Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  That night I said to my husband, ‘How strange it was to see those two men each thinking that if everybody behaved like the other the world would simply have to stop.’ ‘Yes,’ said my husband, ‘Sava Militchevitch thought that if men went about unarmed, putting themselves at a disadvantage before strangers, they would never be able to defend themselves. Constantine thought that if men did not use all means to discover what their enemies were doing they would never be able to defend themselves. Dignity was everything to the one, understanding was everything to the other.’ Five minutes after his voice spoke out of the darkness again, very sleepily now, ‘Sava’s attitude reminded me of something that happened on the mountainside when we were leaving those children. I do not think you saw this, you were too busy trying to convince Dragutin that the tortoise’s bowels would immediately act if it was carried in an automobile. By the way, what curious things you know. What happened was that Constantine gave the remaining cakes to the little fair princess and told her to distribute them among the other children. But there were six children and only four cakes. They would have to be divided, and that entailed an admission that they wanted those cakes, that they would care if the division was unequal. To have one’s mouth water for pastry, to feel like crying if one does not get it: these are not the grand classical emotions. So the little princess took the cakes and set them aside till we should be gone.’ Later he spoke again. ‘It is such a pity you do not read Greek.’ ‘I am too old for that now,’ I said, ‘but why does that distress you at this moment?’ ‘The little princess’s action,’ he said, and then stopped for drowsiness, but pushed himself on to finish, ‘the little princess’s action when she put away the cakes was lovely not only for what it meant but for what it was. Exactly similar movements must have been made a million million million times since the world began, yet the thrust of her arm seemed absolutely fresh. Well, it is so in the Iliad. When one reads of a man drawing a bow or raising a shield it is as if the dew of the world’s morning lay undisturbed on what he did. The primal stuff of humanity is very attractive.’

  Tsetinye II

  In the morning Tsetinye seemed even stranger than it had the night before. What earth lies round the town is richly fertile, and nourishes tall trees, green grass, and upstanding crops under the abundant rainfall. But there is hardly any earth, the fields are tiny, and all the rest of the countryside is porous rock that holds water no better than a sieve. It lies bone-dry not only under the sunshine but under the rain. A matching peculiarity of its inhabitants is their inability to accept this landscape although they are native to it. Few of them have travelled, but they all know that there is something unusual in the elevation and the bleakness of Montenegro. There still stands in the town the old Episcopal Palace, which is probably unique among the episcopal palaces of the world in being known to the population only as ‘Billiards’; this was because in the eighteen-thirties the Prince-Bishop Peter II had had a billiard-table brought up the mule track from Kotor, and it was a great wonder. In a room attached to this palace some Italian prisoners of war made a giant relief map under the direction of the Austrian Staff geographers, which Sava Militchevitch showed to us with a sense of the prodigiousness of its frenetic contours that would have been more natural in an English Fenlander. This surprise the Montenegrins constantly express concerning Montenegro suggests that they have retained a traditional memory of their homes on the plains and valleys of the Serbian Empire.

  Beside the Billiards is the monastery of Tsetinye, a fifteenth-century building to which restoration in the late seventeenth century had given the sturdy look characteristic of Montenegrin ecclesiastical architecture. On a rock above it were the ruins of a round tower, which I recognized as the occasion of the distress felt by an Englishman named Sir Gardner Wilkinson when he came here to visit the Prince-Bishop Peter II. When Peter I, the great law-giver, died in 1830 after a reign of forty-eight years, he was succeeded by one of the most interesting monarchs who ever occupied a European throne. He had been educated in this monastery at Tsetinye, then at the monastery of Savina down on the Adriatic shore, where Alexander of Yugoslavia tolled his own passing bell when he was on his way to his assassination at Marseille, and later he was tutored by a Serbian poet named Milutinovitch. It is part of the common babble of historians that Orthodox monasteries were dens of ignorance, superstition, and debauchery, and that the Serbs were a nation of pig-drivers. Peter II spoke German, French, Latin, and Russian, and learned the literatures of each language; he was an admirable administrator and jurist; he was a student of philosophy, and was deeply instructed in mysticism; he wrote, among much other verse, The Discovery of the Microcosm, which is one of the great metaphysical poems of the world. At this time the English throne was occupied by King William IV. Peter II left his country only once, to be ordained as Bishop and accepted as an ally in St Petersburg. But he often received foreign visitors, who were immensely impressed by his picturesque appearance. He was marvellously beautiful, in a style more delicate than is common among Montenegrins, with long black hair and black beard and a pale face; his voice was noticeably sweet; he was six foot eight inches in height. He wore a red fez, which was the habit of all his people in those days, a scarlet pelisse bordered with fur, a white coat, full blue breeches, a scarlet sash bristling with weapons, white stockings, and Turkish slippers. He also, very oddly, wore a flowing black tie, after the fashion of the French Romantic poets, by whom he was greatly influenced, and black kid gloves.

