Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

by Rebecca West

  Towards such people who ask such questions my husband feels as a shepherd towards lambs. He does not ask himself whether he would not rather be thinking his own thoughts or spending the time with companions more like himself, he wholly abandons himself to the feeling that there is a breed valuable to the community and that he must cherish every member of it. He talked with the boy about books as we strolled along the hillside under green firwoods so high that the spring had only lately reached them, through the flowery pastures, past a ruined house where snakes slid among rank hemlocks and hellebores, to the visibly icy reservoirs where the boy had been bathing, and up a grassy slope to the cavern. It still glowed faintly with holy pictures painted by a medieval hermit, and it resounded with cries that might have been thought to proceed from a spirit in travail, had not the angular behind and bell-rope tail of some form of cattle been visible in its depths. On the grass near by, in the shadow cast by an acacia tree, sat an old Albanian, his bright eyes and smile fresh as a bubbling spring. We felt that he would have been sure to pick the best place for a rest, so we sat ourselves down beside him.

  The young man exchanged jokes with him; and one was so funny that the young man rolled over and over on the ground, but he remembered to pick himself up and say, in a superior manner, ‘The Albanians are a people of great mother-wit, but they are not at all advanced,’ and started talking about books again. His special interests were economics and political theory, and he called himself a Communist, but he had in fact a far more intelligent interest in Marxism than most Yugoslavs who claim that name. They are for the most part simply exponents of the age-long opposition between the country and the towns and have much more sympathy with William Morris than with Marx, but this young man had read Das Kapital with a mind of good tough critical fibre. My husband repeated to him some of the most amusing passages out of H. W. B. Joseph’s book on the Marxian theory of value, and in spite of his faith he laughed aloud and rolled over on his back just as he had done at the Albanian’s jokes. ‘Who is the man that wrote that book?’ he asked. ‘He must have a wonderful mind, though of course essentially frivolous. Do you know him?’ ‘He has one of the finest minds in the world,’ said my husband, ‘and he was my philosophy tutor at Oxford.’ ‘Oh, what I could do,’ cried the boy, ‘if I had the advantages you have had!’ He sat up and held his chin in his hands and looked sulkily down the valley, and then a light stirred in his eyes and he turned to my husband. ‘I heard them say in the town that you came from Kossovska Mitrovitsa and that you were great friends with the people at the Trepcha mines. Could you not give me a letter to the Gospodin Mac asking him to give me work? For there is nothing here for me to do. I help my father in the hotel he keeps, but there is not enough work for the two of us, and I am too good for the work there is, I could do much better. Sometimes I weep, because Petch has nothing for me to do.’

  On our way down to dinner we went into Constantine’s room to see how he was faring with his fever, and on the landing we saw that the chambermaid was ironing her pile of sheets as she had been doing the night before, but this time she was quietly weeping. I said to Constantine, ‘Your little admirer is crying her eyes out, have you been cruel to her?’ He answered, ‘No, she has told me what grieves her and it is something more important than me. She came in here to bring me an orangeade and she sat on my bed and she said, “I should be happy, for they pay me well here. They know well that the hotel is falling to pieces and that if I were not here to scrub the floors and keep the mattresses clean we would be overrun with mice and beetles and bugs. But sometimes I cannot bear life.” I said to her, “What is it you cannot bear, my little one?” and she answered, “It is death. It makes me so angry. Three days ago a man died here, he was a very rich man and he held high office in the town. When the Prime Minister came here he was among those who received him, and he wore a tall hat such as the gentlemen wear in Budapest. I knew him well, and he was a proud and powerful man, with many things passing through his head. And three days ago he died, and yesterday they carried his coffin through the streets, and he was nothing, just a body that would soon begin to stink and would be just dirt, just filth!” And then she began to cry, so I said, “Did you love him, my little one?” and she answered, “No, not at all, but it makes me so angry that death can do such a thing, that one day there can be a man, full of importance, and the next day there is nothing. It should not be so. Oh, I felt so furious, I wanted to fight death and kill him.” And she sat there and wept, and I think she was speaking the truth. I think she had not loved this man but was only enraged at the idea of death, for she wept like a woman who has been insulted, not like a woman who has been hurt. Then she said, “I must iron my sheets,” and she beat my pillow, and she went from me.’ When we went out on to the landing she had left her task for a moment, and a guttering candle, standing on the rucked ironing-blanket between a pile of rough sheets and smooth ones, cast tremendous shadows on the walls and ceiling as we passed.

