” she said, smiling very nicely at Miss Glanfield.
The writer was thinking that she wanted to know any amount more—the details of that beginning, the difficulties overcome. She looked with great liking and respect at the little figure sitting on the foot of her mattress, so small, so quiet, in which, for all her dry unemphatic speech, such a fervour for humanity burned; the New England neatness and precision in no whit affected by twenty years or more in these primitive surroundings. One of the best possible types, the good New Englander, she thought—durable and resistant as the native granite that juts out through the calm green of their pastures, just below the soil everywhere—a hint to the stranger of what to expect from the inhabitants.
“Did you never get discouraged or exasperated?” she asked.
“Both. Frequently. While the Turks were still here it was pretty hard going. But the need was just immense.”
“What was your worst obstacle? Tradition?” asked Miss Glanfield, thinking of that cradle.
“Partly. I have a great respect for tradition, though. Poverty is their worst enemy.”
“Ah yes. Are they stingy as well as poor?” Miss Glanfield asked. “I always think one of the worst troubles with any backward nation is their shrewd peasanty tight-fistedness and suspicion where money is concerned—it’s what hampers the French so, oddly enough.”
Dr. Crowninshield laughed.
“There’s the Englishwoman speaking!” she exclaimed.
“Why the Englishwoman?” Gloire asked.
“Because the English are less mean about money than any nation on earth—I believe because they really don’t care much about it.”
“But we’re not so rich,” protested Miss Glanfield.
“Well yes, you are—anyway for a couple of centuries you were, richer than anyone else. But it’s not a question of wealth, I guess, but of the attitude to wealth. Didn’t someone once define a gentleman as a man who didn’t care how he pronounced his words and never counted his change? Well, that’s the British.”
“No, we don’t count our change much—but the curious thing is that our own peasantry, or what corresponds to peasants with us, don’t either. They’re really rather extravagant—they haven’t the typical peasant attitude at all!”
“No, they have n
ot. I think that’s partly because the whole nation is more or less imbued with the gentleman tradition, and partly because of something that’s just in the English blood, something sweet and spacious in it. What is much more peculiar,” the old lady went on, “is why America, which has never had a peasantry at all, should have so much of that particular taint.”
“You can’t say Americans are mean,” Gloire protested.
“No, Gloire, my dear, maybe not; but you can’t say they’re not money-conscious in a way the British are not. Money stands very high on our national priority list of values!—on the British it stands low. That’s one reason why the debt question caused so much ill-feeling and misunderstanding. The war was won; there were a million Britishers killed as against 100,000 Americans; the British had lent freely to their Allies and borrowed quite as much for others as for themselves—and there was Uncle Sam shouting for his money! The British just couldn’t understand that, and they despised America for it; our people were vaguely aware of their contempt, without understanding it either—and that just put an edge on the bitter feeling.”
“It was all very unfortunate,” said Miss Glanfield civilly. “Mind you, we should have liked to pay if it had been possible.”
“My dear, you don’t have to be diplomatic with me!” said Dr. Emmeline. “Of course you’d have liked to pay if we hadn’t made it impossible with our tariffs, is what yoji mean—and you’re quite right.”
“If that’s all true,” Gloire said slowly, “mightn’t it be partly because our huge mass of immigrants from Europe have been peasants? I mean, if there really is this feeling about money?”
“I think that’s probably so, don’t you?” Miss Glanfield said, looking at the Doctor.
“Maybe. The cause doesn’t invalidate the effect.”
The days slid by. Gloire found her time filled with small tasks. Every morning she stood in the dairy among the rest of the women with two cups, getting breakfast for herself and Miss Glanfield. The writer had to be given bed-baths, and after being coached for a day or two by the old Doctor, Gloire was able to undertake these. Besides washing Miss Glanfield’s person, she washed her clothes and handkerchiefs, and her own as well—this she did out of doors; Lisa was amused that she would not do them on a board at the stream, like everyone else, but insisted on using hot water, which she carried out from the kitchen. However they spread their launderings to dry on the same bushes, exchanging laughing comments; Gloire’s brassière in particular aroused Lisa’s curiosity and mirth. Carrying up water, emptying water, brewing tea, Gloire was forever in and out of the kitchen, and became quite familiar with the routine and work of the household—Marte coming in with a basketful of mulberry leaves and feeding the silk-worms, Lisa spinning wool, one of the older women weaving white homespun cloth at a hand loom, the constant preparation of food. The strangest thing about it all to Gloire was that the pattern of this archaic life was unrolled before her practically in silence, since she could not talk—to any purpose—with the participants; she moved through these scenes, but always a spectator. She said one day to Miss Glanfield that it was like living in a silent film.
“Do you mind?” the writer asked.
“No. It would be more fun if I could talk. I just have to watch more, to understand what’s happening.”
But the effect of this was to make her watch with much more attention than was her habit, so that the impact on her mind was sharper than usual. Going down late in the evening to warm the milk for Miss Glanfield’s night-cap, she used to see what Dr. Crowninshield had called “the hearth school” in progress—Lisa, Marte, and some of the quite young girls sitting round the fire, while Mme. Lek-Gionaj held forth; the other women seated in the background, sewing or knitting, while the foster-mother, imported on Dr. Crowninshield’s orders, squatted by the brown-and-gold cradle and suckled Pieter’s first-born. Even without words, such a scene caught the imagination—the contrast between the deep tranquillity of occupation and attitude and the eager attention on the dark faces in the firelight, the women in the background nodding approval at some familiar and expected episode. As for Mme. Lek-Gionaj, as a narrator she had obviously considerable powers; she used gestures sparingly but tellingly, and the inflections of her voice were a drama in themselves—Gloire used to linger, pulling her milk-vessel aside out of the hot ashes, merely to watch. All through these domestic scenes that great figure moved, calm, dominant, all-pervading—Gloire’s eyes gradually came to convince her that Mme. Lek-Gionaj was indeed the mainspring of the whole mechanism of life in the Kapidan’s house.
