the great journey of world exploration he had intended, but merely
an impulsive pleasure hunt, was by no means the only obscured and
repudiated conflict that disturbed the mind and broke out upon the
behaviour of Benham. Beneath that issue he was keeping down a far more
intimate conflict. It was in those lower, still less recognized depths
that the volcanic fire arose and the earthquakes gathered strength. The
Amanda he had loved, the Amanda of the gallant stride and fluttering
skirt was with him still, she marched rejoicing over the passes, and
a dearer Amanda, a soft whispering creature with dusky hair, who took
possession of him when she chose, a soft creature who was nevertheless a
fierce creature, was also interwoven with his life. But-- But there was
now also a multitude of other Amandas who had this in common that they
roused him to opposition, that they crossed his moods and jarred upon
his spirit. And particularly there was the Conquering Amanda not so much
proud of her beauty as eager to test it, so that she was not unmindful
of the stir she made in hotel lounges, nor of the magic that may shine
memorably through the most commonplace incidental conversation. This
Amanda was only too manifestly pleased to think that she made peasant
lovers discontented and hotel porters unmercenary; she let her light
shine before men. We lovers, who had deemed our own subjugation a
profound privilege, love not this further expansiveness of our lady's
empire. But Benham knew that no aristocrat can be jealous; jealousy he
held to be the vice of the hovel and farmstead and suburban villa, and
at an enormous expenditure of will he ignored Amanda's waving flags and
roving glances. So, too, he denied that Amanda who was sharp and shrewd
about money matters, that flash of an Amanda who was greedy for presents
and possessions, that restless Amanda who fretted at any cessation of
excitement, and that darkly thoughtful Amanda whom chance observations
and questions showed to be still considering an account she had to
settle with Lady Marayne. He resisted these impressions, he shut them
out of his mind, but still they worked into his thoughts, and presently
he could find himself asking, even as he and she went in step striding
side by side through the red-scarred pinewoods in the most perfect
outward harmony, whether after all he was so happily mated as he
declared himself to be a score of times a day, whether he wasn't
catching glimpses of reality through a veil of delusion that grew
thinner and thinner and might leave him disillusioned in the face of a
relationship--
Sometimes a man may be struck by a thought as though he had been struck
in the face, and when the name of Mrs. Skelmersdale came into his head,
he glanced at his wife by his side as if it were something that
she might well have heard. Was this indeed the same thing as that?
Wonderful, fresh as the day of Creation, clean as flame, yet the same!
Was Amanda indeed the sister of Mrs. Skelmersdale--wrought of clean
fire, but her sister?...
But also beside the inimical aspects which could set such doubts afoot
there were in her infinite variety yet other Amandas neither very dear
nor very annoying, but for the most part delightful, who entertained him
as strangers might, Amandas with an odd twist which made them amusing to
watch, jolly Amandas who were simply irrelevant. There was for example
Amanda the Dog Mistress, with an astonishing tact and understanding of
dogs, who could explain dogs and the cock of their ears and the droop of
their tails and their vanity and their fidelity, and why they looked up
and why they suddenly went off round the corner, and their pride in
the sound of their voices and their dastardly thoughts and sniffing
satisfactions, so that for the first time dogs had souls for Benham to
see. And there was an Amanda with a striking passion for the sleekness
and soft noses of horses. And there was an Amanda extremely garrulous,
who was a biographical dictionary and critical handbook to all the girls
in the school she had attended at Chichester--they seemed a very girlish
lot of girls; and an Amanda who was very knowing--knowing was the only
word for it--about pictures and architecture. And these and all the
other Amandas agreed together to develop and share this one quality
in common, that altogether they pointed to no end, they converged on
nothing. She was, it grew more and more apparent, a miscellany bound
in a body. She was an animated discursiveness. That passion to get all
things together into one aristocratic aim, that restraint of purpose,
that imperative to focus, which was the structural essential of Benham's
spirit, was altogether foreign to her composition.
There were so many Amandas, they were as innumerable as the
Venuses--Cytherea, Cypria, Paphia, Popularia, Euploea, Area,
Verticordia, Etaira, Basilea, Myrtea, Libertina, Freya, Astarte,
Philommedis, Telessigamma, Anadyomene, and a thousand others to whom men
have bowed and built temples, a thousand and the same, and yet it seemed
to Benham there was still one wanting.
The Amanda he had loved most wonderfully was that Amanda in armour who
had walked with him through the wilderness of the world along the road
to Chichester--and that Amanda came back to him no more.
5
Amanda too was making her observations and discoveries.
