Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  ‘Yes, Mamma,’ said Constantine, ‘but are you not forgetting that Scriabin himself was the child of a great country covered with snow, where there was a good deal of trapping wild animals?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said the old lady, ‘but I do not believe that in the whole of Russia you would find one man who would claim that Scriabin was the favourite composer of Russians!’ ‘But, perhaps, Mamma,’ said Constantine, ‘it is a different sort of animal that they trap in Canada.’ ‘A different sort of animal? But what would that matter?’ exclaimed his mother in stupefaction, knitting her fine mind against this puzzle till she saw Constantine winking at us, and then she cried out, laughing, ‘Ah, wait till you are old, you will see what it is like when everybody mocks you, even your poor little idiot son!’

  Very soon we had an idea that Gerda thought that this was not the proper way to entertain us. She thought the less of us for liking this wild talk about music, which could not really be of any value, because it made no references to the Ideal or the History of Music. It would have been better if we had made statements about specific musical occasions and had evoked them from her, and had thus established our common enjoyment of culture: if we had, for example, spoken of hearing a Beethoven symphony in Toronto or Montreal, and had asked her where she had heard it. She spoke presently of her surroundings as lacking precisely that kind of sophistication, when the conversation turned to food and the amount of cooking that was done in Yugoslavian households. Contemptuously she told us that when a Serbian family expected guests to tea, the housewife would put herself about to bake cakes and biscuits; but, as we would see, she said with a shrug of the shoulders, indicating the food on her table, which had been obviously bought from a shop, she was not so. Her cool tone drew a picture of how she would like to dispense hospitality. One would go down, well dressed, with a full purse, and all one’s debts paid, to Kranzler if one lived in Berlin, to Dehmel if one lived in Vienna, to Gerbeaud if one lived in Budapest, and would greet the assistant, who would be very respectful because of one’s credit, and would choose exquisite pastries and petits fours, which would not only be delightful when crushed against one’s friends’ palates, but would also be recognizably from Kranzler, or from Dehmel, or from Gerbeaud.

  She was assuming that my husband and I would share her feeling, that we would be with her in upholding this cool, powerful, unhurried ideal against the Serbian barbarians who liked a woman to get hot over a stove, as if she could not afford to pay other women to work for her, which indeed was probably the case. It would have been difficult for us to explain how wrong we thought her. We like the Apfelkuchen of Kranzler, we have never gone to Vienna without buying the Nusstorte of Dehmel, we have shamefully been late for a friend’s lunch in Budapest for the reason that we had turned into Gerbeaud’s to eat meringues filled with cream and strawberries. But we knew that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake; whereas if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at one’s table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart. We believed it better to create than to pay. In fact, England had had a bourgeoisie long before Germany, and we had found out that the bourgeois loses more than he gains by giving up the use of his own hands; but there is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

  As Gerda spoke Constantine watched her with slightly excessive approval, nodding and smiling. He so obviously meant to reassure her and to recommend her to us that there came back to us the spectacle they had twice presented to us lately in the streets of Belgrade, dishevelled and disunited. It was astonishing to think that between such scenes these people should enjoy the glowing contentment with each other which now warmed this room; but of course there are millions of kinds of happy marriages. Only when we rose to go and Constantine told us that he would walk a little way back with us did we see that he was smiling not only at her but at us, and that his smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to real teeth; it performed the function of indicating good-will, but the organism had failed in its normal spontaneous action. I could feel him still smiling through the darkness, as we strolled away from the cache of simple streets in which his pretty little house found itself, into the boulevard where grey concrete cakes of institutions and ministries shone with a blindish brightness behind the electric standards. When we came to the centre of the town, and looked across a circus where people were hurrying in and out of the yellow-lit cafés, at the slow and dark yet gay procession of the corso, he said, still with this undue facial cheerfulness, with the corners of his mouth turned up, ‘I must go back now.’ But he did not take the hand my husband offered him, but stared across the street at the Corso. Two gipsies, lean and dark as Sikhs, with red rags tied round their heads, padded past, wheeling a handcart in which there lay a bundle. It stirred, it sat up, it was an elderly and beautiful woman in richly coloured garments who looked at us with wild eyes that filled with solemn recognition, who swept out her arm in the gesture of a prophet, and cried out some words in Roumanian, which twanged with the spirit of revelation. For a second it seemed a supreme calamity that we could not understand her. But she softened, and fell back, and was a bundle again; she was simply drunk. Constantine said absently, as if his soul were entirely with the march of the Corso, ‘You know, my wife has made up her mind to come with us to Macedonia.’