Though there was no fussy ostentation about it, there was order, too, and routine; and there was leisure. Gloire noticed that both men and women, in their spare time, were nearly always making something; the men carving a wooden spoon with an ornamental handle, or a distaff-top, or some tool for field-work—Lisa embroidering the front of a linen bodice or a shawl. They never seemed bored, though they had no newspapers to read, and if they had books, did not read them. But there was absolutely none of the sitting about yawning and painting one’s nails and wondering what to do next with which Mrs. Thurston was so painfully familiar. Lisa, to her great entertainment, did stain her thumbnails with henna, and had a design in henna tattooed on the palms of her hands—a little sort of star or sun, with rays spreading from a circle and a tiny Greek cross in the centre; when Gloire touched the other, uncoloured, nails enquiringly, Lisa laughed and shook her head and glanced meaningly in the direction of Mme. Lek-Gionaj, whose figure loomed in the distance—and Gloire understood that to colour more than the thumbnail was not approved of. But, unquestionably, Lisa was not bored; and to her surprise she found that she herself was not really bored either—she was too busy.
Poor Miss Glanfield, on the other hand, a fixture on her red mattress under the gauze net, with nothing to read and no paper, even, to write on, was distressingly bored. She had a Balkan flower-book with her and spent her time at first identifying what she had already collected; but when that was done she had no resource but the society of Gloire and Dr. Crowninshield, who usually only spent the evenings with them. Miss Glanfield had not been so surprised as the Robinsons at Mrs. Thurston’s decision to remain and look after her; but Dr. Crowninshield’s words on the night of their arrival had inspired in her a rather unusual hesitancy in her dealings with Gloire. However the old Doctor’s conviction that Gloire had a problem reinforced her own, and her natural kindliness (and the absence of any other occupation) made her really anxious to find out the source of that unhappiness.
She took her time over it. She talked to Gloire a great deal, getting onto easy terms with her, and observed with interest the way in which she was fitting herself into the Lek-Gionaj menage—through her she learned a good deal about it. She did not learn much from the silent visits which her hostess daily paid her, sitting massively smiling, regarding her with a wise examining air, and twiddling her thumbs. Lisa and Marte popped in at intervals, pretty and shy; one day Marte brought her a posy of flowers.
“Where did she get these, I wonder,” the writer observed later to Gloire, examining the small objects, spread out on her red quilt. “I don’t know this veronica, and she’s only brought the flower, no radical leaves; if I had the whole plant, I could find out which it is.”
“They went down to Mastrokol this morning to fetch silkworm cocoons,” said Gloire, who had met the two girls and one of the women on their return and had watched the precious objects, wrapped in silk handkerchiefs, being fished out from inside their bodices, where they had been carried for warmth.
“Where is Mastrokol?”
“Down in the main valley, beyond Torosh. One of the married daughters lives there, and the cocoons came up by mule so far from Scutari; the girls went down with Maria to fetch them.”
“I suppose that’s too far to go and get another bit of this, root and all,” said Miss Glanfield wistfully.
This gave Gloire an idea, and whenever she could she went off and collected a fe
w flowers, complete with leaves and root, and brought them back to Miss Glanfield. To her rather amused irritation she was never left alone on these expeditions; sometimes one of the men about the place, more often Lisa or some woman was told off to accompany her. “It’s no mortal use your kicking,” Dr. Crowninshield told her when she protested—“Lek-Gionaj is responsible for you as his guest, and he wants no trouble; if anything happens to a guest it starts a far worse blood-feud than anything else could. Just make up your mind to it.”
On one of these expeditions—fortunately when Lisa and old Maria were in attendance—disaster overtook Gloire’s grey flannel trousers. They had gone up through the pine woods to the high pastures below the ridge of Mali Shënjt, and Gloire, scrambling up a boulder to secure a flower for Miss Glanfield, ripped a great piece out of the right leg, as well as splitting the seam. The trousers had been getting pretty part-worn anyhow, as Gloire truly said; they were cheap things concocted by a Tirana tailor in a hurry; on her rather discomfited return, with Lisa’s apron tied over the gap, it was obvious that she must find something else to wear while they were repaired. Miss Glanfield’s blue trousers were offered, but they were much too big. At this point Mme. Lek-Gionaj took a hand. Magisterially, with that remote amused expression, she took Gloire off to the women’s quarters and there proceeded to fit her out with a complete Albanian dress—full white trousers, white embroidered tunic, a dark-green velvet jacket and a gaudy woven silk apron. She did this very carefully, holding various tunics against her for the length; the green velvet jacket, consideringly, she held beside Gloire’s strange green-gold hair, and then put her into it. There was no mirror—Gloire was forced to admire herself as best she could in the top of her flap-jack. She liked what she saw, and twirled around gaily in front of Miss Glanfield and the old Doctor on her return. Curiously, wearing the Albanian dress made her feel increasingly at home in the Albanian household—the women smiled at her as she went about among them. Even when her grey trousers were mended she left them alone, and flitted to and fro in her full white ones, her tunic, and her pretty apron, thoroughly pleased with herself.