These moods of his perplexed her; she was astonished to find he was
becoming irritable; she felt that he needed a firm but gentle discipline
in his deportment as a lover. At first he had been perfect....
But Amanda was more prepared for human inconsecutiveness than Benham,
because she herself was inconsecutive, and her dissatisfaction with his
irritations and preoccupation broadened to no general discontent. He had
seemed perfect and he wasn't. So nothing was perfect. And he had to
be managed, just as one must manage a dog or a cousin or a mother or a
horse. Anyhow she had got him, she had no doubt that she held him by a
thousand ties, the spotless leopard had him between her teeth, he was a
prisoner in the dusk of her hair, and the world was all one vast promise
of entertainment.
6
But the raid into the Balkans was not the tremendous success she had
expected it to be. They had adventures, but they were not the richly
coloured, mediaeval affairs she had anticipated. For the most part until
Benham broke loose beyond Ochrida they were adventures in discomfort. In
those remote parts of Europe inns die away and cease, and it had never
occurred to Amanda that inns could die away anywhere. She had thought
that they just became very simple and natural and quaint. And she had
thought that when benighted people knocked at a door it would presently
open hospitably. She had not expected shots at random from the window.
And it is not usual in Albania generally for women, whether they are
Christian or Moslem, to go about unveiled; when they do so it leads
to singular manifestations. The moral sense of the men is shocked and
staggered, and they show it in many homely ways. Small boys at that
age when feminine beauty does not yet prevail with them, pelt. Also
in Mahometan districts they pelt men who do not wear fezzes, while
occasionally Christians of the shawl-headed or skull-cap persuasions
will pelt a fez. Sketching is always a peltable or mobable offence,
as being contrary to the Koran, and sitting down tempts the pelter.
Generally they pelt. The dogs of Albania are numerous, big, dirty, white
dogs, large and hostile, and they attack with little hesitation. The
women of Albania are secluded and remote, and indisposed to be of
service to an alien sister. Roads are infrequent and most bridges have
broken down. No bridge has been repaired since the later seventeenth
century, and no new bridge has been made since the decline and fall of
the Roman Empire. There are no shops at all. The scenery is magnificent
but precipitous, and many of the high roads are difficult to trace. And
there is rain. In Albania there is sometimes very heavy rain.
Yet in spite of these drawbacks they spent some splendid hours in their
exploration of that wild lost country beyond the Adriatic headlands.
There was the approach to Cattaro for example, through an arm of the
sea, amazingly beautiful on either shore, that wound its way into
the wild mountains and ended in a deep blue bay under the tremendous
declivity of Montenegro. The quay, with its trees and lateen craft, ran
along under the towers and portcullised gate of the old Venetian wall,
within clustered the town, and then the fortifications zigzagged up
steeply to a monstrous fantastic fortress perched upon a great mountain
headland that overhung the town. Behind it the rocks, slashed to and fro
with the road to Cettinje, continued to ascend into blue haze, upward
and upward until they became a purple curtain that filled half the
heavens. The paved still town was squalid by day, but in the evening it
became theatrically incredible, with an outdoor cafe amidst flowers
and creepers, a Hungarian military band, a rabble of promenaders like a
stage chorus in gorgeous costumes and a great gibbous yellow moon.
And there was Kroia, which Benham and Amanda saw first through the
branches of the great trees that bordered the broad green track they
were following. The town and its castle were poised at a tremendous
height, sunlit and brilliant against a sombre mass of storm cloud, over
vast cliffs and ravines. Kroia continued to be beautiful through a steep
laborious approach up to the very place itself, a clustering group
of houses and bazaars crowned with a tower and a minaret, and from a
painted corridor upon this crest they had a wonderful view of the great
seaward levels, and even far away the blue sea itself stretching between
Scutari and Durazzo. The eye fell in succession down the stages of a
vast and various descent, on the bazaars and tall minarets of the town,
on jagged rocks and precipices, on slopes of oak forest and slopes of
olive woods, on blue hills dropping away beyond blue hills to the coast.
And behind them when they turned they saw great mountains, sullenly
magnificent, cleft into vast irregular masses, dense with woods below
and grim and desolate above....
