MASS IN THE CHURCH OF THETHIS—A MOUNTAIN CHIEF SEEKS A WIFE—DOWN THE VALLEY OF THE LUMI SHALA, WHILE THE DRANGOJT FIGHT THE DRAGON—HOW REXH CAME TO SCUTARI.
The next morning was Sunday, and we were awakened by the church bell. It hung in a belfry over the padre’s kitchen, and the padre pulled the rope himself. Then tucking his brown robe about his bare ankles, he descended the broken, draughty stairs to the church, and we followed him through blasts of cold rain that the wind drove through holes that had been made in the walls by the invading Serbs.
The church itself was bleak and cold; a bare room, whitewashed, with the stations of the Cross represented by crudely colored lithographs stained by the damp. A railing separated the body of the church from the altar, where a very brightly colored picture of the Virgin hung, surrounded by wreaths of paper flowers, above a rough table with a bit of brocade spread carefully upon it. We girls were given a bench inside the railing, and sat there in a row, in our many-times-water-soaked sweaters and trousers. Outside the railing all the women and children and half the men of the village knelt on the cold floor, and their rain-drenched garments, threadbare and patched, made pools of water about their knees. The rain was still pouring down, as undiminished as a river, and the sound of it and of the waterfalls filled the chill place.
Padre Marjan began the mass, his high Albanian voice chanting the Latin, and the congregation made the responses in the same tongue. A ragged, barefooted man came to swing the censer for the padre, and Perolli, in his neat English tweeds, revolver and knife swinging at the belt, also assisted, going behind the altar with the padre to help him put a brocaded robe over the brown one, and reverently handing the cup and the wine. Rexh, in his red Mohammedan fez, watched it all with serious eyes, his head around the edge of the doorway.
After mass the padre dashed upstairs to look at our cooking dinner, and hastened down again for a christening. I am not familiar with Catholic ceremonial, but nothing could have been more touching than Padre Marjan, thin, worn by fasting and work, barefooted, the edge of his brown robe showing below the front hem of a white cotton garment, bringing into the arms of the Church the tiny, wrinkled infant strapped in its painted cradle. The woman who held it looked at him with a sort of apprehensive anxiety; the crowd pressed informally around them. Every time the padre turned to fetch the little glass bottle of oil, or the tin can of holy water, or the square of crocheted cotton lace that he laid over the cradle, the packed bodies gave way for him, and one child or another picked up the end of his trailing robe to keep it from beneath muddy, bare feet.
At the end, “Is it a boy or a girl?” he asked.
“A girl,” the woman whispered. And the padre ended his solemn words with the name, “Regina.”
The woman sighed and her tenseness relaxed. It must have been a great moment for the mother, I thought; some one said that she had carried the cradle forty miles over the mountains for this christening. We did want to give the baby something; for the hundredth time we regretted not having brought presents, and a hurried ransacking of all our possessions produced only a little colored sport handkerchief. But when we gave it to the baby it was as though we had presented a golden bowl; the excitement, the passing from hand to hand, the reverent marveling over such weaving, such color!
We found Perolli upstairs in the kitchen, grinning to himself, and when we asked him why, he said the christening was a joke on the padre. The woman was not the child’s mother; the real mother, married by Albanian custom, had not yet got around to having the church ceremony, and the priest in the village forty miles away had refused to christen the child until the parents were married by the Church. But the devout neighbor, knowing that the infant was in danger of hell fire, had brought it over the mountains and had it christened as her own, and Padre Marjan, all unsuspecting, had performed the ceremony.
Not half an hour later an almost naked man, streaming with rain as though he had swum the forty miles, appeared, breathless, with a water-soaked note from the other priest, and Padre Marjan read it aghast. “Merely parochial business,” he said, tucking it in his belt and bending over the bubbling pots in the fireplace to taste and season. But his brown face remained wrinkled with worry.
A matter far more serious distracted attention from this complication in Church affairs, for Perolli, taking me aside, said to me: “You say you love the Albanians and the Albanian mountains. Do you want to stay here?”
“I’d love to stay here for years,” I said. “It’s the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen, and the most interesting people. But I can’t, of course. Why?”
“Because you can, if you really do want to,” said he. “I have a proposal of marriage for you.”
“What!” said I. “You’re joking!”
“Not at all,” said Perolli, indignantly. “Do you think marriage is a thing to joke about?”
“But I never know what you mean,” I complained. “And why should anyone want to marry me, here?”
“You needn’t take it as a compliment to your personal charm, if that’s what you mean,” said Perolli, coldly. “It’s really your short hair. But I can get twenty thousand kronen for you, if you want to marry and stay here.”
“Twenty thousand kronen!” said I. “Two thousand dollars? For me? Here? But for Heaven’s sake, why? You don’t mean anyone thinks me beautiful, among all these Albanian women?” said I, indignantly.
