THE CHIEFS OF SHALA PROBATE A WILL—WE VISIT THE HOUSE OF LULASH—A JOURNEY TO UPPER THETHIS.
I may say that such agitators will have a very bad time of it, as doubtless all agitators deserve to have, since all agitators always have had it. There was a conference that afternoon in the padre’s bedroom, and this time it was the padre who wanted the principle of private property established. A man had died and left a piece of land to the Church, and the padre wanted the land to build the school on. Four chiefs of Shala sat beside the desk, on a bench brought in for the purpose, and Padre Marjan, gaunt and earnest in his Franciscan robe, talked the case out before Perolli. (Perolli was no longer a hunted man who might be turned over to the Serbs; he was now an honored guest, emissary from an allied tribe, whose words were heard with respect.)
Padre Marjan had written down the testator’s dying words in a notebook. He read them, those little mysterious marks on paper. They said that the man had made much land—every foot of earth is made by incredible labor of uprooting bowlders and building stone walls to catch washed-down soil—and he felt that he was leaving enough land to the tribe to stand as his contribution, without this one small piece. That piece he wished the tribe to give to the Church.
There was also a statement from the man’s wife, saying that her husband had long wished the Church to have that piece of land, and that she and her children wished it also.
“Those words are written words,” said Perolli, gravely, the eyes of all upon him. “Therefore they are holy words; they are as the words of the saints.”
“That is doubtless so,” said one of the chiefs. “But this man was not a saint, and, besides, how can he give away land? Land belongs to the tribe of Shala.”
“It is not as though I wished to take the land from Shala,” said Padre Marjan. “I do not want it for myself. I wish to build a school upon it, and the school will be for all the children of Shala. It will be for the good of the tribe, that their children can learn to read and write.”
“Glory to your lips,” said another chief. “But since it is for the children of Shala, let it be built on the land of Shala. Build our school upon it, and all our tribe will bless you.”
“But this man left the land to the Church, for the welfare of his soul. It is written here upon this paper that the land belongs to the Church. It is the Church that will build the school in Thethis; I myself am already teaching your children, and even when the new teacher comes from Tirana the school will be under my care. I am the servant of the Church in Thethis, and this land must belong to the Church.”
“We will think about it,” said the chiefs.
“Shall it be said,” demanded the padre, “that the Americans have come from far across strange seas to bring money to build a school for the children of Thethis, and that the people of Thethis will not give even one small piece of land?”
“But,” said I to Frances, “why do you want to take land from the tribe and give it to the Church?”
“The Church is the only light they have up here; the only center of inspiration and learning,” said Frances. “See how the people come to the padre’s kitchen; see what he means to them. I’m not a Catholic, but can’t you see that if the school is to be a community center the Church must have it? They don’t know how to make it what we want it to be, themselves.”
“Very well,” said the chiefs. “You may have the land, Padre Marjan.”
My opangi had arrived. The edges of the leather had been turned upward and joined across the toes by an intricately woven network of rawhide thongs. Another network made a heel piece, and there were thongs to go around the ankles. With the opangi came a pair of short, knitted purple socks reaching just to the ankle, where they ended in points bound with black braid and stiff with gold and silver embroidery. These were really separate linings to the stiff and hard opangi, which had to be soaked a long time in water and put on wet, in order to get them on at all.
Very conscious of my feet, which seemed large and unwieldy flopping objects at the ends of my legs, I went across the flat, wet fields with Perolli to drink coffee in the house of Lulash.
The house of Lulash was different from any of the others we had seen. It stood on a castlelike rock; we went up to it by a stairway cut in the side of a cliff that rose almost sheer for so far that the waterfall pouring down it looked like a motionless streak of snow near the top. A natural bridge of rock crossed the little space between the cliff and the rock on which the house of Lulash was built; a furious little stream roared beneath us as we crossed the bridge, and then there was another stairway leading up to the house.
Lulash and a dozen men and women of his household stood outside his door to receive us. No rifles were fired. We passed through a double line of salutes and greetings and into a high-arched stone doorway. There was a little hall, floored and walled with stone, and a massive stone stair leading upward. This we climbed, and were in a large whitewashed room, lighted by a window and furnished with beautifully painted chests and a few hand-woven rugs. But this was not the only room; there were others, and, leading us through several arched stone doorways, Lulash brought us into the living room, where I exclaimed, “My house in San Francisco!”