  The foreign visitor whom he would have most liked to entertain was Lamartine, for whose works he felt a passionate admiration. But he had to put up with less illustrious guests, who, when they were British, usually displayed the utmost courage in reaching their destination, but lacked both the intelligence and the information to discover anything of interest when they got there. In Blackwood’s Magazine for January 1845, beside a review of Monsieur Alexandre Dumas’s new success, The Three Musketeers, an English officer and his wife record a visit they paid to the Prince-Bishop when he was commanding his army on the islands beyond Riyeka on Lake Scutari. Their journey must really have been terrifying; but the Montenegrins, who were such thoroughly professional soldiers, albeit of a specialized sort, that they could not practice any other profession, struck them as ‘amateur soldiers,’ and they suspected that Peter II was only waiting till he had saved enough of his apanage to run away to some more civilized country. Sir Gardner Wilkinson was better than this, but he must have been irritating enough to his host. He thoroughly appreciated Peter II’s gifts from his favourite trick of shooting a lemon thrown into the air by one of his attendants (‘a singular accomplishment for a Bishop,’ he thought) to his administrative ability; but he was scandalized by this round tower beside the monastery of Tsetinye, because it was stuck with the heads of Turks fixed on stakes and surrounded by a welter of skulls.

  ‘The face of one young man,’ wrote Sir Gardner, ‘was remarkable; and the contraction of the upper lip, exposing a row of white teeth, conveyed an expression of horror, which seemed to show that he had suffered much, either from fright or pain, at the moment of death.’ The sight distressed him enormously; and indeed it was a terrible proof of the demoralization wrought by the presence of the Turks in Europe. He remonstrated with Peter II, who wearily told him that nothing could be done. If the Montenegrins ceased to pay out the Turks in their own coin, the Turks would think they were weakening and would invade them. He might also have pointed out that the Montenegrins were constantly obliged to cut off the heads of their fellow-countrymen who were wounded on the field of battle lest the Turks should find them alive and torture and mutilate them; and that they could hardly be blamed if they did to the Turks what the Turks had often forced them to do to their own kind.

  Sir Gardner, deeply shocked, went off to Herzegovina and, when calling on the Vizier of Mostar in his palace, was still more shocked to find beside it a round tower which was stuck with the heads of Montenegrins. He tried remonstrances there also, but the Vi
zier said he could do nothing, since the Montenegrins were so extraordinarily cruel to the poor Turks, who never did anybody any harm. Sir Gardner then proposed that he should declare a truce and hold a conference with Peter II, but the Vizier declined on the ground that all members of the Orthodox Church were cheats; however, he promised that if Montenegrins would stop cutting off the Turks’ heads then the Turks would stop cutting off the Montenegrins’ heads. This convinced Sir Gardner, who wrote to poor Peter II telling him that the Vizier was a very nice man and was anxious to arrive at a humanitarian agreement regarding this abuse. Peter II cannot have engaged in this correspondence with any zest, for he could not hope that a family should twice have such a success as his uncle Peter I had enjoyed, when Napoleon’s Marshal Marmont had rebuked him on the same subject and he had replied, ‘It is surprising that you should find this practice shocking, since you French cut off the heads of your King and Queen.’ He contented himself in replying that the Vizier of Mostar was in fact not a very nice man and was unlikely to be moved by humanitarian considerations, since he was notorious for his cruelties and had often impaled living men. There was no remedy, he said, but to drive the Turks out of Europe.

