Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  These people of the Trepcha mines were not wholly innocent; for the England which was inferior to them nevertheless existed by their consent. It is probable that the Gospodin Mac was an old-fashioned Scottish liberal, reared in reverence for Mr Gladstone, and it is certain that he was a radical in spirit; again and again he betrayed his sense that the spirit of society was not loyal to the creative spirit that expressed itself in sound mining and sound administration. His wife would have witnessed a revolution, had it been the right one, with the sturdy approval of a housewife who sees a sluttish neighbour at last tackling her spring cleaning. But most of the others who sat round the tennis court would, I think, have been fiercely conservative. They would have leaped to the defence of the forces which were working for their destruction; they would at least have excused, if they would not have totally exonerated, any governor who murdered those revolutionaries who were seeking to come to their relief. Everywhere such men as these, men of definite and distinguished action, tend to vote for the maintenance of the great house. They cannot give any close intellectual justification for their feelings. Plainly they are obeying their instincts; and instincts, it is proverbial, are sound. But that is a self-flattering lie we humans tell ourselves, which was disproved by the peak above us, goal of Stephen Dechanski’s indeflectable instinct for death.

  My husband said, ‘It is time that we must go,’ and we began our farewells. I felt real sorrow that I should probably never see these people again, and as I left I turned to a group of men and women whom I had not met and said, ‘Good-bye,’ although I knew it was an action appropriate to a royal person leaving a bazaar, because I wanted to look squarely at their pleasantness. But in the very intensity of my admiration for them I realized how impotent the West was to help the rest of the world; for it produces individuals so entirely excellent, so single-minded and honest and fastidious, that a paradisal society should long ago have established itself, had not there been within them a dark force impelling them to trace with their actions, so delicate and graceful when considered separately, a hideous and gloomy pattern. Here, through the genius of the Gospodin Mac, that force had been so far as possible frustrated, and the Western virtues showed themselves in their purity. But this was a purely local exorcism. The West, as I thought of it extending thousands of miles beyond the setting sun, was astonishing in its corruption, in its desire for death, and in its complacency towards its disease.

  Only in Macedonia, it seemed to me, had I seen mankind medicining its corruption, trying to raise up its love of life so that it might contend with its love of death and defend the kingdom of human affairs from a government that should extend only over the grave. I remembered how Bishop Nikolai had seemed to wrestle with this desire to die as if he were throwing a steer, though his columnar body had stood stock-still in his rich robes. I remembered how the monks of Sveti Naum had held up an enticing symbol of life to those who had lost their taste for it. I remembered with hope that we were going that evening to Petch, and would the next day visit the great monastery which Stephen had founded at Dechani, for it is a seminary for the training of monks, and there it would be made plain whether these achievements in Macedonia were the works of individual genius, or whether the Orthodox Church were in possession of wisdom which it could impart to all its children; if that were so, then even the mediocre could perform such feats, and the preference for life could be established everywhere. We were standing at the gate now: Dragutin was waiting for us beside the automobile, his hand to his forehead, looking as if he had brought our gold-harnessed horses to the tent of Tsar Lazar. The Gospodin Mac said, ‘You’ll like Dechani, it’s a beautiful place up there in the mountains, it’s like a Highland glen,’ and his wife said, ‘I hope you’ll not be shown round by that wee monk with the awful galoshes.’ At last we slid down the hillside that was like Golder’s Green, that was like Chislehurst, that was truly very Heaven, and the dark, proliferating complexity of Slavonic life again absorbed us.

  Petch I

  When we got back to the hotel Constantine was walking up and down in a frenzy of impatience, holding his watch in his hand. That fretfulness which we had begun to notice as part of the disintegration that Gerda had worked upon him now took the form of a continual allegation that everybody but himself was either too late or too early for every event in the daily routine. If he saw people drinking coffee it seemed to him that they might have done it with propriety an hour earlier or an hour later, but not then. Now we had come back to the hotel twenty minutes before the time set for our departure for Petch, but it was to him as if we were very late, so late that we would have to put off the journey till the next morning. As we got out of the car he ran towards us, waving his watch and crying out reproaches, but Dragutin jumped out and faced him with the detached malevolent intensity and cold health of the snake. It was day by day more apparent that he was repelled by Constantine’s sick state and would have liked to chase him away from us. Though we could not understand what he said to him, we felt the chill of its insolence, and there was suddenly a muffled quality about Constantine, as if he had slipped on a padded garment to protect himself. I wondered if there had been a scene between the two of which I knew nothing. But Constantine only said, ‘Well, you know we must not start too late, for until a short time ago this road was the most dangerous in Yugoslavia.’ ‘But it is so no longer,’ said Dragutin, and began to load the car with our luggage.

