Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  Montenegro

  Montenegro

  ROAD

  I WOKE EARLY. BECAUSE OF MY INQUIRY INTO THE STATE of religion in Petch, I had had to dine on sardines, dry bread, red wine, and black coffee, and the diet had not suited me. I crept out of my room and along the groaning, grumbling corridors and down into the street, and took a cab out to the Patriarchate, because I wanted to have another look at the huge Madonna and her tiny rebellious and athletic Christ-child. The Albanian cab-driver brought a friend with him on the box, who also, he said, wished to enjoy the opportunity of conversation with me, so I spread out my dictionary on my knee and did what I could for them. The cab-driver was a sombrely handsome young man of a type familiar in the Balkans; his friend was a natural comedian, a Robin Goodfellow, with straight red hair long about his shoulders, a crowing voice, and stiff, signalling hands. They were Roman Catholics, but I found they knew nothing of the sayings or doings of Pope Pius X, and most of their Western co-religionists would have found them not altogether congenial. The driver was single, but Robin Goodfellow had married a girl of fourteen seven years ago and had six children. They were resentful against the Government and expressed the desire and even an intention to murder as many of its officials as possible, but their chief grievance seemed nothing more than the price of sugar. This is indeed high, owing to the state monopoly, but not so high as to justify this extreme ferocity. They were very much interested in all sweet things, and had heard about the superiority of English and Swiss chocolate, so I had to talk with the pedantry of a wine connoisseur about Peters and Tobler and Nestle, Cadbury and Rowntree and Fry. Jam and spices they wanted to learn about also; but I failed to surmount the difficulty of describing curry in an imperfectly mastered language. They asked me how old I was, what my husband did, and why he had not come out with me. When I said he was still asleep they suggested to each other, not facetiously, but as realists in a world of men, that he had as like as not been drunk the night before.

  The garden of the Patriarchate was golden-green in the slanting early sunlight, the church was honey-coloured and filled with the honey of the Abbot’s voice. Among the chief glories of the Orthodox Church are the number of priests who can sing and speak as the mouthpieces of a god should do. I had come in for the end of a service which had been attended by two middle-aged men, who bore themselves like devotees of unusual fervour, some young women with their children, and a number of the straight-backed old ladies in trousers whom I had noticed here before. When the service was over I had half an hour with the frescoes, which were now still lovelier than I had thought them. The morning light, striking the windows of the dome at right angles, was deflected into the softest possible radiance as it poured down into the church, and under it the paintings gave up their full gentleness, the elegance and spring-like freshness that made them kin to much early Italian art. I looked not so long at the terrible Mother and Child as at the scenes which showed the Christian legend taking place in a country that I had thought to be ancient Tuscany, that I now knew to have wider frontiers. Then I went out into the sunlight, warm enough now to draw the scent out of the walnut trees and the pines, and I took a last draught of the healing water from the fountain before I went to say good-bye to the priest, who was drinking his morning coffee at a table under the trees. I stood beside him for a minute before he noticed me, for his Albanian servant and an old labourer had laid down before him a plant with fleshy leaves and stem that had been trampled and broken, and he was staring at it, with his elbows on the table and his coffee-cup held in his hands. I think they were debating what animal had been that way. Their deliberation had an air of essential virtue. By such carefulness life survives.

  On the way home the cab-driver and his friend inquired what countries I had visited, and which I liked best. I said I had been to the United States and every country in Europe except Russia, Roumania, Poland, and Portugal; and that I liked Yugoslavia, the United States, France, and Finland best of all. They cried out at the name of France. The French they could not abide. They had fought against them in the Great War, they said, and they were glad of it. They liked, they said, the Germans and the Bulgarians, and they hated the Serbs. They both agreed that they would thoroughly enjoy another war if only it would give them the chance of shooting a lot of Serbs. They help up their left arms and looked along them and twitched their right thumbs against their left elbows and said ‘Boom! Boom! A Serb is dead!’ I said, ‘But what have you against the Serbs?’ They said, ‘After the war they ill-treated us and took our land from us.’ There was some justification for this, I knew. The district of Petch was handed over to an old man who had been King Peter’s Master of the Horse, and he appears, like our own followers of the Belvoir and the Quorn, to have offered conclusive proof of the powerfully degenerative effect of equine society on the intellect. ‘But now what do they do to you?’ I asked. They shrugged and grumbled. ‘We live so poor,’ they said; ‘in Albania our brothers live far better than we do.’ It was as pathetic as the belief of the Bulgarian schoolboy in Bitolj that Bulgaria was a richer country than Yugoslavia; for everybody who comes out of Albania into Yugoslavia is amazed at the difference, which is all in Yugoslavia’s favour, of the standard of living.

