Old Serbia

The Plain of Kossovo I

OUR ROAD FROM SKOPLJE TO THE Kossovo POLYE, THE Field of the Blackbirds, took us towards grey hills patterned with shadows blue as English bluebells by a valley that had the worn look, the ageing air that comes on the southern landscape as soon as the fruit blossom has passed. Soon Dragutin made us get out because we had come to a famous well, and we found sitting by the waters a couple of old Albanian Moslems, paupers in rags and broken sandals, who were quietly merry as the morning. ‘Good day to you,’ said Constantine. ‘What are you doing here?’ It was a natural question, for this was far between villages, and they did not look to be persons of independent means. ‘I am doing nothing,’ said the older of the two. ‘What, nothing?’ ‘Yes, nothing,’ he said, his grin gashing his beard widely. He had received moral instruction somewhere, he had learned enough about the obligation of honest toil to find a conscious joy in idleness. ‘Shame on you!’ mocked Constantine. ‘And your friend?’ ‘He has come to help me!’ said the Albanian; and over our glasses of stinging water, risen virile from mountainy depths, we jeered at industry.

But back in the car Constantine slumped. It was as if he were a very sick man, for he was sleepy, fretful, inferior to himself, and quarrelsome. He could put nothing in a way that was not an affront. Now he said, ‘We will stop at Grachanitsa, the church I told you of on the edge of Kossovo Plain, but I do not think you will understand it, because it is very personal to us Serbs, and that is something you foreigners can never grasp. It is too difficult for you, we are too rough and too deep for your smoothness and your shallowness. That is why most foreign books about us are insolently wrong. In my department I see all books about us that are published abroad, because I must censor them, and usually I am astonished by their insolence, which for all the pretences made by Western Europe and America to give our peoples culture is nothing more than the insolence of a nasty peasant who has learned some trick that lifts him up above the other peasants, who lends them money at usury and then lifts his chin at their misery and says, “Peuh! What a stink!” but who is still ignorant like the worst of peasants. Did you read John Gunther’s Inside Europe? Well, was it not a disgusting, a stupid book! How glad I was to forbid the sale of this imbecile book!’

‘But it was not a bad book,’ I objected. ‘It was altogether bad,’ said Constantine, ‘it was ill-informed and what he did not know he could not guess.’ ‘Yes, I know some of it was not as good as the rest,’ I said, ‘but there were two things in it which were quite excellent: the descriptions of Dollfuss’s death and the Reichstag trial. And in any case you should not have censored it.’ ‘And why not?’ screamed Constantine. ‘And why not?’ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘you know perfectly well that you could not censor Inside Europe except by applying standards so strict that they would prevent the publication of any sincere book on any subject. ’You are wrong,‘ he shrieked, ’there is something your English brain does not know that our Serb blood is sure of, and that is that it is right to stamp on books written by such fools. Why should Western cretins drool their spittle on our sacred things?‘ He had, of course, censored Inside Europe in defiance of his own convictions just as Voltaire might, once in a while, have grimaced and put his liberal conscience to the door just for the sake of taking a holiday from his own nature. But Constantine was pretending to be somebody totally unlike himself, a stupid Prussian officer, a truculent Italian clerk, with whom he had so little in common that he could not persist in his imitation very long, and slumped into silence, his chin on his chest and his belly falling forward in a soft heap. He looked years older, and congested. It was as if in his abandonment to Gerda’s nihilism he had withdrawn his consent to every integrating process, even to the circulation of his blood.

Nothing interested him on our journey. He did not leave the car with us when we got out to take some meadowsweet and wild roses, though it was his usual custom to follow us while we gathered flowers, relating to our bent behinds stories of his sexual or academic prowess. ‘And when I closed my bedroom door that night,’ we would hear as our fingers closed round the innocent stems, ‘the wife of the Swiss minister jumped out of the wardrobe, quite naked,’ or ‘Do you understand truly the theory of prime numbers? It is something that throws a light on history. I will explain it to you, for I am a mathematician, I.’ But now he sat in the car, neither asleep nor awake, but simply unhappy. We had to laugh alone when we were given a proof, more absolute than could be given by any homing bird, that the year had come to its kind ripeness. In a field outside one of the dullish Moslem villages which dappled these hillsides with poplars and minarets, we saw an old peasant look up into the sunshine and wipe the sweat from his brow, with the air of one observing clinical symptoms, and enact his verdict by changing from his winter to his summer clothes. No process could be simpler. He stepped out of a fine pair of those white serge trousers with allusive embroideries round the loins and the mysterious affixment to the hipbone, and he took up his hoe again. He was of the opinion that his shirt, which now showed a neat waist and a handsome gathered tail, and his under-pants made as good a summer suit as anybody needed, and he was right. But to the Western eye the publicity of the adjustment was very diverting. It was as if a stockbroker, talking to a client, should mark a patch of brightness on his office wall and should therefore strip off his coat and waistcoat and trousers, continuing his talk the while, serene in a common understanding that from now on all sane men faced a warmer world in their underclothes.

But Constantine came to life again when the car stopped under a little hill surmounted with a new white church. ‘This is our church that we Serbs built for Kossovo,’ he said; ‘from there we will see the plain where the Turks defeated us and enslaved us, where after five hundred years of slavery we showed that we were not slaves.’ He was red, he was passionate, he panted, he was as he was when he was happy. We followed a path to the church through the long grass, and as our steps brought us higher there spread before us a great plain. Dragutin clenched his fist and shouted down at the earth, where the dead Turks lay. To him the dead Christians were in Heaven or were ghosts, but not under the ground, not scattered lifeless bones; only the Turks perished thus utterly. Then we were stilled by the stillness of Kossovo. It is not one of the plains, like the vega of Granada or the English fens, that are flat as a floor, it lacks that sly look of geological aberration, of earth abandoning its essential irregularity. Its prototype is Salisbury Plain: the land lies loosely, like a sleeper, in a cradle of featureless hills. Not by any means is the ground level. There a shoulder rises, here a hand supports the sleeper’s head. But it is obviously prostrate and passive, it has none of the active spirit which makes mountain and forest and the picturesque valley. It is active only as a sleeping body is, with that simplest residual activity, without which sleep would be death, without which the plain would be a desert: the grass pricks the sod, the fallow field changes its substances in biding its time, the green corn surpasses its greenness, but there is no excess beyond these simple functions.

It is the character of the skies that overarch plains to be not only wider than is common, but higher; and here one cloudy continent rode above another, under a vault visible yet of no colour except space. Here light lived. Its rays, brassy because it was nearly the summer, mild because it had been a bad spring, travelled slowly, high and low, discovering terraces of snow beyond the cradling hills on peaks of unseen mountains, the white blocks of a new settlement in a fold of falling fields, and the passage over downlands of a flock of sheep, cream-coloured and nigger-brown and slow-footed as stupidity. Those houses and those herds showed that there was here a world of human activity: thousands of men and women, even tens of thousands, lived and worked and sweated on Kossovo. But the plain absorbed them and nullified them by its own indifference, and there was shown before our eyes the first of all our disharmonies, the basis of our later tragedies: the division between man and nature. In childhood, when we fall on the ground we are disappointed that it is hard and hurts us. When we are older we expect a less obvious but perhaps more extravagant impossibility in demanding that there should be a correspondence between our lives and their setting; it seems to all women, and to many men, that destiny should at least once in their lives place them in a moonlit forest glade and send them love to match its beauty. In time we have to accept it that the ground does not care whether we break our noses on it, and that a moonlit forest glade is as often as not empty of anything but moonlight, and we solace ourselves with the love that is the fruit of sober judgment, and the flower of perfectly harmonious chance. We even forget what we were once foolish enough to desire. Then suddenly at some crisis of incongruity, when we see the site of a tragic historical event that ought to be blasted and is green and smiling, or pass a garden in full blossom when we are carrying our dead to burial, we recall our disappointment at this primary incongruity, and feel bitter desolation. The earth is not our mother’s bosom. It shows us no special kindness. We cannot trust it to take sides with us. It makes us, its grass is our flesh, it lets us walk about on it, but this is all it will do for us; and since the earth is what is not us, and therefore a symbol of destiny and of God, we are alone and terrified.

Kossovo, more than any other historical site I know, arouses that desolation. It spreads peacefully into its vast, gentle distances, slow winds polishing it like a cloth passing over a mirror, turning the heads of the standing grain to the light. It has a look of innocence which is the extreme of guilt. For it is crowded with the dead, who died in more than their flesh, whose civilization was cast with them into their graves. It is more tragic even than its own legend, which with the dishonesty and obstinacy of a work of art commemorates one out of several battles of Kossovo. That battle which was fought under the leadership of Tsar Lazar in 1389, and placed the Serbs under the yoke of the Turks, was followed by three others of a major character, in which the Serbs stood up before the Turks and had their death demonstrated to them, the complete annihilation of their will established. Fourteen years later the son of Tsar Lazar fought here for the shrunken title of Serbian Despot against another Serb noble, George Brankovitch. They were competitive parasites of the Sultan’s court and each led the half of a rent people. Definite victory was impossible, they both lived on in an undignified compromise; only Kossovo was the richer, and that by many graves. Forty-five years later the conditions of defeat had so thickened that, though there was another battle of Kossovo, the Serbs could not fight. They, who of all peoples feel the least reluctance to fighting, had to stand inactive on the field where it was natural they should determine their fate. Now another George Brankovitch, nephew of the first, was Despot of a diminished Serbia; he joined with the famous John Hunyadi, a Roumanian in the service of Hungary, and King Vladislav of Poland, and they formed a great expedition to recover Serbia and Bulgaria from the Turks. Bulgaria could not be saved, but Serbia came into full freedom. A solemn treaty was signed by all the belligerents, binding the Hungarians and the Poles to stay on their side of the Danube and the Sultan to stay on his, and giving George Brankovitch the whole of Serbia, as well as returning to him his two sons, who had been captured and blinded by the Turks. But as the Turks were then being attacked in Asia Minor it seemed to the Pope that this was the right time to drive them out of Europe, and he sent an army under the Cardinal Julian Cesarini to urge the Christian forces to take up arms again. When they protested that they had just signed a treaty pledging themselves to peace, the Cardinal told them that it is lawful for Christians to set aside and break an oath made with an infidel.

The peculiar flavour of the Western Church lies strong on the tongue in that declaration. George Brankovitch refused to join the Poles and Hungarians in availing himself of this licence to perfidy. It is easy to explain this by pointing out that he had done better out of the treaty than the other signatories; but the fact remains that, although such a ruling would have been a great advantage to the Christian subjects of Turkey, at no time during their enslavement did the Eastern Church encourage them to cast away their honour. Therefore George Brankovitch stood by while the Catholic armies advanced on the Turks at Varna in Bulgaria, whose Sultan prayed as they came, ‘O Christ, if thou art God, as they followers say, punish their perfidy.’ His prayer was answered. Both the King of Hungary and the Cardinal fell on the field, with most of their soldiers. But the war dragged on with interruptions for another four years, and came to an end here on Kossovo, in a battle that lasted for three days and gave the plain about fifty thousand more dead. By this time the Serbs were demoralized by the division of the Christian world and by comradeship with their pagan enemies, and it is said that they waited on the hills around the plain till the battle ended and they could rob the dead.

So in the first battle of Kossovo the Serbs learned the meaning of defeat, not such defeat as forms a necessary proportion of all effort, for in that they had often been instructed during the course of their history, but of total defeat, annihilation of their corporate will and all their individual wills. The second battle of Kossovo taught them that one may live on such a low level of existence that even defeat cannot be achieved. The third taught them that even that level is not the lowest, and that there is a limbo for subject peoples where there is neither victory nor defeat but abortions which, had they come to birth, would have become such states. There was to be yet a fourth battle which was to prove still another horrible lesson. Very shortly after the third battle, in 1453 Byzantium fell; and the Turks were able to concentrate on the task of mastering the Balkans. The Serbs were constrained not to resist them by their fear of the Roman Catholic powers, who venomously loathed them and the Bulgarians for their fidelity to the Eastern Church and their liability to the Bogomil heresy. The night fell for four centuries, limbo became Hell, and manifested the anarchy that is Hell’s essential character.

It happened that the Slavs who had become Janizaries, especially the Bosnian Serbs, who had been taken from their Christian mothers and trained to forswear Christ and live in the obedience and enforcement of the oppressive yet sluttish Ottoman law, had learned their lesson too well. When the Turks themselves became alarmed by the working of that law and attempted to reform it, the Janizaries rose against the reformation. But because they remembered they were Slavs in spite of all the efforts that had been made to force them to forget it, they felt that in resisting the Turks, even in defence of Turkish law, they were resisting those who had imposed that Turkish law on them in place of their Christian system. So when the rebellious Janizaries defeated the loyal Army of the Sultan in the fourth battle of Kossovo in 1831, and left countless Turkish dead on the field, they held that they had avenged the shame laid on the Christian Slavs in the first battle of Kossovo, although they themselves were Moslems. But their Christian fellow-Slavs gave them no support, for they regarded them simply as co-religionists of the Turkish oppressors and therefore as enemies. So the revolt of the Janizaries failed; and to add the last touch of confusion, they were finally defeated by a Turkish marshal who was neither Turk nor Moslem-born Slav, but a renegade Roman Catholic from Dalmatia. Here was illustrated what is often obscured by historians, that a people can be compelled by misfortune into an existence so confused that it is not life but sheer nonsense, the malignant nonsense of cancerous growth.

Kossovo speaks only of its defeats. It is true that they were nullified by the Serbs of Serbia, who snatched their own liberty from the Turks under the leadership of Karageorge and Milosh Obrenovitch in the early nineteenth century, and pressed on, against the hostility of the great powers, until they gave liberty to Old Serbia and Macedonia in the Balkan wars. But of this triumph Kossovo says nothing, for the battle which gave it to the Serbs in 1912 was fought not there but at Kumanovo, some miles to the south-east; and even after that it knew defeat again, for here the retreating Serbian Army was bombed by German aeroplanes as they fled towards the Albanian border, and though they pursued their enemies across it when they returned three years later it was without spectacular event. Here is the image of failure, so vast that it fills the eye as failure sometimes fills an individual life, an epoch.

The white church we found had been built to celebrate the recovery of the lost land, by a society of patriotic Serbian women. Inside it many plaques of thanksgiving, ardent beyond the habit of inscriptions, hung on the whitewashed walls, and outside it, darkened by its short noonday shadow, there lay the grave of this society’s president who, her head-stone said, had worked all her life long to fire her countrymen with the ambition to free their enslaved brothers, and had expressed with her last breath the desire to be buried within sight of Kossovo. As we stood beside the cross two little boys came out of a white house lying under us on the Kossovo side of the hill, caught sight of us, and stalked us, as though it were we who were wild and shy, not they. They moved in circles about us through the long grass and paused at last about ten yards away, their thumbs in their mouths, their eyes like little dark tunnels down to their animal natures.

Constantine called out, ‘Little ones! Little ones!’ and charmed them to him, step by step; and when they were still some feet away they told him that the white house was an orphanage, founded by the same patriotic society, and that they were all alone there, because they were too young to go to school. It would not be in accordance with our Western ideas that two boys, hardly more than babies, should be left in an orphanage for a morning by themselves, or that they should be barefoot; but they looked quite uninstitutionalized and very healthy and serene. Very likely there was here a wise Slav disorder, as in the sanatorium in Croatia, that allowed human processes to develop according to their unpredictable design. When Constantine’s enchantments had brought the children to his side, he asked them, ‘Why was the orphanage built here?’ and they answered him in a tender and infantile version of official oratory, touching as the flags and wreaths used for a patriotic celebration in a very little village. They spoke of the glorious ancient Serbian Empire, of its shameful destruction by the Turks at Kossovo, of the agonizing captivity that lasted five centuries, of the liberation offered through courage by the Serbian people, and the founding of Yugoslavia, that should be as glorious as ancient Serbia. ‘And do you know,’ asked Constantine, ‘the songs that our people have sung about the terrible day of St. Vitus?’ They began at once, with the inexhaustible, almost rank verbal memory of the Slav child:

“Musitch Stephen his cool wine was drinking, 

In his palace, rich with purest silver, 

In his beautiful and lordly dwelling; 

And his servant Vaistina poured it, 

When of his cool wine he had drunk deeply, 

Then said Musitch Stephen to his servant: 

”Vaistina, thou my child beloved, 

I will lay me down a while to slumber. 

Drink some wine and eat some supper, 

Then walk before my lordly palace, 

Look upon the clear night sky and tell me, 

If the silver moon is sinking westward, 

If the morning star is shining eastward, 

If the time has come for us to travel 

To the fair and level Plain of Blackbirds.“ ‘

The little boys looked noble and devout as they recited. Here was the nationalism which the intellectuals of my age agreed to consider a vice and the origin of the world’s misfortunes. I cannot imagine why. Every human being is of sublime value, because his experience, which must be in some measure unique, gives him a unique view of reality, and the sum of such views should go far to giving us the complete picture of reality, which the human race must attain if it is ever to comprehend its destiny. Therefore every human being must be encouraged to cultivate his consciousness to the fullest degree. It follows that every nation, being an association of human beings who have been drawn together by common experience, has also its unique view of reality, which must contribute to our deliverance, and should therefore be allowed a like encouragement to its consciousness. Let people, then, hold to their own language, their own customs, their own beliefs, even if this inconveniences the tourist. There is not the smallest reason for confounding nationalism, which is the desire of a people to be itself, with imperialism, which is the desire of a people to prevent other peoples from being themselves. Intense nationalist spirit is often, indeed, an effort by a people to rebuild its character when an imperialist power has worked hard to destroy it. Finnish nationalism, for example, is a blood transfusion given after the weakening wounds inflicted by Tsarist Russia, and it is accompanied by defensive but not aggressive feelings in relation to its neighbours. Here certainly I could look without any reservation on the scene, on the two little boys darkening their brows in imitation of the heroes as they spoke the stern verse, on Constantine, whose Jewish eyes were full of Serbian tears, on my husband, who bent over the children with the hieratic reverence Englishmen feel for boyhood that has put its neck under the yoke of discipline, on the green bed and stone cross of the happy grave, on the domes of the native church, and the hospitable farmlike orphanage. This was as unlikely to beget any ill as the wild roses and meadowsweets we had gathered by the road.