  They began to wrangle on the point again, when we had travelled some distance from the town and were passing through low hills covered with scrub-oak, now ruddy with the early sunset. Where the road cut across a twisting valley we saw a car drawn up by the roadside and a man standing on a raised hillock, his head bent towards the west. We slowed down and saw that he was crossing himself, and we stopped dead. ‘When he has finished I will ask him why he is praying here,’ said Dragutin; ‘perhaps it is a holy place where some Turkish beg was killed.’ When the man stepped down from the hillock he shouted to him, ‘Why are you praying, friend?’ The man came up to our car and answered, ‘Because I am glad to be alive. But are you not English? Listen how well I speak English! My friends in England laugh at me and say I speak so well that I speak Scotch. For all the war I was at school at Aberdeen. And afterwards I came back here, and because of my good education I became a dealer in factory-made clothes and that is why I am praying here now. For very often I had to make this journey from Kossovska Mitrovitsa to Petch, and because of the brigands I was always very frightened, particularly just at this spot, for they used to come down this valley and lay a tree-trunk across the road. I used to think of my dear wife and my little children, and pray to God for protection, and now that there is no more danger I am thanking him for giving it to me. But since you come from England I would like very much to talk to you. Are you going to Petch? Are you staying there long? Ah, well, then I shall see you, but now I must hurry, for I must go to supper with a friend of mine who has a farm outside the town.’ ‘You see,’ said Constantine, as he left us in dust, ‘he said the road was dangerous.’ ‘He said it had been dangerous,’ Dragutin corrected him, ‘and he showed by his action he believed it was so no longer. I believe in God as much as anybody, but on a road where I thought there were still brigands I would not leave my car and stand beside it praying, I would pray as I drove, and so would any sane man.’

  The brigands who had operated on this road were by way of being political insurgents. They were Albanians claiming to represent the element which had been dispossessed by the redistribution of land made by the Yugoslavian Government after the war. All over the Balkans there is an association between highway robbery and revolutionary idealism which the Westerner finds disconcerting, but which is an inevitable consequence of the Turkish conquest. This crystallized the conditions of the fourteenth century; and in the Middle Ages anybody who stepped out of the niche into which he was born had no other resource but banditry, as he could neither move to another district nor change his trade. If a peasant excited
the displeasure of authority by standing up for the rights of his kind, he had to make himself scarce and thereafter live in cover of the forests and make forays on rich travellers, alike under the Nemanyas and under the Turks. Hence the Balkan peoples are not, to this day, initially shocked by a rebel who professes political idealism though he habitually loots and murders, though sooner or later they become irritated by the practical results of this application of medieval theory to modern conditions. The weak point in the programme is the present lack of rich travellers. A Robin Hood working on the road between Petch and Kossovska Mitrovitsa would earn a few good meals in spring and autumn and none at all in summer and winter. So he would have to fall back either on robbery from travellers of inconsiderable means, or regular exactions from the local peasants: that is to say, he would become a pest to the very class which he claimed to be championing. This is the real reason why I.M.R.O., the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, perished; and these Albanians could not surmount the difficulty, particularly after the Trepcha mines brought money to the district. The peasants became so anxious to get on with their lives and enjoy their share of this new prosperity that, actively or passively, they were all on the side of the gendarmes. But even so the business of exterminating these bandits must have been formidable. To the right of this road runs a wall of mountains, fissured with deep wooded glens, and to the left lies a flat plain, green and sweet and fertile as our Vale of Pewsey. The loot was as tempting as the cover was kind.

  ‘Look, there is Tserna Gora, there is Montenegro,’ said Constantine; and it was so. The country, the fact of it, the essence of it, not just a part of it, was before our eyes. A wall of mountains ran south from Kossovska Mitrovitsa, another wall ran north to meet it from the misty limits of the plain, but they stopped short of meeting; and above the gap was a still higher wall, a black cliff-face, half as tall as the sky. That was Tserna Gora, Monte Negro, which may fairly be translated as the Black Mountain, but meant nothing of the sort when the name was given, for then it meant the mountain of Strashimir Ivo the Black, that is to say the outlaw, a Serbian chief who fled there half a century after Kossovo and established a Christian principality. The Turks did not follow him, not for a couple of centuries. They sat on the plain and looked up at this colossal fortress, this geological engineering feat that brings rock as it is seen only deep below earth in caverns and abysms and hangs it in an area that had seemed reserved for clouds.

  About the mouth of this gap were scattered agreeable foothills, on which we discerned as we grew nearer the mosques and cubes of a city. The buildings glimmered blue-white about us as we drove into an evening iced and shadowed by the precipice at the end of the gorge, but still light enough to disclose the tottering and dilapidated charm of Petch. It is not unlike a Swiss town, for a river rushes beside the high-street, bringing the cold breath of the glacier with it, and as the light fails the mountains seem to draw closer; but the place knows nothing so solid as a chalet. Nobody can imagine how insubstantial an inhabited building can be till he has visited Petch. Most of the houses we passed, and nearly all the shops, could be knocked down in half an hour by any able-bodied person with a small pick, and quite a number could be razed to the ground. Many are made of thin planks and petrol tins, and such as had essayed the use of plaster had been stricken with a kind of architectural mange.