  As we sat down in the restaurant there came to our table the traveller in ready-made clothing we had seen praying on the road near Kossovska Mitrovitsa, who was so civil that we asked him to dine with us. He accepted our invitation with alacrity because he longed to speak of the abode of joy, a blend of Venice in Carnival time and the New Jerusalem, to which his memory had transformed Aberdeen. But there was some other alchemic agent beside his memory; there were personalities at work which had softened the gaunt handsomeness of that town and injected blandness into the veins of my maternal country to mix with its grim vigour. For he spoke of many people he had met in Great Britain with tenderness, particularly of one woman whom he proved by his story to be remarkable. She had organized the scheme for placing the Serbian refugee boys in English and Scottish homes and schools and had travelled perpetually to see how they were getting on; and later she had astonished them by her interest in them as individuals. ‘She was like a baba, like a grandmother,’ he said, ‘but many people are fond of children, and young people, it is like being fond of dogs or horses. It is what happens afterwards that matters. And do you know, last year, she came out here. She said she was getting very old and might die before long, and she wanted to see what had happened to her boys. So she travelled all over the country seeking us out, and when we had done well she was so pleased. She came to my house and had tea with my wife and saw my children, and she sat and nodded her head and said, “This is very good, this is very good indeed. It couldn’t be better. I shall often think about this when I get home.” She had really liked us boys, for ourselves, not because we were boys. That I think very nice.’ And indeed we thought it a paradisal action, full of promise that earth need not always be what it is.

  ‘I shall always be glad that I was in England,’ he went on, ‘for I learned to do things neatly and in order and at a definite time, which we do not do here, and this has made me successful in business. Not very successful, I am not an eagle; but I have all I want and much more than I expected as a child, and I can keep my wife well and give her a nice home, and my children are strong and well-educated. But I am glad I came back to Yugoslavia, for it is a most beautiful country.’ He asked us if we had visited many of the monasteries, and was sorry that we had not visited more in Serbia proper, in the valleys south of Belgrade, but glad that we had seen Sveti Naum and the Frushka Gora. ‘How do you know the monasteries so well?’ asked my husband. ‘You cannot take much time off to look at them while you are travelling in your business.’ ‘Then I have no time at all,’ he replied, ‘but I belong to a society in Belgrade, and every time there is a holiday such as Easter or Whitsuntide we members hire motor charabancs and we drive off with our wives and children to some monastery and stay there two or three days. It is an excellent way of spending a holiday, for it keeps us close to the Church, even when we do not like what the patriarchs do, and forget to go to services in Belgrade, and it reminds us of our national history, and the places are always exceedingly beautiful, and there are many good monks whom it is ple
asant to meet.’ I tried to imagine Canterbury or Gloucester invaded by a Bank Holiday crowd, who picnicked all over the Close and sang and danced and drank, and occasionally rushed into the cathedral and joined heartily in the service and rushed out when they felt like it, and freely and familiarly conversed with the Dean and Chapter. The imagination cannot contrive such a picture. The Anglican Church has bought decorum at such a great price that it is indelicate to imagine her deprived of her purchase. ‘I am glad,’ continued our friend, ‘that you are to see Dechani. It is one of the most beautiful monasteries. My friends and I spent last Easter there and we were amazed by its richness. It gives some idea of what our land must have been like in the days of the Nemanyas.’ ‘Has Dechani much influence on this town?’ I asked. ‘It does not seem so,’ answered the traveller; ‘this is a miserable town, not because the people here are not good, for the Serbs of Petch have always been remarkable for character and intelligence, but because nothing ever happens here. They say that dinars amounting to two or three thousand pounds a month are paid into the town as war pensions and gratuities, and the people live chiefly on that. It is a subsidy of a little over two pounds a year per head. You see, under the Turks it was a frontier town, and that meant a lot of money, both in the employment of troops and in selling the troops goods and in smuggling; and the people had a great interest in maintaining their faith against persecution. But now they need a new thing.’