The scene was exquisite; but it was pitifully without weight, without mass, compared to the plain that spread for forty miles before us, thickened by tragedy. If a giant had taken Kossovo in his right hand and us and the church and the farmhouse and the grave in his left hand, his right hand must have fallen to his side because of the heaviness of the load, but it would have seemed to him that in his left hand there was nothing but a little dust. It is flattery of nature to say that it is indifferent to man. It grossly disfavours him in quantity and quality, providing more pain than pleasure, and making that more potent. The simplest and most dramatic example is found in our food: a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever. The agony of Kossovo could not be balanced by the joy that was to be derived from it. The transports of the women who built the church must dull themselves in continuance, and even if they generated the steady delight of founding a new nation that itself was dulled by the resistance offered to the will by material objects, and by the conflict between different wills working to the same end, which is often not less envenomed than the conflict between wills working to different ends. But the agony of Kossovo must have been purely itself, pain upon pain, newly born in acuteness for each generation, throughout five centuries. The night of evil had been supreme, it still was supreme on a quantitative basis.

Above the plain were the soft white castles of the clouds and a blank blue wall behind them. Into this world I had been born, and I must resign myself to it; I could not move myself to a fortunate planet, where any rare tear was instantly dried by a benediction. This is my glass, I must drink out of it. In my anxiety to know what was in the glass, I wondered, ‘The world is tragic, but just how tragic? I wonder if it is finally so, if we can ever counter the catastrophes to which we are liable and give ourselves a workshop of serenity in which we can experiment with that other way of life which is not tragedy, but which is not comedy. Certainly not comedy, for that is merely life before tragedy has fallen upon it, ridiculous as a clown on the films who grins and capers without seeing that there is a policeman behind him just about to bring down a club on his head. That other way of life must transcend not only comedy but tragedy, must refuse to be impressed by its grandiose quality and frustrate it at every point.’

But I found my mind wandering from the subject, which was surely the nature of tragedy and the points at which it attacked man, to indulge in some of that optimism which serves us in the West instead of fortitude. Life, I said to myself, was surely not as tragic as all that, and perhaps the defeat of Kossovo had not been a disaster of supreme magnitude. Perhaps the armies that had stood up before the Turks had been a huddle of barbarians, impressive only after the fashion of a pack of wolves, that in its dying presented the world with only the uninteresting difference between a live pack of wolves and a dead pack of wolves. That is a view held by some historians, notably the person so unfortunately selected by the editors of the Cambridge Medieval History to write the chapter on the Serbian Empire; and it seems to receive some support when one drives, as we did after we left the church, along the fringes of the plain. The population of Old Serbia is sunk far deeper in misery than the Macedonians, and at a superficial glance they justify the poor opinion of the Christian rayahs held by nineteenth-century travellers. Their houses turn a dilapidated blankness on the village street; their clothes are often dirty and unornamented by a single stitch of embroidery; and they gape at the stranger with eyes empty of anything but a lethargic fear which is quite unapposite to the present, which is the residue of a deposit left by a past age, never yet drained off by the intelligence.

Actually I knew that there were many reasons why these women should be so, other than the predisposition of their stock. They were not a fair specimen of the Slav population as it had been at the time of the battle of Kossovo, for most of the noble families had died on the field, and the cream of what were left emigrated to Austrian territory within the next three hundred years. Such as were left suffered from all the disadvantages of Turkish rule without enjoying any of the advantages that had made the ruin of Macedonia so far from absolute. It had no rich capital like Bitolj, nor such trading centres as Skoplje, Veles, Tetovo, and Gostivar; and it had no picturesqueness to tempt wealthy Turks to build country houses. It was purely agricultural land. The Turks raped it of its crops and sent them back to Constantinople, and took the peasants’ last farthings in taxes, and gave nothing in return. This plain might have blossomed like the rose with civilization and nothing would have remained. It was also probable, in view of the falsity of the face a house and a peasant turn on the world, that these women were not as they seemed. But for this moment I looked on them idiotically, as if I were Gerda, imputing to them worthlessness instead of difference; and I alleged to myself that probably nothing had fallen at Kossovo that was an irreparable loss, that perhaps tragedy draws blood but never lifeblood.

Grachanitsa I

But I could not keep that up for long. It happens that there stands on the plain of Kossovo, some miles south of the actual battle-field, a building which demonstrates what sort of civilization fell with the Serbs. It proves it as no nationalist rhetoric could hope to do, it leaves no room for differences of opinion, for it is a chunk of the Nemanyan Empire, irrefutable testimony to its quality. We drove along the straight road, through low-spirited villages, past herds and flocks, all of them ornery, plain ornery, and slouching peasants, so few that the land was almost empty as the sky; and we turned into a lane leading towards the hills, through fields whose crops were smothered by those aromatic flowers which are half-way to being scrub. I would fear to say that it was not rich ground, but it is being reclaimed after centuries of avid and ignorant farming, and the effect is destitution. There was no sufficiency anywhere save in the scented handsome sprawl of honeysuckle in the hedges. Then, across a field grey-green with the young maize, we saw a settlement of smallish farms lying among low trees, and in the midst of them a rose-red dome upheld by four lesser domes of the same warm and transparent colour. These made, as the dominant shape of a religious building should do, a reference to the reality which lies above the world of appearances, to the order which transcends the disorder of events.

Even from this distance it could be seen that Grachanitsa was as religious a building as Chartres Cathedral; though it made a simpler and smaller statement, the thought and feeling behind it were as complex, and the sublime subject matter was the same. But it was as if Chartres Cathedral should stand alone on a land that has been shorn of all that was France when it was built and has been France since then; with no Paris, no Sorbonne, no Académie Franéaise, in fact not a single modern representation of the culture that built the cathedral, and not a single trace within miles of the well-being that affords a physical basis for this culture, not a plump chicken, nor a pound of butter, nor a bottle of good wine, nor a comfortable mattress. Such spectacles are commonplace in Africa or Asia or America, which have their Pyramids and Angkor Vat and Inca memorials, but in Europe we are not accustomed to them. Our forms of historic tragedy have blotted a paragraph here and there, but they have rarely torn out the leaves of a whole volume, letting 846 only a coloured frontispiece remain to tease us. Of Grachanitsa, however, catastrophe has left us nothing but Grachanitsa.

At the moment when we reached the church its ruin of surroundings was emphasized by attempts to repair it. Grachanitsa lies in a bare enclosure shaded by a few trees, pitifully different from the gardens that surround the mosques of its conquerors, with their fountains and conduited waters and marble seats. It was now stacked with heaps of masonry, and on the further side a half-finished building stood among its scaffolding; and on benches in the shadow of the church twenty or thirty young soldiers sat at a meal, while an officer stood beside them, talking to a tall white-bearded priest and a man in townish clothes. They turned to look at us, and the man in townish clothes clapped his hands and ran towards us, crying, ‘Constantine! Constantine!’ ‘You see, he knows me, all people know me,’ said Constantine, as he always did in such circumstances, but without his usual vivacity. Formerly he said it as if he could remember the exact taste of the pleasure he had shared with his friend; but it was now as if he could think of it only as a payment from a fortune he had exhausted. ‘He is a very well-known architect from Belgrade,’ he explained. ‘I know all such people. No doubt he is in charge of the new building, whatever it is.’

That this was so the architect explained, clinging happily to Constantine’s coat lapels. He was putting up a new guest-house, which was needed because the monastery was so miserably poor and wanted a new opportunity to raise funds. Tens of thousands of pilgrims come here every year on St. Vitus’s Day, the anniversary of the battle of Kossovo. There could be, of course, no question of housing all of them. These pilgrims, who would be half rosy with Bank-Holidayness and half agonized by the contemplation of the national tragedy, would continue to sleep on the summer-baked soil of the fields, as they had always done. The plan was to catch the few pounds now spent by the richer peasants at the inn at Prishtina, which is the nearest town. The architect went on, speaking French for our benefit, ‘And it is the greatest joy to be here, for I have some little things to do also for the marvel, the pearl, the church itself. Look at her!

‘It has been a wonderful thing for me to work here, because in Belgrade one forgets what one’s people is, what paprika we really are. Look at this old monk here. You know, when I first came here, I had some hope of persuading the Abbot and the monks and their Bishop to let me take off the porch, for I knew that if they consented the Government would permit it. So I told them what a shame it was not to have Grachanitsa in its beauty as it was when King Milutin founded it, but they would not listen to me, and perhaps they had a little of the right on their side, for indeed the porch is historically interesting. It was built when the Turks in theory prohibited all building of Christian churches or repairing of them, and the reason it could be done is romantic. A member of the Sokolovitch family who had been taken by the Turks when a child to be a Janizary had become the Grand Vizier, and he used his position to protect all Serbs, and in particular to grant any favour asked him by his brother, who saw a priest and whom he had appointed Patriarch of Petch. But I am an architect and not a historian, and I became very angry when the monks would not grant me my wish. I turned my back on them and walked out of the room where we were, and I came out here and sat on the stone seat that runs along the wall of the church, fuming and kicking the pebbles in front of me. Presently this old one with the white beard came out and told me that they felt I had better know at once that if I came by night and did what I wanted to the porch they would get me excommunicated. The brave old one, he belongs to the days of comitadji and smuggled rifles and bombs and night raids, and that is the way he thought life was conducted, particularly by people who are angry. And indeed that is a way not inappropriate to this place, for it is fierce, very fierce, as you will see when you go inside. There you will see, if you have eyes in your head, that we were not barbarians, yet very fierce.’

He halted us again as we crossed the dust towards the church. ‘No, certainly we were not barbarians,’ he said. ‘Look, look at her. Nothing about her is accidental. She is built not out of simplicity but out of the extremest sophistication. She is full of tricks, so elaborate that I can hardly explain them to those who are not trained architects. The towers supporting those cupolas are pulled out of their proper axes by somebody who knows—and it is unbelievable what theory and practice one would have to have mastered before one could know it—that thus there could be achieved an effect of airy lightness. Ah, but what this builder knew. Think of it, there is water, and much water, under this ground. At one point it lies within three feet of the walls. But he was calm, he was sure of his knowledge. I would not dare to build a building of such a size and importance so near water. He dared, and he was right in his daring, for after six hundred years the church is lying level as she was built, and she is not an inch nearer the water. Such things barbarians cannot do at all, such things hardly any of the cultured races have been able to do.’ There was evidence of the unfortunate position of the Balkans in his realization that we had probably doubted the value of the culture which Kossovo had destroyed. ‘But you must go inside. The interior of Grachanitsa tells you all about the people who built her.’

That was true; and what it told us was, to our surprise, not unfamiliar. From the immense height of the cupolas light descends on three naves, divided by gigantesquely sturdy columns, and arrives there multicoloured, dyed by the frescoes which cover every inch of the walls. There is here a sense of colossal strength, of animal vigour, of lust so lusty that it can sup off high pleasures as well as low, and likes crimson on its eye as well as wine on its tongue, and a godhead as well as a mistress. In fact, here is something very like the spirit of the late Tudor age; and this is the kind of church that the architects of Hampton Court might have built if the Gothic obsession had not laid its hand on their end of Europe. This was a startling correspondence, because the Serbian king who built Grachanitsa some seventy years before the battle of Kossovo closely resembled our Henry VIII.

This was King Milutin. In the twelfth century the Nemanyas, a family of chieftains who lived in a petty fortress on the Montenegrin border near the Adriatic coastline, produced a genius in the person of St Sava and a man of great talent in his brother, King Stephen the First-crowned, who together founded a stable Christian Serbian state, which their descendants expanded north towards the Danube, east towards the Vardar river, and south into Byzantine territory. When the dynasty had been under way about a hundred and fifty years Milutin came to the throne, and in himself and his royal functions his likeness to Henry VIII was very strong.

He worked marvels for his country, but was untender to many of his subjects. He hungered hotly for women, but was cold as ice when he discarded them or used them as political instruments. He was ardently devout, but used his religion as a counter in his international relationships without showing a sign of scruple. There is a robustness in him that charms from the yonder side of the grave, but without doubt his vitals were eaten by the worm of melancholy. His picture is among the frescoes here. He stands, deeply bearded, in the costume worn by Serbian royalty, which is clearly imitated from the Byzantine mode: a stiff tunic of rich material studded with jewels, which disregards the frailty of the enclosed flesh and constrains it to magnificence. That costume powerfully recalls the later Tudor portraits, the gorgeous robes that held together the grossness of Henry VIII and the brain-raddled emaciation of Elizabeth and presented them as massive monarchs. Such vestments speak of a world founded on the idea of status, which regarded a king as the beloved deputy of God, not because he was any particular sort of man, but because it was considered obvious that if he were crowned a king he would try to act like a beloved deputy of God, since society had agreed that was how a king should act. There stands beside him, equally sumptuous, his wife Simonis, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II. She was Milutin’s fourth wife. He had had to work up to her, earning the right through a long life to avenge an early disappointment.

Of that disappointment we read in the writings of a contemporary who was on the side of those who inflicted it. Pachymeres, the Byzantine historian, relates that the Byzantine Emperor Michael Palaeologus wished for an alliance with King Stephen Urosh of Serbia, and to that end offered his second daughter, Anna, as wife to King Stephen’s second son, who was this same Milutin. Michael’s wife, who was not only Empress but a great lady by birth, had a poor opinion of this proposal, and before the bride and her train started she sent some officials and a bishop as scouts to see if the Serbian court was fit for her daughter. Their adventures were sad. They were shocked by what seemed to them the poverty of the land; and for some reason this invariably happened in the Middle Ages when anybody visited any country other than his own, and Byzantines were likely to receive this unfavourable impression with peculiar poignancy. There was an authentic reason for this which held good over a long period. For hundreds of years their standard of living was higher than in most other countries, so much higher that when one of their ladies went to Venice to be the wife of the Doge Selvio in the eleventh century, the luxury of her habits, which included eating with a gold fork and wearing gloves, led her to be regarded as fit for Hell. But later, when this superiority was nothing like so marked, the Byzantines grew soft and insular and complaining, like a certain type of well-to-do English person who grumbles at French coffee, at American trains, at German bedclothes, to a degree far beyond what is justified by the amount of irritation these can cause in the sane. The Byzantine emissaries evidently belonged to this class, for they reported that the Serbians subsisted solely on what they brought down hunting and what they stole; but it is known that at that time they conducted a lively trade in timber and livestock and wheat and oil, that there were several rich mines, and that the organization of artisans set up by the Romans still flourished.

The insularity of these Byzantines was further alarmed when they came on a manifestation of the West with which they were unfamiliar. King Stephen Urosh was married to a French princess, Hélène of Anjou, who was a Roman Catholic zealot of an austere type. She is said to have been an admirable woman of great benevolence and intelligence, who did much excellent work in restoring the lands which had been laid waste by the Mongols, but she practised that extreme type of Catholic asceticism which is the root of Puritanism. Under her influence her elder son, Dragutin, who was a cripple, formed a habit of sleeping in a grave lined with thorns and sharp flints. Her husband, although he remained within the Orthodox Church, was governed by her ideas. When the officials and the Bishop arrived at his palace he received them coldly, and on hearing that they were part of Princess Anna’s train and that many more were following, he said sourly that he was sorry to hear it, for he and his family were not accustomed to such luxury. Then in a spirit with which we are all familiar, particularly if we were young before the war, he took them to see the wife of his elder son Dragutin, who was the daughter of the King of Hungary. She was plainly dressed and was spinning wool. ‘Now that,’ said King Stephen, ‘is the sort of wife that we like here.’ The touch can be recognized by those of us who were brought up on relays of princesses who were all but dropping dead under the continuous effort of public simplicity, who wore shirt-blouses unusual for gauntness, who had no fires in their bedrooms, who went to bed so early that, even allowing for the early hour at which they rose, their slumbers must have been inordinate.

But the Byzantines did not understand. Leaving a bad impression behind them by their obvious perturbation, they rode back hastily and stopped the Princess at Ochrid. Not certain what to do, whether to take her straight back to Constantinople or wait for orders or let her go on and be recalled, they hung about the district till there arrived a Serbian ambassador named in the chronicles George, simple George. He seems to have been a person of great resource. He had plainly been sent to discourage the expedition from proceeding, since the Serbian court had liked the Byzantine emissaries as little as they had liked it. He began by telling them that on the way he had been robbed, and they naturally asked themselves what mercy they as foreigners could expect from robbers who did not spare notables of their own country. George also started a conversation in ambiguous terms which led them to question him sharply as to whether the conditions of the marriage contract to be signed between Michael Palæologus and Stephen Urosh were likely to be faithfully observed. He answered with transparent evasiveness. And in the night the Byzantine emissaries’ horses were stolen. They found the local police unhelpful in the search for them, though ready enough to provide extremely inferior substitutes. Princess Anna and her train left in haste for home.

This incident cannot have pleased Milutin, though he probably liked the bit about the horses. He had a marked distaste for his family’s ideas. Simplicity he abhorred, and throughout his life he showed that Roman Catholicism was to him simply a means of winning the support of a man called the Pope who exercised an enviable amount of power. He worked to become inarguably great, in terms that would be understood across a continent, that would be understood even by gorgeous Byzantium. There was a certain amount of preliminary waiting to be done, while his family life broke into curious blooms. His pious elder brother Dragutin rebelled against his father King Stephen; with the help of his brother-in-law, King Ladislas IV of Hungary, beat him thoroughly in a great battle in Herzegovina, and seized the throne for himself. He was so completely under his Roman Catholic mother’s influence that it cannot be doubted she was in sympathy with his revolt, which they both probably justified by Stephen Urosh’s fidelity to the Orthodox Church, although King Ladislas, a notorious scoundrel descended from an unlovable Asiatic tribe, was an odd ally in a Holy War. When Dragutin had won he threw his father into prison and proceeded to manoeuvre his country towards the abandonment of the Orthodox Church and conversion to Roman Catholicism. These plots were detected and resented by his people, and after he and King Ladislas had made an unsuccessful attempt on Byzantine territory, for which he had to make amends by the surrender of a large tract of Serbian land, he abdicated in favour of Milutin. He then settled in Bosnia, which his Hungarian wife had brought him in her dowry, became a Roman Catholic, and asked the Pope to send him a mission of Franciscan friars to convert the Bogomil heretics and the members of the Orthodox Church within his territory. Thus there was initiated the period of savage religious persecution which made the distracted Bosnians prefer Islam to Roman Catholicism, and enabled the Turk to entrench himself in a key position in South-East Europe. This was a truly lamentable rascal.

