Singing Waters Page 10

  “There’s no simple answer to your question,” Warren said at last. “Nothing is simple out here. That’s the trouble with our people back home—they want everything to be too simple; black and white, right and wrong. Italy could do a lot for this country, and for herself at the same time, if she had an unselfish tradition, as the Dutch and the British have. This place is the gateway to the Balkans; and Italy wants to boss the Balkans—if she doesn’t, Russia or Yugo-Slavia will. It’s understandable enough, whether it’s laudable or not. Besides, the Italians are great roadmakers. That would do this country a lot of good. What it needs before all things is communications. Look at this road! Oungh!” Cyril had failed to avoid one of the grave-like holes, and they bounced in their seats. Gloire laughed and straightened her hat.

  “There’s copper in those mountains, masses of it,” Warren went on, again waving his long clever hand at them—“if there were roads, you could get it out, and it would be worth mining. That would make this country rich.”

  “But what’s that got to do with throwing the British out of the Gendarmerie?”

  “Quite a bit. It’s another reason for the Italian interest in this place—they can do with plenty of copper!—and it is another reason for Albanian pliancy to Italian wishes. No one else has built them airfields or offered to make them a fine set of roads. Italy can—and does—pose as the friend of Albania; her only friend.”

  “But doesn’t the Government see what she’s really after?”

  “Maybe they do. But even if they do, it’s a choice of evils. There are other smash-and-grabbers to right and left of this wretched little state.”

  “Who?”

  “The Greeks to the South; the Yugo-Slavs to the North. I told you—after the war it was only old Woodrow that saved Albania from being carved up in three bits. The Yugos only just didn’t get the whole of the North down to the Drin.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Well, it’s right here, as a matter of fact,” Warren answered. During the last few minutes a river, grey and rapid, had approached the road on a gradual slant from the left, and now ran beside it.

  “Here you are,” Warren said, as the car, with a hollow sound, ran onto a long slender bridge—“this is the Drin.”

  “But—we’ve been in Albania for miles and miles,” Gloire protested. “All that stretch yesterday before Scutari, and all the way we’ve come this afternoon.”

  “Just the same, this was the line the Yugos wanted, and damn nearly got,” Warren told her. “And in the South, the Greeks damn nearly got the whole country pretty well up to Valona.”

  “But I can’t see why such ideas were ever considered.”

  “Believe you me, they were—and if there were another war, and Greece and Yugo-Slavia fought on the winning side, they’d be considered again,” said Warren, with a sort of sour energy. ‘Reward your friends’ is a great motto! The Greeks are great hands at propaganda, much better at it than these poor little people. They say they’re disunited anyway, with their three religions—Roman, Moslem, Orthodox; and it’s durned easy to call them down because of their feuds—I know that. And the British and American publics tend to think that since there’s only a million Albanians anyway, they’re too small to matter. God rot and damn,” said Warren with surprising sudden anger, “the whole cursed conception of size! As if size has anything to do with it!”

  Gloire was startled. Warren, the American diplomat, was echoing Larsen now, as he had echoed George not long before. Funny how everyone who knew these countries seemed to have much the same ideas about them.

  “Did you ever meet a man called Larsen?” she asked Warren suddenly.

  “Why, I don’t recollect that I did,” Warren answered, turning to her in surprise at this sudden change of subject. “What is he? A diplomat?”

  “No, he’s in the International Labour Office. I just thought you might have,” said Gloire carelessly, rather regretting her impulsive question.

  “He a boy-friend of yours?” Warren enquired, turning his deep-set eyes on her with a sort of gloomy amusement.

  “Oh God, no!” Gloire replied. She shifted back onto the former subject. “Are the Albanians very disunited, actually?”

  “No. It’s true that they have three religions—Roman in the North, Moslem in the centre, and Greek Church—Orthodox—” in the South, but—”

  “Why?” Gloire interrupted.

