by Rebecca West
‘I see the problem from a different aspect,’ said Mr A., ‘because I have been in America for a very long time. It does not shock me so much that Dalmatia should be governed from Belgrade, for I have lived in Milwaukee for many years, and things went very well there, though we were governed from Washington, which was far further away from us than Belgrade is from Split. And I have been to Washington, which is a fine city, and I know it is right that the government of a great country should have impressive buildings. But my case against Belgrade is that it governs badly. Oh, I know there is corruption and graft in American politics, but you have no idea what it is like here. The trouble is not only that, as X. says, the money goes to Belgrade, it’s what happens to it when it gets there. It sticks to people’s palms in the most disgusting way. There are ever so many people in Belgrade who have made fortunes, huge fortunes, by peculation. And that’s the only activity in which they ever show any efficiency. For the idiotic muddle of the administration is beyond belief.’
‘It is worse, then, than it was under the Austrians?’ asked my husband. They looked at him in astonishment. ‘Not at all,’ said Mr A.; ‘the Austrians were not inefficient at all. They were assassins. Look what they did here with the railways!’ They all broke out into cries of anger and disgust. ‘Why, think of it,’ said Mr X., ‘the railway stopped outside Split, so as to make sure we should be nothing of a port.’ ‘And we could not go to Austria except through Budapest,’ said Mrs X. ‘That was the Hungarian influence, of course,’ said Mr A. ‘But Austria permitted it,’ said Mr X. ‘Permitted it!’ cried Mrs A., the Czech. ‘Tell me when those who speak German have not rejoiced in humiliating the Slavs. And there are people in your country,’ she said to us, ‘who are sorry for the German-speaking minorities in Czechoslovakia. There are beings so charitable that they would get up funds to provide feeding-bottles for baby alligators.’
But my husband persisted. ‘Then you found the Austrians efficient in what? Assassination only?’ ‘In that certainly,’ said Mr A., ‘but they were also far more efficient than our present Government in the everyday routine of administration. Take the case of my family. Several of them have been university professors. Now, the old ones, who retired under the Austrians, never had any difficulty in getting their pensions. They drew their pay, they retired, they filled in papers, they drew the appointed sum. Nothing could have been simpler. But now there is terrible disorder. I have an uncle, a professor of mathematics, who retired months ago. He fulfilled all the requisite formalities, but he has not yet touched a penny of his pension. The papers have not come through from Belgrade, for no other reason than sheer muddle.’ ‘And it is so, too, in my profession,’ said Mr X. ‘I am a lawyer, it is the calling of my family, and some of my older relatives are judges. It is the same with pensions, and appointments, and even dates for trials, everything that comes from Belgrade. There is endless bother and muddle. And we are not accustomed to such things in Split, for here we manage our affairs simply, it may be, but with a certain distinction.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ said Mrs A., ‘if they would leave us Splitchani to manage our own affairs, that would be all we ask.’
‘But there are affairs which are certainly your own, but which equally you cannot manage,’ said my husband. ‘You could not yourselves have got rid of Austria, and you cannot yourselves protect yourselves if she comes back, or if Italy wants to establish the same domination over you.’ They looked at him with preoccupied bright eyes, and said, ‘Of course, of course.’ ‘And though some money must vanish in Belgrade in peculation, since that inevitably happens in every new country,’ said my husband, ‘a great deal must be spent in legitimate enterprises. There is, after all, Macedonia and Old Serbia. I have not yet been there, but my wife tells me it has been revolutionized since the days when it was Turkish, that she has seen with her own eyes hundreds of miles of good military roads, whole districts of marshes that have been drained and now are no longer malarial, and many schools and hospitals. All that costs money.’ ‘Yes, there was nothing down there in those parts,’ said Mr A. without enthusiasm. ‘They are nearly barbarians,’ said Mrs X., wrinkling her nose with distaste. ‘Have you ever been there?’ asked my husband. They shook their heads. Split is two days’ easy journey from Old Serbia, three days from the heart of Macedonia. ‘It is not easy for us to go to such places,’ said Mrs X.; ‘here in Split we have a certain tradition, we would not be at home there.’
When we got back to our room in the hotel, my husband said, ‘All this is very sad. Men and women have died and lived for the ideal of Yugoslavia, the South Slav state; and here are these very charming people chafing with discontent at the realization of it. And so far as I can see, however bad Belgrade may be, they give it no chance to prove its merits. These people are born and trained rebels. They cry out when they see a government as if it were a poisonous snake, and seize a stick to kill it with, and in that they are not being fanciful. All the governments they have known till now have been, so far as they are concerned, poisonous snakes. But all the same that attitude would be a pity, if they happened to meet a government for once who was not a poisonous snake.
