by Rebecca West
Constantine burst out, ‘You see how stubborn they are! They are heroes, they must always go on, they cannot go back, not even if it is merely an evening promenade that is in question, and going on means that you must die! How are we to change them into reasonable men, men of our times, if we are not to beat and beat and beat them?’ ‘Well, if they had not been like this they would not have kept off the Turk so successfully,’ said my husband. ‘Yes, but if what was good has been done must it be to do for ever and ever?’ asked Constantine angrily. ‘I have in my time done many things that were excessively brave, in North Bosnia during the war I have cut myself out of a valley through the bodies of many soldiers with my bayonet, in Bulgaria after the peace I have saved my troops by seizing a railway train in manu militari. Must I then always be killing people by my bayonet, must I every day seize a railway train, because it was good that I did so once?’ The Chief of Police and he then carried on a passionate exchange of complaining undertones, until the chauffeur cleared his throat and made a remark with an air of sense and dignity, in correct blank verse metre, and they both broke out into angry shouts. ‘He is saying such fatuities,’ cried Constantine; ‘he is saying that you wanted to go to the edge of the cliff to look at the view.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ said my husband, ‘I think that the person concerned in this incident for whom I feel the least affection is the woodcutter’s boy. Look, he is watching us from under that elder tree on the left.’ ‘What have you against the little one?’ asked Constantine. ‘I feel so strongly,’ said my husband, ‘that if we had gone over the cliff he would have been the first, by quite a long way, to find our bodies.’
When we returned to the inn I was very tired, for it was now thirteen hours since I had risen to go to the Patriarchate at Petch, and I thought I would not be able to eat any dinner. But I ate a great deal, for the stately landlady brought us rich bean soup, and some home-cured raw ham, and a dish of lamb roasted with herbs, and a pile of little cakes, made in the Turkish fashion, of pounded fruit and nuts pressed between two layers of pastry, very well made indeed. There was also some good wine from the southern slope of Montenegro. Dragutin was eating at a table in the opposite corner of the dining-room from ours, and we and he raised our glasses and drank to the health of the widow, who stood in the centre of the room, responding with unexpected animation by contralto cluckings and coy agitations of her black draperies; it was as if we had pleased a rookery.
All was drowsy and agreeable, when the door opened, or rather was thrown open with considerable panache, and the chauffeur came in, very pale. We all fell still and watched him as he came across to our table and halted. ‘What is it? What is it?’ asked Constantine, and the boy set out on a speech, all in blank verse. Constantine shot out of his chair, he beat the table with his fist, he screamed at the boy, and Dragutin stood up, uttering cries of derision and rage. ‘Will you believe it?’ Constantine explained when he had gone, ‘He does not come to say he is sorry, he is still trying to prove that it was not a fault to take you to that cliff where you might have been dashed to a thousand pieces.’ He shuddered and took a deep draught from his glass, wincing at what he saw at the bottom of it. Then his face was shadowed by sinister recollection, by caution, by malice. He remembered that we were English, that we were liberals, that we liked him; and the disposition he had made of his soul required that he should be loyal only to those who were German, who were Nazi, who despised him. He snarled, ‘See what trouble you have caused by always being so independent! You two must always do the thing that is extra! If you had kept by the Chief of Police and myself we would have had none of this trouble!’ There was nothing for us to say, the charge was so unjust, for we had been sent ahead with the chauffeur as our guide. When Constantine saw that we were not going to answer he looked at Dragutin and repeated what he had said in Serbian. But Dragutin also said nothing.