  We went up the high-street, which was very broad, with a breadth that was the more remarkable because the shops and inns on each side were so low and rickety. A stream ran down one side of it, one of those channelled by the Turks to take the drainage. It was the hour of the corso, and a crowd of people, mostly very tall, were shuffling up and down, their passionate faces and fantastic dresses shot with two aspects, both equally passionate and fantastic, by the conflicting lights of the dusk and the white downpour from the electric standards. There was contrapuntal sense of movement, for there was the leisurely shuffle of the crowd, the quick ripple of the stream in the roadway, and the leaping and dancing of the river which could be seen through the gaps in the houses, driving over a wide bed of shingle among poplars and willows. Yet I was reminded of a ghost town I once visited in Colorado, where a ribbon of untrodden dust led between windowless frame houses to an abandoned mine.

  The hotel received us into a vast eccentric bosom. It was built round a restaurant, a strange irregular quadrilateral apartment, with a gallery and a line of super-Corinthian pillars marching across it, all painted a hot dull maroon. It was yet another specimen of the innate architecture of the Balkans, which seems to have been run up without a pattern by somebody who had never seen a building of the type he was constructing. In this restaurant a few people in Western clothes, probably functionaries, sat about at the tables, attended by several waiters; all, because of the vastness of the room, in which the beams of the electric light wandered loosely and ineffectively, seemed to be featureless. We went upstairs and traversed passages that were true to the Petch fashion for insubstantiality. When the floor creaked underfoot it was making no idle complaint, it had indeed suffered an injury.

  The manager flung open the door of a bedroom and we looked in on an ebony-haired young officer, his olive-green coat tapering exquisitely to a dandyish waist, who was standing at an iron table and washing his hands in an enamel basin with bright pink soap. The scent of the soap was so powerful, so catastrophically floral, that we remained in a still and startled semicircle, looking down at the magical lather. It was as if one had opened a door and found a man taking a white rabbit out of a tophat. It was the manager who first recovered his self-possession. ‘It seems the room is occupied,’ he explained to us. Reluctantly we retired, our eyes on the extraordinary soap. ‘But the officer is going quite soon,’ he said, when we were out on the landing: ‘If you will sit down here you will not have long to wait.’ ‘Have you not other rooms?’ asked my husband severely, in German. ‘Yes,’ the manager answered, ‘but there is something special about this room and the next; I have often remarked it. I would like you to have them.’ ‘And I?’ said Constantine. ‘Do I also have to wait?’ ‘Yes,’ said the manager, ‘there is another officer in yours. I do not know why they have not gone. They said they would be gone at half-past five. But of course they are both young, and when one is young one often does not know how the time is passing. You will find these comfortable chairs.’

  About that he was wrong. They were cane chairs with large holes in the seats. But it was not disagreeable to occupy them, for they were set beside a table where a chambermaid was ironing a pile of sheets, and she was a very agreeable person. She was a Hungarian, not very young or pretty, but she had a jolly, monkeyish face, with russet cheeks and shining brown eyes, which she twisted into amusing grimaces. The sheets were very coarse, so that to iron them required a real muscular effort, and every time she responded to the strain with a delicious expression, a blend of ascetic voluptuousness and self-mockery. It was quite pleasant sitting there in the warm dusk. The sheets smelt like toasted tea-cakes. I nearly went to sleep several times, but I was awakened because the doors of a cupboard just beside me kept on bursting open for no other cause but sheer flimsiness, sheer inability to stay put together another instant, disclosing a number of unidentifiable objects wrapped in brown paper. I remembered a Russian novel I had once reviewed in which the description of a bedroom had ended with the sentence, ‘And under the bed there was an enormous enema.’

  At last the officers clattered down the passage, and we took over their rooms. Ours was still tenanted by the scent of the pink soap, the spectre of an unthinkably lush and oleaginous summer. We changed our clothes, and just as we were ready Constantine knocked on the door and came in looking very pleased and happy. ‘That little Hungarian chambermaid,’ he announced, ‘she is perhaps not so good as she might be, or perhaps she is a little better. I have told her I want a hot, hot bath, because I have a little fever and I want to sweat, and she says to me, “Yes, you will have a hot, hot bath, myself I will make it very hot, but who wi
ll give you the massage afterwards? Is it myself also?” Ah, it is so with all our chambermaids, they are very naughty, but very good also, you saw how she worked.’ He turned his back on us to straighten his tie among the delirious reflections of the extravagantly framed mirror, with a sudden revival of the gallant spirit of self-parody that had so often enchanted us, when we had first travelled with him; and all three of us laughed. But I noticed that the back of his neck was fiery red, and I said, ‘But what about this fever? Constantine, are you really ill?’ He whirled about and answered, ‘It is from my hand.’ We stared at it in horror: the whole hand between the knuckles and the wrist was scarlet and pulpy. ‘But what happened?’ ‘Just this morning as we got up from breakfast,’ said Constantine, ‘I was stung by a great ferocious insect with huge wings. It was either a wasp or a hornet. But you did not notice.’