by Ann Bridge
“Yes,” she went on, much more slowly than usual—“you could make a tremendous thing of it, Gloire. And you seem to be planning to do it in such a wise way—beginning from the bottom, learning the ropes thoroughly, and building up gradually. So many frightfully worth-while enterprises fail from being begun on too big a scale, from the top, and without local and individual knowledge. Oh,” she said, her generous enthusiasm growing as she envisaged the scheme more and more fully—“oh, dear Gloire, I think it’s quite brilliant of you and Dr. Emmeline to have thought this up. It’s the ideal thing for both of you—and it will be wonderful for Albania. Oh, I am so very glad.”
Gloire was delighted by all this. Warmly, happily, presently, they exchanged addresses: her publishers for Susan, Brown Shipley in Paris for Gloire; and it was a moving moment for both when they took their farewells. Miss Glanfield might not be a real lover of humanity, as the old Doctor was, but she was a warm-hearted and generous person, and where her rather choosy and capricious affection was given, it was given whole-heartedly—and it had been so given to Gloire. The diffused general benevolence, too, had operated in Gloire’s case with really dynamic results. And Gloire herself was fully aware of this. She owed much to Susan Glanfield, and in her unsophisticated simplicity she looked—wisely, perhaps—only on what she had gained by knowing the writer, not on what she had, possibly, lost. Simplicity is in some ways a blessed state.
Gloire drove back to Tirana in an even more contented frame of mind than she had driven out. She found the passage outside her room full of cases and parcels—some from the local chemists, two from Rome. She looked them over, half with excitement, half dismally—she supposed they would have to be unpacked and the contents checked, a lousy job. Perhaps Warren’s secretary, who was accustomed to such things—but then she gave herself a little shake. No, she must stop being so lazy, and shoving the boring tiring jobs off onto other people. She would do it herself, tomorrow. Larsen was leaving tomorrow, on the Corinth boat—when he was gone she would have nothing on earth to do. I guess I’ll live to be glad of those cases, she thought, as she turned into her room.
She had not yet made up her mind whether or not to tell the Swede about her new “design for living”, but she dressed and went downstairs early on the off-chance of catching him alone, merely to be with him—Warren always drank Old-Fashioneds till the last possible moment, and then went to have his shower, change, and be comfortably late for dinner; his household knew this, and arranged soufflés and the like accordingly. So little time left, Gloire thought, as she drifted downstairs—only this one evening. She had not been able, very humanly, to refrain from putting on one of the loveliest of her dresses, all beige lace and tulle and semi-revealings, a work of art in its own genre. There was no one in the garden-room when she got down, and she went out into the garden. The dress really wanted some coppery-orangey flowers to set it off; she had a brooch at her breast to pin them with. She wandered about, looking for the exact note of colour; the garden was brilliant with flowers, and presently she found some roses of the perfect shade; she picked a few, arranged them, and was pinning them on when she heard Larsen’s voice behind her—“Do you garden in this dress?”
She turned, unsmiling.
“No, I’m getting some flowers for it.”
“That is charming,” he said, when she had done. “Perfect. The dress is very beautiful. This is a thing you do extremely well—dressing. It is a contribution, too.”
“To what?” she asked, smiling in spite of herself, as they walked down one of the paths.
“To civilisation,” he said, grinning at her. She made a face at him.
“Where I am going, at Broussa, they make lovely materials,” he said. “Silks, and cut velvets. Shall I send you some?”
“Yes, surely. I’d love that. Will you truly?”
“Yes. What sort of thing?”
“Enough cut velvet for a jacket with long sleeves—in very, very deep red,” Gloire said, thinking of Lisa. His wish to give her a piece of stuff gave her extreme pleasure.
He took out his little book and noted that down methodically, making her smile.
“And you, what do you do, now?” he asked, stuffing the book back into his pocket. “Do you go on to Istanbul?”
“No. I’m staying here.”
“For now, yes, but later?”
“I’m still staying here. For quite a time—perhaps for keeps.”
Nils stood still and faced her.
“What does this mean?” he asked, suddenly grave—in Nils surprise was often expressed by gravity.
“Only that I’ve got a job. I’m going to help Dr. Emmeline. I don’t know the first thing about medicine—it’ll just be donkey-work, of course. But I shall learn Albanian, and I’ll learn my way around down here.”
He stared at her.
“You mean to do this?”
“I certainly do.”
“And it is settled? She agrees?”
“She suggested it,” Gloire said dryly—she was hurt by the last question. He proceeded to hurt her more.