The widow grew sensible of a change in the atmosphere and began moving about the room on petty errands, tweaking a curtain straight, taking away an empty salt-cellar. My husband put a match to a cigar and said over the flame, ‘I do not know why I have never asked you this before, Constantine, for it has often come into my mind. Did you ever pass through a phase in your youth when it seemed to you that no writer existed except Dostoievsky?’ The sneer, the look of self-dedication to death vanished from Constantine’s face. He said, ‘For two years it was so with me. But indeed it was more than so, for I felt that I myself did not exist save as a part of Dostoievsky’s mind. I would ask myself, whenever I was at a new thing, “Who are you now? Are you Stavrogin or Shatov? Are you Karamazinov or Alyosha?” ’ He set about defining the revelation that Dostoievsky had made to all of us, talking as brilliantly and nobly as I had ever heard him. ‘Turgeniev is greater than he, the critics say, and they are right, but if we had not been saved from the pit by Dostoievsky we would not be here to read Turgeniev....’
Nevertheless I shook with a chill that even his recovered fire could not exorcize. The chauffeur had been willing to cast away his life on the hills, and ours also, in order that he should not be thought foolish enough not to know a certain path; Constantine was willing to cast away his self-respect, and indeed all he cared for, art and philosophy and his country’s life, for a cause as frivolous: he wished to win the good opinion of those who had given him a sense of their social superiority by pointing out that Berlin was a richer city than Belgrade. So one could not say of the chauffeur, ‘He has erred out of curable ignorance,’ because Constantine, who was one of the most gifted and learned men in Europe, surpassed him in guilt, and one could not say of Constantine, ‘He would not plan his self-destruction had he not overstrained our human equipment,’ because the chauffeur had committed the same offense in a state of simplicity. The woman we had met walking on the mountains that afternoon seemed not such a consoling portent as I had thought her. On the great mountains she was so small; against the black universal mass of our insanity her desire for understanding seemed so weak a weapon. Therefore I shuddered, and could take no pleasure in the genius of my friend, nor in my husband’s kindness to my friend. I was glad when the widow rose from her seat by the hearth, and, to let us know that hours were getting late for Kolashin, gave us a message which I think Constantine failed to translate with his usual felicity. For I am almost sure that she said she was anxious to do everything she could for us, and that we had better use the earth-closet while the lantern in the garden was still alight; but Constantine announced, ‘The widow says she will give you her all, and hopes you will go to the closet before you have an accident.’
Podgoritsa
We left the inn early, taking all the remaining little cakes the widow could give us, and travelled for some miles further through the beechwoods and streams of this sensuous version of the Lake District. Then we crossed a pass into the traditional Montenegro, the land which defies cultivation so that no peasantry could live there were its breast not bound with oak and triple bronze. It is an astonishing country, even to those who know the bleakness of Switzerland and Scotland and the Rockies. There one sees often enough trees growing askew from the interstices of a hillside paved with rocky slabs; but here it is as if a volcanic eruption had been arrested just at the moment when it was about to send the whole countryside flying into the air. The hillside bulges outwards, and slabs and trees jut out at frantic angles to a surface itself at a frantic angle. The inhabitants of such a fractured and anfractuous landscape are obliged to alter some of the activities that might be thought to be unalterably the same all the world over. There could be no such thing as strolling a few hundred yards from one point to another; the distance could be covered only by jumping, striding, and climbing, unless a track were made.
But the next pass brought us to a district even wilder and less easily habitable. It could not be accurately called barren, for there was a certain amount of very rich earth to be seen; but again it had suffered an internal assault that had sent it spinning. We have all seen houses so ruined that only part of t
he ground-floor walls were left standing, to define rooms that were now plots where grass and weeds and flowers grew more lush than in the wilderness outside. Here it is as if the whole mountainside for twenty miles around were covered with such houses, but the walls were of lilac-blue rock and no mason had built them. If the plots they defined were more than a few yards across crops grew there, or stunted trees, for we were drawing nearer the Adriatic, where timber is precious. But if these plots were small or inaccessible they flamed with flowers, with thickets of tall iris and torches of broom, rising out of the blanched hellebore. It was a hungry scene, yet it offered distractions to hunger.