  When they left me at my hotel, I gave the driver a good tip, and he thanked me in a phrase so remarkable that I made him repeat it several times. But it was true; he had really said, ‘I am glad of this money, for tomorrow I am going to Paris to be married.’ It sounded such a Sketch and Tatler thing to do that, though by this time I was exhausted by the strain of picking a conversation piecemeal out of a dictionary, I made him explain it. The explanation gave me fresh evidence of the capacity of France to assimilate strange stuff and make it her own. ‘You must know,’ he said, ‘that I am not only the driver of this cab, I own it.’ ‘He is Rothschild!’ shrieked Robin Goodfellow, poking him in the ribs, ‘he owns a dozen cabs.’ He owned in fact eight. They took the visitors to Dechani, and anyway no woman of property went about Petch on foot except to the market. When he had bought the eighth he had written to his aunt, who had married the Italian proprietor of a small hotel in Paris, and asked her to find him a wife. She had found him the photographs of several candidates in the Albanian colony of Paris, which was small but prosperous, and he had chosen one to whom he was to be married in five days’ time. In a missionary spirit I said, ‘Is your aunt happy in Paris?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she and her husband made a lot of money, and they say they are very free there.’ ‘And the Albanians who live there, are they happy?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘they are all doing well.’ ‘But don’t you think maybe that means the French are good enough people?’ I said. But it was not a point that was likely to convince people who had been brought up to regard as normal a state where different races grew up in conditions decided by a distant ruler. To them the idea of a country being directly governed by its inhabitants is one of abnormal compactness, like a hermaphrodite.

  I went up to our bedroom and found my husband locking his suitcase. On the middle of my bed there had been built with offensive ingenuity a little cairn of the things I had forgotten to pack in mine. ‘They are all things,’ I pointed out, ‘that I would not mind losing.’ ‘Packing,’ said my husband, ‘belongs to a different category from criticism.’ The little Hungarian chambermaid popped her head inside the door, and we tipped her fifty dinars, which is four and twopence, and she thought it so handsome that she kissed my hand furiously. ‘That is a good little one,’ said Constantine, as he went downstairs to breakfast; ‘this morning she helped me to pack and she said to me, “I tell you, I would have liked to be with you, you are so charming, so very cultured, it might even have been that you would have quoted select passages of poetry to me. So I have been to you every night when I had finished my work, but each time you had fever, you were red as a lobster, so I saw it was not written in the stars that we should be together.” ’

  We had our breakfast outside the large restaurant, and presently Consta
ntine left us to say good-bye to the Chief of Police, who was giving some advice to a man standing with two pack-horses in the middle of the road, and we were joined by the Danish seller of agricultural machinery, who regarded us with a benevolence that was galling. We had the impression that he had just received information that we were completely harmless and unimportant, and that in any case even if we had some grain of significance we were leaving, so it did not matter. ‘You are going, hein?’ he said. ‘Over the mountains to Kolashin and then to Tsetinye? And up the coast to Split, and then to Budapest, and home, very nice, very nice.’ ‘How kind of you to be so interested in our itinerary as to find out what it is,’ said my husband. ‘Oh, the people here talk, you know,’ said the alleged Dane. ‘I should think it more likely that they read,’ said my husband darkly. There fell a silence, which I weakly broke by saying to him, ‘Look, do you see that young man walking along carrying that black portfolio? Bow to him, he has greeted us. It is the clerk of the court, who so kindly offered to show us the sights of the town the first night we got here.’ The alleged Dane burst into laughter. ‘That young Lümmel! He was fool enough to tell me what he earns. Think of it, he is a university graduate, and he makes each week twelve marks—one of your pounds! Here they’re a starveling lot.’ ‘Yes, it’s a pity they’re so poor,’ said my husband. ‘For they are such nice people,’ said I. ‘You waste your pity,’ said the alleged Dane, in sudden and brutal passion; ‘these are Slavs, they have no right to anything, they are as sheep, as cattle, as swine.’

  The hotel tried to overcharge us, but its experience of the world was so small that its efforts were scarcely perceptible. However, Constantine and Dragutin were very indignant, and we did not get clear of the dispute until ten minutes past seven. Then we started off for the gorge, for Tserna Gora. ‘Now we will climb like eagles!’ cried Dragutin. ‘And there,’ he said, as we passed a grassy patch under the willows on the river’s bank on the way to the Patriarchate, ‘is where I have slept each night since we came to Petch. These accursed thieves at the hotel tried to charge me, a chauffeur, for my room at the same rate as you people, and though I knew you would have paid, I would not have it so, and I came out here and flung myself down, and it was no sacrifice, for I slept like a king.’