When Milutin ascended the throne he felt under no necessity to set his father free. He, a Lear who really had something to worry about, died in an Albanian prison a year later. Thereafter Serbia prospered steadily, for no other apparent reason than that Milutin was a fortunate ruler, like a garden whose owner has the ‘green finger.’ The mines gave up their riches, wine and wheat and oil and livestock flowed out of the country in a fat river of well-being. Abroad, he carried on a continuous policy of expansion at his neighbour’s weakest points. He ate southwards into the disordered Byzantine Empire, his first marriage helping him. He had married the daughter of Duke John of Neopatras, the most powerful of the despots who were setting up for themselves here and there on the Greek islands in defiance of Constantinople. Then Byzantium sent the Tartars against Milutin, and on the plea of consolidating his position in the West he sent Duke John’s daughter packing, quite in the manner of Henry VIII, and married Elizabeth, the sister of Dragutin’s wife and his old ally, the Asiatic King Ladislas of Hungary. But this new marriage was remarkable for the number of ways in which it was bound to displease people. The Roman Catholics outside and inside the Serbian Empire were scandalized, not only because Milutin was divorced but because the bride was a nun. The members of the Orthodox Church were equally scandalized because she was the sister of Milutin’s brother’s wife, thus falling within the prohibited degrees. She was also unpopular with Milutin’s party because she was Hungarian, and the alliance between Dragutin and her brother had meant a defeat for Serbia and the loss of territory. It is impossible to believe that this marriage can have secured more support for him than it lost, and that the motive was not passion. One must compare it to Henry’s impolitic and impassioned marriage with Anne Boleyn. It resembled it too in brevity. Before long Milutin dismissed her and married Anna Terteri, the daughter of George Terteri, a fierce and able Emperor of Bulgaria, who was part Slav, part Asiatic. East and West found it not at all impossible to meet in South-East Europe after the barbarian invasions.

But soon Anna also was dismissed. Under Milutin’s government Serbia had become so rich and his disingenuous statesmanship so notoriously successful that the Byzantine Empire regarded its power with alarm. But the Turks, massing decade by decade in Asia Minor, were a graver danger. So the Emperor Andronicus II, who had succeeded his father Michael Palaeologus, signed a treaty of peace with Milutin, and offered to seal it with the hand of his widowed sister Eudocia. This offer could not have been made unless Milutin had composed a masterly fantasia on legalist themes comparable to Henry VIII’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon. On the face of it Milutin could not marry anybody, because the canon law of the Orthodox Church definitely forbids fourth marriages. But Milutin overcame that difficulty. He now claimed that his first divorce had been illegal. In support of this he brought it forward that the Orthodox Church officials would never permit the name of his second queen to be mentioned in the liturgy, though the real reason for this had been that she was connected to him within the prohibited degrees. This pretence that his first divorce had been invalid meant that not only his second but his third wife had never been really married to him, and that their children were all bastards. That did not distress him, for though he had two sons who were affected by this decision, a mere heir was not what he wanted. He wanted an heir who should have a title through himself to the Serbian crown and through his mother to one of the Byzantine crowns. Also there was at last to be won revenge for the sneers of Michael Palaeologus’s eunuchs, sent to see if he were a fit bridegroom for Princess Anna. The precise moment had arrived when he could pursue these ends because his first wife, the very first of all, had died; and although the Orthodox Church looks on the remarriage of widows and widowers hardly more favourably than if they had been parted from their spouses by divorce, now that he had succeeded in wiping out his second and third marriages, the one he contemplated counted as only his second, and he was free to make it after performing a slight penance.

The Emperor’s sister Eudocia, however, refused this opportunity. She put in the alternative pleas that she dearly loved the memory of her husband and would not for the world marry again, and that when she married again she wanted a more respectable bridegroom than Milutin. For public opinion was profoundly shocked by his matrimonial casuistries. It is to be noted, however, that there is nothing in Milutin’s reign comparable to the beheading of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. In certain respects Milutin was far more civilized than Henry VIII, though he lived a hundred and fifty years earlier in a country that had been Christianized three hundred years later. Few would care to say that Henry VIII might not have forgotten the duties of filial piety if he had had an energetic mother who led a campaign against all his divorces, and never ceased to act as a Roman Catholic propagandist in both his own realm and neighbouring territories. But although Hélène of Anjou denounced all Milutin’s marriages but the first, and not only supported her Roman Catholic son in Bosnia on the western frontier of Serbia, but tried to convert the Emperor of Bulgaria on its east, she outlived Milutin. We know also what happened to Sir Thomas More; better luck attended the Archbishop Jacob, who was fearless in his opposition to Milutin’s tortuous matrimonial policy, yet lost neither his life nor his archiepiscopate. Still, sufficient unto the day was Milutin’s barbarity. It was in sorrow and shame that the Emperor Andronicus resolved to buy Serbian adherence at a higher price than he had meant to pay. Since his sister Eudocia refused to be sacrificed he had to offer up his daughter Simonis, who was only six years old.

Their services are insufficiently recognized, those girl children who held together the fabric of history by leaving their nurseries and going into far lands to experience the pains of rape and miscarriage, among strangers talking unknown tongues and practising unhomely customs. The practice has not been so long in desuetude that we can despise it as a remote barbarity; it was thought a pity that the Belgian Princess who married the Crown Prince Rudolph of Habsburg had not shown the signs of womanhood at the time fixed for her wedding, but the ceremony was not for that reason postponed. Nor is it necessary, in order to feel its horror, to exaggerate the infamy of early sexual activity; it is sheer humbug to pretend that a girl of twelve who is married to a kindly young bridegroom is in worse case than a woman in her forties, of the kind that would like to marry, who is not married. If child marriage were as fearful as the modern world pretends, the white race would be extinct by now. Erasmus declared in a sermon that, though it was usual for little girls of ten to marry and straightway have children, he himself thought it too young; and our own Henry VII was born of a thirteen-year-old mother who lived to be a vigorous woman with scholarly interests.

But the export trade in these little princesses was indubitably and totally repulsive. For a child-wife to be happy she must have a gentle husband of her own kith, and familiar faces round her when she comes to childbirth. But these royal children were sent out into strange lands, not to see their kinsfolk again for years and perhaps for ever, to be handed over to men who would not have been able to compel such precious gifts if they had not proved themselves bloody in mind and deed. Often such marriages marked the signature of peace between powers that had been savagely at war, so that little girls were sent to the beds of enemies who had been the Bluebeards of their nursery tales. Every child in the Byzantine Empire in the thirteenth century must have shuddered at nights to think of the Tartars, the little yellow men that passed over the land like living flames from hell. But when Michael Palaeologus needed the support of the Tartars against the Bulgars, he sent superb presents to their chief, Prince Chalaii. There was chosen as ambassador the priest and Abbot of the monastery of Christ Ruler of All, who took with him, among much else, a portable altar, screened with magnificent curtains and embellished with images of the saints and with a superbly worked cross, and furnished with costly chalices and plates for the celebration of the mysteries; and also an illegitimate daughter of the Emperor called Euphrosyne who had been promised to the Tartar chief as his bride. She was well under ten years of age. When the train arrived at the South Russian camp of the Tartars it was found that Prince Chalaii was dead, so his son Nogai married her instead. The bridegroom looked curiously at the pearls on the Byzantine bonnets of her suite and guessed them to be charms against thunder. Nothing is known of Euphrosyne’s later life save that one of her sons was strangled in some convulsion of Bulgarian politics. Michael Palaeologus had another illegitimate daughter, Marya, whom he sent even further afield on the same sort of errand. She went to marry the Khan of Tartary who lived at Baghdad, a grandson of Genghis Khan. It is to be remembered that these Asian invaders were as shocking to that age as they are to this, for in spite of the greater social violence of the Middle Ages there was a stricter chivalry observed in war. No prisoner was put to death or held to ransom unless he was royal or noble, captured common soldiers were disarmed and turned loose, and there was no killing save in actual battle. A society which held this code would plainly be appalled as we are by the Tartars’ massacre of millions and their destruction of all property and disregard for all human rights in the territories they ravaged. It is not to be believed that Euphrosyne and Marya were unafraid, either as children or as grown women.

So Simonis, for a little girl born to a lofty place in the hierarchy of Byzantium, was not faring so badly; but she fared ill enough. A historian of her day has described the manner of her going out to her martyrdom. It was at the beginning of Lent that the Emperor Andronicus left Constantinople to take her to Milutin. There had been a long and cruel winter which had killed many trees and plants. The land was still under snow and the rivers were frozen. The imperial train travelled slowly towards Salonika, halting sometimes to attend to local matters of state. One night they stayed at the monastery where the Patriarch had his residence, and in the morning all attended Mass. Afterwards the Patriarch tried to rebuke the Emperor for the scandal of the marriage and asked if he might talk to Simonis about it. But Andronicus, with the curtness which is the weak man’s substitute for strength, told him they must be on their way, asked him to give himself and his daughter the benediction, and set out on the northward journey through the frozen country. Later he wrote to the Patriarch and told him that he would not take. Communion from his hands at Easter, according to custom. The task must be deputed to another priest. But at the same time he sent him the present of a thousand crowns which it was his habit to send him at that season.

His heart must have been heavy as he rode away from the monastery, for he knew well that the Patriarch was right. And the little girl was very dear to him, for she had been born after he had been greatly grieved by the loss of several other daughters in their infancy. Her name recorded his concern for her, since it was given her by reason of a magical device he had practised lest he lose her like her sisters. When she was born twelve candles of equal size and weight were lit before the images of the Twelve Apostles, and while these were burning prayers were said for the child, and she was put under the protection of the saint whose candle lasted longest. It was St. Simon who preserved her life, for the curious end that at the age of six she should be handed over to a bridegroom some forty years her senior who was, by consummating their marriage too soon, to render her barren. Yet Andronicus cannot be blamed. Over the sea, in Asia Minor, there were massing Turks, and more Turks, and yet more Turks, surpassing the Mongols in dreadfulness because of the reinforcement of their ferocity by persistence, in their stabilization of massacre by settlement. There was nothing a Christian king could do but swallow the vices of other Christian kings if they were possible allies in the defence of Europe against the Ottoman invaders.

At a gorgeous festival in Salonika the child and Milutin were married by the Archbishop of Ochrid; and hidden behind the crowds and the banners and the trumpeters and the processions of soldiers and eunuchs a second sombre and infestive ceremony took place. Two people were handed over to the Emperor Andronicus as some compensation for the loss of his daughter. One was a Byzantine deserter who had of late very successfully led King Milutin’s troops against certain towns on the fringe of the Emperor’s territory: Milutin had his Wolsey. The other was the daughter of the Bulgarian Emperor Terteri, till lately Milutin’s wife. She was to be filed for reference with Andronicus, to be brought out or forgotten as political expediency was served. Hardly less than the bride she proved to what a limited degree it is possible, without falling into the most savage irony, to describe women as the protected sex. It is said that Milutin showed so little compunction in discarding her because her father had lately been driven from the Bulgarian throne: but he had been succeeded by her brother. For women, however, blood is constantly as thin as water, and nobody seems to have anticipated that her family would come to her defence.

Later Simonis was to face for some time the destiny of her predecessor. She was to survive Milutin, as Catherine Parr survived Henry VIII; but both were to have moments when it seemed that they too were going down into the abyss that suddenly fissured the uxorious ground on which they had seemed secure. Time brought certainty that Simonis could never bear Milutin an heir to the Byzantine throne; it also brought evidence that her father, the Emperor Andronicus, was an incompetent ruler who year by year became a less valuable ally. So Milutin entered into negotiations with Charles de Valois, titular Emperor of the Latin Empire and brother of Philip the Fair, with the purpose of forming an alliance to depose Andronicus. As a necessary prelude Milutin had to take steps towards being converted and converting his country to Roman Catholicism, and to that end entered upon a long correspondence with the Pope; and he also proposed marriage to a relative, and possibly any relative, of Charles de Valois. The project failed, because Charles lost interest. Had it succeeded Simonis would have been sent home to her father’s court, which would probably itself have been removed to exile, to be despised as a failure as diplomat and breeder; and this disgrace would have befallen her because the hateful old man who had married her had abandoned himself to the. Roman Catholic Church, which she, like every Byzantine since the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, regarded as a band of criminal enemies. Simonis had always loathed Serbia, and it is no wonder that she attempted to escape. When her mother died she took the body home to Constantinople and refused to return, and Milutin, to whom her flight must have recalled the contemptuous withdrawal of Michael Palaeologus’s ambassadors in his youth, forced her back by threats of military action and would not listen to the plea which she reiterated through the years, that he should allow her to become a nun. In the routine of daily life he appears to have treated her kindly, and even with devotion. But it is no wonder that she leaves the same ugly mark on the fabric of Serbian history as Mary Tudor on our English record. She presents the same spectacle of piteous martyrdom not flowering into sanctity but withering into peevishness and hate. A fresco here at Grachanitsa shows her being crowned by an angel, tense as a cat under an undesired caress, full of that lack of peace which passes all understanding, recognizable in the shrew and the prisoner. She left behind her an undying legend of hatred and malice. Any Serbian peasant will tell one that Queen Simonis was an evil woman though he may know nothing else about her. The name ‘Bloody Mary’ has a similar independent existence in the English popular mind.

It is probable that Simonis caused this ill fame by the part she played in alienating her husband from his son Stephen. In the popular calendar of the old Serbian saints and kings which was reprinted from ancient sources for the first time about a hundred years ago, it is definitely stated that that was her offence. The story as it is told there cannot be true, for it represents her as trying to oust Stephen from his position as heir to the throne, and replace him by a son of her own, whereas she had no son, and not until she was manifestly barren did Milutin acknowledge Stephen as his heir. But the outline of the story seems to be correct. This Stephen was probably the son of Milutin’s second wife, Elizabeth of Hungary, the nun of Asiatic descent. When he was quite young he had seen his mother displaced by the daughter of George Terteri the Bulgarian Emperor, but he himself remained at court and did valorous work for the state. He went as hostage to Nogai, the Prince of the Tartars, who had married the little Byzantine Euphrosyne, and he remained there in that dangerous capacity for some years. When he returned he was given as bride the daughter of Smilatz, a Bulgarian noble who for some years was the emperor, like many of his fellow-countrymen, for the Bulgarian throne was then as often and diversely occupied as the last chair in musical chairs. Stephen was also given a part of his father’s kingdom as his own principality.

Then civil war broke out between Milutin and Stephen. It is possible that the son rebelled against the father, for there was a party in the state which thought that Milutin showed unpatriotic weakness in his relations with the Byzantine Empire, and it would have supported Stephen. But in a solemn document connected with the foundation of a monastery Stephen accused Simonis of having lied about him to his father; and it is significant that the campaign began by an invasion of Stephen’s principality by Milutin. If this first guilt lies on Simonis, then later and blacker guilt lies on her too. For at the behest of his Byzantine advisers Milutin ordered his son to be banished to Constantinople, and to be blinded before he went. This was not a Serbian punishment; there the code punished criminals either by simple banishment or by the confiscation of their goods. But the Byzantines used mutilation of one sort and another as a penalty for many crimes, and blindness was often inflicted on persons of high position who might be dangerous to the state if left in possession of all their faculties. So Stephen, with his son Dushan and his daughter Dushitza, was taken by guards from his father’s palace, and borne along the road to Constantinople. Before they left Serbian territory, at that same Sheep’s Field where I saw the slaughter of the lamb at the rock, the guards halted and put out his eyes with red-hot irons. I do not know why they chose that particular spot, but tradition is certain that they did. The legend runs that that night St. Nicholas came to him in a dream and said, ‘Fear not, thine eyes are in my hand.’ In fact, as quite often happened when the men who used the irons were merciful or clumsy or bribed, the sight had not been destroyed. But Stephen said nothing.

At Constantinople the Emperor Andronicus received him with a kindness hard to explain, save that to such a gentle temperament as his to do a gracious act in this bloodthirsty age must have been like an hour of rest under a shady tree. Stephen was comfortably lodged in the Monastery of Christ Ruler of All, where he sat in affected blindness, facing the sunshine as if it were the night for more than five years. Such virtuosic performances of fearful cunning did the Tudors inspire in the flesh of their flesh; so did Mary Tudor hold her breath to keep it while her father lived, so did’ Elizabeth when she was Mary Tudor’s prisoner. At last Stephen dared tell Andronicus that he could see; and Andronicus bade him continue to bandage his eyes and to tell no one else.

The legend says that shortly afterwards Andronicus sent a mission to Milutin to consider common measures of defence against the Turks, and that he added to the train the Abbot of the Monastery of Christ Ruler of All, with instructions that he should find a chance to speak well of Stephen to his father. It is certainly true that two great Serbian churchmen, the scholar Daniel and the statesman Nicodemus, worked on Milutin year after year till he was reconciled to his son. We get here a hint regarding the nature of Simonis: her father Andronicus befriended her enemy Stephen, and though she was devout the ecclesiastics of her Church were not on her side. At last, thanks to these intercessions, Milutin asked Andronicus to send his son back to him. So Stephen travelled home with his little Dushan—his daughter had died during his captivity—and was taken to his father’s palace. There he was led to the feet of his father, and he kneeled down and clasped his stiff, jewelled robes, and cried out that whatever his father said he had done he had indeed done, and had long repented of it. Then his father bowed down his bearded bluffness to him and raised him up, and gave him the kiss of forgiveness. But Stephen did not unloose the bandage over his eyes. When Milutin gave him another principality in place of the one he had lost, and bade him go to it and leave his son Dushan at court to be reared as a prince, he went blindfold to claim his possessions. A year or two later nobles came and told him Milutin was dead. But Stephen did not put aside the fiction of his sightlessness till he knew that his father was not only dead but buried. So would a child of Henry VIII have acted, had his father formed the intention to blind him and not succeeded at the first doing.