“And for how long do you mean to go on?”
“If it works out, perhaps for ages. I might put some money into it later on, and get some other units going. There’d be room for them.”
“Indeed there would,” he said. But he went first, as always, for the practical aspect. “And how would you staff these other units?”
“What I would like to do would be to train Albanians for it, men and women—endow them, or whatever you call it, to learn English and get their medical training over there, and then bring them back and pay their salaries and all that. But I’ll have to see if I find the right people. I’ll know, after a year or two here.”
He looked at her now with a sort of deep grave pleasure.
“This is very splendid news,” he said; “this is more than the best.” He did not say—“that I had hoped for”, but with his kind eyes upon her, Gloire knew that that was what he meant. “That old American,” he said thoughtfully, studying her face above the lovely dress—“she is very wise. She is quite right. You shall do this well. And it shall make you very happy.”
She was touched at his saying that; tears sprang to her eyes. And when he took her hand and kissed it, the bright drops came showering down. He saw them, and said very simply—
“Dear Gloire, you have made me so glad.”
She stood among the flowers, looking at him.
“Well, in a way you’ve made me happy,” she said rather quickly. “You said you wanted to, in the train after Trieste— and I told you it was quite an undertaking. But you’ve done it. Though why you ever wanted to be such a missionary beats me! But you’re responsible for the whole thing—” and she broke away and floated back to the house, leaving Nils to follow slowly, sighing a little as he went along the sanded paths between the bright borders.
He left next day. Gloire occupied herself with the unwonted drudgery of unpacking, checking, and re-packing her first instalment of stores. Fagged but satisfied, she went down unchanged, long before dinner, in search of Warren’s company and a drink. After a cocktail she felt expansive—and anyhow the time had come to tell Warren that she was going to Rome next week, and wanted to come back. She did this, adding:
“I’m going to stop on and work here, Warren—understudy Dr. Emmeline.”
Warren sat up.
“Well for Heaven’s sake! What do you want to do that for?”
“Because I do.”
Well, I be darned! And what does the old Dottoressa say?”
“Says she wants me.”
“Well I be darned!” Warren repeated, staring from his sad deep-set eyes at his pretty guest.
“Oh Warren, don’t keep on saying that. And stop staring! I know I don’t look like it, but I’m sure I can do it. Don’t go blowing on it, and being a toad,” Gloire said, half plaintive, half impatient. “Miss Glanfield thinks it a great idea, and so does Mr. Larsen. Don’t you think it’s a sound
plan?”
“Why yes—I’ll surely think it’s great, when I’ve had time to get accustomed to the idea,” Warren said. “Only you drudging around waiting on sick peasants seems kind of queer, just at first.”
“If it works, it might mean a lot,” Gloire said. “I think Dr. Emmeline would have liked to expand some while back, if she’d had the money. Well I have the money.” She expanded herself, telling him of her schemes for the future. In Warren, as he listened, the old affection for Gloire welled up, tinctured as it was, inevitably, with scepticism.
“Yes, I’m sure you could do it, Gloire,” he said as she finished. “And it wants doing. I think it’s swell, really. You’re a great little girl.” He paused, puffing at his long cheroot, his eyes wistful. As so often, he saw someone else, someone tougher and more enterprising, doing something for which he saw the need, but lacked the toughness and the enterprise. He startled her by saying, “If you’re really going to put money into this— and I can’t imagine a better use for your mother’s dollars—I suppose you hadn’t thought of going in for a bit of fruit-growing here, as a side-line?”
Gloire laughed. Warren’s absorption in fruit-growing in Albania was an old joke between them by now.
“Oh darling Warren, no! I’m going to teach them to grow potatoes—not for export, but for food.”
“You’re what?
“Going to make them grow potatoes. I’ve got a ton of seed potatoes coming.” She rose as she spoke, went over, and gave him a kiss. “You’ve always been an angel to me, Warren, and I know I’ve mostly been a pest to you. Well, I’ll go right on being one, I guess, while you’re in this country.” She went off to change, leaving Warren muttering again to himself that he would be darned.