  He excused himself early, for he had to start driving south the next morning shortly after dawn; but he did not go till he had performed a service for us in the way of some supplies from a chemist. He was an altogether admirable person, but his place was almost at once taken by a person whom we found less admirable, the Dane who spoke German like a German. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I suppose you will be going to Tsetinye tomorrow?’ ‘No,’ said my husband. ‘But what are you doing here so long?’ demanded the Dane. ‘We are tourists,’ said my husband. ‘But there is nothing here to keep a tourist longer than one day!’ exclaimed the Dane in a tone of exasperation. ‘We have not yet seen Dechani,’ said my husband. ‘But you should have seen Dechani in the morning, and the Patriarchate in the afternoon!’ the Dane said in a very loud and threatening voice. ‘What are you doing here in Petch?’ asked my husband. The Dane clearly thought this an impertinent question. ‘I am a traveller in agricultural machinery,’ he answered coldly, as if to tell us to mind our own business. ‘I suppose you will be here for weeks,’said my husband. ‘Why do you say weeks?’ asked the Dane. ‘Well, would you rather I said days, months, or years?’ replied my husband. In open ill-humour the Dane went back to his own table and studied a German newspaper.

  Petch II

  The next morning we spoke of this suspicious person to Constantine, as we breakfasted outside the hotel. ‘Certainly he will be a German agent,’ he said. ‘That is the second we have come across, for I am sure the little one in knickerbockers at Sveti Naum was a German agent also. But I cannot think what can be going to happen here, for this is not an important place. In Macedonia the Germans make much trouble with the Bulgarians, and it is worth their while, but here there are only Albanians, and it is worth nobody’s while to stir them up.’ The day was hotter and there had been no rain for days; a wind came down from the wall of rock at the end of the gorge, stabbed us with unexpected chill, and blew into our teeth, into our eyes, a film of warm dust from the high-street. The slight discomfort aroused in Constantine his chronic malaise, and he turned to us with a gorgon smile. ‘Yes, the Germans are terrible people,’ he sneered, ‘they employ secret agents to serve their interests abroad. I suppose the English never did so, not in Russia, not in India.’ ‘Of course we use secret agents like every other power,’ said my husband, ‘and sometimes we use them justifiably and sometimes unjustifiably, which again can be said of any other power. What is interesting us is not the fact that this man is a secret agent, but that he practises his art with so little discretion that we have only to describe his proceedings for you to be quite sure that he is a secret agent.’ ‘Yes,’ squealed Constantine, clenching his fists, ‘the English are always cold and dignified and they are never ridiculous, and the Germans are clowns and make fools of themselves, but there is a mystery there, and what is behind it may not mean that the English are saved and the Germans damned.’ His voice sounded charlatanish and bewildered; he was using the spiritual vocabulary of the Slav, who is preoccupied with the ideas of failure and humiliation, to justify his allegiance to Gerda, who had no sympathy with them and would have regarded his interest in them as proof of his Slav inferiority, and as he spoke his taste exposed to him his own falsity, though he persisted in it.

  But once we had started on our way to Dechani Constantine became himself again, for the road was beautiful. I have said that Petch stands where a wall of mountains running from the north just fails to meet a wall of mountains running from the south. The road from Kossovska Mitrovitsa to Petch lies under the mountains that 978 come from the north; the road from Petch to Dechani lies under the mountains that come from the south, and passes country that is better watered and shadowed, and is therefore green with a fertility that seems to well up from deep wet roots. Forests are thick on the hillside, tall trees hold up handsome densities of foliage, and on the left of the road stretches the plain we had seen on our way from Kossovska Mitrovitsa, that is rich and damp as the Vale of Pewsey. In its fat fields parties of labourers worked in close-set teams, looking like a corps de ballet in their white pleated skirts, and in the villages women stately as the queens in their frescoes gossiped round the fountains. But the houses we passed told an appalling story. The narrow windows were set high, so that they could be shot from and not into, and the walls were pock-marked with bullets. I remembered having read that on this road there stand two houses, side by side, which in 1909 were the subject of an imbecile tragedy. In that year a man living in one slew four men of the family living in the other. He had to flee. That is natural enough. What was not natural, what was as artificial a constriction of human nature as any abuse of Western civilization, was that thirteen other men belonging to his family, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime, were obliged to flee. Had they not done so, the institution of the blood-feud, which flourished unchecked under Turkish rule, would have involved them in a welter of butchery, in which all must have acquired the guilt of murder and would themselves have been murdered. In 1919, under Yugoslavian rule, the criminal was arrested, and his innocent relatives, with the consent of the inhabitants of the other house, who were equally anxious to be relieved from the blood-feud, were able to return home.