  I stood transfixed with horror. Tears began to run down my cheeks. Macedonia was the most beautiful place that I had ever seen in my life, I had looked forward to showing it to my husband, and now we were to be accompanied by this disagreeable woman who liked neither of us. It was like having to take a censorious enemy on one’s honeymoon. Not only was this proposal an outrage to a reasonable sentiment, it raised endless practical difficulties. The cars and cabs we could rely on in Macedonia would be small, too small for four, though comfortable enough for three. Gerda would have to be our guest, as Constantine was to be, and the relationship between host and guest is not easy for people who feel a strong mutual antipathy. And her contempt for everything Slav and non-German would be at its most peevish in Macedonia, which is the most Slav part of Yugoslavia, and which is not only non-German but non-Occidental, being strongly Byzantine and even Asiatic. ‘But she will not like it!’ I exclaimed. ‘So I have told her many, many times!’ wailed Constantine. My husband bent down over him, his spectacles shining with a light that looked menacing, that was in fact panic-stricken. ‘Your wife cannot come with us,’ he said. ‘But she will, she will!’ cried Constantine. ‘All night she cries, because I will not take her, and I get no sleep. And she says she will suicide herself if I go without her! And I cannot let you go alone, for my Ministry wishes me to go with you! I tell you, she must come with us!’ And he turned and left us, walking very fast. My husband and I stood staring at each other, feeling like the people in Kafka’s books who are sentenced by an invisible and nameless authority for some unnamed sin to a fantastic and ineluctable punishment. It was not a thing that happens to one in adult life, being obliged to go on a journey with someone whom one dislikes and who has no sort of hold over one, sentimental or patriotic or economic.

  So, at eight o‘clock on the morning of Good Friday (according to the Orthodox calendar) the four of us started for Macedonia from Belgrade station. My husband and I had driven down from the hotel, past a corner of Kalemegdan Park that drops a steep bank towards the river, claret-coloured with tamarisk bloom. The early light lay as a happy presence on the wide grey floods round the city, and it shone on the Obrenovitch villa on the hill-top, which, like all Turkish villas, was exquisitely appropriate to everything freshest in nature, to spring and the morning. At the station we found that Gerda and Constantine had not arrived, and we sat down at the café on the platform and ate beautiful Palestinian oranges, their flesh gleaming like golden crystal. There appeared presently a y
oung doctor of philosophy, a colleague of Constantine’s, with whom I had had some official business, who came to say good-bye and bring me a bunch of red roses. He sat down with us and had some coffee, and we talked until it became evident that Constantine and Gerda were very late indeed, and we began to walk up and down, alarmed and exasperated.

