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.