“Of course not,” said Perolli.
“And I can’t even talk their language. What do you mean, twenty thousand kronen? And what has short hair to do with it? Don’t be so annoying, Perolli. What do you mean?”
“Well,” said Perolli, “Lulash would like to have an American wife. I don’t mean he put it to me so crudely as that. He didn’t actually put it to me at all, in fact. But I know that he will give twenty thousand kronen for you, and you can stay here and make over the whole life of Shala, if you like.”
“But why me? Why not Frances, or Alex?”
“Because you are all a long way past marrying age, in Albania, and their hair is long, so naturally these people think they are already married. But your hair is short, so they think you are a sworn virgin. In these mountains, when a girl is old enough to marry and absolutely refuses to marry the man to whom she has been promised, she may escape the marriage by swearing before the chiefs of the two tribes an oath of life-long virginity, and she cuts her hair and takes a man’s place in the tribe. Naturally, when they see you, at your age, with short hair, they think that is what you did. If you were an Albanian no one would dream of marrying you, for the man to whom your parents gave you would have to kill your husband to clear his honor, and all the chiefs before whom you had sworn would be bound in honor to see that your husband was killed. But America is a long way off; that man and the chiefs would hardly come so far after you, especially as your customs are so different. Besides, I think Lulash would take the chance, anyhow. He really very much wants a woman to help him with the people, and he will not marry a mountain woman.”
“You mean he would listen to my ideas and take my advice—you mean he wants a wife who will be his equal, a sort of partner?”
“Of course. What else is a wife? He would like nothing better than to have you give him American ideas.”
“But I thought a woman had no rights at all, here.”
“How absurd! She has all the rights that a man has.”
“But women aren’t in the tribal councils?”
“They are when it’s a council of the whole tribe. They aren’t chiefs, no. But chiefs always talk things over with their wives.”
“But women are bought and sold. You just said so. Didn’t you say you were offered twenty thousand kronen for me?”
“It’s an unusual situation. Here you are, without a family; I’m the only man in the party; naturally he thinks of me as in the position of a brother or a father. The man’s family always pays money to the girl’s family before a marriage, but the girl isn’t sold; she’s been betrothed in her childhood, for any number of reasons. The money the man pays is spent for the girl’s clothes and household things.”
“Then you’d be supposed to give me the twenty thousand kronen? And then it would be his again, after all.”
“Of course not. It’s yours, isn’t it? No one has any right to a woman’s personal belongings, except her.”
“You mean I could do anything I liked with it? I wouldn’t have to have his consent?”
“Of course you could do anything you liked with it,” Perolli said, wearily. “This isn’t Europe.”
“Obviously,” said I. “Nor America.”
“Well, what do you say? Do you want to do it?”
Men ask women to marry them for many reasons and from many motives, even though they are all lumped under the word “love.” Sometimes the asking is an honor that should make any woman, either happily or regretfully, proud. And sometimes it isn’t. For myself, I shall always remember as one of my finest experiences this offer of a scalplocked Shala chief to pay twenty thousand kronen for me. There was no eager clutching in it, no selfish, grasping, personal asking for personal happiness; he could have had no idea whether or not this strange woman would bring happiness into his house; his motives in asking her to marry him had their roots quite outside himself. He believed that she would help him in his work for the tribe.
And I thought that a woman might have a much worse life than in this remote, stranded fragment of primitive times still left among the Albanian mountains, where respect for women is not taught like courteous manners, but is as natural as breathing, so natural that it is never discussed nor even thought about, and where marriage is not centered in small egotisms, but in the larger idea of the family and the future.
But I must admit that to live that life requires other training than any daughter of the twentieth century has received, for one’s ideas have little to do with one’s actions; my mind might admire this alien concept of life, but I fear that nothing will ever lead a Western woman to marry for the good of anyone but herself.
“Why, Perolli,” I said, “of course I can’t marry a Shala chief!”
We came back to the fireplace where Padre Marjan was stirring the tantalizing contents of the cooking pots, and were clutched by a radiant Frances. She had ventured to speak to Padre Marjan about the family of Kol Marku. And this was the news he had told her. The bitter old mother of Pjeter was relenting. Because the holy Easter-time was near—so Padre Marjan said, but we guessed that Padre Marjan himself had caused her change of heart—the family of Pjeter had told him the day before in upper Thethis that Koi Marku might come home, and the men of his family work in peace, for two weeks.