It was exactly the same—long, wide, with the large gray stone fireplace in the center of one wall, folded blankets of goats’ wool piled like cushions around it; the alcove where my bookshelves used to be was there—an old carved chest stood in it; and there were my windows, where the nasturtiums used to grow and the orange curtains frame the blues of San Francisco Bay and the Berkeley hills and the sky. I went to those windows at once. But, no, the magic departed; there was only the flat wet lands of Thethis below me, the stone houses and stone fences, and beyond them the blue and purple and white and black and rose color of the snow-crested mountains with a hundred waterfalls. Beautiful, but like the stranger’s face that shatters the wild, irrational expectation of having found a friend in an impossible place. I turned my back upon those windows.
But it was, it was the living room that I remembered! The gray walls—but these were of plaster; the black floor; the huge gray stone fireplace. Even the rug on the wall, where my treasured shawl used to be. “It is my house!” I said, while Perolli looked as though I had suddenly gone mad, and all the others stood concealing their amazement. “Tell them that it is exactly like my house at home, far away on the other side of the world.” And I sat down on a pile of folded blankets before the fire, not yet sure that I was not dreaming and that the strange chests and stranger figures of turbaned men and barbarically dressed barefooted women would not vanish when I awoke.
“I did not think,” said Lulash, “that any of our houses would be as fine as an American house.” He was so pleased that his hand quivered a little on the long handle of the tiny brass pot in which he was making the coffee. So I told them that only our finest houses are of stone, that my house was of wood, and much smaller than his. But all our houses had windows, I said.
“Yes,” said Lulash, wistfully. “Windows are very good; I always wish that all our houses had windows. But first we must have a besa of peace among all the tribes; it is not safe now to have windows, a man never knows when his tribe will be ‘in blood’ and enemies will shoot him through windows. You see that mine are so placed that it would be difficult to shoot through them, and I have heavy shutters for closing them at night, when the firelight makes it easier to see us from outside.”
But he was pleased that I praised his windows; he had gone through many other tribes and down into Scutari to bring up the glass of which he had heard, and made them with his own hands. They were on leather hinges so that they would open and let in the air; he said he had observed that sunshine and air were good things, and, if good outdoors, why not good in houses? “But it will be a long time before my people can have windows,” he said, sadly.
He did not think it was good to keep the sheep and goats with the family, either; all his flocks were driven at night into their own quarters, on the lower floor of the house.
Houses are the most endless subject in the world; all of humanity and its history is expressed in houses, and while the coffee cup was passed back and forth I told about American houses; about the log cabins of the pioneers, such a little time ago as crude as those of the Albanians; about the loophole glassless windows, and the pegs on which rifles were hung; and about farmers’ houses in New England, where the cattle live under the same roof, at the end of long sheds; and suburban houses with gardens, and apartment houses where whole tribes of people live, going up and down in movable rooms. And then I spoke about water power and said that it became electricity—Lulash asked me eagerly how it was done, but I did not know—and that brought us to the whole subject of machinery. I drew a picture of a spinning wheel for them and explained it, but they said it would not be practicable on the trails, where the women did most of the spinning; a woman could not carry her baby in its cradle and a spinning wheel, too; the spindle was better; and I agreed with them. But if men and women did not work so hard carrying water from the springs, they would have time to sit in the house and work a spinning wheel, and I said that water could come into houses in pipes, and Lulash and I discussed for some time how a hollowed-out log could bring part of the waterfall into his house. But he said regretfully that a log was so expensive; cutting a tree meant destroying so much pasture for the goats, and it took a long time for a tree to grow again. And I saw how princely had been his gift of a hundred trees to be burned to make the lime to make the mortar to make the schoolhouse, and the infinite labor of such a life made me realize the stupendous obstacles mankind has overcome in climbing out of it. And I thought that it was the long struggle to wrest from the unwilling earth the material necessities of human life that turned humanity’s terrific energy in the course it still follows, though the need for it is past, and that perhaps some day this energy, turned into other channels, will make the life of civilized man as rich in spiritual and emotional values as it now is in material things.