All this story is implicit in Grachanitsa, in the lavished treasure of its colours and the vigorous fertility of its form. ‘But,’ a Western reader may object, ‘it is a story of barbarism, it shows that it is perfectly correct to say that nothing worth grieving over perished at Kossovo.’ That judgment applies standards that have never been valid save in the reign of Queen Victoria, which must now be recognized as an oasis in the moral desert of ordinary time. If the amount of violence habitual to society is admitted it can be seen that the reign of Milutin was the great age that came before the greater age, as Henry VIII’s morning came before the noon of England which is called Elizabethan. Milutin was a true king. He tilted his land towards the sun, wherever that might be in its course across the heavens. This can never be done without negotiation, the spirit must deny its appetite for principle. This is more of a sacrifice than would appear, for all men have a letch to live by principle; the good man would live by virtue, the bad man would live by vice, but both alike want a fixed rule for their happiness. The ruler, however, must have none. He must ask himself of every act the opportunist question, whether it tilts his land towards the sun or the shadow, and abide by the answer. This obligation prevents him from being a bad or a good man, but it makes the people feel for him as if he were a loving father.

Hence such a king brings glory and confusion to his country. Conduct breaks its established bounds and covers the whole gamut of conceivable action, not because of laxity, but because of a spirit of inquiry. The king is bewildered by the effects of his own deeds, which work well on the bodies and minds of his subjects, although they are contrary to the accepted moral code. He imagines that he must have discovered a new principle of morality, and feels about for it by a number of experimental acts, of a kind not previously sanctioned or even anticipated. His subjects share his sense of triumph and bewilderment, knowing him to be right when he could be proven wrong by all the authority they know. So they too give all events their chance to happen, and since their land is tilted towards the sun all seeds planted in the soil come to a prodigious growth.

Such a crescent age can be distinguished from decadence by its discussion of fundamentals. The people that rots declares with every breath that all is already known; the people that is young falls into the other error of declaring that nothing is yet discovered. There is a testing of the capacity of women’s bodies for pleasure and pain, which might be pronounced simple voluptuousness, were it not for the simultaneous exploration of their minds and respect for their wills shown in the art of the time. There are excesses of loyalty and treachery which might be put down as mere animal reactions, were it not for the speculative inquiries into the bases of faith and conduct sometimes conceived in a head that was to fall for treason to the axe, sometimes written in the hand that had signed the headsman’s warrant. Such an age is moral, not because it conforms to a moral code but because it is in search for one.

Doubtless Milutin was a murderer and a lecher, as red-fanged a husband and father as our Henry VIII; but like him he made war here and treaties there as it profited his country, nourished commerce, and built higher the fortress of the law. This last achievement was neither safe nor simple. He was surrounded by nobles who wore magnificently furred and jewelled garments made from the costliest stuffs sent out by Greece and Italy and Flanders, and practised an etiquette based on the exalted ceremonial of Byzantium, but for all that were apt to fall into common banditry when away from court. Milutin gentled them, diverted their ferocity to the service of the state, and opposed their lawlessness by an increasing elaboration of the law. Here Serbia never took its inspiration from Byzantium. It drew on the juristic achievements of the kingdoms of the North, of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, and even borrowed here and there from the codes, which were not so simple as might be supposed, of the Mongol invaders. One sign of the Northern influence was the establishment of trial by jury, which under Milutin appeared and developed. We can see him dealing with a specifically Macedonian problem in arranging for the representation of the various races of the district on these juries.

In religion also he had renounced all animal simplicity, no matter what his sword arm and his loins might prefer. Though the Kingdom of Heaven will have to be broadminded indeed to receive him, he might even be called an adept in the Christian faith. With a dualism more often found in the realm of sexual relations, he constantly considered the advisability of betraying the Orthodox Church by capitulation to the Papacy, though he was loyal to it in his soul. His age found proof of his loyalty in his charity, which was indeed impressive; he maintained an army of what were then called lepers, which probably included some victims of true leprosy, but which would consist for the most part of those suffering from skin diseases and those appalling ulcerations due to the Puritan theory, still active and working incalculable harm in the Balkans, that to drive out an infection of the skin it is proper to apply a fiercely irritant ointment or lotion. But these good works may have been what Americans compactly call fire insurance, or even a mechanical continuance of the routine set up by his pious mother. His participation in the life of the Church, however, admits of no such reading. He was certainly not moved by fear of ecclesiastical power, for he never hesitated to defy it when it was a question of policy, of tilting his land towards the sun. Throughout his reign he ignored the hostility between the Orthodox Church and the Papacy by permitting six Roman Catholic sees in his kingdom. It is more likely that, after the strange fashion of Henry VIII, he believed. Both of them, longing to be free for all possible courses of action, might have prayed, ‘Lord, I believe, help Thou my belief.’

That Milutin was a believer is proved by the fiercely, passionately—it might almost be said unnecessarily—religious quality of the churches he built. Grachanitsa speaks first of all regarding the union of church and state. Its architect saw in his mind’s eye, when there was but the bare site, the Godhead shining from the secret darkness behind the iconostasis; and he saw, advancing towards the iconostasis to draw power from the hidden Godhead, to derive authority for their rank, Milutin and Simonis and their courtiers, dressed in glowing purple, girt with belts of gold studded with pearls and precious stones, multicoloured as flowers of the field. He permitted earthly glory to state its case, to establish its value; but he demonstrated the supremacy of the Godhead’s glory by a paradox of forms which were solid as the rock, yet light as the spread wings of a bird. It would be improbable that a society, particularly a small and coherent society, should cause such a church to be built and should afterwards frequent it, without participating in the passion which had engendered it and which it engendered; and its records prove that many among Milutin’s courtiers became so enamoured of the hidden Godhead that they could no longer bear to be divided from it by the iconostasis. The Serbian aristocracy included, as well as many sheep-stealers, many saints. Young men fled from the court to become hermits and monks, taking irrevocable vows far stricter than those imposed in the Roman Catholic Church, in such numbers that dangerous gaps began to appear in the governing class; and a law was passed which forbade a religious order to accept any novice, male or female, save with the consent of a bishop.

In the church the ardour of these young men becomes comprehensible. About us were the thick pillars, cold with their great mass, so like virgin rock that we might have been standing deep under the earth, among the sources of rivers. Above us the light, dripping down through the narrow windows of the cupolas from the simple unmeaning amplitude of the sky, lay on the frescoes, and revealed an age of perception so delicate, of speculation so profound, that it is almost outside our Western understanding. They do not represent the perfect classical Byzantine art as it was seen in its two great periods, the fourth to the sixth and the ninth to the twelfth centuries. It is not classical in spirit: it does not celebrate the completely comprehended discoveries which a civilization has achieved by mastering all available information about its environment. But before classicism there must come a preparatory phase of romanticism, in which the age feels its way towards such discoveries, by formulating all conceivable theories and fantasies, to the end that those which are not valid can be distinguished from those that are; and to such an experimental period, based on the remains of a substantial classicism, belong these frescoes. When Grachanitsa was built, Byzantium had already lost the firm and massive character of supremacy: too many of its forces were diverted by apprehension of the Turks. The spirit of the Empire had therefore found several provincial lodgments, in such places as Salonika, Trebizond, Mistra, and Serbia, among populations too different and too distant to be able to carry on the Byzantine tradition without adapting it to their alien natures. Hence Serbo-Byzantine art is a fusion of classicism and romanticism and of two racial spirits, unlike in age, intensity, and experience. It is therefore not a unified and completely satisfying art: but it presents many beauties that have never been surpassed by later ages.

There is in these frescoes, as in the parent works of Byzantium, the height of accomplishment in technique and of ambition in content. The Mother of God prays, her lifted hands far apart, in the fashion of those born not far from Asia; and her nature is as prodigious as might be expected from the mother of a god, the destiny which perplexes her is as amazing as we know it to have been. Two women meet, and a strong wind blows their red and blue cloaks about them. It is the Visitation, and the wind is the Will of God, blowing them to marvellous fruitfulness. An angel stands before the young Mary and gives her a sharp military command; she shrinks back, not in refusal, but because she realizes more fully than he does how the fulfilment of that order must affect destiny. This version of the Annunciation has an originality, what our grandfathers would have called piquancy, which is noticeable in others among these frescoes; for nothing here is not profoundly considered, and as the likeness of men lies on the surface and their uniqueness in their depths, this makes for unpredictable vision. Here and there this originality was exploited by the romantic element in this art till it substituted strangeness for beauty, and instead of making a revelation started a debate. It was so with the fresco that made my husband say, ‘Look, here is something extraordinary. Do you remember at Neresi the fresco of a woman washing the Infant Christ, which looked like a Blake illustration to The Mental Traveller? Well, here is another fresco that looks like a Blake illustration to Urizen or Los.’

That was true, if one could imagine a Blake from whom there had been removed that discordant element which obliged him to see the naked body as an unharmonized assembly of muscles and begin all the prophetic books, and indeed interpenetrate them, with terrific groaning family rows among the supernatural beings. This fresco takes the breath away by the unanticipated beauty of the represented natural forms; it says, ‘This is how you would see if you were not as bad as blind.’ Against a background of great architectural magnificence, such as one sees in the works of the early Italians, a supernatural youth stands naked on a high and narrow altar, an old man is prostrated in adoring shame before him, and a bishop stands a little way off, worshipping in less humble ecstasy. The nakedness of the youth is depicted with extreme solemnity, as if the human body were the copy of a divine image, and whosoever could completely realize it could completely realize the form of God. The garments of the old man are a thin clothing for his limbs, his limbs are a thin clothing for his spirit’s turmoil. The Bishop’s cloak, a superb example of that early adventure in abstract art, the play that the Byzantine artists loved to make with the crosses on ecclesiastical garments, wraps an impressive man in greater impressiveness. The relations of these figures and their background are so proper that when we left the church we could not remember whether it was vast or minute, whether it covered half the chapel wall or only a fraction of it. Yet it lacked the effect of sufficiently great art. It raised the question—What are these people, and what are they doing? This would be asked by any spectator, however well he were acquainted with the subject, which is, in fact, an episode in the life of St. Peter of Alexandria, a martyr in the persecutions of Diocletian: Christ appeared to him in nakedness, to foretell that his garment, the Church, was to be reft from him by the Arian heresy. It remained true, after that historical fact was known, that these three people’s strange demonstrations of their being, the opinions they are expressing on divinity and humanity and the fusion of these in ecclesiastical authority, required an amplification which can only be made in language. This new and experimental age had not discovered the limits of each art, it had not learned that painting must not touch a subject on which literature has still an essential word to say.

This resemblance of Serbo-Byzantine art to the work of Blake, which seems to me entirely mysterious, not to be explained by any conceivable theory, has nothing to do with romanticism; for it is strongly apparent in the most classical fresco in Grachanitsa. This depicts a mystic, and both the Orthodox Church and William Blake knew very well what mysticism was. The Orthodox Church had drawn its knowledge direct from Christ and the Apostles and had developed it in the monasteries of Mount Athos; and Blake was one of the long line of mystics which England finds it so much easier to produce outside the Church than inside. This fresco shows Elijah sitting in one of those caves to which El Greco has accustomed us, an enclosing womb of rock. Beyond it are signs of a forest that makes its own night in the day; and at its mouth are two highly stylized little trees, symbols of barrenness. The old man’s clenched right hand supports his bearded chin; his head is thrown back in an ecstasy of thought; his left hand grips his bony knee. He is wrapped in a sheepskin, his tired feet are bare. ‘This is a study of what our people alone know,’ said Constantine, ‘this is mysticism without suffering.’

In that he named a distinction between the modern Western world and this Byzantine world, which is at bottom a distinction between poverty and wealth. The West imagines a hermit in the desert as inconvenienced by lack of material objects. He is always assumed to have so few ideas about the spiritual world that he has difficulty in keeping his mind on them, and therefore has to regard the mere exclusion of physical comfort as a positive victory which has constantly to be rewon. This actually was the state of many of the Western mystics. St Jerome shows in his letters that his animal preoccupations were always bursting into the sparsely populated area of his spiritual life; and St Augustine describes in his Confessions how the sight of a lizard catching flies or a spider entangling them in his web was enough to distract him from contemplation. But in this fresco of Elijah and in another which shows St John, wild-eyed with more wisdom than a man can carry, there is depicted the mystic who went into the desert because his head was so full of ideas about the spiritual world that everyday talk was in his ears as a barrel-organ playing outside a concert-hall is to a musician, the mystic who does not want to eat or drink or sleep with women because that is to take time off from the ecstatic pleasure of pursuing the ramifications of good and evil through his bosom and through the universe. There is a raven alighting in Elijah’s cave, food in its beak; he will hardly thank it. If a naked woman appeared before him she would be not a temptation but an offence, offending as a person in a library who begins chatting to a student who has found a long-sought reference a few minutes before closing time. Life is not long enough for these men to enjoy the richness of their own perceptions, to transmute them into wisdom.

Their wealth is past our computation. Our cup has not been empty, but it was never full like those in this world, at a spot where Asia met Europe, at a time when the governing civilization had known success as well as failure, and there were these new Slav races to give the sensibility and vigour of their youth to exploiting this inherited treasure of experience. Across one of the walls of Grachanitsa is shown the Falling Asleep of the Virgin Mary, the state which preceded her Assumption, a subject often treated by the Byzantines. There is no man living today who, exploring his mind in the light of that idea, could draw out so much.

In the foreground of the fresco is the Virgin lying on her bier. By the lax yet immutable line is rendered the marvel of death, the death which is more than the mere perishing of consciousness, which can strike where there is no consciousness and annul a tree, a flower, an ear of corn. Above her bier there shines a star of light; within it stands Christ, taking into his arms his mother’s soul in the likeness of a swaddled child. Their haloes make a peaceful pattern, the stamp of a super-imperial power, within the angles of the star. About them throngs a crowd of apostles and disciples, come hastily from the next world or from distant lands to attend the Virgin’s death, wearing their haloes as bubbling yet serene spheres. On the edge of the crowd stand some bishops in their cross-covered mantles, rock-like with the endurance of the Church, which cannot be perturbed by the most lacerating grief, and still others, also in flowing garments but with bodies liquid with grief, and others, also in flowing garments but with bodies tautened by effort, low under the weight of the bier. One astonished man is attached to it by both arms; he is a Jew of the party that killed Christ, who has tried to upset the bier, and will be glued to it until an angel cuts off his hands with a sword. The background is full of angels as the Eastern Church loved to conceive them, ethereal messengers who are perpetually irradiated by the divine beauty and communicate its laws to flesh-bound man, who embody, in fact, a dream of perfect vision and unfrustrated will, unhampered by the human handicaps of incomplete information and clumsy faculties. Without a taint of labour but with immense force they throw open the doors of Heaven, and light blazes on its threshold, a light inhabited by welcoming saints.

The huge imaginative space occupied by this small fresco is washed by two swinging tides. There is a wave of such sincere and childish grief as children feel when their mothers die, that breaks and falls and ebbs; there is a rising sea of exaltation in the Son who can work all magic and cancel this death or any other, making glory and movement where stillness and the end seemed to be ineluctable. The sides of the fresco are filled in with buildings, distorted with the most superb audacity in order to comply with the general pattern, yet solid and realistic in effect; we are amazed, as we all so often are during our lives, that our most prodigious experiences take place in the setting of the everyday world, that the same scenery should be used for the pantomime and the tragedy. Behind these buildings there is a firmament which evokes another recurrent amazement. It is the most astonishing of all the things which happen to us that anything should happen at all. It is incredible that there should be men and women, mothers and sons, biers and buildings, grief and joy; it would seem so much more probable that the universe should have as its sole packing empty nothingness. Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

But this fresco, though it is inspired by these ideas and communicates them, is pure painting; it essays no task proper to another art. These ideas manifest themselves because they were part of the intellectual and spiritual wealth which the painter had inherited from Byzantium, and he could engage in only the most superficial activities without being reminded of them. But he was wholly loyal to his art. He restricted himself to dealing with certain problems of form and colour, but such was his command over his technique that these restrictions gave him as much liberty as most men’s talents and allotment of time are likely to need. He knew how to put circle by straight line and straight line by circle, and pattern by pattern within an enfolding pattern, in a design which by a certain angularity never consented to renounce its nature, always refused to pretend to be a plain copy of material objects; he knew how to exploit the Near Eastern palette of strong colours which have had their strength eroded by stronger sunlight to pale virile essences, or obscured in the labyrinths of Byzantine palaces and only half revived by the glow from torches and candelabra. It is a convention of form and colour which we of the West know through its use by El Greco, and which we are tempted to mistake for his self-made fortune, if we do not know the treasure house of tradition where he found it. In Grachanitsa, where the painting of these frescoes and the architecture of the church illustrate two arts proceeding from the same late Byzantine culture, we can see how inexhaustible were the treasures of this tradition. Here artists knew the supremest wealth their kind can know; they were rich in creation and they worked for an audience rich in perception. These people were born into a kingdom which was as kingdoms of earth should be, yielding good grain and good meat and good wine; and they had had enough of everything for long enough to forget starvation and outgrow excess. Before their eyes was a kingdom of the mind, founded by another people, which, like all kingdoms of the mind, had never been completed, but was unique in beauty. Well nourished and full of power, the Serbs went forth to know the new pleasures of art and thought, and to complete this culture with a richness that should match the richness of its first intention.