This was the law of the blood-feud truce; that the injured party might grant, when it desired to do so, on holy days or at a time of common danger from without, a reprieve of a stated length of time. During that time the families or tribes involved would meet and greet each other courteously, although on the day that the truce ended the law of the blood debt applied again, and they must kill each other at sight. The family of Pjeter had granted two weeks—fourteen days of burden lifted from the spirit of the family of Kol Marku. A great deal could be done in fourteen days, Padre Marjan said—fields cleared, ditches repaired, seed sown, family councils held. And he was hopeful that this was the beginning of complete forgiveness; perhaps in another year Kol Marku might come home to stay with his family. The news was being telephoned to the tribe in which he had taken refuge—a tribe in the valley of the Kiri, near Scutari—and in two days at most he would be in Thethis. Already the men of his family were working; we could see them from the windows of Padre Marjan’s dining room, working in the rain with iron bar and hammer, attacking a gigantic bowlder which lay in the middle of their poor little field. Laboriously they chipped at it, cutting it into pieces small enough to roll away, and they worked with trembling haste, for it seemed a task too long to be done in two weeks. We wished that we might be there when Kol Marku came home.
And the next morning, in the rain that still continued to flood down from apparently inexhaustible skies, we all stood on the edge of the cliff, half a mile down the trail, and said farewell to the village of Thethis. Everyone had come so far on the trail with us; Padre Marjan thanked us in the name of the village; Lulash spoke, his hand on his heart; Frances and Alex and I addressed them with as many happy phrases of thanks as we could devise. All the guns were fired and fired again; all along the cliff tops the boys were giving a last display of the astounding feats that human muscles can do.
“Go on a smooth trail!” they all called after us as we went over the rustic bridge that crosses the green stream dotted with white bowlders and black bowlders and rose-colored bowlders and the one huge bowlder of jade, and, looking back from far down the trail, we saw the people of Thethis still standing there, a black and white and gorgeously colored mass against the gray rocks.
Our way led down the Lumi Shala. Going northeastward from Scutari, we had reached that river’s headwaters at Thethis, and now, crossing it, we came southeastward, high on the shoulders of the mountains that wall its narrow valley. Higher still, seen at intervals through breaks in the lower mountains, a wall of pure white snow rose into the sky; the wall of the second great mountain range, which we were to cross to reach still more hidden fastnesses and wilder tribes.
We went across the lands of the Shala tribe, but there were no villages on the way and no scattered houses; it was fifteen miles to our next stopping place, the village of Shala. “An hour and a half,” said Cheremi, gayly; he had learned to speak short English sentences in the few days he had been with us, but he could not learn that fifteen miles of exhausting mountain climbing meant more than ninety pleasant minutes to anybody.
Padre Marjan has lent us his little horse, a beautiful bay, hardly larger than a Shetland, but perfectly built, with a saddle of red leather held on by finely woven woolen straps. He went across slides of slippery shale, climbed giant bowlders, walked on a log that crossed a two-hundred-foot gorge, and made his way straight up the courses of waterfalls as easily and cheerfully as a pet dog. But after our days of walking our muscles did not like even the very slight idleness of such riding, and our own feet carried us most of the way.
An indescribably wild, beautiful way it was, with hundred-mile vistas opening before us, changing, disappearing again, as we rounded cliffs or passed the ends of smaller mountain ranges that ran down to the opposite banks of the Lumi Shala. There were villages over there; we saw them built against the mountains like clumps of gray swallows’ nest—the villages of Shoshi, with whom Shala was in blood. At the foot of the waterfall streams that dashed down their cliffs we saw now and then a little mill, flooded with water, its roof of slate hardly showing above the flood, where in drier season Shoshi ground its grain or put the loosely woven white woolen cloth to be soaked in the running water and pounded by paddle wheels until it shrank into the feltlike fabric that makes their garments.
Here and there a red-brown or gray-white moving patch at the foot of a clump of mangled trees announced that a little shepherd was there, clinging to a tall stump and cutting twigs to throw down to the goats and sheep; we were too far away to see him. And there were other clumps of trees green with uncut leaves; always near these we saw, bronze brown among the gray rocks, structures taller than a man and shaped like a beehive. These were trees that the axes spare until the leaves are fully grown and filled with sap. Then the branches are cut and piled in a circle, the cut ends outward and the leaves to the center, layer upon layer, until the beehive shape is completed, when they are weighted down with rocks. The leaves dry, remaining green and nutritious, and slowly through the winter the curious silos are demolished armful by armful and carried into the houses to be fed to the sheep and goats.
The sky was still a leaden gray, with darker clouds moving sluggishly among the mountains, and the air still seemed more than half full of falling water. The soaked rawhide opangi were like soft rags on my feet; at every step my woolen stockings emptied and filled with water like sponges, and all our fingers were shrunk in ridges from the long wetting. But we were gay, we sang along the way, the weak little songs that so amused the steel-lunged mountaineers, and when a low growl of thunder and a flicker of fire among the clouds announced a stronger onslaught of the rain, Perolli waved his hand toward the mountain tops and joyously shouted something—we thought, to the effect that we were not flowers.