‘Moreover, I cannot see how these people can ever fit into a modern state. They are essentially the children of free cities. Because all these towns, even while they were exploited and oppressed so far as their external relations were concerned, possessed charters that gave them great freedom to manage their internal affairs. Under the Hungarian crown the towns enjoyed the same sort of freedom, as of a state within a state, that the City of London enjoyed under Henry the First. Their rights were ceaselessly attacked by Venice, but they managed to defend most of them. They were forced to provide men for the Venetian Army and Navies, and their trade was ruined by the restrictions laid upon it; but they were always to some extent masters at their own firesides. They really cannot conceive of a centralized government at all as otherwise than an evil: and when they got rid of Austria there must have been a childish idea at the back of their minds that they had also got rid of a centralized government, and would return to medieval conditions. Alas! Alas!’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I am watching three people talking in the square. They are so very picturesque; come and see them.’ My husband turned out the light and came and sat beside me on the window-seat. The square was whitewashed with moonlight; the dark shadows took the nineteenth-century Venetian Gothic architecture and by obscuring the detail and emphasizing the general design made it early, authentic, exquisite. On the quay ships slept, as alone among inanimate objects ships can sleep; their lights were dim and dreaming. Between the flaked trunk of a palm tree and the wild-haired shadow of the leaves stood three men of the quick and whippy and secret kind we had seen when we first entered Split, descendants of those who had lived through the angry centuries the lives of rats and mice in the walls of Diocletian’s palace. Sometimes we could hear their voices raised in lyrical mockery, and sometimes they made gestures that united them on a platform of heroism and loaded some absent person with ridicule and chains. ‘Yes, they are wonderful,’ said my husband. ‘Though they probably have no noble ideas, they are noble in the intensity of their being, and in the persistency with which they try to identify their standards and the ultimate values of right and wrong. See how they are pretending that behind them, had one but the proper eyesight, could be seen the wings of the hierarchy of angels and the throne itself, and that behind the man they are despising is primeval ooze and chaos. These people are profoundly different from us. They are not at all sentimental, but they are extremely poetic. How they examine everything, and analyse it, and form a judgement on it that engenders a supply of the passion which is their motive power! How I should hate to govern these people who would not accept the idea of government and would insist on examining it, but only as a poet does, from the point of view of his own experience, which is to say that they would reject all sorts of information about it which they ought to consider if they are going to form a just opinion about it.’
&n
bsp; We watched the three men till a languor showed in their vehemence. They had laughed so much at the fourth man who was not there that any further mockery would seem an anticlimax. The night was left to the sleeping ships, to the temporary romantic perfection of the Venetian arcades. ‘Get into bed,’ my husband said, ‘and I will read you the other story which Voinovitch says the Dalmatian peasantry tell about the Emperor Diocletian.’ It was the prettier of the two. It represents Diocletian’s daughter, Valeria, as the victim of her father; not, as in fact she was, as the subject of a good worldly marriage that went maniacally wrong, but with a destiny cut fairy-tale fashion. She had, according to this story, a crowd of suitors, and of these her father chose a prince whom she could not tolerate. So she refused obedience, and upon this her father cast her into one of the dungeons in his palace. But God was on her side. Once a year invisible hands opened the door of her prison, and she travelled through the city clad in cloth of gold, in a shining chariot drawn by winged horses. Her presence was a benediction, and anybody who could stop the chariot and embrace her would be happy all the rest of his life. When Diocletian heard of these visits he sent soldiers to clear the streets, but it could not be done. The people worshipped Valeria and would not be driven away. Then Diocletian decided to kill her. But the walls of her prison melted, and not all his power could discover her. According to this legend, she still lives, and once every hundred years she comes back to her worshippers. It is not known what year of the century she chooses for her visit, but be that as it may, her visit always falls at Christmastide. When they are saying the midnight mass in the Cathedral, a procession of ghosts starts from Salonæ and winds up the road to Split; and at the end the lovely young Valeria rides in her golden coach, still able to give lifelong happiness to all that embrace her. She still, it must be observed, carries on her quarrel with authority. She was at odds with her pagan father, but she does not attend the Christian mass.
‘See, this story cuts at the root of the idea of power,’ said my husband; ‘it denies all necessary sanctions to authority. For power claims to know what life is going to be about and what prescription to offer, and authority claims to be able to enforce that prescription. But the Slav knows, as this story proves, that life, which is to say Valeria, is in essence unpredictable, that she often produces events for which there is no apt prescription, and that she can be as slippery as an eel when wise men attempt to control her; and they know that it is life, not power or authority, that gives us joy, and this often when she is least predictable. Knowing Valeria, they cannot respect Diocletian; yet they produce Diocletian, they are Diocletian, they know perfectly well that power and authority are necessary.’