And when we went out of the church there was nothing. Defeat had taken all. Across a dusty yard which had once been a garden, soldiers wheeled barrows full of stones, not to rear again the vanished palaces, but to put up a hostel to divert pence from peasants that might otherwise be spent at a poor inn. On the footboard of our car Dragutin sat smoking, and by him there stood a dull-eyed boy, wearing an unbuttoned shirt of stained linen, patched breeches, and broken sandals. A sore on his lip was smeared with sky-blue ointment. ‘Go now! Go now!’ Dragutin said to him, and crushed his cigarette under-foot. ‘Look, he is foolish. He knows you are going on to the Trepcha mines, because most English people who come to Grachanitsa are on their way to Trepcha, or have been there. So he wants you to give him a letter to the manager, the great Gospodin Mac. But I ask you, what would they want with the likes of this poor little one? For everything there is fino, fino, brlo fino, and they can have anyone they like to work for them, for they pay well and are just people, all dukes.’ The boy said, ‘There is nothing for me to do here. I want to work in the mines. Lady, gentlemen, there is nothing at all for me to do here, I want to go to the mines.’

Outside the walls of the compound rose the shabby, empty hills which in Milutin’s time had been covered with villages. They receded into distances that were truly vast, for a traveller could penetrate them for many miles before he came on life that was gentle, where the meals were full and delicate, and there was clerkly knowledge. Yet when Grachanitsa was built the people on these plains and hills had eaten game and fine fattened meats off gold and silver and pewter, and the noble men and women, of whom there were a great number, closely kind to the peasantry, spoke Greek as well as Serbian. But because the Christians had lost the battle of Kossovo all this life had perished. Only there remained the pious gravity of the soldiers, which is something the West does not know. An English soldier is more cynical than an English civilian; but when the Serbian puts on uniform he becomes quiet with a deep unformulated faith, which is perhaps a memory of a Cæsaropapist empire whose emperor was the Vicar of Christ. Also there was in Dragutin a kind of lordliness that might have been an inheritance from a nobility which, because it was half peasant, did not lose its force when its possessions were rapt from it. Nothing else was left on this scene of what had once been there; the residue was pitifully thin, thin as a shadow cast by a clouded sun. The boy shifted his weight from one leg to the other, and said, ‘There is nothing here for me to do.’

Prishtina

‘This is Prishtina,’ said Constantine. Prishtina was one of the capitals of the Serbian monarchs; for they had a peripatetic court to cope with the immensity of their new country, as was the custom in early Hungary and Germany, and held it now at Skoplje, now at Tetovo, now here, now in some northern town nearer the Danube. We blinked at a dull and dusty little village. ‘Here we must have lunch,’ continued Constantine, ‘for it will be too late when we get to Trepcha. You can throw away your flowers,’ he added, with the melancholy and unaggressive malice of an invalid, ‘they are all dead.’ We sat down at a table outside a hotel in the principal square. Near us a horse, angular as a Euclidean diagram, seemed to be holding up and to be held up by a greenish cab. Rickety little wooden shops, like hencoops on an ill-found small-holding, leaned up against each other, proffering at their oblique doors and in their tiny windows the smallest and most ingenuous specimens conceivable of the goods it was their business to sell.

A waiter took our order. Because the Turks were in the Balkans, and where Turks were there were coffee-houses, the smallest town here-abouts is familiar with the waiter, who in Western countries is the sign of a sophisticated centre. There came to stand beside us the hotel-keeper, very complacent about his position. Around us sat men in Western clothes more fantastic than any peasant costume could be, because they and their tailors had never seen a suit till they were grown men. It did not take us long to order lunch, for the bill of fare was short. ‘Chicken and rice,’ the waiter said, and the hotel-keeper echoed plumply, ‘Chicken and rice.’ He bent down, and shifted the tablecloth so that there fell at my place a particularly fine wine-stain, large and of a decorative shape, which the sunlight of some days had mellowed to a delicate mauve. With such an air, on days when I have been looking my best or have been companioned by the great, the maîtres d’ hôtel of famous restaurants have greeted me with gardenias.

‘When you go back to England,’ said Constantine sourly, ‘you will despise us for this, and say that we are all like pigs, and you will forget that we have had no advantages like you in your country who have always been rich.’ ‘Nonsense,’ I said, ‘I know quite well that this means nothing more than that people hereabouts have not yet heard about the convention that tablecloths should be clean. They know in most places that the world has made up its mind that bedclothes must not be dirty, they have learned it only too well. In a hotel at Nish I once spent a most wretched night, coughing and choking myself awake every time I fell asleep, because the sheets had been boiled in a powerful disinfectant. It was like going to bed in a bottle of smelling salts. Those people will be far cleaner than the English once they begin.’

‘There is one thing, I notice,’ said my husband, ‘and that is that whether Prishtina is clean or dirty, and in spite of the fact that it is extremely poor, I think poorer than any other town that we have visited—though not of course poorer than some of the villages—the people are not downcast. The hotel-keeper is very proud of being what he is and where he is. He does not dream of apologizing for his surroundings, as I have known hotel-keepers do in places that struck me as simple and beautiful. And the people who go by look very cheerful, though their faces are lined and their bodies marrowless and bent.’ ‘It is because they were worse before,’ said Constantine. ‘This district was the worst of any place in the Christian provinces of Turkey, because there was nothing here but the simplest agriculture, there were neither urban centres of trade and industry, nor even any luxury crops like tobacco. They raised nothing here but grain and animals.’ ‘In fact,’ said my husband, ‘they raised the most necessary things there are, therefore they were desperately poor. You need not trouble to tell us that. It is so in our country also, and indeed all over the world. That is perhaps the fault for which we are going to be punished.’

‘It is perhaps the fault for which Byzantium was punished,’ I said; ‘the two classes, the “powerful” and the “poor,” fought hard from the ninth century. The small landowners and the free peasants were so constantly harried by invasion and civil war that they bartered their liberty in return for the protection of the great nobles, who took advantage of the position to absorb the small landowners’ estates and to make serfs of the free peasants. At first the monarchy fought these great nobles, and even appeared to have vanquished them. Feudalism, the exploitation of a country by its large landowners, could not exist in a declared theocracy, which implied the conception of divinely impartial justice for all individuals and every class. But when the Latins invaded the Byzantine Empire they brought with them the feudal system which was established in their own countries, and it could not be driven out with them, because the Byzantine nobles, like all the rich, would rather choke than not have their mouths full, and applauded the idea of any extension of their wealth and their power, however dangerous. Therefore Byzantine society became inconsistent. Its claim to theocracy was no longer a holy myth, but a glutton’s lie.

‘Yes,’ I continued, delighted to speak on a subject of which my husband knew less than I did, ‘that sowed the seed of ruin in the state. The poor were thereafter so poor that the aggressive among them became mercenary soldiers with no loyalty save to the nobles who paid them. I fancy that the centre of power was shifting towards Serbia in these last days because the peasant, though he was nearly everywhere bound to his land and forbidden to sell it, had his definite legal rights on which the nobles were not allowed to encroach, and he could very easily, if he showed ability in managing his land and in his general conduct, join the ranks of the lesser nobility. One got, in fact, an expanding country that gave its citizens no reason to foment civil disorder and every reason to resist invasion. Had it not been for the Turks, Byzantine civilization could have retreated here and known a second flowering in the Serbian Empire, just as a considerable part of our European civilization has retreated to America and lives there in universities and art galleries and concert-rooms and laboratories planned on an ampler scale than we can afford.’

‘What is this?’ asked my husband. This was no rhetorical question. He really wanted to know. ‘It is your chicken and rice,’ said the waiter. ‘Yes, it is your chicken and rice,’ chirruped the hotel-keeper. The dish regarded as a whole was not unpalatable, for the rice was well cooked; with some good bread, butter, sheep’s cheese, white wine, and cherries, we did not do so badly. But the bird itself was a ghastly prodigy, lean and twisted in its leanness, like one of El Greco’s fasting saints. In these parts, because the poverty of the land forbids the peasants to fatten their stock for more than a few weeks, one often eats very young meat, the stuff the germ plasm puts out into the world however its adult transmitter has been nourished, part of the continuous belt of animal life. The lamb and the sucking-pig are made on such a scale that their birth-right of flesh amounts to something, but on the small and complicated bone structure of a bird it is hardly more than a flavour. This being the only kind of poultry that the hotel-keeper knew, he beamed at us as we worried the carcass. A plump chicken that was easy to eat would have seemed to him wrong in the same way as a golf-course with no hazards.

‘It does not matter at all, my dear,’ said my husband. ‘I have really done very well.’ But the chicken had perhaps some part in making him say, ‘Perhaps you are right in thinking that Serbia could have carried on the work of Byzantium, but I doubt it. I seem to remember that there were Byzantine writers who recorded their impressions of visits to Serbia with positive disgust at its barbarity. There was, I think, a writer called Gregoras.’ ‘There was indeed,’ I replied, ‘but he was an ass.’ That was apt to be the character of Byzantine writers. There could be no effective literature, because there was no integrated language. Three kinds of Greek were known in Byzantium. There was first the childish and degenerate Greek spoken by the poor, and secondly the supple and developed Greek used by the wealthy, and there was a vast difference between these two languages because there was a wide gulf between these two classes. There was also classical Greek which all educated people had to learn; and the professional man of letters felt that to keep up his dignity he must either write this third form of language or the wealthy man’s Greek distorted to resemble it as much as possible. That is to say he wrote as a conscious snob and dilettante, which is never a good prescription; and Gregoras brought to the task a fatuity which we can recognize in its full distastefulness, because it flourishes unchanged today.

He wrote with that verbosity which results not from exuberance but from destitution. ‘The sun had crossed half our meridian,’ he writes somewhere, ‘it was now on its way to hide itself and was descending as it does every day, towards the horizon.’ Through millions of such phrases there emerges the horrid fact that he exactly resembled the more tiresome type of well-to-do Englishman. He wrote a letter to a friend about his visit on a diplomatic mission to Serbia at the end of the thirteenth century which has been widely quoted by historians, particularly by those who are anti-Slav; and in this the resemblance is stark. This expedition which, as he put it, ‘comprised a sevenfold decade of man and beast,’ began badly by starting at night, for no respectable reason, and blundering along a path by a river through a forest, where they became embroiled with a number of armed men whom they assumed to be bandits, but who turned out to be a frontier police maintained by the Serbian Empire. There is something very English in the circumstance that none of the party knew more than a few words of Serbian, although for a hundred years it had been of vital importance to Byzantium to have good commercial and diplomatic relations with Serbia. When they got to the Serbian court at Skoplje, Gregoras and his friends had no eyes for anything native to the country, for they were so enormously impressed by the Serbian King Stephen’s mother-in-law, who had been married to the Byzantine Emperor John Palaeologus and had recently been bereaved of her husband. He himself took enormous snob-pleasure in her grief which took the form of magnificent purple Gummidgery, and felt flattered at being allowed to watch her apostrophizing her husband as ‘Oh, thou heir to numerous Emperors, who wert adorned with all the virtues,’ while tearing at her cheeks till her nails were red with blood.

The insufficiently diplomatic mission clustered round her for ten days, comforting her for her loss and for bearing it in his savage country. The Serbian King, they whispered, was not showing nearly enough respect to the Queen Mother in the arrangements he was making for her return to Constantinople, but what could one expect? Monkeys, they tartly agreed, must act like monkeys and ants like ants, and neither can be expected to behave like eagles and lions. In a typical sentence Gregoras says, ‘He was truly a sage who first conceived in his mind, and expressed it in his words, whether he was Thales of Mileto or Plato son of Aristo, or both, the second having borrowed from the first, that he was grateful from the bottom of his heart because he had been born a Greek and not a barbarian.’ Really, he titters, when he and his party remembered how things were done in Constantinople, they felt as if here in Serbia they had fallen among beetles that were decked out with necklaces and bracelets.

That touches a chord familiar to those of us who are acquainted with the Transatlantic situation: ‘My dear, it was too awful, seeing all those wonderful jewels and marvellous clothes worn by these dreadfully vulgar people.’ It unfortunately happens that, though many nice little boys and girls die when young, the nasty child who spoils the Christmas party by jeering at the presents on the tree always grows up; and if he is a European he is certain, though not so certain as he would have been a hundred years ago, to despise the United States. Such as he affect to hate a new and expanding society for its ostentation and vulgarity, but the truth is that they can tolerate social ritual only when it has crystallized into an opaque form which conceals its inner meaning. Hospitality that is still determined by generosity and wealth that enjoys its own good fortune disturb them by recalling fundamental realities which their effeteness would prefer to forget. To this class Gregoras clearly belonged; and just as nothing that could be said against America by an English dowager duchess who had not done so well as she had hoped out of her lectures on her herb garden could avail against the known handsomeness of the continent, so Gregoras’s letter cannot prove its point against the genius of Grachanitsa.

‘But tell me,’ said my husband, ‘which King Stephen was it who had the Byzantine mother-in-law? For I thought that the Stephen who was Milutin’s son and was blinded by him and succeeded him had married a Bulgarian princess.’ But this was one of the occasions when life falls into a pattern, when the design repeats itself, Stephen did not come easily to his crown. In order to inherit it he had been obliged to keep up his pretence that he was blind until his father was dead, and therefore quite a number of people believed that he would be unable to defend it. His brother or half-brother, Constantine, who like himself had been bastardized by Milutin’s annulment of his earlier marriages when he married Simonis, and his cousin Vladislav, son of that crippled King Dragutin who had abdicated and become the Catholic King of Bosnia, both tried to snatch his throne. Vladislav he merely exiled to Hungary, but Constantine he had nailed to a cross and then sawn asunder. This was not an uncommon form of punishment in the fourteenth century, and Stephen, though humane, was no more than a man of his time. Then, and not until then, was he sure of his kingdom and free to live according to his own nature.

But immediately Stephen became a faithful copy of his father, who had been his enemy and had been thought his antithesis. At the first possible moment he initiated just such overtures to the Papacy as Milutin had made in the earlier part of his reign, even going so far as receiving a Papal Legate to discuss the terms on which the Serbian Empire was to be handed over to Roman Catholicism. He had no need to imitate his father in divorce, for his first wife had died, but he attempted to follow him in matrimonial opportunism, for he tried to marry Blanche, the daughter of Philip of Taranto, a member of the house of Anjou exercising titular suzerainty over most of Greece and Albania, in order to ally himself with the Catholic Latin powers who were threatening Orthodox Byzantium. This was perfidy more monstrous than Milutin‘s, for it was the great Archbishop Nicodemus who had saved Stephen from exile by persuading his father to recall him and who had secured him his throne by throwing the influence of the Church against Constantine and Vladislav. It was also exceedingly imprudent, for the Serbs were fully as devoted to Orthodoxy as they had been in the previous reign, and the Papacy had lost much of its influence by leaving Rome for Avignon. When after five years he abandoned this policy it was only to imitate another of Milutin’s mistakes, for he then married a Byzantine princess. It is true that his bride, Marya Palaeologus, was a less sinister character than Simonis, but the marriage resembled its earlier prototype in two respects. It was unpopular with the Serbian nationalist party, who wanted the Byzantines to be united with them by military force rather than by family relations; and it sowed trouble between the King and his heir.

Life is most apt to repeat a design and fall into a pattern when it is weak and diseased. When it is powerful and healthy it is always unpredictable. This means that timid people refuse to let it take its course and insist on provoking events with which they are already familiar, preferring the known evil to the unknown. Some of the repetition on which Stephen insisted added to the power and the glory of Serbia, for what he imitated was his father’s strength. He followed him in church-building; Dechani, the great monastery at Petch we were going to visit after we had seen Kossovo and the Trepcha mines, was his foundation. He followed him in military triumph; there was a new Bulgarian Tsar, Michael, who found the Byzantine Empire quite ready to combine with him against Serbia, in spite of the marital alliance made through Marya Palaeologus, and this invasion Stephen brilliantly defeated in a decisive battle at Kustendil, which was then known as Velbuzhd. But the weakness that made him an imitator made his imitations of strength of no avail.

Milutin had raged against his son, blinded and exiled him, pardoned him and kept him impotent after the reconciliation, because he was the stronger of the two. Even had Stephen had the power to revolt against him, his political wisdom had created a people so contented that they would never have considered supporting the son against the father. Milutin’s genius guaranteed him the right to sit in his throne till natural death removed him. But when Stephen raged against his son he invited a different destiny, for his son was a greater man than himself or Milutin, and against this menacing and prodigious heir he had built no bulwark of a people’s loyalty. He had indeed greatly alarmed and irritated the nobles by failing to consolidate his victory over Bulgaria by statesman-like action and leaving it a resentful and armed autonomous state. His son set himself at the head of the malcontents, conquered his father, and imprisoned him in a castle to the north of Kossovo. Then he had himself crowned king by the great scholar and statesman, Archbishop Daniel. It was necessary that this should be done soon, while his hands were still clean, since Daniel was incorruptible; for two months later, with his connivance if not by his actual orders, Stephen was strangled in prison.

Thus dreadfully was it announced that this family of amazing genius, which had now been reinforced with Byzantine and French and Bulgarian and Asiatic blood of proven worth, had reached its moment of divine positiveness. The seed that had travelled from loin to loin of the Nemanyas, driving them from the Adriatic swamp of their beginnings to glory and torture and art and crime and civilization, had at last found its proper instrument. This son of Stephen was also called Stephen. To distinguish them the father is called Stephen Dechanski, from the great monastery he founded, and the son is called Stephen Dushan. There is a dispute about the meaning of the word dushan. It might be a term of endearment, a diminutive of dusha, the soul; but some have tried to derive it from the verb dushiti, to strangle, and seen in it a reference to his father’s fate. But plainly the first is the proper root. He was probably called that in childhood, for his sister was called Dushitza; and Slavs would not find it incongruous to give a national hero such a tender name. It is, on the other hand, unlikely that they should go about calling him ‘the strangler,’ for if he had been that once he could be it again. It is as improbable that Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers should have gone about speaking of her not as Gloriana but by some name alluding to the axe that put an end to Raleigh and Essex and Mary. The analogy must suggest itself, for, even as Milutin was Serbia’s Henry VIII, so Stephen Dushan was its Elizabeth.