These were unforgettable scenes, and so too was the wild lonely valley
through which they rode to Ochrida amidst walnut and chestnut trees and
scattered rocks, and the first vision of that place itself, with its
fertile levels dotted with sheep and cattle, its castle and clustering
mosques, its spacious blue lake and the great mountains rising up
towards Olympus under the sun. And there was the first view of the
blue Lake of Presba seen between silvery beech stems, and that too had
Olympus in the far background, plain now and clear and unexpectedly
snowy. And there were midday moments when they sat and ate under vines
and heard voices singing very pleasantly, and there were forest glades
and forest tracks in a great variety of beauty with mountains appearing
through their parted branches, there were ilex woods, chestnut woods,
beech woods, and there were strings of heavily-laden mules staggering up
torrent-worn tracks, and strings of blue-swathed mysterious-eyed women
with burthens on their heads passing silently, and white remote houses
and ruins and deep gorges and precipices and ancient half-ruinous
bridges over unruly streams. And if there was rain there was also
the ending of rain, rainbows, and the piercing of clouds by the sun's
incandescence, and sunsets and the moon, first full, then new and then
growing full again as the holiday wore on.
They found tolerable accommodation at Cattaro and at Cettinje and at a
place halfway between them. It was only when they had secured a guide
and horses, and pushed on into the south-east of Montenegro that they
began to realize the real difficulties of their journey. They aimed for
a place called Podgoritza, which had a partially justifiable reputation
for an inn, they missed the road and spent the night in the open beside
a fire, rolled in the blankets they had very fortunately bought in
Cettinje. They supped on biscuits and Benham's brandy flask. It
chanced to be a fine night, and, drawn like moths by the fire, four
heavily-armed mountaineers came out of nowhere, sat down beside Benham
and Amanda, rolled cigarettes, achieved conversation in bad Italian
through the muleteer and awaited refreshment. They approved of the
brandy highly, they finished it, and towards dawn warmed to song. They
did not sing badly, singing in chorus, but it appeared to Amanda
that the hour might have been better chosen. In the morning they were
agreeably surprised to find one of the Englishmen was an Englishwoman,
and followed every accessible detail of her toilette with great
interest. They were quite helpful about breakfast when the trouble was
put to them; two vanished over a crest and reappeared with some sour
milk, a slabby kind of bread, goat's cheese young but hardened, and
coffee and the means of making coffee, and they joined spiritedly in the
ensuing meal. It ought to have been extraordinarily good fun, this camp
under the vast heavens and these wild visitors, but it was not such fun
as it ought to have been because both Amanda and Benham were extremely
cold, stiff, sleepy, grubby and cross, and when at last they were back
in the way to Podgoritza and had parted, after some present-giving
from their chance friends, they halted in a sunlit grassy place, rolled
themselves up in their blankets and recovered their arrears of sleep.
Podgoritza was their first experience of a khan, those oriental
substitutes for hotels, and it was a deceptively good khan, indeed it
was not a khan at all, it was an inn; it provided meals, it had a kind
of bar, or at any rate a row of bottles and glasses, it possessed an
upper floor with rooms, separate rooms, opening on to a gallery. The
room had no beds but it had a shelf about it on which Amanda and Benham
rolled up in their blankets and slept. “We can do this sort of thing all
right,” said Amanda and Benham. “But we mustn't lose the way again.”
“In Scutari,” said Benham, “we will get an extra horse and a tent.”
The way presently became a lake and they reached Scutari by boat towards
the dawn of the next day....
The extra horse involved the addition of its owner, a small suspicious
Latin Christian, to the company, and of another horse for him and
an ugly almost hairless boy attendant. Moreover the British consul
prevailed with Benham to accept the services of a picturesque Arnaut
CAVASSE, complete with a rifle, knives, and other implements and the
name of Giorgio. And as they got up into the highlands beyond Scutari
they began to realize the deceitfulness of Podgoritza and the real truth
about khans. Their next one they reached after a rainy evening, and
it was a cavernous room with a floor of indurated mud and full of
eye-stinging wood-smoke and wind and the smell of beasts, unpartitioned,
with a weakly hostile custodian from whom no food could be got but a
little goat's flesh and bread. The meat Giorgio stuck upon a skewer in
gobbets like cats-meat and cooked before the fire. For drink there was
coffee and raw spirits. Against the wall in one corner was a slab of
wood rather like the draining board in a scullery, and on this the
guests were expected to sleep. The horses and the rest of the party
camped loosely about the adjacent corner after a bitter dispute upon
some unknown point between the horse owner and the custodian.
Amanda and Benham were already rolled up on their slanting board like a
couple of chrysalids when other company began to arrive through the open
door out of the moonlight, drawn thither by the report of a travelling
Englishwoman.
They were sturdy men in light coloured garments adorned ostentatiously
with weapons, they moved mysteriously about in the firelit darknesses
and conversed in undertones with Giorgio. Giorgio seemed to have
considerable powers of exposition and a gift for social organization.