  “Well, there are perfectly good historical reasons for that,” Warren said, brushing the question aside. “And it’s quite true that they did have the most ruinous blood-fueds—till Zahg had the guts to make it illegal to carry arms, and the Gendarmerie more or less enforced the law. And they are politically immature—well, so is the U.S.A.! It’s so easy to misrepresent all that, and you bet your life it has been done, and thoroughly! But the point is,” said Warren, again with that surprising energy, “that they’re a distinct race, with perfectly individual traditions. The Albanian colonies right through Greece have never been absorbed—they’ve never even bothered to learn Greek; they’ve taught the Greeks to speak Albanian! Same goes for the Kastriote colony in Southern Italy. And since they were freed from the Turks;—they revolted against them fifty-two times, by the way; that’s an average of a revolt every eight years for four centuries—their national consciousness has gotten the bit between its teeth, and believe you me, it’s come to stay. No one will ever be able to make Bismarck’s damfool mistake about the Albanians again. They don’t want to be under the Jugs or Greeks or Wops—they want to be themselves.”

  “Of course. Why shouldn’t they?” said Gloire carelessly. She was peering out of the window of the car. “Warren, what on earth is that bird?” she said.

  Warren leaned across and peered too. On the telephone wire beside the road sat a bird with a longish tail, brilliantly coloured in black, coral-red, and vivid jade-green, bright and glowing as enamel.

  “That’s a bee-eater,” said Warren, sitting back. “Place is full of them.”

  “It’s exquisite,” said Gloire, also sitting back. “Wouldn’t it be heaven in a hat?”

  Warren looked rather sourly at her. He didn’t know quite what to make of Gloire at the moment—now apparently interested in Albania, now vague and vain as of old, as he had always known her.

  “What did you want to come to Albania for, anyway?” he asked her suddenly. “You haven’t told me that yet. I wouldn’t have thought it was at all your cup of tea.”

  “I thought I’d like to see something a bit different,” she said, with elaborate casualness.

  “Well, I guess you will,” he said rather grimly.

  Gloire’s face took on a curious little air of satisfaction.

  “I guess I will, all right,” she said.

  Chapter Six

  Warren Langdon, for some time after their arrival in Tirana, continued to wonder what had prompted Gloire to come to Albania. His reaction to her proposed visit had been the same as that of most people who knew her, at the prospect: pleasure at the idea of having someone so decorative about, tinged—usually rather strongly tinged—with anxiety as to how she would behave. Ever since she grew up Gloire had generally had one or more admirers hanging around—the worst type of continental Duke or Count, or else quite impossible South Americans. (Warren did not find it easy to extend the Good Neighbour policy to individual Latin-American gigolos when they were actively engaged in compromising Gloire, of whom in his vague and helpless way he was rather fond.) Also he had had to take Anne into account. Miss Anne, always generous with disapproval of everything and everyone which did not conform to Beacon Street standards, could not have disapproved more than she did of Gloire; since her marriage she had never heard her name mentioned without wondering aloud how in the Name of Fortune that girl could have captured that attractive well-bred Captain Thurston. Warren always agreed that Tony Thurston had been “durn nice”—like many high-class Americans he used the lower forms of his native speech out of a rather pleasing affectation�
�and his mere presence, his tough unsubtle British husbandliness had sufficed to keep the Argentines and Dukes at arm’s length. But since her husband’s death, Warren had gathered that Gloire was “worse than ever”, as Miss Anne put it. He had asked her why she had come to Albania, but what he really wondered was for whom she had come.

  However, no one obvious appeared—no Counts or Dukes sprang up out the ground, and Warren and Miss Anne set themselves, conscientiously but rather depressedly, to entertain their guest. Diplomatic societies are usually small, but in Tirana the society was even smaller than elsewhere, few legations having a staff larger than three, of whom one was usually the archivist; Military and Naval Attachés belonged to and lived in Rome, and appeared at rare intervals for a sort of pastoral visit. The other resources of Tirana were slender in the extreme. There was no theatre or opera, and only one hotel worth mentioning, the Ritz—which bore but a slight resemblance to the Ritzes of other capitals. In fact a Moslem Monarch, and some beautiful but inaccessible scenery was about all! Diplomatic life in Tirana, Warren said, was much more like Jane Austen than Harold Nicolson—it literally did consist largely, as far as he and Miss Anne were concerned, in taking tea and reading aloud.