BOAT
On another great white steamer we glided down the coast to Korchula, and received at one port, and put ashore at another, the older of the two German couples with whom we had travelled from Salzburg to Zagreb. They hastened towards us uttering cries of welcome, excessively glad to see us because their holiday had made them excessively glad about everything. The man no longer looked ill; he seemed bound to his wife by a common novel satisfaction, as if they had been on their honeymoon. ‘It is so good here,’ they laughed, ‘one forgets all one’s worries.’ There seemed fresh evidence for the malignity of the universe in the sight of these Aryans, blossoming in their temporary exile from Germany, when all over England and France and America so many Jews were mourning for the fatherland in a grief visible as jaundice. Another of Dalmatia’s angry young men watched them coldly as they disembarked. ‘I am a hotel manager at Hvar,’ he said. Hvar is a beautiful town, which lies on an island of the same name. It is noted for the extraordinary sweetness of its air, which is indeed such as might be inhaled over a bed of blossoming roses, and by a perversity rare in the Serbo-Croat tongue it is pronounced ‘Whar.’ ‘Your friends will presently come to me and demand impossible terms. They are a curious people, the Germans. They seem content to travel when we would prefer to stay at home. Where is the pleasure of travelling if you cannot spend freely? Yet these Germans come here and have to count every penny and do not seem at all embarrassed. Now, that is all right if one is a poor student at Zagreb or Vienna, or is ill and has to go to a spa. But for a tourist it seems very undignified.’ It had struck me before that there are many resemblances between the Slavs and the Spanish, and this spoke with the very voice of Spain, in its expression of the purse-pride which comes not from wealth but from poverty, in its conception of handsome spending as an inherently good thing, to be indulged in, like truthfulness, even against one’s economic interest.
The angry young man scowled down at the marbled blue and white water that rushed by our ship. ‘I have read in Jackson’s great book on Dalmatia,’ said my husband, to soothe him, ‘that the inhabitants of the island of Hvar added to their income by making a sweet wine called prosecco, by distilling rosemary water, and by making an insecticide from the wild chrysanthemum. Do they still do all those pleasant things?’ ‘Not to any extent,’ answered the young man, his brows enraged. ‘Now they cultivate the tourist traffic all summer, and talk politics all winter. Politics and politics and politics, I am sick of politics. Why can we never have any peace? Why must there always be all this conflict?’ He was as angry as the young man who had been angry with the gardener at Trsat, or the other who had been angry with the cold soup on the boat to Rab, and it was with them that he felt angry. My husband attempted to comfort him by telling him that in England we were suffering from marked deterioration of political life, and even of national character, because we have no effectual opposition. ‘But here there is nothing but disputes and disputes and disputes!’ cried the young man.
There had been standing beside us a middle-aged man in expensive clothes, who was holding up his hand to hide the left side of his face. He now pressed forward and made what was evidently a sharp remark to the angry young hotel manager, who turned to us and said gloomily, ‘This man, who is a native of Hvar, says that I do wrong to speak to you like this, for it might discourage you from visiting Hvar, and it is certainly the most beautiful place in the world. I hope I have not done that?’ The middle-aged man interrupted in German, ‘Yes, you must not take what he says too seriously, for though we in Hvar are quarrelsome, as all Slavs are (it is the curse that has been laid upon us), that does not alter its extraordinary beauty. You must not miss visiting us, indeed you must not.’ ‘We cannot do so now,’ said my husband, ‘for we have made definite plans to go to Korchula today. But we will try to stop at Hvar on our way back.’ ‘Yes, that you must do! For, though I do not want to be discourteous to a sister island, and indeed all Dalmatia is glorious country, Korchula has little to show compared to Hvar.’ He began to speak of their main street, which is broad and paved with marble and lined with fifteenth-century palaces weathered to warm gold; of the old Venetian arsenal, that had a dry dock for the galleys below and above a theatre, the first theatre to be built in the Balkans, which is still just as it was in the seventeenth century, though the curtains in the boxes are thin as paper; of the Franciscan monastery that stands on a piny headland, with its picture of the Last Supper which is so marvellous that a Rothschild who had been made an English duke had tried to buy it from the monks for as many sovereigns as would cover the canvas; and of the lovely garden that had been made on the hill above the town, by a pupil of our dear Professor at Split, who had wished to emulate his teacher’s achievement in planting the woods on Mount Marian, which is as pretty a testimony to the value of humanist education as I know. During his story there sometimes came to him living phrases which made actual the beauty of his home, and then his hand dropped, no longer feeling it urgent to hide the port-wine stain that ravaged the left side of his face from temple to chin; and when the steamer entered Hvar harbour, and it was as he had said, he let his hand drop by his side.
When these new friends had left us and we were out in midchannel, I picked up a guide-book, but soon laid it down again, saying to my husband peevishly, ‘This guide-book is writ
ten by a member of my sex who is not only imbecile but bedridden. She is wrong about every place we have been to, so wildly wrong that it seems probable that not only can she never have visited any of these particular cities, but that she can have seen no scenery at all, urban or rural.’ ‘I think,’ said my husband, ‘that that is perhaps something of an over-statement. In any case there is no need for you to keep your eyes down on any guide-book, you might just as well be looking at the islands, which are really becoming very beautiful now that they support some trees. But I rather suspect that you are nervous about coming to Korchula and do not want to face it until the last moment.’ ‘Well, neither I do,’ I admitted. ‘I must own that I am seriously nervous about it, because I can’t believe that it had quite the revelatory quality I thought it had last year. You see, I passed it on my way from Split to Dubrovnik last year. I had been asleep on one of the benches on deck, and I woke suddenly to find that we were lying beside the quay of a little walled town which was the same creamy-fawn colour as some mushrooms and some puppies. It covered a low, rounded peninsula and was surmounted by a church tower, rising from it like a pistil from a flower; and its walls girt it so massively that they might have been thought natural cliffs if a specially beautiful lion of St. Mark had not certified them as works of art.