As we came down towards the lowlands and the distant sea we ran within sight of a canyon, cut by a river that flowed a dull bright-green, clear and yet snake-like, over sand and pebbles. This colour delights the Yugoslavs very much. It is mentioned in the folk-songs of the district, and all sorts of people, from Militsa to an assistant in a Belgrade shoe-shop, had said to me, ‘You are going to Montenegro? Then you must look long at the water of the Moracha, which runs through Podgoritsa, for it is very beautiful.’ Beyond the canyon were low mountains ruled into natural terraces so level that the artificial terraces on the fertile land at their base seemed faultily ruled. Then the distance flattened out into plains, and before we got to them we halted for a minute or two to hang over a bridge that spanned a river sent down from the mountains to join the Moracha. ‘This bridge,’ said Constantine, ‘was fought over again and again by the Turks and the Montenegrins, again and again it has run with blood. For this is the key position to these fertile flatlands, which are the best part of the Zeta, which was Turkish until the Montenegrins took it from them once and for all in 1876.’ ‘They are good lands,’ said Dragutin, rubbing his stomach; ‘now others as well as the Turk can eat.’ ‘God, why do you speak of eating when we are out here in the country!’ exclaimed Constantine. ‘Drive us at once to Podgoritsa.’
We travelled fast beside the river in the canyon, which runs all the way into the town without losing the integrity of its strange and brilliant colour, and soon we were eating trout in the dining-room of the principal hotel. We had not wasted one moment looking at the sights of Podgoritsa, for too evidently it has none. There are hardly any relics of the Turkish occupation; and as a modern town it lacks charm. It is solid, for it used to be the second town of Montenegro, and it is now the administrative capital of the district, but it is built without eloquence. Stone, which everywhere else imposes a certain rhetoric on those who build with it, can do nothing against the limitations of the Montenegrin genius, and expresses nothing but forthrightness and resistance. But there was an immense amount of human sightseeing to be done here, even in this dining-room.
As soon as we sat down, a plump elderly man, with hair artlessly dyed an incredible piano-black, rushed across the dining-room and embraced Constantine. ‘What are you doing so far from Belgrade?’ he cried. ‘And you? I did not know you could breathe outside the Café Moscow,’ cried Constantine. A beautiful young man, who was sitting at the next table and had been staring at a letter instead of eating his trout, looked up at these metropolitan greetings, seemed to recognize both parties, and broke into bitter silent laughter. Fiercely he folded up the letter, put it into his pocket, and started on his fish. The fat man explained that he was in Podgoritsa rehearsing the local repertory company in one of his dramas. ‘And a very fine job they are making of it too,’ waving his hand in a courtly gesture; and we saw that the players were all around us, eating trout. The men sat at one table: a couple of spaniel-eyed juveniles, the père noble with a toupee that rode higher and higher as he laid down the law with a wagging forefinger, and the funny man, who had the anxious face of a concerned mother and a shelving belly. The leading lady ate alone. Though she was not young she was very handsome and she had authentic glamour. That is not to say that she resembled Miss Marlene Dietrich, and announced herself poisoned by special self-generated sexual toxins, affecting the face like the heavier sorts of beer. It is to say that while she was well equipped for love and sensible of its claims, she would be far more difficult for a lover to subjugate than the most frigid spinster. For it was inconceivable that the love of a man could ever matter to her so much as the approval of an audience. No lover, therefore, could ever feel sure of her, even after he had physically possessed her; she would leave any Romeo to play Juliet. And every man could promise himself the triumph of breaking down her preoccupation and making himself more precious to her than applause.