Stephen Dechanski came between him and his grandfather Milutin, as Edward and Mary came between Henry VIII and Elizabeth: fragile creatures not insulated from the lightning that played round their families and wilted by it, not inspired. But Stephen Dushan could grasp any thunderbolt, perhaps because, like Elizabeth, he needed all arms, being wholly surrounded by enemies and in mortal fear. In a few years he made himself the most powerful monarch in the fourteenth century, and if he had not he would have become a vassal. On his east was Bulgaria, which his father had left only half pacified; on his west was Catholic Bosnia, always plotting with the Papacy to attack Orthodox Serbia; on his north was Hungary, as always suicidally eager to attack its neighbours when they were attacked by Asiatic invaders; on his south was the Byzantine Empire, which was ready to fight him but quite unable to fight the Turks as they swept on towards Europe. To confront all these enemies he must be more than a king, he must be an emperor, and unconquered at that. It was so with Elizabeth. If she were not to be Gloriana of a supreme England her head must be on the block and her country the wash-pot of France or Spain.

Stephen Dushan dealt first of all with Bulgaria; he threatened it with arms and then married the Tsar’s sister Helen. It is typical of this perplexing age that this woman, who must have been handed over to her husband like so much merchandise, who had every reason to be timid and cultivate no art but the smile that melts the jailer, became a figure of commanding ability. She was her husband’s constant companion and adviser, and impressed foreign diplomats by her sense and courage both before and after his death. Next he led a campaign against Byzantium, conquering a large part of Macedonia and besieging Salonika. That he could not follow up to its full conclusion, for he was stabbed in the back by the King of Hungary and had to hurry northward to repel an invasion. But his successes had already been sufficient to enable him to impose a treaty on the Byzantines which was likely to make them respect him in future. In the north he defeated the King of Hungary and seized a considerable slice of his territory. Later he drove the house of Anjou out of its possessions in Greece and Albania, which improved his strategical position in relation to Byzantium.

All these were affairs of arms; but he worked by diplomacy also. He stretched across his troublesome Catholic neighbours in Bosnia and shook hands with the Republic of Venice, which was inclined to regard him with sympathy, since it was at war with his own enemy, Hungary, over Dalmatia. It is needless to say that he found Venice, as always, selfish and short-sighted and anti-Slav, and to protect his interests he had to practise the cunctatory, teasing guile that we take as characteristic of Queen Elizabeth. Sometimes we recognize in him, as well, her secret, mystifying grin by which she so often infuriated foreign diplomats. Once he wrote to Venice begging to be allowed shelter there if his country should be overrun with enemies. That has been regarded by some historians, who have not taken the precaution of examining its date, as evidence of the insecurity of his reign. But it was written nine years after his accession to the throne, when he had just defeated the Angevins and had every reason to feel pleased with himself. ‘What a business it is to treat with a woman,’ complained one of Elizabeth’s Spanish ambassadors, ‘who must have a hundred thousand devils in her body, notwithstanding that she is for ever telling me that she yearns to be a nun and to pass her time praying.’

That tale Stephen Dushan also could tell. He had a prolonged correspondence with the Popes Clement VI and Innocent VI which he must have carried on in a spirit of pure cynicism, for the Papacy had been at Avignon for thirty years or so and was now simply an instrument of French foreign policy, and far too heavily involved with Hungarian interests to be able to promise much to Serbia. But he affected to be anxious for conversion, though when the Pope dispatched precise instructions as to how this might be arranged he was apt to assume a glassy blankness, as if he had hardly understood what all these letters were about. In fact he was a devoted member of the Orthodox Church, though his relations with it were curious. It did not forgive him then or afterwards for the murder of his father. Though the Nemanyan kings were described by the astonishing term ‘born in sainthood’ because they were descended from St. Simeon, and both Milutin and Stephen Dechanski were revered as saints, there was no nonsense about canonizing Stephen Dushan. But like his father and grandfather he took no important step without consulting the great Archbishop Daniel; and as time went on he became actively interested in the organization of the Church, for legal and political reasons.

The path of his ambitions lay southwards. He meant to win one of the multiple crowns of Byzantium; the Empire was distraught by civil war and he knew he could seize it and rule it. That alone would have prevented his adherence to the Roman Catholic Church, for it was not thinkable that Byzantium could be ruled by anyone not Orthodox. But there was also a technical problem to be solved. Only a patriarch could crown an emperor and it was quite obvious that the Ocumenical Patriarch, who was a fierce partisan of the existing imperial families, would never consent to crown a Serb conqueror. So Stephen Dushan convoked a Great Council of Serb and Bulgarian ecclesiastics at Skoplje and induced them to raise the Serbian Archbishopric of Petch to a Patriarchate. Less than a month later the newly appointed Patriarch crowned Stephen Dushan Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and the Byzantines, the Bulgarians and Albanians, his wife an empress, and their son a king. This amounted to the schismatic foundation of a new nationalist church, but the situation was treated with great calm, so different are the tempers of the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox faiths. Ultimately the Ocumenical Patriarch anathematized the Emperor, the new Patriarch, the whole Serbian Church, and the whole Serbian nation, but not for nearly seven years, and then for reasons that were largely political. Meanwhile Stephen Dushan behaved handsomely to such remnants of the purely Byzantine Church as were incorporated in his expanding territories, not only confirming but increasing the privileges of the See of Ochrid. He was an extremely tolerant ruler, and it was definitely his policy to let conquered territories inhabited by non-Serbian populations retain all their accustomed forms of government.

This theory broke down, however, when he took Thessaly from the Empire. There he found that the Byzantine clergy were urging their congregations to revolt, and he had to supplant them by Serbians. This was undoubtedly an interference with the soul of a people, but it can at least be argued that he was constrained by necessity. When Mussolini prevents the Slovenes from using their own language in their churches and their schools and their homes, it cannot be urged in his excuse that if they were not part of Italy they would be part of a neighbouring disorder which would be fatal to Italian peace, for if they were on the other side of his frontier they would be incorporated in the unaggressive and civilized state of Yugoslavia. But in the days of Stephen Dushan, the Byzantine Empire was a masterless land, where weeds grew that spread to all neighbouring fields and smothered all profitable crops. We know its state from the unimpeachable evidence of one who recorded that state without shame, since he himself was responsible for it and thought that all he did was good; we have the memoirs of John Cantacuzenus, the Byzantine usurper.

That detestable man was one of those men who are the price a civilization pays in its decay for the achievements of its prime. In Byzantium, as in many other societies, government was reserved to the hereditarily favoured and to the lucky, who were immediately taken into the bosom of the hereditarily favoured as soon as their luck had declared itself, since the rich are apt to believe riches are a mark of divine favours. A closed and self-satisfied group, they were able to develop the technique of government to a point very near perfection, and to realize its full potentialities by exchanging the information which came to their hands through their monopoly of power. Thus they secured more and more successes for their country and for themselves, until they became in their own eyes magicians who could not know failure. In the end they came to regard national prosperity as a secretion of their class, which it could produce for ever provided it led a healthy life and was allowed to practise its traditional activities; and this was a fantasy so delicious that they could not bear to be awakened from it even when it conflicted with their own interests. We English are familiar with such bemusement. Many of our manufacturers refuse to alter their methods by which they established their wealth in the nineteenth century, although it is written in their balance-sheets that they are losing the twentieth-century market; and our diplomats have for long behaved as if British sovereignty were guaranteed simply by the mode of living habitual in legations and embassies.

There comes a time in the history of every country when even its most subdued and credulous children see through the fantasy of its governors, usually for the reason that it is threatened by famine and danger, and its governors exaggerate that fantasy to an insulating madness rather than face reality. Cantacuzenus was the sign that the Byzantine Empire had come to such a pass. It was, of course, doomed. Destruction by the Turks awaited it, but it had already been destroyed by the merciless West: by the greed of Venice and Genoa and Pisa, which had demanded murderously exorbitant trade agreements from it in return for help against the marauding Latins; by the intrigues of the Papacy, which always hated the Orthodox Church more bitterly than Islam; by the foreign mercenaries who bound themselves to fight against the Turks and turned in treachery against their employer. There is, indeed, no end to the crimes committed against Byzantium by the other and supposedly more civilized side of Europe; and while it worked slowly Asia worked faster. Quite soon the Turks had eaten into Byzantine territory over in Asia Minor, and this was of the gravest importance, for from those districts the Empire had drawn most of her sailors and soldiers. There was nothing the Byzantines could have done save resign themselves to partnership with Serbia and Bulgaria, who were of the same religion and related in culture. This could have been arranged without the embarrassment of a confessed capitulation, through the institution of the multiple crowns. There was no limit to the number of Byzantine emperors which could coexist, and at one time there had been five. One only of these exercised the imperial power, and the others were sleeping partners, ready to act in a consultative capacity or as successors. In Serbia this custom had already been adopted and several Nemanyan kings had crowned their sons as secondary kings with special rights over a part of the country. It should have been easy to make an arrangement which would have united the Orthodox Balkan peoples under two or three emperors, particularly as by now the Byzantine population was largely Slav. That, however, was not the will of John Cantacuzenus.

He was the heir to one of the great fortunes which shamefully existed in this shattered state, and he was the Great Domestic, which is to say the military commander-in-chief of the Emperor Andronicus II. His disintegrating influence was first made manifest when the Emperor disinherited his grandson, Andronicus the Younger, after he had pushed generally unsatisfactory conduct to a climax by employing some archers to hide outside his mistress’s door and assassinate a visitor of whom he was jealous. As the dead man proved to be his brother, and his father, who was an invalid, died of shock on hearing of the tragedy, the old Emperor’s action was explicable enough. But so violent were the times that some of the nobles thought it unreasonable and refused to accept the Emperor’s nomination of another grandson as his heir. This preposterous movement was supported by John Cantacuzenus, who thereupon led the country into seven years of civil war. He left an extremely detailed autobiography to tell us why and how he did it, which is a disgusting work. It resembles that mixture of white of egg and sugar used instead of pure cream by some pastrycooks: endless pleas of self-justification make the page unnaturally white, it is sickly with a smug sense of good form, it is slimy for lack of principle and recognition of reality. There could be no more convincing proof that in certain periods a conservative class can be more disruptive than any revolutionary horde.

Unquestionably Cantacuzenus was a man of great ability. Byzantine administration had developed a tradition of efficiency and the Army was the most highly organized that Europe was to see till modern times, so a successful commander-in-chief was likely to be a brilliant man by any standards. He prided himself on his powers of negotiation, no doubt with reason, for Byzantine diplomacy was extremely accomplished. But negotiation is an art safely to be practised only in the years of plenty, when there is a surplus which can be comfortably haggled over by the parties involved. In gaunter times a country must lay down the conditions necessary for its own preservation, and annihilate those that will not concede them. Cantacuzenus, however, was constitutionally unable to see that Byzantium could ever not be at its zenith, and with the utmost recklessness he encouraged the difference between the Emperor and his grandson, in the hope that his skill would arrange a compromise between them. That hope was more than gratified. During the seven years of civil war he thus precipitated, he was able to present three most ably framed treaties for the signatures of the disputants as they stood bloodstained in their ravaged country. Cantacuzenus was a surgeon to Byzantium, and the operation was always successful, but the patient always died.

At length his fellow-countrymen began to notice something about him. They showed an extreme reluctance to suffer him in any position of power, and they manifested it in an unmistakable manner when the younger Andronicus died and left him guardian of his twelve-year-old son, John. Cantacuzenus could not understand their ingratitude. He knew that he had ability of a sort that had in the past rendered Byzantium many services, and the exemption of his class from all criticism prevented him from realizing that the technical accomplishment of diplomacy is not the same thing as statesmanship. With sublime dignity and the full authority of a conscience that his autobiography brings to the reader’s eye in the likeness of an immense and tasteless building, he started the civil war again by crowning himself Emperor and claiming the executive power from the child Emperor John and his mother, Anne of Savoy. There followed thirteen years of the most painful disorder, which Cantacuzenus saw as a series of triumphs for his own dexterity, as indeed they were if they were considered individually, without regard to their cumulative effect in murdering the Byzantine Empire.

During this time Cantacuzenus turned constantly to neighbouring states for aid, and conducted his negotiations with them on the highest imaginable plane of tact and discretion. These greatly expedited the collapse of civilization in South-East Europe, for his neighbours required order in Byzantium for the sake of the common front they had to form against the Turks, and they could not be certain whether this could better be guaranteed by Cantacuzenus or by the Empress Anne, and they too vacillated and added to the confusion. Later, he gave a disastrous exhibition of his virtuosic talents in his achievement of an alliance with Orkhan, the chief of the Ottoman Turks. Nothing could have been more expert. But it brought the Turks to Europe in numbers that made it impossible ever to expel them again; and when he gave his daughter in marriage to Orkhan he weakened the clear picture of the antithesis between the Christian Byzantines and the Islamic Turks which should have been preserved at all costs in the minds of his own people and the West.

Finally Cantacuzenus set the seal on his adept and imbecile achievements by ingeniously making peace with the Emperor John, who was now a young man, on condition that there were two emperors and three empresses—himself, young John, his mother Anne of Savoy, Cantacuzenus’s wife and his daughter, whom he had induced young John to marry—and that he himself reserved the right to be sole ruler for the next ten years. It was certainly a masterpiece of diplomacy to get this agreement signed, but he must have been powerfully aided by the exhaustion he had brought on his country. Civil war had so depredated the state that even the court, which had not long before amazed the world, was stripped of its gold and jewels. At the wedding feast of the Emperor John and Cantacuzenus’s daughter, royalty and nobles alike adorned themselves with gilt leather and coloured glass, and the toasts were drunk from tin and lead.

But the defence of humanity against its Cantacuzenuses is its quick resilience. As soon as the truce between the two combatants had given the country a breathing-space, the young John rebelled and brought in Genoese help, and was supported by most of his subjects. Cantacuzenus’s response was to make his son Matthew emperor in John’s stead; he knew that what the country really needed was one more of a family who knew how to do things. At this point the Byzantines at last lost patience. They turned on him as one man and ran him into a monastery. In the most graceful fashion imaginable he accepted the situation, took his vows, and, since his attentions had been insufficiently appreciated here on earth, transferred them with unabated self-confidence to the next world. He spent the many remaining years of his life in fomenting the spiritual equivalent of civil war by writing ingenious treatises against Jews and Mohammedans. It was characteristic of him that first he ably invited the Turks to Europe, where they had no business to be, and then as ably assailed them for the ideas which they had every right to hold.

This conservative politician, shining smooth, smooth as water as it slips over the lip of a precipice, came to Prishtina at a time when he should have been doubtful about his fate, being a new-fledged and not popularly acclaimed usurper; and indeed he was diffident as a Member of Parliament who for the sake of holding office has just crossed the floor of the House. He perhaps never knew a deeper diffidence. The town he entered, the town in which Constantine and my husband and I were lunching, was then very proud. It was built of wood, which some historians have mentioned as proof that it was primitive; but the Slav, like the Scandinavian, always builds in timber when he can, and the Mediterranean habit of using stone was determined by the lack of forest and the abundance of quarries in the south. Between the wooden houses the Serbian nobles and their ladies rode out to meet him, themselves handsome in red cloaks lined with fur and embroidered in gold, and their horses as handsome with silver trappings, often brought from Venice. They were not greatly divided by their Slavdom from their visitor. Many of them spoke Greek, and to Stephen Dushan it was as a second mother-tongue, since he had lived in Constantinople from his eighth to his fifteenth year; and the protocol of the court was definitely Byzantine, which pleased Cantacuzenus very much.

It was the Serb custom, he tells us, that when an eminent foreigner came to visit their King they both descended from their horses and the foreigner kissed his host on his face and breast. But Stephen Dushan ordered that when Cantacuzenus came he was to be greeted as he would have been within his own Empire; so all the nobles dismounted as soon as they saw him in the distance and when he approached them they stepped forward to kiss his knee where it was crooked against the saddle. Then he was taken to the palace, and was received very graciously by the Emperor and Empress, and when it was time for banqueting he was taken into a great hall and set at a table in a chair higher than Stephen Dushan’s own. Byzantine though he was, this banquet impressed him. The nobles and their ladies wore their ceremonial costume of green or yellow tunics, studded with diamonds and precious stones and the cut gems of ancient Greece, and belted with silver and gold. Then men carried magnificent daggers and wore jewelled rings and bracelets and crosses suspended from the neck, and the women were crowned with intricately wrought diadems of gold and silver, from which fine chains ran down to take part of the weight of their immense and gorgeous earrings. To the music of flutes they drank great quantities of mead and wine, and ate game and venison and fish which had come in snow from the Danube, with many kinds of vegetables and fruits and sheep’s milk and honey; and there was also about the table the orchestral murmur of a great cosmopolitan court. Many Italians and Spanish and Asiatics had come to Serbia to seek their fortune, and Stephen Dushan had for his personal guard a company of German soldiers, in imitation of the Byzantine Emperor’s famous Varangian guard of Scandinavians and English. But Cantacuzenus was not more impressed by the wealth and cosmopolitan quality of the court than by its fine and formal manners. He was hardly ever suffered, he says, to remain alone in his tent. Nearly every day Stephen Dushan sent a deputation of the most distinguished old nobles and the most charming young pages, to beg him to come to the palace and give the court more of his delightful company; and when Cantacuzenus obeyed the summons Stephen Dushan would come to meet his guest at the door of his great apartment, and sometimes even at the place where he dismounted.