Steaming down the coast of Southern Albania, Nils Larsen watched the mountains turn paler and paler blue, grow dim and faint against the pale sky beyond the soft green flatness of the coastal plain. Standing at the rail, watching that lovely outline recede and fade, he thought of Gloire, and—most vividly—of Dr. Emmeline. Splendid old woman—modest, industrious, selfless, wise. If Gloire would stick it, she could do much under those auspices—and she could not be in better hands. A curious turn of events. He had certainly never expected this when he told Mrs. Thurston in the train that to learn about European civilisation she had better come to Albania. But it was a good thing—certainly for her, perhaps also for Albania. It seemed to him very strange, as he turned away from the now almost invisible mountains, that he should be leaving two American women in there, both bent on good works! And one already understood Europe, and the other stood a good chance of learning. As for the good works, modest small-scale individual efforts like this usually produced much more in the way of results than was ever achieved by Commissions and press campaigns and huge impersonal expenditures of money. He strolled to the other side of the ship, and looked out across the Adriatic, whipped by a rising breeze to a dark steely blue, and thought about Italy. Poor Italy! With their graceful gift for gay and civilised living, their lovely architecture and their charm, the Italians were allowing themselves to be drugged and beguiled and driven along a disastrous and alien road, the road of imperialism and conquest, for which they were as a race wholly unsuited, causing untold misery to other wretched and innocent nations on the way. His face darkened as he thought of what Warren Langdon had told him of their doings in Abyssinia. And the tragedy of it was that they would fall by the way; they would never reach their wicked silly goal. Empires were not achieved like that, self-consciously and deliberately; they were built up in bits and pieces, in a perfectly ad hoc manner—opening a trading or a coaling station here, fighting a little war there, negotiating a Treaty somewhere else. That was how the British Empire had been built, and the American Empire too—the annexation of California, the Mexican War, the Louisiana purchase. Nils never fell into the vulgar and uneducated error of assuming that an Empire is only an Empire if it lies overseas; he recognised the truly imperial quality of U.S. expansion on the North American continent in the nineteenth century, and of Russian expansion in Asia during the same period. All three were Empires, and all created in the same way and for the same reasons—commercial reasons, Strategie interests. The British was the more spectacular because of the distances involved, seas and oceans and diversity of races and climates—and because of its amazing and temperate success. But they were all Empires, all right.
He leaned on the rail, a little heavily, thinking about the future of the world; thinking, as he so often did, about America and her place in it. Perhaps America would be one of the great Empires of the future—she could hardly fail to play a big rôle. Nils, a purist, distinguished sharply between words and their meanings; he knew the difference between big and great. An enemy of size, he admired greatness. Would America learn enough, in time, be humble and wise enough to make her rôle in the world not only big but great? He wondered. Would men come forward, her aristocracy of character and intellect, to lead their country, as the aristocracy of England had come forward?—to bear the burden of drudgery and ill-will, at home and also abroad, in filthy climates, in isolation and desolating homesickness, to carry the torch of justice and decent administration and personal liberty? Did that torch burn for them, really and truly?—and would they sacrifice their personal lives to it, as the English did? Or would they seek to impose on the world, by their immense economic strength and technical supremacy, a lower order—of mechanised living, of advertisement, of the selfish pursuit of comfort, of high-sounding suicidal greediness? Greediness and selfishness were infectious, contagious—but how suicidal, also. Even greedy agriculture was suicidal—look at the Dust-bowl! Would they learn, would they see?
Nils Larsen sighed, and walked back to the other side of the boat. Nothing was now to be seen, above the darkening waters, of the Albanian mountains. But somewhere in there were two American women, both unselfishly pledged to the service of others. It was a good omen. He turned, breasting the cold evening wind, and walked briskly forward along the deck.
A Note on the Author
Ann Bridge was born in 1889 in Hertfordshire. Bridge’s novels concern her experiences of the British Foreign Office community in Peking in China, where she lived for two years with her diplomat husband; her works combine courtship plots with vividly-realized settings and demure social satire.
Bridge went on to write novels based around a serious investigation of modern historical developments. In the 1970s Bridge began to write thrillers centred on a female amateur detective, Julia Probyn, as well as writing travel books and family memoirs. Her books were praised for their faithful representation of foreign countries which was down to personal experience and thorough research. Ann Bridge died in 1974.
Discover books by Anthony Sampson published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/AnnBridge
A Lighthearted Quest
A Place to Stand
Emergency in the Pyrenees
Enchanter’s Nightshade
Frontier Passage
Julia in Ireland
Moments of Knowing
Singing Waters
The Dangerous Islands
The Dark Moment
The Episode at Toledo
The Ginger Griffin
The Malady in Maderia
The Numbered Account
The Portuguese Escape
The Tightening String
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1945 by Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Copyright © 1945 Ann Bridge
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eISBN: 9781448211579
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