  Order is something. I thought so again when we passed through a grove of trees which the Turks, in their great love for any beauty that did not involve careful maintenance, had chosen for a graveyard. It must have been at this grove that the downtrodden monks of Dechani had waited when Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby came to visit them on their way from the Patriarchate more than seventy years ago, that they might beg the ladies not to bring their Turkish military guard to the monastery, as they were worn out with defending their treasures and the sanctity of their altar. Miss Mackenzie and Miss Irby had had to act with great decisiveness, even scribbling notes to demonstrate their command over the magical art of writing, before they could rid themselves of the soldiers, who had evidently promised themselves great sport at the monastery. Now the grove was empty save for an Albanian shepherd-boy, pretty as a girl, who sat playing on a pipe, while his flock nibbled among the tree-trunks and the marble stumps of the tombs, dappled like them with sunshine and shadow.

  We were at Dechani. Across a wide neatness of farmland we looked into a glen of the Highland sort, with a background of mountain falling back from mountain to show snow peaks that must have been many miles distant, far beyond the Albanian frontier. The nearer hills were emerald on their lower slopes and above that shrill green, where there were beeches and limes; and where there were pines they were feathered with blackness. At the mou
th of the glen was the white oblong of the monastery. It was larger than any other we had seen, and even from this distance it could be seen that it was a rarity, a jewel. As we drew nearer to it down a by-road we could see that it could never be spoiled, and also that it was as near to being spoiled at this moment as it could ever be. For it was covered with scaffolding and surrounded with the potent and infective disorder that builders, by a malign kind of compensation, diffuse round what they repair. But when we had crossed the ramp of planks that was now the only entrance to the monastery, and picked our way among the trenches and heaps of rubble in the courtyard, it was fully apparent that what we had come to see was a pearl of architecture. It has the unity of a pearl, its living texture, and even its tint, for it is built of blocks of white, grey, and rose marble, which merge in the eye to a soft pale glow.

  It happens, however, that I have no great taste for pearls; and I did not like Dechani. It represents an inspired moment in that phase of Christian architecture when Armenian influence fused with the Byzantine and Lombard schools; and many French churches demonstrate what virtue can be in that conjunction. But with the religious tolerance characteristic of the Nemanyas Stephen Dechanski had employed a Roman Catholic architect, a Franciscan friar, to build this, his chief, and, indeed, his only remarkable foundation; and this contact with the Western Church has introjected an element into Dechani which strikes an eye accustomed, as mine was by this time, to the Byzantine standard, as soft and impure. In the Roman Catholic faith it often appears that the partitions between the different kinds of human activity have been broken down, and that the worshippers often bring to religion desires which could be properly satisfied only in the sphere of sex or by the exercise of power or the enjoyment of respect. Hence the Church may often, through its art or ritual or dogma, speak of voluptuousness or pomp or respectability; and it seemed to me that Dechani spoke of all three. Grachanitsa was built for people who never thought of sex when they came to church, since they had already judged its claims in relation to society and had settled them, who had been assigned their places in the social structure and had play for their powers within those limits, and who knew that if they were to earn the respect of their fellows they must be good soldiers or scholars or craftsmen. But Dechani might have been built for people who were repressed and sentimentally lecherous, who were acquiring a nihilist standard of ability and a negative standard of virtue because an honoured place in the community could be bought simply by the continued possession of material goods. It is exquisite, but it is unaustere and complacent.