The gay Cheremi, bringing our breakfast of Turkish coffee next morning, spoke with proud nonchalance in English. “Padre gone,” said he. “When wake, no padre. He is went.”
The import of these words came slowly to us. Awakening in that chill room, to find ourselves between crimson sheets, beneath blankets of woven goat’s hair, and to see the scarlet-sashed, scalplocked Cheremi bearing the brass tray with its coffee cups, had always a quality of unreality. It was not so much an awakening from dreams as to them. In the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness we must traverse so many centuries to feel at home, that we arrived a little breathless.
But, “The padre gone?” Frances cried, after an instant. And we sat dumb, staring at Cheremi’s beaming. Any impossibility was probable; we did not question that the padre had disappeared in some strange fashion, and our minds, while we hurriedly dressed, were not concerned with the manner of his going so much as with what we should do without him. We were prepared to deal gallantly with the catastrophic emergency, as the walker up stairs in the dark is prepared for the last step, which is not there.
For when we found Perolli squatting by the kitchen fireplace, busy with long-handled coffee pot and spoon, he confirmed Cheremi’s report absent-mindedly. “Mmmhm. He went at dawn. Off to hear confessions in upper Thethis. Getting ready for Easter. More coffee?”
He seemed more abstracted than this anticlimax justified, and we drank coffee again, in silence. The kitchen was dismal, a poor and wretched place without Padre Marjan. Rain was pouring steadily outside, and the house was filled with roar of waterfalls as a shell is filled with sound of the sea. In those moments of cold gray light by the fire which was dying slowly under hissing raindrops, I realized the courage and endurance of Padre Marjan—of all the priests who, in these mountains, keep alight a warmth and gayety of spirit for their people.
“I’m going to upper Thethis myself,” said Perolli, at length. “Like to come along? We’ve been invited to visit Sadiri Luka, the richest man in the Five Tribes.”
We roused ourselves with some little effort, for the grayness of the day, the chill, and the ceaseless sound of pouring water were like an actual weight on muscles. We swept the floor painstakingly and long, with the pine bough. We went down the draughty stairs and out into the downpour to bring back a wooden bucket of water; we tried to stir the sullen embers into a blaze to warm it; we gave up in despair and washed the coffee cups in water cold and sooty. We made the beds; we went up and down the stairs, bringing water, emptying wash basins, carrying ashes and wet wood. Our admiration and reverence for Padre Marjan grew like Jonah’s gourd while we did these things, which he does every day before beginning his work. At last we set out, opangi laced and staffs in hand, to go to upper Thethis.
A day of comparative dryness had broken our fishlike habits, and water seemed again an unkind element in which to be moving. Crossing the flat valley in single file, accompanied by the sucking, slushy sound of water-filled stockings, we said little. The sheets of rain blurred our sight, and the sound of it dulled our hearing. But when we began cautiously to climb the slippery trail that edged up the mountain side, exercise had begun to warm us, and we escaped from the silence which is to human beings a more unfamiliar element than water.
“How can he be the richest man in the Five Tribes? I thought these people were communistic,” said Alex.
“The tribes own only lands and houses and most of the forests,” said Perolli. “A man or a family can own flocks, or buy and sell when they go down to the cities. Sadiri Luka’s the richest man because he went down to Ipek. He was a merchant there, and everyone is rich in Ipek. How I wish I might show you that valley, my own valley—it is more beautiful than you can imagine. There are such rich fields—the cows stand knee deep there in greenness like a carpet—and the best fruits of all the Balkans grow there. And butter, and honey, and fine flour, and quantities of the finest wool that makes the beautiful rugs of my people—there is everything in Ipek that you could wish to have, and both hands running over. I mean,” he added, grimly, “there was. Yes, Ipek was a rich and happy place before the Serbs came. And if Sadiri Luka——” He broke off, on such a savage note that we were startled.
“You see,” he resumed with a note of eagerness, stopping to point with his staff, “just over that mountain—no, that one, farthest east—well, just over that mountain, and down through a little gorge where there will be violets soon, and then around the curve of the hills, there begins my valley of Ipek. In four hours I could go there. I know every step of the way. My father and my mother are there, and I am the only son, and I have not seen them for two years, nor my houses, nor my fields. And I could go there in four hours.”