  They came at the last possible moment, and we had to jump into the train just as it went, the doctor of philosophy handing up the roses to the window after we had started. My husband and I busied ourselves packing away our baggage and putting out cushions and books, for we were to be nearly twelve hours in the train. But soon we became aware that Gerda was standing quite still, looking down at the roses with a resentful expression, and Constantine, with his arm round her, was attempting to console her. ‘Yes, it is very bad,’ he was saying, ‘certainly he should have brought you flowers also.’ My husband and I stared at him aghast, for it was obvious that the yong doctor had come down to give me the roses as an impersonal and official act, and that he had refrained from bringing any to Gerda for the precise reason that she had some personal value for him. ‘But I am afraid,’ said Constantine, ‘that this young man really does not know how to behave so well as I had hoped, for look, these are not the flowers he should have given our friend.’ ‘Nein, ganz gewiss nicht!’ agreed Gerda hotly, and they gazed down at the roses, shaking their heads.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Constantine, turning to my husband, ‘what sort of flowers would it be considered right in your country for a man to give to a lady whom he does not know very well when he sees her off at a station?’ My husband guffawed and said, ‘In our country he would go to a florist and ask for some nice flowers.’ Gerda looked disgusted, sat down, and stared out of the window. Constantine said in shocked and bewildered accents, ‘O! Ilyades règles!’ ‘What are they?’ asked my husband, laughing coarsely. From Constantine’s explanations I learned that it was not by ill luck that I had been dogged through Central Europe by carnations, which I detest; I had brought them on myself by my marriage to a banker. Pains had been taken, which I had never perceived, to keep me from getting above myself, for it was ruled that the flowers which I received on my arrival in a town, and during my stay in it, should be modest. ‘It is only on departure,’ said Constantine, ‘that the bouquet should be really large. And there remains the question of colour, which is what disturbs us at this moment. There are certain colors, particularly in roses, which are purely personal, which are not suitable for gifts of ceremony. It is here that our young friend has offended. These roses are nearly crimson.’ My husband turned to me with an air of suspicion, but Constantine did not laugh. There was doubt in his eyes, as if he were wondering whether his wife were not right, and he had greatly exaggerated the degree of our refinement.

  The lovely Serbian country, here like a fusion of Lowland Scotland and New England, with many willows rising golden green, and meadows white with daisies, and nymphean woods, ran past us for some hours. Then there was the call for lunch, and we went along to the restaurant car, to eat one of those pungent and homely meals that are served on the Balkan trains. As we sat down, a middle-aged man in a grey lounge suit stood up in his place and shouted at an elderly man in a braided purple peasant costume who went on with his meal. ‘It is nothing,’ said the waiter who was taking our order; ‘they are only two members of Parliament.’ ‘Yes,’ said Constantine, ‘the one in peasant costume in a well-known supporter of Mr. Stoyadinovitch, and the other is an opposition man.’ At this point the opposition man bent down to look at his opponent’s plate, straightened himself, and cried, ‘I see you are eating an enormous amount of fish. No wonder you take no interest in measures for controlling the floods, I suppose you like floods because they bring us quantities of fish.’ He then sat down, but sprang up immediately to shout, ‘If you don’t make better roads we in our banovina will become separatists. We’ve got a fine regiment, and one will be enough, for only the riff-raff of the Army would march for your lot.’ That was the end, and we all went on with our meal.

  As we went back along the corridor a man ran out of his carriage and grasped Constantine by both hands. ‘Look at him well,’ said Constantine, ‘he is a typical old Serbian patriotic man.’ He was short and thickset, overweight but nimble, with a great deal of coarse black hair on his head and face. ‘See, he has not a grey hair on his head,’ Constantine went on, ‘and he is nearly an old man. I will get him to come and sit with us, for he likes me very much, and you can observe him.’ He remained with us for quite a time, bouncing up and down on his seat, as he passionately attacked the Stoyadinovitch Government, not for its reaction, but for its innovations. ‘The country has gone to the dogs,’ he cried, ‘now that there are so many non-Serbs in the Army! Think of it, there are Croat colonels. A Croat colonel, that is something ridiculous to think of, like a woman preacher! I tell you, the Croats are spoiled for ever by the Austrian influence, they are like fallen women, they cannot be raised.’ Every now and then he stopped to show my husband and myself some point in the landscape, which he thought strangers should not miss. ‘They look good people,’ he said of us; but sighed and added gloomily, ‘But after all they are from the West, they’re Europeans, no doubt they are in sympathy with this horrible age when everything is questioned.’