When enough time had passed to satisfy the convention that there was nothing behind the visit save pure sociability, Stephen Dushan asked Cantacuzenus whether he had come to ask any favour of him, and expressed the hope that if this were so he would be able to accede. Cantacuzenus answered by a reference to the myth of the gods gone avisiting, and said that he had come to gain Stephen Dushan’s friendship, since the wise esteemed nothing so highly as a faithful friend. But he went on to admit that he sought his host’s aid in restoring order to the Byzantine Empire. He added that if Stephen Dushan did not want to help him he would like to be told so at once, in order that he could look for other means of salvation; and one perceives in his account of his own conversation how clever a performing flea he was. He made his appeal in terms that enmeshed Stephen Dushan by the twin assumptions that they were gentlemen talking together, and that the one who altered the tone of the conversation from the tenor determined by himself would prove himself no gentleman, and by a strong hint that if help were refused the refusal would be taken as proceeding from impotence.

This last suggestion Stephen Dushan, whose security depended largely on his prestige, could not let pass. He had soldiers enough to give Cantacuzenus all the help he needed, he said, if Cantacuzenus proved that he really wanted it. Cantacuzenus expressed wonder at the phrase. What proof could be necessary? Stephen Dushan replied that he could believe in Cantacuzenus’s desire for help if he handed over to the Serbian crown all the towns of Thrace: that is to say, on the Greek seaboard east of Salonika. It was in fact not an exorbitant demand. The inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire were by this time mostly Slav and not Greek, so there was no racial reason why the Serbs and Bulgars and Byzantines should not coalesce, and it was imperative that the territory should fall under the shield of a strong government. Often aggressors have justified their thefts on such grounds, but here in South-East Europe, in the middle of the fourteenth century, they happened to be valid. Ungoverned towns on the seaboard meant a door unlocked to the robbers from the Catholic West.

Cantacuzenus answered Stephen Dushan very much as an English diplomat of the worst old type might speak to an American who was being tiresome about the debt settlement. The theme of gentlemanliness was recapitulated with frosty delicacy. ‘You speak very reasonably,’ he told him, ‘concerning the reward you want; for there is no wise man who does not expect a return when he goes to trouble and expense. So, if your instinct does not tell you that you ought to help me as an act of grace, you are right to ask me to buy your assistance. But if I buy it and pay for it, I shall be under no obligation to you, for who pays for what he buys feels under no obligation to the seller. But if you help me out of generous friendship, and out of ambition of a sort honourable to a sovereign, it will be a glory to you to have taken up arms for such noble motives, and not from greed, as low natures would. Moreover,’ he added, ‘if you have me as a friend while I enjoy the imperial power, you will possess all that I possess, since everything is shared among friends, as the philosophers say.’ He had made perfect use of his technique; he was now to show his perfect blindness to reality. ‘If your offer of help is conditional on the surrender of the towns you claimed, say so frankly,’ he ended coldly, ‘so that I can make other arrangements. For I swear to you that I will never surrender a single town; but I will guard them all as I have guarded my own children.’ They were not his children; they could not be guarded so long as he pretended they were.

Stephen Dushan then fell into a transport of rage, which must have been impressive enough. Foreigners who visited his court describe him as ‘the tallest of all men of his time,’ and a fresco portrait shows him sinewy, with black eyes burning over high cheek-bones. There was reason in his rage against Cantacuzenus, for the usurper was in his weakness a threat to the peace of the whole Balkan world. But Stephen Dushan was calmed by his wife, the Empress Helen, and he consented to summon the Diet of twenty-four of his most important nobles and discuss the issue with them. There an important part was played by Helen, in a fashion illustrating the ambivalence with which men regard women. They love them and they hate them; they pamper them and ill-treat them; and women are at once slaves and freer than men. In medieval Serbia women must have been chattels, for their evidence was not accepted in the law courts; and such a rule always implies that no woman is sufficiently assured of protection by society to risk giving evidence that has not been dictated to her by some man. Yet the Empress Helen was able to rise in the Diet and make a long speech urging a rejection or at least a modification of her husband’s policy, in terms which suggest that she was accustomed to using her mind vigorously and without fear.

This speech was extremely able. She affirmed that the Serbs were under no obligation to consider Cantacuzenus’s interests before their own, but warned them to judge carefully what was best for them. In cryptic phrases, which we now know to have referred to an offer made by Anne of Savoy to hand over an immense slice of Byzantine territory in return for Cantacuzenus alive or dead, she repudiated the possibility of harming their guest. That, she said, would be a crime displeasing to men and odious to God. She believed that they should aid Cantacuzenus; for he had in the past proved himself an able governor, and if he regained imperial power might be a dangerous enemy. She suggested that the price they should ask of him for their aid should be not new towns but recognition of their claim to the towns which they and their ancestors had already taken from the Byzantines. With shrewdness greater than was recognized by Cantacuzenus, she pointed out that he would probably accept these conditions since the loss of these towns brought no personal disgrace on him.

The Empress convinced both the Diet and her husband. Stephen Dushan made a speech and thanked her for her care for his people, and then went to Cantacuzenus and said, smiling, ‘You have won, you have persuaded us to undertake all sorts of hardships and trials for your sake.’ When Cantacuzenus heard Helen’s proposals he accepted them eagerly and sat down happily to turn out more of his exquisitely accomplished paperwork. But his fortune was crumbling so fast that the basis of the treaty altered between its drafting and its signing. A military adventurer who was straddling the border between Serbia and Byzantium, acknowledging the allegiance of now one and now the other according to their fortunes, took another Byzantine town and hastened to drop it into Stephen Dushan’s lap. It was an ill omen. The fellow was an infallible barometer, and since it was his opinion that Cantacuzenus meant nothing, that probably was his real value, and alliance with him was of no service to Serbia. But Stephen Dushan went on with the treaty, insisting merely that the town should be added to the list of his possessions and the adventurer should be declared his subject, though Cantacuzenus fought hard to keep them under his impotence. Then the twenty-four members of the Diet were called together and told, by an admirable form of parliamentary procedure which has been insufficiently imitated, that since they had decided that military aid should be given to Cantacuzenus they must now provide it, and twenty of them were sent off at the head of troops with orders to obey their new general in all things. They must have left Stephen Dushan reflecting, as Elizabeth was so often forced to do, that no man has any reliable ally save in his own right hand.

Eight years later Cantacuzenus and Stephen Dushan met again: a long way from Prishtina, outside Salonika. By this time Cantacuzenus was far advanced in his competent and complacent pursuit of destruction, and Stephen Dushan had pushed out his strength to north, south, east, and west, gathering to himself mastery of the Balkans. He had made Skoplje a great city, and there he had been crowned one Easter Sunday Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and Byzantines, the Bulgars and the Albanians. His upbringing in Constantinople had always profoundly influenced the etiquette of his palace, and now he lived in an exact imitation of the Byzantine court; he had assumed the tiara and used the double eagle as his emblem, and his officials were called by the names borne by their originals in Byzantium, Sebastocrator and Grand Logothete, Grand Domestic and Sacellary. The imitation went deeper than nomenclature. He was not, of course, wholly free from care. When Cantacuzenus, in a last ill-considered effort to reclaim territory which he could not hold, had marched against him he had found it far from child‘s-play to repel the attack, for his Catholic enemies had stabbed him in the back on the Bosnian frontier. But he was magnificent, imperially magnificent. The land he stood on as he faced Cantacuzenus was to its further distances his, or about to become his, drawn to him by the magnetism of his true power, which all others lacked.

He had first to resist Cantacuzenus’s reproaches of perfidy. Like Elizabeth he awoke in his enemies an indignant sense that they had had to deal with an infinity of cunning and trickery; but any animal will run like a fox if it is hunted like a fox. Unquestionably he had broken treaties he had made with Cantacuzenus, but the alteration in the two men’s statuses must have made it difficult to observe them. It would be hard to execute a document signed by a living man and a phantom. The further rights and wrongs of this dispute cannot be judged, for at this stage of his memoirs Cantacuzenus had arrived at a decision, not unfamiliar in autobiography, that he could only be fair to himself by lying. But he tells us something of Stephen Dushan which we can believe because it is not credible. It struck the unimaginative Cantacuzenus as so odd that he put it down in the hope of discrediting his successful rival. He says that in the midst of their open conference, in the hearing of all the Byzantines and Serbs, Stephen Dushan suddenly confessed that he was very greatly frightened of Cantacuzenus and his forces. Yes, he said, he feared them horribly. If the thought of them came to him as he slept, he woke in a sweat; if it came to him before he slept, he stayed awake all night. This was a surprising note; and it was struck again later in the conversation. Cantacuzenus asked him how he had come to lower himself by paying a certain state visit to Venice and making obeisances to the republic unsuitable in the ruler of a kingdom so much more mighty and extensive; and he answered that he was well aware how much beneath his dignity his bearing had been, but fear had compelled him. He added that, considering what fear was, he wondered it had made him do nothing baser. Cantacuzenus naively said to himself that evidently he and the whole world had been acting on far too elevated a conception of Siephen Dushan’s character, and forthwith demanded from him the return of all the Byzantine territory he had conquered.

Stephen Dushan was amazed by the suggestion. He had merely been discussing the nature of fear and the occasional sick fancies to which he, like all born of woman, was subject; he had not had the slightest intention of acting weakly. It is as if a Dostoievsky character came marching to us through Cæsar’s De Bello Gallico. There could be no more curious proof of the identity of the Slav character through the ages, for he was plainly giving rein to the desire that governs the Slav of today, the desire to know the whole. Finding himself at the extremity of a condition, he leaned out of his destiny towards its opposite, trying to understand that also. Had he been defeated and hopeless, he would have talked of triumph till his hearers would have wondered at his boasting. So it was natural for him to explore his potentialities for terror, since, though danger still threatened him, it seemed that he had found a formula for its control.

The core of his power was his great strength, which enabled him to support the delicacy of his Slav mind. He was apparently a man of the explosive but easy temper which goes with perfect health and exceptional vitality. A glimpse of his habitual being is given in that part of the Acts of the Saints which deals with St Peter Thomas, a curiously stupid and tactless person who was very unsuitably employed as a Papal Legate. He was sent to the Serbian court to labour for its conversion, but for some mysterious reason refused to make the usual obeisance on being received by the Emperor. Not unnaturally Stephen Dushan was carried away by rage, and he forbade the Roman Catholics about the court to attend a Mass at which the Legate was to officiate on the following day, on pain of having their eyes put out. St Peter Thomas interpreted this to mean that he ran the risk of being killed, though blinding, which was a recognized penalty borrowed by the Serbs from the Byzantines, never entailed death. But he went ahead and celebrated the Mass, which was attended by many of the German guards and other Catholic courtiers. It was a singularly graceless act on their part, for there was complete religious freedom in the Serbian Empire, and they could have attended any Mass save that celebrated by the priest who had insulted their Emperor. But when Stephen Dushan sent for them, and they told him they were prepared to lose their lives as well as their eyes for their faith, he was shaken by sudden laughter and let them go unpunished as a reward for their spirit; and he treated St Peter Thomas for the rest of his stay with a special courtesy.

There shines through the story a reluctance to waste time on hatred and compulsion which is characteristic of Stephen Dushan. That may seem an odd testimonial to give a parricide; yet even that vast initial crime has aspects that warn us not to judge it as if it were a piece of our age. When Stephen Dushan murdered his father he neither killed nor imprisoned nor even exiled his stepmother. Six years afterwards he married her to the despot John Oliver and gave her a large dowry, including the Sheep’s Field and the town of Veles; and documents in which he called her his ‘well-beloved mother’ show that in the meantime she had been a respected figure at his court. We ask ourselves in vain how it can have been done, how the persons involved found it possible to go on breathing when they were in the same room, so great their reciprocity of fear and shame. But the situation is not shocking compared with Tudor practice, for Lady Jane Grey might well have sighed for some Nemanyan tolerance; and any comparison with the practice of modern times, though it would have been to our advantage thirty years ago, becomes less so with the, dawning of each day. It cannot be doubted that if Stephen Dushan failed to achieve the millennium it was not because he lacked the appetite for it. Like most of us, he would have used the means if he had known what they were.

He liked life to take its own course. There was nothing totalitarian or xenophobic about his regime. His people showed a reluctance to trade in towns and work in mines, preferring, very reasonably, to farm their fat lands. Their sovereign let them have their way, and brought in Venetians and Ragusans as traders and Saxons as miners, and treated them well. We know exactly how his mind ran on these and many other matters, for he left behind him a legal code comprising nearly two hundred articles. This is a very creditable achievement, which brought up to date the laws made by the earlier kings of the Nemanyan dynasty and was in sum a nicely balanced fusion of Northern jurisprudence and the Byzantine system laid down by Justinian. It coped in an agreeable and ingenious spirit with the needs of a social structure not at all to be despised even in comparison with the West.

There, at this time, the land was divided among great feudal lords who ruled over innumerable serfs; but here in Serbia there were very few serfs, so few that they formed the smallest class in the community, and there was a large class of small free landowners. There was a National Diet which met to discuss such important matters as the succession to the throne or the outbreak of civil war, and this consisted of the sovereigns, their administrators, the great and small nobility, and the higher clergy; it was some smaller form of this, designed to act in emergencies that met to discuss whether John Cantacuzenus should receive Serbian aid. All local government was in the hands of the whole free community, and so was all justice, save for the special cases that were reserved for royal jurisdiction, such as high treason, murder, and highway robbery. This means that the people as a whole could deal with matters that they all understood, while the matters that were outside common knowledge were settled for them by their sovereign and selected members of their own kind; for there were no closed classes, and both the clergy and the nobility were constantly recruited from the peasantry.

Against the military difficulties that constantly beset Stephen Dushan there could be counted the security of this possession: a country rich in contented people, in silver and gold, in grain and cattle, in oil and wine, and in the two traditions, one Byzantine and mellow, one Slav and nascent, which inclined its heart towards civilization. Here was plenty, and a plentiful spirit: with a gesture that recalls our own Tudor age, when a gentleman leaving his country house for some months would leave orders that all visitors should be well entertained in his absence, Stephen Dushan ordered that all foreign envoys travelling through the land should be given all the meat and drink they desired at the imperial expense. As he pressed southward into Byzantine territory he restored to it elements necessary to civilized life which it had almost forgotten. He was not in need of money, so he did not need to rob his new subjects after the fashion of participants in the Civil War; he taxed them less, repaired gaps in their strongholds, and lent them Serbian soldiers as police. He also practised the principle of toleration, which was very dear to the Byzantine population; it must be remembered that the Orthodox crowd of Constantinople rushed without hesitation to defend the Saracen merchants’ mosque when it was attacked by the fanatic Latin knights. There could be no complete application of this principle, and Stephen Dushan certainly appointed Serbian governors to rule over his new territories, as well as Serbian ecclesiastics when the local priests were irreconcilable; but he left the indigenous social and political systems just as he found them, and there was no economic discrimination against the conquered.

It was as if there were falling down the map from the Serbian Empire an ooze of honey, runnels of wine. They must drip across Byzantium, they must spread all over the country to the sea, to the Bosporus. To all men’s minds it became possible that some day Stephen Dushan might come to Constantinople and that he might be Emperor not only of the Byzantines but of Byzantium, seated at its centre in the palace that had known Constantine the Great and Justinian. There are many reasons why he should not have succeeded in this enterprise. It would have been hard to capture Constantinople without a fleet, and Stephen Dushan could neither develop maritime power nor persuade the short-sighted Republic of Venice to enter into an alliance with him for the sake of his aid against the Turks. But there were many reasons why he should not have been able to found the Empire that he did; the cards stacked against him by his neighbours on every frontier made any further extension of territory seem impracticable. But even so the end of our Queen Elizabeth’s reign could not have been foretold at its beginning. It is chiefly Russian nineteenth-century historians, pro-Bulgar and anti-Serb, who allege that Stephen Dushan could not have reached Constantinople. His own age, and those who lived within recollection of its glory, believed him capable of that journey, and more. He would have found it a poor place; it had been stripped of its wealth by the civil wars, its population had been wasted by the first onslaughts of the plague, its valuable harbour was in the hands of loutish Italians who seized its commerce and insulted those they had robbed. Those who knew him trusted him to restore its splendour, which would have been to perform a miracle. He might have achieved deeds more miraculous still. He might have saved Europe from the Turks; he must, in any case, have held them in check and given Europe a longer time to arm herself. It might have been that Hungary need never have had her hundred and fifty years of Turkish tyranny, and Vienna need never have been besieged, and then that abomination of abominations, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, need never have been founded. Our night would have been less black, and our glory far more glorious.

But Stephen Dushan died. In the forty-ninth year of his life, at a village so obscure that it is not now to be identified, he died, in great pain, as if he had been poisoned. Because of his death many disagreeable things happened. For example, we sat in Prishtina, our elbows on a tablecloth stained brown and puce, with chicken drumsticks on our plates meagre as sparrow-bones, and there came towards us a man and a woman; and the woman was carrying on her back the better part of a plough. Here, where women had worn diadems of gold and silver, and the Empress had spoken her fine mind before the respect of the Diet, where the worth of womanhood had been so generally conceded that a painter could treat it passionately in his frescoes and assume the sympathy of his audience, this woman had walked a great distance by the side of her husband, bearing a heavy burden, while he went free.

It could be seen that they had made a long journey, for their sandals and woollen stockings were white with dust, and though she was of my own sturdy pack-horse build, a blue shadow of fatigue lay across her mouth. Her husband went up to the hotel-keeper, who was leaning against the door, and had a long talk with him, while she stood and looked at us. She could not sit down because of the long iron blade that was bound to her back and ran from above her head down to her knees. It was apparent that neither she nor her husband felt any embarrassment at the sight they presented. They had smug and serious faces, and would not, I think, have done anything that was not approved by the community; indeed, when he tied the ploughshare to her they were both automatically carrying out a custom which nobody in their world had ever criticized, without any intention of unkindness on the one side or resentment on the other. It was not as if she were a middle-aged woman against whom her husband might have turned as she had lost her sexual value, for she was in her early twenties, and showed a certain handsomeness; and there looked to be a steady though dull good-humour between them.