Presently he came to Benham and explained that raki was available and
that hospitality would do no harm; Benham and Amanda sat up and various
romantic figures with splendid moustaches came forward and shook hands
with him, modestly ignoring Amanda. There was drinking, in which Benham
shared, incomprehensible compliments, much ineffective saying of “BUONA
NOTTE,” and at last Amanda and Benham counterfeited sleep. This seemed
to remove a check on the conversation and a heated discussion in tense
undertones went on, it seemed interminably.... Probably very few aspects
of Benham and Amanda were ignored.... Towards morning the twanging of a
string proclaimed the arrival of a querulous-faced minstrel with a sort
of embryonic one-stringed horse-headed fiddle, and after a brief parley
singing began, a long high-pitched solo. The fiddle squealed pitifully
under the persuasion of a semicircular bow. Two heads were lifted
enquiringly.
The singer had taken up his position at their feet and faced them. It
was a compliment.
“OH!” said Amanda, rolling over.
The soloist obliged with three songs, and then, just as day was
breaking, stopped abruptly and sprawled suddenly on the floor as if he
had been struck asleep. He was vocal even in his sleep. A cock in the
far corner began crowing and was answered by another outside....
But this does not give a full account of the animation of the khan.
“OH!” said Amanda, rolling over again with the suddenness of accumulated
anger.
“They're worse than in Scutari,” said Benham, understanding her trouble
instantly.
“It isn't days and nights we are having,” said Benham a few days later,
“it's days and nightmares.”
But both he and Amanda had one quality in common. The deeper their
discomfort the less possible it was to speak of turning back from the
itinerary they had planned....
They met no robbers, though an excited little English Levantine in
Scutari had assured them they would do so and told a vivid story of a
ride to Ipek, a delay on the road due to a sudden inexplicable lameness
of his horse after a halt for refreshment, a political discussion that
delayed him, his hurry through the still twilight to make up for lost
time, the coming on of night and the sudden silent apparition out of
the darkness of the woods about the road of a dozen armed men each
protruding a gun barrel. “Sometimes they will wait for you at a ford
or a broken bridge,” he said. “In the mountains they rob for arms. They
assassinate the Turkish soldiers even. It is better to go unarmed unless
you mean to fight for it.... Have you got arms?”
“Just a revolver,” said Benham.
But it was after that that he closed with Giorgio.
If they found no robbers in Albania, they met soon enough with
bloodshed. They came to a village where a friend of a friend of
Giorgio's was discovered, and they slept at his house in preference to
the unclean and crowded khan. Here for the first time Amanda made the
acquaintance of Albanian women and was carried off to the woman's region
at the top of the house, permitted to wash, closely examined, shown
a baby and confided in as generously as gesture and some fragments of
Italian would permit. Benham slept on a rug on the first floor in a
corner of honour beside the wood fire. There had been much confused
conversation and some singing, he was dog-tired and slept heavily,
and when presently he was awakened by piercing screams he sat up in a
darkness that seemed to belong neither to time nor place....
Near his feet was an ashen glow that gave no light.
His first perplexity gave way to dismay at finding no Amanda by his
side. “Amanda!” he cried....
Her voice floated down through a chink in the floor above. “What can it
be, Cheetah?”
Then: “It's coming nearer.”
The screaming continued, heart-rending, eviscerating shrieks. Benham,
still confused, lit a match. All the men about him were stirring or
sitting up and listening, their faces showing distorted and ugly in the
flicker of his light. “CHE E?” he tried. No one answered. Then one
by one they stood up and went softly to the ladder that led to the
stable-room below. Benham struck a second match and a third.
“Giorgio!” he called.
The cavasse made an arresting gesture and followed discreetly and
noiselessly after the others, leaving Benham alone in the dark.
Benham heard their shuffling patter, one after the other, down the
ladder, the sounds of a door being unbarred softly, and then no other
sound but that incessant shrieking in the darkness.
Had they gone out? Were they standing at the door looking out into the
night and listening?
Amanda had found the chink and her voice sounded nearer.
“It's a woman,” she said.
The shrieking came nearer and nearer, long, repeated, throat-tearing
shrieks. Far off there was a great clamour of dogs. And there was
another sound, a whisper--?
“RAIN!”
The shrieks seemed to turn into a side street and receded. The tension
of listening relaxed. Men's voices sounded below in question and answer.
Dogs close at hand barked shortly and then stopped enquiringly.
Benham seemed to himself to be sitting alone for an interminable time.
He lit another match and consulted his watch. It was four o'clock and
nearly dawn....
Then slowly and stumbling up the ladder the men began to return to
Benham's room.
“Ask them what it is,” urged Amanda.
But for a time not even Giorgio would understand Benham's questions.