“Do you suppose,” said Frances, nervously, “that the Serbs have field-glasses? If they had, Rrok, they could recognize you from their lines up there. They might be looking at you right now.”
“If they even had any code of honor,” he continued, not heeding her, “if they had any proper respect for women, I could go straight through their lines with you girls beside me, and I could go to see my people, and I could show you what a country Albanians make when they only have land to work, and we could come back again—we could do it all in one day. There is not a tribe in our mountains who would not let a Serb come and go in safety, with a woman beside him. But the Serbs—— And Christ tells us to love our enemies! How can we? How can we?”
It was the unanswerable passionate question, and we did not try to answer it. We went on, the little valley of Thethis narrowing below us, till mountain overlapped mountain, and the gorge between was filled with a foam-white green river. From time to time we struggled through a waterfall, and there was one huge torrent that, leaping from a cliff above the trail, arched over it in a curve that seemed solid as glass, and we passed beneath it. Then, descending, we came to the little valley of upper Thethis. Perhaps six or ten houses were scattered there, among broken-off fragments of cliff as large as they, and between them all the level land was glistening with water at the grass roots.
The house of Sadiri Luka was notable for its stone-walled courtyard and its broad balcony. The heavy arch of the gateway was mediæval in its grim solidity; we escaped from the rain to the peace of its shelter, and there were welcomed by Sadiri Luka. He was middle-aged, sturdy, even a little stodgy of figure, among the lithe mountaineers, and this appearance suggested the successful business man—a suggestion incongruous with his picturesque clothes. His trousers were the purest white that new wool can be, his fringed jacket the densest black, the colors of his sash were clear and gay, and his silver chains were massive. There was even a heavy silver ring on his finger. And there was no rifle on his back.
The courtyard was a litter of cornstalks, almost entirely covered with a roof of woven branches; evidently it was the home of flocks now out in the rain attended by a shepherd cutting leaves for them. An arched doorway opened into the first floor of the house, where we saw a pensive donkey gazing profoundly upon the liquid gray weather.
Obviously this was a rich house, and we followed Sadiri Luka expectantly, up the stone stairs and down a long hall mysterious with closed doors, to a large room full of color. There were rugs on the stone floor, rugs on the stone walls, floor cushions covered with rugs in front of the fireplace. There was no other furniture save a row of old rifles on a wall. Their slender four-foot-long barrels were inlaid with silver, their curved thin butts were of silver chased and enameled, their triggers were intricate flint-lock affairs, and we tore our eyes from them with a wrench, to reply with proper courteousness to the welcome of our host.
While he made the coffee a woman came quietly through the door beside the fireplace and greeted us with poised and gracious dignity—one of those many beautiful Albanian women who, because they were so poised and so silent, remain a background for all our memories of the mountains, more mysterious behind their level eyes and courteous phrases than Turkish women behind their veils.
Sitting on the cushions, we drank the coffee and the rakejia, from time to time responding to the greeting of other guests come to meet us. Perolli was quiet, fallen into one of the moods which we had learned not to interrupt with requests for interpreting. There was constraint in the atmosphere, and when, presently, he fell into low-voiced talk with Sadiri Luka, we tactfully engaged the others in such conversation as occurred to us. I forget how it happened that we first mentioned the ora. There were, of course, ora in Thethis, we were told, but no one remembered any news of interest concerning them. Then, prompted by the incessant sound of rushing water, we inquired if there were ora of the waters as well as of the forests.
“The old men know these things,” said a handsome youth, somewhat bored. He was a traveled young man; he had been in Budapest and Bucharest, and spoke their languages as well as German and Italian, and—from wherever gotten—he wore an American army shirt. Ora did not interest him. “Old man,” said he, politely, turning to an aged chief beside him, “what do you know of the water ora?”
The old man took the amber mouthpiece of his long cigarette holder from his shrunken lips and blew a reflective cloud of smoke. The alert Rexh produced my notebook and fountain pen from his pajama pocket, laid them beside me, and leaned forward, attentive.