  However, he did his best. One could go for picnics—that is to say, one could go for two picnics, to Kruja, and to the old castle of Petrella, up in the hills towards Elbasan—those being the two directions in which there were roads. And one could go to Durazzo, to which there was also a road, and visit at the British Legation. And Gloire could meet the Corps, such as it was. Warren anticipated, with a sort of dismal relish, introducing such a bird of paradise into the modest flock of sparrows of the local society. But he was sure Gloire would very soon become bored, and then to désennuyer herself she would begin to behave frightfully, and there would be a whole lot of trouble with Anne.

  At first, however, his fears were not realised. Gloire did dazzle the local society, certainly, but it obviously enjoyed being dazzled, especially the male half. Nor did she seem anywhere near as bored as usual. The fact was that Gloire, actuated still by the impulse given her by Larsen, was for the first time in her life looking at a capital with some other motive than seeing what amusement or sensation she, Gloire, could personally extract from it. She constantly asked to be “shown everything”; and everything did not bear the usual Gloire construction of restaurants and cocktail-bars—of which in any case there were next to none in Tirana. She asked to see hospitals and schools!—and Miss Anne, with grudging and incredulous approval, faithfully took her to view them. Gloire was rather struck by those institutions, as a matter of fact; the admirable and up-to-date equipment introduced under the “Zahg” régime was startling in a capital which was in many respects so “small-town” and so rag-time.

  For Tirana in 1936 was rather a rag-time capital. Large parts of it consisted of small ramshackle wooden houses, “shacks” Gloire called them, or of stone ones, behind high walls and almost windowless on the street side; there was of course the Mosque, old and beautiful; on the outskirts were the modern and rather attractive villas of the diplomatic corps and the official and business communities. Finally there was the Whitehall of Tirana, a broad street with the various newly-erected ministries, as gaily-coloured as Neapolitan ices, stretching away from a large square in which it had once been intended to have a sheet of ornamental water. But though the hollow for this had been dug out, funds ran short before it could be cemented and filled; and Nature, abhorring a vacuum, had stepped in and taken the place in hand. A dense growth of bushes, wild hollyhocks, long grass, and acanthus now filled it, in which goats browsed. Nature crept up to the very edge of Whitehall, too. Sitting one day in the Cadillac, waiting for Warren outside the Ministry of the Interior, Gloire was fascinated to observe a small flock of brown and white sheep emerge from the bushes behind the Ministry of Education, nip smartly across the roadway, and disappear into the undergrowth behind the Ministry for War.

  Confronted with such scenes, Gloire’s rather facile contempt tended to get the upper hand. She had always despised the badly-dressed, the insignificant, the people who didn’t know what restaurants to go to, and whom the maîtres d’hôtel in the right restaurants did not instantly recognise and fawn upon. She was too ignorant to recognise the measure of achievement which Tirana represented, the distance which the little capital of a little nation had already travelled in its twenty-five years, or less, of independence—a distance as great as from the Old Testament to the twentieth century. She had no idea of how close the Old Testament lay to the very outskirts of the city.

  It was in one of these moods of contempt that she asked Warren, one day when she had been in Tirana nearly a week, whether he really liked being there? They were sitting out in the long open-fronted garden room at the back of the house, where the Langdons had their meals in warm weather; the dining-table stood at one end, at the other was an assemblage of garden-chairs and swing seats, flanked by small tables for drinks and ash-trays. Warren had a genius for comfort. Miss Anne, on the other hand, sat always in an uncompromising high-backed chair, and the small table beside it seldom carried anything more adapted to relaxation than her work-box, gold thimble, and gold scissors. She did smoke, on principle—one cigarette after lunch, one after tea, and two after dinner; before dinner she drank one cocktail; they were her deliberate compromise with the modern world, and a part of the companionship which she felt it a duty to extend to her brother in Melanie’s absence.