There seemed to be a doubt whether he ought to know. The shrieking
approached again and then receded. Giorgio came and stood, a vague
thoughtful figure, by the embers of the fire. Explanation dropped from
him reluctantly. It was nothing. Some one had been killed: that was all.
It was a vendetta. A man had been missing overnight, and this morning
his brother who had been prowling and searching with some dogs had found
him, or rather his head. It was on this side of the ravine, thrown over
from the other bank on which the body sprawled stiffly, wet through, and
now growing visible in the gathering daylight. Yes--the voice was the
man's wife. It was raining hard.... There would be shrieking for nine
days. Yes, nine days. Confirmation with the fingers when Benham still
fought against the facts. Her friends and relatives would come and
shriek too. Two of the dead man's aunts were among the best keeners in
the whole land. They could keen marvellously. It was raining too hard
to go on.... The road would be impossible in rain.... Yes it was very
melancholy. Her house was close at hand. Perhaps twenty or thirty women
would join her. It was impossible to go on until it had stopped raining.
It would be tiresome, but what could one do?...
7
As they sat upon the parapet of a broken bridge on the road between
Elbassan and Ochrida Benham was moved to a dissertation upon the
condition of Albania and the politics of the Balkan peninsula.
“Here we are,” he said, “not a week from London, and you see the sort
of life that men live when the forces of civilization fail. We have been
close to two murders--”
“Two?”
“That little crowd in the square at Scutari-- That was a murder. I
didn't tell you at the time.”
“But I knew it was,” said Amanda.
“And you see the filth of it all, the toiling discomfort of it all.
There is scarcely a house here in all the land that is not filthier
and viler than the worst slum in London. No man ventures far from his
village without arms, everywhere there is fear. The hills are impassable
because of the shepherd's dogs. Over those hills a little while ago a
stranger was torn to pieces by dogs--and partially eaten. Amanda, these
dogs madden me. I shall let fly at the beasts. The infernal indignity
of it! But that is by the way. You see how all this magnificent country
lies waste with nothing but this crawling, ugly mockery of human life.”
“They sing,” said Amanda.
“Yes,” said Benham and reflected, “they do sing. I suppose singing is
the last thing left to men. When there is nothing else you can still sit
about and sing. Miners who have been buried in mines will sing, people
going down in ships.”
“The Sussex labourers don't sing,” said Amanda. “These people sing
well.”
“They would probably sing as well if they were civilized. Even if they
didn't I shouldn't care. All the rest of their lives is muddle and
cruelty and misery. Look at the women. There was that party of bent
creatures we met yesterday, carrying great bundles, carrying even
the men's cloaks and pipes, while their rascal husbands and brothers
swaggered behind. Look at the cripples we have seen and the mutilated
men. If we have met one man without a nose, we have met a dozen. And
stunted people. All these people are like evil schoolboys; they do
nothing but malicious mischief; there is nothing adult about them but
their voices; they are like the heroic dreams of young ruffians in a
penitentiary. You saw that man at Scutari in the corner of the bazaar,
the gorgeous brute, you admired him--.”
“The man with the gold inlaid pistols and the diamonds on his yataghan.
He wanted to show them to us.”
“Yes. You let him see you admired him.”
“I liked the things on his stall.”
“Well, he has killed nearly thirty people.”
“In duels?”
“Good Lord! NO! Assassinations. His shoemaker annoyed him by sending in
a bill. He went to the man's stall, found him standing with his child
in his arms and blew out his brains. He blundered against a passer-by in
the road and shot him. Those are his feats. Sometimes his pistols go off
in the bazaar just by accident.”
“Does nobody kill him?”
“I wanted to,” said Benham and became thoughtful for a time. “I think I
ought to have made some sort of quarrel. But then as I am an Englishman
he might have hesitated. He would have funked a strange beast like me.
And I couldn't have shot him if he had hesitated. And if he hadn't--”
“But doesn't a blood feud come down on him?”
“It only comes down on his family. The shoemaker's son thought the
matter over and squared accounts by putting the muzzle of a gun into the
small of the back of our bully's uncle. It was easier that way.... You
see you're dealing with men of thirteen years old or thereabouts, the
boy who doesn't grow up.”
“But doesn't the law--?”
“There's no law. Only custom and the Turkish tax collector.
“You see this is what men are where there is no power, no discipline,
no ruler, no responsibility. This is a masterless world. This is pure
democracy. This is the natural state of men. This is the world of the
bully and the brigand and assassin, the world of the mud-pelter and
brawler, the world of the bent woman, the world of the flea and the
fly, the open drain and the baying dog. This is what the British
sentimentalist thinks a noble state for men.”
“They fight for freedom.”