“Dranit?” said I. “Great Scott! do you need announce that we aren’t flowers? Shout that we are not drowned puppies, if you want to startle onlookers.”
“Not dranit—drangojt,” Perolli corrected. “I said to the dragon he may growl as he likes; we’re not drangojt.”
“No,” I said. “No, we aren’t. But what aren’t we?”
“Drangojt,” replied Perolli, and broke into careless song. There were times when I could have boxed that young man’s ears, for nothing is more irritating than a sense of humor which is not yours. And the Albanians have a sense of humor which is never idle, and seldom comprehensible to the foreigner.
“Drangojt means the people with wings, Mrs. Lane,” said Rexh, and thought that all was clear. “You know, the people born with little wings under their arms,” he elaborated, when I regarded him blankly. “The people—I don’t know how other to say it, Mrs. Lane. Wings, you know—what the birds fly with—wings. Under their arms. Don’t you have people born with wings in your country?”
I said that if we had I knew nothing of it, and Rexh’s forehead wrinkled with perplexity. “But perhaps——Of course you are not a drangue, you would not know the American drangojt,” he concluded, his face clearing. “You can usually tell them, though, by their running to their houses whenever it rains. First, you hear the dragon on the mountains; then, you see all the drangojt running to houses. That is the way you tell them; except, if you are their mother, then you see the wings when they are born. But if you are not their mother, you cannot see the wings, and you only know they are drangojt when they run to their houses in the rain.”
“Are they afraid they’ll get their wings wet?” said I, with great interest.
“Oh no! They are not afraid of anything. When the weather is thundering, that is the dragon fighting with the drangojt. So when they hear the dragon, all the drangojt go quickly to their houses to be ready if they are called to fly and fight the dragon. Even the babies fly home with their cradles. There is no drangue so young that it could not anyway scratch the dragon.”
That was the charm and delight of those days and nights, all too few, which I spent in the Albanian mountains. Around every turn in the trail the unexpected awaited us.
We gazed with new interest upon the gray clouds that struggled among the mountain tops. The dragon and the drangojt were fighting up there, then? Yes, indeed, said Rexh. When the drangojt had defeated the dragon, then he would go away and we would see the sun again. All the world, he said, would be taken by the dragon, and we would never see the sun again, if it were not for the brave drangojt. Once the dragon had almost taken the world—that was when the waters fell and the seas were born—and only the drangojt of Dukaghini had saved it then. That was long ago. “Long, long years of years ago,” said Rexh. “I guess, even before these tribes of people and drangojt were ever called Dukaghini.” At that time, the dragon had lost his three heads, and that was why there never since had been such a battle in the skies.
“How do you know all this, Rexh?” we asked, respectfully.
“It was told in the songs,” said he.
“And do you know those songs?”
No, he said regretfully. He had heard some of them when he was very little—when he lived with his people in the mountains. But when the Montenegrins came and killed all his family that had not died in the fighting, and burned his village, then he had had to go all the way to Scutari, hiding from the Montenegrins. “You know, they came all the way to Scutari, too, Mrs. Lane. And I had to hide from them, because I was so little. I took a gun from a dead man, and it was a good gun, too, but it was so heavy I could not carry it, so I could not fight. I was only six years old. So I had to hide, and when I came to Scutari I found the first of my children, and then little by little I found the others, and so I was very busy all these years. And learning English and Arabic, and working with Miss Hardy, and all, I have forgotten to sing. I’m sorry I do not remember the songs.
“How did I find my children? They were just there, in the streets, Mrs. Lane, and I saw them. I took the first one because he was littler than me—than I—and he had cut his foot on a rock, and I knew by his clothes he was of my tribe. And I had found a dry place to sleep, so I took him there. And then the others just came, little by little. Some when the Serbians came through in 1914, and some when the Austrians came, and Glosh came from Gruda last fall when the Montenegrins were killing up there. I hope they are all well and clean,” he added, anxiously. “I told them to wash themselves and their clothes and their blankets every week while I was gone. I made them give a besa to do it, and there is anyway plenty of water in the river and probably it is not raining in Scutari, so it will be all right. But if it is raining, then they will have to wash their clothes because they gave a besa, and it perhaps can be that they will take cold.”
The rain had become so breath-taking that we said no more, rapidly following the trail which ran easily through a small deformed wood, among the ten-foot cones of dried branches which were last fall’s store of winter fodder. The path came soon to the edge of a cliff, dipped over it, and ran along the wall of rock, high above the Lumi Shala. Here, sheltered in a smoke-blackened shallow cave, we found Cheremi and four strange men sitting by a tiny fire and smoking cigarettes. Bundles of dried boughs which two of them had been carrying were stacked behind them, and Padre Marjan’s little horse was munching a handful of leaves and gazing out at the rain.