  Peter II died at forty-seven, an absurdly early age for a Montenegrin to die a natural death. But he was phthisical, perhaps for literary reasons. For his tutor, the Serbian poet Milutinovitch, had lived in Germany and had been profoundly affected by the Romantics. From them he had acquired a belief in the elevating influence of storms, and he had been in the habit of taking his infatuated pupil during his delicate adolescent years across the mountains in drenching rain and storm, in order to bring him into relation with the Sublime. In any case, poor Peter II must have been fatigued by his destiny. It cannot be easy to be a beautiful giant, with a poetic genius of the Miltonic sort and a nature saintly in its sweetness, and to be obliged to live as chief of a nation of noble savages forced to wrangle barbarously for every sippet of civilization, with a moral enigma gnawing at the roots of both his religion and his national faith. If civilization were worth fighting for, why was the Western civilized world so indifferent to the tragedy of his people and so friendly to their oppressors?

  It is not surprising that with Peter II the reigning dynasty lost the full force of its moral passion. Since the great Prince-Bishop Danilo I, who had sent the Martinovitch brothers out on their terrible errand, his office had been hereditary, descending from an uncle to a nephew, or some member of the same family whom he adopted as his nephew, all parties taking monastic vows. Peter’s nephew, Prince Danilo, refused the latter condition, for he had arranged to marry a beautiful and well-educated Dalmatian Serb, but he quite rightly thought himself a proper governor for the people. So he changed the constitution and gave all ecclesiastical power to the Metropolitan of Tsetinye and all the secular power to himself as a hereditary absolute prince. Thereupon he brought upon himself a long nightmare by his courageous and farseeing conduct of foreign affairs. He supported Prince Alexander Karageorgevitch of Serbia—Karageorge’s mild son who came to the throne after Milosh and Michael Obrenovitch had been driven out of the country—in his policy of neutrality, of evasive refusals to be entangled in the intrigues of the great powers. This was not easy; neither he nor Alexander Karageorgevitch could resist foreign attempts to drag them into war against their own interests without exposing themselves to humiliations which their subjects bitterly resented.

  Danilo would not give Russia aid against Turkey in the Crimean War, because he feared that if he did the Turks would launch a more serious attack on Montenegro than ever before. Since his subjects loved Russia, this left him in the position of a ship’s captain with a mutinous crew. But equally he would not be the creature of Austria, who in revenge continually plotted against him. In 1858 his policy seemed to have failed, for the Turks, unmindful of the benefits of Montenegrin neutrality in the Crimean War, attacked his country; but Danilo, who had been training his country on Western lines, smashed the invading army to pieces at the battle of Grahovo. The next year he lost his Serbian collaborator and got a better one; Alexander Karageorgevitch was deposed, and after Milosh Obrenovitch had filled his place for a little he was succeeded by his son Michael, now recognizably a genius. There is no knowing what the two brilliant men might have done for the South Slav people, had not both of them been destroyed by assassins.

  In the summer of 1861 Prince Danilo’s wife, the Dalmatian Darinka, was ordered sea-bathing by her doctor, and went down to spend some time at Kotor. Her husband insisted on going with her, though his counsellors warned him that his safety on Austrian soil could not be guaranteed. On fine evenings the society of Kotor used to gather in a little public garden on the seashore where a band played, and the Princess liked to frequent these minuscule entertainments, and then be rowed back to her villa. One night Danilo was handing his wife into the boat when a shot rang out and he fell dead. A Montenegrin had fired a pistol into his back. ‘The murderer,’ said Sava, who was leading us through the wide, unsecretive, banal streets of Tsetinye towards its centre, ‘was a man whose wife had been seduced by Prince Danilo.’