She could not have been more attractive as she sat there, doubly dazzling with the radiance of a Slav blonde and the maquillage of her profession, which seemed to proclaim her as more accessible than other women and actually proved her less; for the black on her lashes was designed to convince not a lover within kissing distance but the man at the back of the gallery, and her complexion did not aim at freshness but at transporting into ordinary life the climate of the footlights. How little she and her kind represented pure passivity was shown by two older actresses at another table, who illustrated another phase of their being. Both were elderly, one had been very beautiful; about them was neither embitterment nor despair, only the cynicism of old foxes that had evaded the hunters a thousand times and found their holes in time. Their value, real or imagined, in the world of art had given them a refuge from all the common ills of life, had given them the power to tell any person who tried to humiliate or disappoint them that it was not to be done, that they could only be hurt by unknown people, sitting in rows. As I watched them, one said to the other, ‘My dear! What can you expect from such people!’ Her darkened eyebrows went up, her rouged lips went down at the corners, her fine wrist turned and showed a safety-pin where a button should have been at her cuff. The sight evoked the disorder I knew would be characteristic of the rooms of all these three women, of all women like them in every country, which would proceed not so much from slovenliness as from defiance of all conventions touching on regularity, and from refusal to spend one drop of nervous force anywhere but on the stage. I put down my knife and fork and clapped my hands, for I had thought of something pleasant that I could say to Constantine about the Germans.
It took him and his friend some time to part. The spectacle of their prolonged conversation made the young man at the next table take out the letter he had put in his pocket and tear it to pieces. It was typewritten and no doubt administrated a rebuff to some notable literary ambition; and no doubt that was a real tragedy, for there is an astonishing amount of ability in these small Slav towns. In another Montenegrin town, Nikshitch, there is published a brilliant satirical journal. At last Constantine sat down with us, smiling and panting, ‘You see, I have friends everywhere!’ and I said, ‘Listen, Constantine, I have just thought of something that proves you right and me wrong!’ ‘Aha, such news I love to hear,’ he cried, beaming and falling on his fish. ‘I have sometimes spoken ill of Goethe in your presence,’ I said, ‘and I take it all back. There is one thing he did perfectly, and he did it for all time. I remembered it as soon as I saw your friend’s company waiting around him. Nobody can see actresses in any country, neither a touring company waiting at an English railway junction, nor Comédie Française pensionnaires rehearsing in a Roman arena, nor stars lunching at the Algonquin in New York, without thinking of one thing, and one thing only!’
‘And that is?’ asked Constantine. ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship!’ I said. ‘Yes,’ said Constantine. ‘Yes, indeed,’ I said happily. ‘Do you not remember the wonderful description of the untidiness of the lovely Mariana’s bedroom? He has a superb image for the theatrical make-up and costumes that lay about, as different from what they were in use as the glittering skin of a fish cast aside by the cook in a kitchen. He catalogues the other oddments in her room, the plays and pincushions and hairpins and sheet-music and artificial flowers, as all united by a common element, an amalgam of powder and dust. And he describes how young Wilhelm, used to the order of his bourgeois home, was
at first shocked when he had to lift aside his mistress’s bodice before he could open the harpsichord, and had to find another place for her gown if he wanted a seat, but later came to find a special charm in this chaotic housewifery.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Constantine.
‘What, do you not like Wilhelm Meister?’ I asked, for he spoke a little coldly. ‘Oh, yes, very much,’ he said. But his eyes stared over my right shoulder, returned to me, examined me without much interest, then sought space again. ‘He does not believe me,’ I thought penitently. ‘I have convinced him too well that I don’t like Goethe.’ So I continued aloud, ‘I am sure that if you went home with the leading lady over there you would find that her room was just like Mariana’s and that she herself was like Mariana and Philina, and perhaps even the serious Aurelia.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Constantine, ‘I think you are right.’ But his voice was distant as his eyes. ‘It is no use,’ I thought, ‘he believes I cannot really be fair to anything German. And it is he who is not being fair to me, for I can see beauty there as everywhere else.’ I saw the Germany which was the setting for Mariana and Philina and Aurelia, the neo-classical villas with their creamy white stucco pilasters and pediments, the lilacs and chestnuts, the fountains and the statuary that was none the worse for being none too good; and I was about to tell Constantine how much I liked that scene when my husband asked, ‘Constantine, why are you looking so hard at those people?’