  Warren turned round in his chaise-longue, at Gloire’s question and looked at her from under his grey eyebrows. How distinguished he is, she thought idly. She had a momentary absurd wish that Larsen could see Warren.

  “Yes, I like being here a lot,” he replied, slowly.

  “Why on earth? It’s such a hick town,” said Gloire, discontentedly.

  “I like the Albanians terribly,” Warren said.

  “Now Warren, you can’t possibly like all those ghastly men, the Cabinet or whatever they were, in the frock-coats, that we met at that luncheon yesterday. Their top-hats! I can’t think where on earth they got them.

  Warren laughed.

  “Why my dear, I grant you their top-hats are pretty comic, and they’re no beauties themselves, in that dress. But they’re mighty nice men, all the same. I don’t suppose it has ever occurred to you,” said Warren, taking a sip at his John Collins, “that the transition to modern ways is always a little comic, but you can take it from me that it is. People can hardly put a foot wrong with traditional dress, just because it is traditional—it’s as effortlessly beautiful and right as the fur on a sable or the coat on a horse. But modern dress requires a great deal of skill and a great deal of experience—as well as a lot of money—if it’s to come off.” He looked at her as she sat in one of the linen swings, in her sleeveless white shark-skin frock, the skirt so short that it showed the knees of her long silken legs, with her faultless hair and face, and the heavy bizarre gold necklace and bracelets that she wore—the latest dress-makers’ fad extended even to jewellery.

  “You do bring it off, my dear,” he guyed her indulgently; “but then you devote pretty well all of your time to it, don’t you? And a whole heap of money. Your friends in the top-hats can’t do that—they’re running a country, in very difficult circumstances, on a minute exchequer. But they’re great people.”

  “Great in what way?” Gloire asked.

  “Why, they’re plucky and exceedingly intelligent—much more intelligent than you would ever find out, because they haven’t the Western tradition of talking to women about things; they still feel orientally about women, that you should just pet and flatter them. The Turks are still that way too, Melanie tells me,” Warren put in parenthetically—“she got pretty mad with them when we were in Ankara.”

  “Did the Turks pet Melanie?” Gloire asked, with delighted incredulity, thinking of that gaunt face and figure, rigid with nerves.

  Warren laughed.

  “No, I guess not—just flattered h
er. But they wouldn’t talk politics with her, and that made her mad. She thought them all fools. But they aren’t fools, any more than these boyos here are.”

  Warren, in his leisurely way, pursued his exposition. Warren was like that—ask him a question, and he would go on carefully answering it for hours. Very restful, Gloire found it. You didn’t have to listen unless you wanted to.

  “They’re somehow nearer to reality than we are,” Warren was saying.

  “Just how do you mean?” Gloire interrupted.

  “Why, they’re still familiar with the plumb bedrock conditions of life, the soil, and the weather and all that, that we’ve gotten sort of air-conditioned away from, with our artificial temperatures and our refrigerator-cars bringing us fruit and vegetables from sub-tropical climates at all seasons.” He smiled. “When we were talking politics, after luncheon yesterday, old Vrioni, the Minister of Finance, was pointing out that if the Cabinet stood up to the Italians about—well, about something or other—they would get a particular sort of reaction, and he finished off by saying—Tease the donkey, but take the kick.’ I like people who still use those country proverbs so naturally. And then they have a very distinctive quality, among all these Slavs down here.”

  “Who are they actually—what race I mean? You say they aren’t Slavs—I thought everyone down here was Slav, that wasn’t Greeks or Turks.”

  “Well, I won’t say you’re a disgrace, Gloire, because pretty well everyone is the same way! But that’s no credit to the world! The Albanians,” Warren pronounced, “are just about the oldest race in Europe. They’re Thraco-Illyrians; the one living remnant of the very first Aryan immigrants to this little continent. That’s pretty interesting, to me. They were right through the Balkans at first; in the fourth century B. C., the kingdom of Illyria stretched from Trieste right down to the Gulf of Arta—that’s below Corfu—under a pretty good King they had: Bardhyllus—which means White Star.”