  We left the bosomy domes of the Patriarchate behind us, and we went into the Rugovo gorge, which would at any time be superb, and was now a pageant of the sterner beauties possible in nature and man. It was over the rocks at the mouth of this gorge that the retreating Serbian Army of 1915 pushed its guns lest the Austrians and Bulgarians should make use of them, and walked on into ice and famine; and the scenery is appropriate to that drama. Its sheer precipices and fretted peaks show the iron constitution our planet hides under its grass and flowers; and down the road there were swinging in majestic rhythm men and women who showed the core of hardness humanity keeps under its soft wrapping of flesh. They were going down to the market at Petch, and most were on foot; before nightfall they would return to their homes. And they were coming from villages five, ten, and even fifteen miles up the gorge. In fact, they were going to walk ten to thirty miles in the day, the latter half of the journey up a steep mountain road. It seemed so Herculean a trip that we got Constantine to question two typical wayfarers, an Albanian wearing a white turban with its ends brought across his throat, to hide one of the goitres which are so common in the mountains, and his wife, a raw-boned woman wearing a black dress which oddly broke into a flounce just above her knees, with something of a Cretan air. Yes, they came from that village up there, about a mile away on the hillside, and they would walk to Petch and back by nightfall. There was no question of riding their pack-pony for it was loaded now with what they were going to sell, which was wool, and on the return journey it would be loaded with what they were going to buy, which would probably be wood, if the price were right; in any case I doubt if it could have carried their pylon-like forms. Their leathery faces slowly split into enormous grins as they grasped our astonishment. All these people on the road were very deliberate and stiff and emphatic in their movements and their speech, like frescoes come to life. One woman, who was sitting in a cart with her young child under her blue mantle, resembled exactly one of the Madonnas of Dechani, twisted by the strain put upon her endurance by her love. Again it seemed that Byzantine art is not so much stylized as we believe, and that it may be a more or less naturalist representation of a highly stylized life.

  The gorge widened to a valley where snow mountains looked down on beechwoods, widened and steepened to another Switzerland; and so it might be, and may yet become. The grass grows short and thick as gourmand cows would have it. Here there might be cheese and tinned milk and milk chocolate, if the population could but afford to buy good cows and knew how to keep them. In Stephen Dushan’s time fat flocks and herds were driven up here every summer, but under the Turks such luxurious husbandry was forgotten among Christians, and only a few nomads cared for pastures in such a disputed district as the frontier between Montenegro and Albania. Even those had their movements circumscribed by the definition of the Yugoslavian frontier, for some of them had their winter pastures in territory that was assigned to Greece and to Albania, hence they could no longer pass from one to the other. Also there might be practised a moderate form of mountaineering, for there is some excellent rock-climbing and some eternal snow; but the tradition of guides and chalets has yet to be created. There are as good as Swiss flowers. Where the road mounted to the pass it hairpinned across a slope too high for trees, which was clouded purple with crocuses, golden with kingcups. On the razor-edge of the pass we looked, as one may often do in Switzerland, backward and forward at two worlds. Behind us the mountains stretched to a warm horizon, themselves not utterly cold, as if the low hills and plains beyond exhaled a rich, thawing breath from their fertility. Before us the mountains and valleys fused into a land cooler than all others, as a statue is cooler than a living body. It is not, as the school books have it, that Montenegro is barren: that is a delusion of those who see it only from the sea. Its inland half, if it has little for the plough, has many woods and pastures. But they are held in a cup of rock, they are insulated from the common tide of warmth that suffuses the rest of earth. What the cup holds is pure. In summer, they say, there is here pure heat; in autumn pure ripeness; in winter pure cold. Now, in this late springtime it was pure freshness, the undiluted essence of what that season brings the world to renew its youth.

  ‘At this pass was the old Turkish frontier,’ said Constantine. ‘And is no more, and is no more, thank God,’ said Dragutin. Down below, at the end of a valley bright with the thin green flames of beechwoods and clouds of flowers, we came on a poorish village and halted at the inn. ‘Now I must ask the way to Lake Plav,’ said Constantine, ‘for you should certainly see Lake Plav. Did you ever hear of it?’ I knew the name. An unfortunate contretemps occurred here during the Balkan War. When Montenegro captured the village of Plav from the Turks in 1912, they were greatly aided by a local Moslem priest, who joined the Orthodox Church and was appointed a major in the Montenegrin Army. His first action when left unsupervised was to hold a court-martial on his former congregation and to shoot all those who refused to be baptized. They numbered, it is said, five hundred. The incident has the terrible quality of juvenile crime. Little Willie was told to be a good boy and keep his baby from crying, and it was precisely because he wanted to be a good boy that he held a pillow over baby’s face. I had thought of the place where this happened as a circle of mud huts in a hollow of gleaming stones below vertical mountains. But two or three miles over a bumpy road took us to a place that was a perfect and rounded image of pleasure. A circle of water lay in a square of emerald marshland, fringed with whitish reeds, and framed by hills patterned with green grass and crimson earth, with a sheer wall of snow mountains behind them. The glowing hills and the shining peaks were exactly mirrored in the lake, and received the embellishment of a heavenly bloom peculiar to its waters. We sat down on
a stone dike, shaded by a thorn which the winds had whipped into the form of a modest Chinese lady. Below us a man was cutting turf at the lake edge, and loading it on a bright-blue cart drawn by a grey pony; he was as graceful as if he had never known fatigue in his life, and his white shirt, kilt, and trousers and black bolero were white as snow and black as coal against the emerald marsh. This was as good a place as can be, if beauty is of any good. ‘Lake Plav,’ said Constantine, ‘means blue lake. Plav is a strange word. It means blue or fair-haired. All that is beautiful without being sombre.’