  ‘Of course he is not at home in the present,’ Constantine explained to us, ‘he is one of our medieval heroes reborn.’ Though he was very rich and he had much to see to in his own district, all his youth he used to rush backwards and forwards between his home and Macedonia, where he was a comitadji and killed many Turks. He fought like a lion in the Balkan wars and the Great War, and after the peace he was made Ban of South Serbia (which is the administrative title of Macedonia) as a reward. ‘But,’ said Constantine, ‘his ideas were not modern enough for his position. He was splendidly brave, of course, and that was a great qualification, for there could not have been a more dangerous job, what with the I.M.R.O. and the wild Montenegrins and the Albanians. But in other ways he was too simple and too large, too Homeric. He wished to remake Macedonia as it had been five hundred years ago, and whenever he saw a ruined church or a castle that had-belonged to the Serbs and had been destroyed by the Turks, he would take Turks and Moslem Albanians away from where they lived until he had enough labour to rebuild them, and then he made them work under armed guards. And when people said, ’But you must not do that,‘ he answered, ’But why not? They knocked them down, didn’t they?‘

  ‘But King Alexander was very kind about it, and though he did not keep him there for long, since these things will now not do, he gave him other work that he could do better. And now this man is very happy building many churches, since he is very pious, and the Church and the state to him are one. He aims to make more foundations than our medieval King Milutin, who built thirty-seven monasteries.’ He bent across and asked the patriot what his record was, and the old man stroked his coal-black moustache with a flourish and announced, ‘Forty-six.’ ‘The one he loves most,’ said Constantine, ‘is a chapel near the field of Kossovo, where he has really let himself go. It cost two hundred pounds, and it is ornamented with frescoes, which gratify him in an old quarrel he has with the Church. You see, our medieval kings, the Nemanyas, were recognized as saints, except for the one who was a flagrant sinner and defied the Church, who was that same Milutin who built the thirty-seven monasteries. They were saints because they were heads of a theocratic society on the Byzantine model, and because they defended Christianity against the pagan Turks. So he cannot see why Karageorge and the Karageorgevitches, who also united the Church and state and who actually drove out the Turks, should not be recognized as saints too. But of course the Church of today will have nothing to do with such an idea, they think it is profane, and they tell him not to be so impious. However, down there his chapel is far away from everywhere, so he has had frescoes painted showing Karageorge himself, and Alexander Karageorgevitch and old King Peter, yes, and King Alexander, all with immense haloes like golde
n soup-plates. He had quite a well-known artist to paint them, and he knew it was wrong and did not want to do it, but this one roared at him like a bull, and snatched so at his belt as if he were finding his pistol, and the artist said, ’Oh, certainly they shall be saints, they shall all be saints!‘ Then when the Patriarch came down to consecrate the chapel this one covered all the frescoes that showed the new royal saints with banners, and all went well. But his mother, who is very dévote, she spends many hours lying on the floors of chapels praying these sins of his will be forgiven.’

  ‘Now tell your friends that we are coming to the heart of Serbia,’ the patriot bade Constantine. ‘This town we are coming into is Kraguyevats,’ Constantine explained, ‘and it was the big town of the Shumadiya, that is to say the wooded district, where the most Serbian Serbs came from, the ones that were foremost in the revolt against the Turks. Now there are great munition works here.’ ‘Tell them to look over there at the memorial to King Alexander,’ said the patriot; ‘it is a good thing for foreigners to see, it makes him quite stout and broad as a king should be, though God knows the poor man was thin as a student. But now make them look out of the other window, for God’s sake.’ ‘Why?’ asked Constantine. ‘If they do that they won’t see the memorial to the Serbian dead.’ ‘That’s just what I am hoping,’ said the patriot. ‘But why?’ asked Constantine again. ‘The figure of the Serbian mother is considered very fine.’ ‘It’s just that figure I don’t want them to see,’ insisted the other. ‘Serbian women have got good breasts, this creature they have put up looks like a toothpick.’ ‘Never would he think of a woman’s breasts except from a patriotic point of view,’ explained Constantine. ‘His country is all to him. He is as pure as a good monk.’