  ‘Surely not,’ said my husband, very firmly. ‘Why do you think that?’ said Sava in surprise. ‘Have you heard otherwise?’ ‘No,’ said my husband, ‘but I have never been in a country where every point was so thoroughly overlooked. Prince Danilo could not have taken this woman to the woods round Kolashin, for in his reign that was perpetually the scene of military activities. He certainly could not have seen her clandestinely in Tsetinye, which I suppose had a population of something like four or five thousand inhabitants, all with their attention fixed on the Prince. Every ledge in the valleys is as exposed as the shelf of a china cupboard. I should think that the only spots in Montenegro where a man and a woman could meet unobserved would be at the extreme tops of the mountains, which I understand are covered with snow and ice in the winter-time and infested with snakes in summer-time. An obscure peasant might surmount these difficulties, but not a prince.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Sava coldly, ‘it is known that it was so. The wife of this man had been expelled by her tribe, and we know now that it was for that reason.’ ‘Was that,’ said my husband, ‘what you did to unfaithful wives in Montenegro?’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sava with solemn gust. ‘We drove, and still drive, them out of their homes.’ We had observed him to be one of the kindest people in the world in all his human relations, adored by his relatives and his secretary and his servant. ‘And in early times, she would have been stoned.’ ‘That I find very curious,’ said my husband, ‘for it was really a terrible punishment to turn a woman loose in this country, where every plot of earth is accounted for, and every human being has a niche. It is like turning Hagar into the desert. And I would have thought there was no need for such harshness here, since your women are obviously of a type that feels no impulse towards looseness. They would find unchastity far more of a strain and effort than chastity.’ My husband said this without guile, but he had faced our host with a disagreeable dilemma. For Sava wanted at one and the same time to agree with him that Montenegrin women were innately and unalterably pure, and to maintain that Montenegrins were performing a sacred duty by protecting their hearthstones from a possible taint.

  His handsome face clouded, he went on to other things. ‘It is interesting,’ he said, ‘to know how carefully this man prepared his vengeance. For he left Montenegro, he went to the Greek islands and earned his living as a fisherman, and then came back to Kotor; and as all the Greek sailors spoke of him as one of themselves nobody there realized he was a Montenegrin, so he was able quite easily to approach Prince Danilo when the day came.’ ‘That is very strange,’ said my husband, who sometimes resembles a dog which has become quite certain that there is something buried beneath a rosebed, ‘for surely if a Montenegrin believed that his ruler had seduced his wife he could have shot him anywhere except actually in Tsetinye, and gone scot-free.’ To this Sava answered nothing, and we found afterwards that
we had touched on a dubious point in his national history. There had been at this time a group of Montenegrin exiles who had revolted against Danilo’s imposition on the tribes of a new legal code, very harsh on brigandage and the bloodfeud, and had taken refuge in Zara, the capital of Austrian Dalmatia. It is certain that the assassin belonged to their party. They existed on pensions paid them by the Austrian Government, and Danilo had refused submission to Austria; and it is to be remembered that seven years later Prince Michael of Serbia, who had also earned Austrian disfavour, fell as the result of what was most improbably said to be a Karageorgevitch plot. It is to avoid distressing speculations that Montenegrins prefer to tell this story, implausible as the plot of an opera, about a wronged husband wandering round the Greek islands for years in preparation for a revenge he could have executed on his doorstep.

  In this tragedy can be seen the touch that the great powers were to lay on the Balkans from the middle of the nineteenth century: which can be rightly termed corruption, which was bad when it plunged a knife in a good man’s back, which was worse when it changed warrior peasants dowered with rather more of the medieval virtues than the medieval vices into panders who procured their own people for their Western paymasters. That depraving process is commemorated in a big bare villa that still stands in Tsetinye, alarming in the contrast of its mean yet grandiose design to the stately and severe and ramshackle houses with their pine shingles which are characteristic of Montenegro, for nothing could be more alarming than the attempt of a primitive society to adapt itself to the standards of another society so far advanced as to be decadent. This was the palace of Nicholas, the last ruler of Montenegro before its absorption, who was first its Prince and then its self-elevated King. He was Danilo’s nephew, the son of his brother Mirko, a man with a fine reputation as a general and an unpleasant one as a miser; he inherited the throne because Danilo’s only child was a daughter. In him there survived a great deal of the family ability and not a particle of its moral passion. He was that most disagreeable and embarrassing kind of eccentric, he was a conscious buffoon. He liked to behave so grotesquely that he compelled people to laugh at him, and then he laughed at them behind his hand for having been so easy to deceive so that there was no good feeling anywhere, only jeers and sniggers.