It may be said that if that were so, that if she and her husband were contented and the community were not shocked, there was no reason for strangers to become excited. In Prishtina it could be seen that this was not true. Any area of unrestricted masculinism, where the women are made to do all the work and are refused the right to use their wills, is in fact disgusting, not so much because of the effect on the women, who are always taught something by the work they do, but because of the nullification of the men. This Kossovo peasant was strong and upstanding, but he had the pulpy look of a eunuch, and this was not unnatural, for he had resigned from the sphere of effort. He had expected the woman to do everything, to produce the next generation and to do all the work for this one; he had left not enough of the task for himself. Though the woman was not so null, she had a displeasing air of essential slovenliness which cancelled the superficial neatness of her black dress and orange kerchief. She had grown careless of her womb. She had forgotten that she must use herself delicately, not out of pride or cowardice, but because her body was an instrument of the race. Life, that should have proceeded from these people, running ahead to conquer the next stage of time, dragged behind them like a shadow cast on mud. Yet people here had once known all that we know, and more, but the knowledge had died after the death of Stephen Dushan, it had been slain on the field of Kossovo.

The pair moved off into the sunlight, high-coloured and well-fleshed, hollow with stupidity. I went upstairs to the lavatory. Open doors in the corridor showed me bedrooms monastic in cleanliness and austerity, with iron bedsteads, flimsy washstands and enamelled ewers and basins, and bare boards scrubbed white by the secret process the gipsies use. In one room a kilted Albanian lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and counting on his fingers. The lavatory was of the old Turkish kind: that is to say, it was a small room paved with stone, with a round hole in the floor near one wall, and a tap not far away. The whole floor was wet. Everybody who used the place must go out with shoes stained with urine. It was an unlovable apartment. The dark hole in the floor, and something hieratic in the proportions of the place, made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and hostile and magically powerful element that could cover the whole earth with dark ooze and sickly humidity. There came on me the panic that bad sanitation can sometimes arouse even in the most hardened travellers. I felt as if the place were soiling me with filth which I would never be able to wash off because it was stronger in its essence than mere mild soap and water.

I went downstairs and said to my husband, who was standing outside the hotel looking at a piece of orange cloth, ‘In Byzantine Constantinople there was an abundant water supply, and we know from the charters of the hospitals that they had elaborate bathrooms and lavatories.’ He answered, ‘My poor dear, I was afraid it would be like that. But look at this. I went over to the shops to see if I could buy you a local handkerchief, but this is all they use.’ It was a square of poorly woven cloth with a machine-stitched hem; at eight-inch intervals there were knotted through the hem wispy skeins of four or five orange threads, about three inches long, which were as poor attempts at decoration as have ever been made. ‘They say one can buy good embroideries in the town, there is a well-known woman who sells them,’ said my husband, ‘but this is what most of the women wear. They are the plainest things we have found anywhere. They say the people here are so poor they have no wool to spare to make things for themselves, they have lost the habit of ornament.’

Plain of Kossovo II

As we got into the automobile Constantine made a face at some scented rags of meadowsweet, a few rose-petals, that had fallen from the dead flowers I had thrown away before lunch. ‘That I cannot understand,’ he said, ‘that you pretend to love beautiful things, and yet you pick flowers though you know they must wither and die, and will have to be thrown away.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘There were hundreds of others where these grew, so nobody would miss them, and we all enjoyed them for two or three hours.’ He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Oh, well, if that is your point of view, it is your point of view.’ Then, huddling down in his place, he threw back his head and sat with his eyes shut and a contemptuous smile on his lips. ‘You are very different from my wife,’ he said. ‘She is a mystic, she would rather dance round a wayside flower than pluck it. But that you would not understand, for you English are not tender.’ My baser part silently remarked that Gerda could not have danced round a wayside flower without inflicting the most untender damage on the surrounding growth. I thought also of her hatred of the gipsy boys and girls who were like flowers. ‘She is as tender as the Turks were,’ I said to myself, ‘the Turks who loved nature, who slaughtered humankind’; and we sat dumb as the road rose out of the trench where Prishtina lies, looking back at the new whitewashed Government buildings that protrude square as a set chin among the shapeless lumber of the old town, or forward to the dark green of the plains. The close opaque texture of the grass gave them an artificial look, as if they had been prepared for a special purpose, like our race-tracks and golf-courses, or that mound at Silbury which our prehistoric ancestors put to some unknown use.

I tried to deny its flat, monotonous boast of irreparable damage done to our kind. I pretended that perhaps very little had been destroyed here, since if Slav culture had been a reality the Serbian Empire would not have fallen to pieces in the thirty-four years between the death of Stephen Dushan and the battle of Kossovo. That is the opinion of the anti-Serb historians; they point out that within a short time his Empire had dissolved into its constituent parts, so that the Turks were faced not by a united people, but by a loose federation of feudal barons and their followers. But as I resorted to repeating it I knew it was nonsense. England might have passed into a disabling period of faction fights if Elizabeth had died at forty-eight instead of seventy; and there were many reasons why Serbia was specially liable to such disorders.

One proceeded from a genetic fatality that has been largely responsible for the unstable character of civilization. Stephen Dushan had forgotten, as great men sometimes do, a son that was a faint echo of his father’s genius; of a like rarity and fineness but without the needed volume and force. Though Stephen Urosh was only nineteen when he came to the throne, his limitations had already been recognized. It seems certain that his able mother, the Empress Helen, did not want him to assume power. For a time she transacted the imperial business herself, even to commanding the armies in the field, and even after she had retired to the cloister as the nun Elizabeth she continued to administer a certain amount of territory. Eight years after Stephen Dushan’s death the Byzantine Emperor John became anxious for an alliance with Serbia against the Turks, and sent his Patriarch to take the necessary preliminary step of arranging for the repeal of the excommunication he had pronounced against the Serbian Church. It was to the Empress in her convent that the mission addressed itself. It is typical of the fitful and distracted spirit of the age that when this mission was aborted by the death of the Patriarch on the road, no step was taken to send out another.

A further reason for the collapse of Serbia was a calamity which ravaged the country shortly after Stephen Dushan’s death and would have shaken the authority of any successor, no matter however able. It is described as a famine which killed many men; and it can be identified as an attack of the form of plague then devouring the population of Constantinople. Such an epidemic left vast areas of farm-lands undercultivated, destroyed centres of craftsmanship, and annihilated foreign trade. This catastrophe must have affected the Empire, which by this time had enjoyed the happiest expansion for three-quarters of a century, as the slump of 1929 affected the United States. In those days, when economic theory had hardly begun to be formulated and was wholly beyond the comprehension of ordinary man, material discontents often expressed themselves in theological or dynastic disputes quite irrelevant to the hardships experienced.

The Byzantines of that age vented their misery in the controversy of the Zealots; but the Serbs were artists rather than intellectuals, and they preferred to dispute about the seen. They therefore wrangled about their rulers. It would have been far better if they had discussed whether the divine light of the Transfiguration could have been apprehended by the corporeal eye, for that could only have gratified the vanity of the unseen powers, and Serbia had to be very careful of disturbing the seen powers. For it was still creating its nobility, that is to say its administrative class, by means which demanded an acknowledged authority. We realize this in learning that when a noble was given a military or civil charge he was given by the sovereign arms and a war-horse; and when he died these or new ones had to be handed back to the sovereign, who decided whether to return them to a son of the dead man or to confer them on another family. This required a monarch of almost ecclesiastical authority whose will was sacred law. If he vacillated in the many decisions of a like personal nature which he had to make, a crowd of feudal barons would press in on him, disputing his title to domination and then claiming it for themselves. It has always been the special tragedy of Slav communities that at any moment of crisis they can furnish not too few but far too many men capable of taking charge of affairs.

In the first few years of Stephen Urosh’s reign there were quite a number of aspirants to his power. There was his mother; his father’s brother Simeon, and his son-in-law; two brothers, Uglyesha and Vukashin, formerly his cupbearer and marshal, who rebelled against him and stole large portions of his land; and there were several lesser chieftains, including some vigorous personalities who fell on Bulgaria and partitioned it. For some time before the battle of Kossovo all these rivals had been obscured. Stephen Urosh was driven into exile and murdered, and presently the fame of his gentleness made the faithful speak of miracles at his tomb. It was of him that the Russian monk had said to us at the monastery of Yazak in the Frushka Gora, ‘No, there is nothing interesting here, only the body of a Serbian emperor.’ Vukashin and Uglyesha were killed leading their armies against the Turks, Vukashin at the hand of a treacherous servant. Of the others those who were not obliterated by natural death or military failure were outshone by two princes of conspicuous ability.

One was Tvrtko, King of Bosnia, an offshoot of the Nemanya family, who had seized a great part of Dalmatian and Serbian territory; the other was Prince Lazar, the same Lazar whose brown defeated hand I touched at Vrdnik, who was lord of the northern and eastern Serbian lands. Tvrtko had shown signs of military genius and Lazar could claim at least a high degree of military efficiency. In the pact they signed for the sake of maintaining Slav unity against the Turks they showed considerable statesmanship. The quality of these two men suggests that the decadence of the Serbian Empire after the death of Stephen Dushan was only the trough that follows a great wave, and that a wave as great might have succeeded it. The historians, in trying to prove that Balkan Christian civilization was already self-doomed before its destruction, are moved by a snobbish and pusillanimous desire not to speak ill of the Old Squire, destiny. It is probable that the battle of Kossovo deducted as much from civilization as the sum of England after the Tudor age.

It was a painful thought, implying that the world we have embarked on is a leaky ship and may not keep afloat. I did not want to get out of the automobile when Constantine said, ‘See, now we must walk and I will show you all things of our tragedy.’ But when I stood on the road I felt nothing. I saw before me simply green downs like those that lie along some Wiltshire valleys, and a high silver sky which took all foreignness from the scene, since it made the snow ranges on the horizon look like shining bars of cloud; some winding roads and lanes, and some scattered buildings. Nothing that had happened here was present to me. At Grachanitsa I had seen medieval Serbia in its living guise as the visitor may see the Tudors at Hampton Court or Frederick the Great at Potsdam; but the armies that had waited here on the eve of St Vitus’s Day in 1389 were not even ghosts to me, they were words out of a book. Nothing could be more agreeable than to be so exempt. I remembered how I had dreaded the first anniversary of the most disagreeable event that had ever befallen me, and how I had awakened on the day and felt nothing, absolutely nothing. I walked away from the automobile towards a tuft of pinkish-purple flowers that grew about a hundred yards away, enjoying the cool, freely flowing air of the uplands, and I did not turn round when Constantine called to me. But Dragutin ran after me, and said slowly, in order that I might understand, ‘Like a child, like a child.’ He put his hand flat two or three feet above the ground, and with the other pointed to Constantine. ‘Like a child he is, but he has a bad wife. Come to the hill, it is very interesting. Do not mind him.’

‘No, no, it is not that,’ I said, but I could not explain, so I followed him across the grass, and we joined my husband and Constantine, who were on a path running up a little hill, on the top of which was a whitewashed hexagonal building, surmounted by a grey-blue metallic dome. Around it the turf was pierced here and there with the white toppling poles of Moslem tombs, and there were some wild rose bushes and a fruit tree, hung with brown wreaths of dead blossom. Out of the folds of what had seemed an empty landscape there emerged suddenly a number of people who converged on us just as we reached the building. There was a veiled woman, her black cotton garments made a strange ghostly colour by the heavy summer dust, gliding along with a baby in her arms and two little children at her heels, exhibiting a dark and slippery and un-individualized fecundity like caviare. There was a lean and wildish-looking man with a shepherd’s staff, his cheeks so hollow that one might have thought he usually wore false teeth and had taken them out, were it not that his belly was as concave. There was a Christian girl of about fourteen who had better been veiled, for her face showed a fixed and empty stare of hunger, of appetite so completely starved that it was ignorant of its own object. She wore a skirt that was a straight piece of cloth gathered along one selvedge to form a waistband so that it stood out round her knees like a coarse version of the ballerina’s toutou. There were several boys, all wearing the fez, all bandy. The veiled woman slipped with her children into the shabby porch of the octagonal building, and Constantine explained sententiously, ‘This is a holy place for them,’ and indeed she had the air of being on some errand which at once satisfied the motor impulses and the sense of duty, like shopping or calling, but more so, which Moslem women bring to their religious exercise. The man with the shepherd’s staff stared at Dragutin with the admiration due to a very handsome man. The children held out to us bunches of flowers with an almost aristocratic lack of insistence, and Constantine said, ‘These are the famous poppies of Kossovo that grow nowhere else, they are supposed to have sprung from the blood of the slaughtered Serbs. Later the whole plain is red with them, but as you see it is too early for them, these are only buds.’ They were a very beautiful kind of wild peony, with golden centres and pink stamens. My husband bought some from the girl and Dragutin bought some from the boys; he was behaving at Kossovo as he behaved at springs and in churches, with a mystical and soldierly excitement, like one who salutes the sacred spectre of valour.

Constantine began to tell us how the troops had been marshalled for the battle. Here Prince Lazar had had his tent, there the Turks had waited. ‘But no!’interrupted Dragutin. He was shouting slowly and without rage, as he did when moved by patriotic fervour. ‘How could they wait in the North-West! Not here, but there were they, the dogs! And there, over there, Vuk Brankovitch should have come in with his troops but turned away and left the battle-field!’ ‘Vuk Brankovitch,‘ said Constantine, ’is the Judas of our story. He was the specially beloved brother-in-law of the Prince Lazar, and he is supposed to have sold himself to the Turks and to have led his army off the battle-field at a crucial moment, thus exposing Lazar’s flank. But now historians do not think there was any treachery, though it seems likely that one of the Serbian princes did not receive a message in time telling him to go forward to Lazar’s support, and so failed him. But we all know that it was not treachery that lost us Kossovo, it is that we were all divided among ourselves.‘ ’Yes,‘ said Dragutin, ’it is so in our songs, that we were betrayed by Brankovitch, but we know that it was not so, that we lost the battle because we were not of one mind.‘ ’How do you mean you know it?‘ I asked. ’Do you mean you learned it at school?‘ ’No,‘ he said, ’we know it before we go to school. It is something our people remember.‘ I was again checked by the curious honesty of the Slav mind, by its refusal to dress up its inconsistencies and make them superficially acceptable to the rationalist censor. They had evolved a myth which accounted for their defeat by treachery within their own ranks and thereby took the sting out of it, just as the Germans did after the war; but they did not suppress the critical part of their mind when it pointed out to them that this myth was merely a myth. With an inconsistency that was not dangerous because it was admitted, they let their myth and the criticism of it coexist in their minds.

Constantine and Dragutin waved their arms at the downland, and still I saw nothing. I turned aside and looked at the white building behind us and I said, ‘What is this place? Can we go in?’ ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Constantine, ‘it is very interesting; this is the mausoleum of Gazi Mestan, a Turkish standard-bearer who was killed in the battle and was buried where he lay.’ ‘Yes,’ shouted Dragutin, ‘many of us fell at Kossovo, but, praise be to God, so did many of them.’ As we went into the wooden porch, the veiled woman and her children padded past us. We found ourselves in a room which, though light and clean, had that look of having been long disused by any normal forces which one expects to be completed by stuffed animals; but there was nothing there except two coffins of the Moslem type, with a gabled top, higher at the head than the heels. They were covered with worn green baize, and hung with cheap pieces of stuff, some clumsily embroidered, others printed. On the walls were a few framed scraps of Turkish calligraphy, a copy of a Sultan’s seal, and some picture postcards. A man came towards us, smiling sweetly and indecisively. He wore a faded fez and neat but threadbare Western clothes, and his whole appearance made a wistful allusion to a state better than his own; I have seen his like in England, walking through November rain in a summer suit and a straw hat, still mildly cheerful. He told us of the fame and gallantry of Gazi Mestan in a set speech, unnaturally uttered from some brain-cell petrified by memory. ‘And you? Who are you?’ said Constantine. ‘I am the descendant of Gazi Mestan’s servant,’ the man answered, ‘the descendant in the sixteenth generation. My forefather was by him as he fell, he closed his dead master’s eyes for him, he preserved his body and guarded it after it had been placed in this tomb. So have we all guarded him.’

A weak-eyed boy ran into the room and took his stand beside the man, who laid an arm about his shoulder. ‘My brother,’ he said tenderly, and laid his face against the boy’s fine lank hair. They looked incredibly fragile. If one had tapped them with a pebble on the paperthin temples they would have dropped to the ground, still faintly smiling; the bare ankle-bones showing between the boy’s brown shoes and frayed trouser-hems were so prominent that the skin stretched across them was bright red. ‘What do these people live on?’ I asked. ‘Doubtless they receive gifts, this is a kind of shrine,’ said Constantine, ‘and there would probably be an allowance from the Vakuf, the Moslem religious endowment fund. In any case they can do nothing else, this is the family’s destiny and it is a distinction.’ ‘But they are not like human beings at all,’ I said, ‘they are to human beings what a ship inside a glass bottle is to a real boat.’ I saw before me what an empire which spreads beyond its legitimate boundaries must do to its subjects. It cannot spread its own life over the conquered areas, for life cannot travel too far from its source, and it blights the life that is native to those parts. Therefore it imprisons all its subjects in a stale conservatism, in a seedy gentility that celebrates past achievements over and over again. It could be seen what these people had been. With better bones, with more flesh, with unatrophied wills, they would have been Turks as they were in the great days of the past, or as they are in the Ataturk’s Turkey, robust and gracious. But there they were sweet-sour phantoms, human wine gone to vinegar.

Outside we found Dragutin lying on the ground, the girl and the boys about him and a field mouse curled in his hand. ‘You do not want to go inside?’ asked Constantine. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That a Turk was alive and is dead is good news. But this one has been dead so long that the news is a bit stale. Hola!’ he roared, and opened his hand and the field mouse made a brown streak for safety. ‘Now I am to take you to the tomb of the Sultan Murad,’ he said, standing up, ‘but thank God we stop at a Christian monument first.’ It was some miles down the main road, a very plain cross set back in a fenced garden where irises and lupins and the first roses grew with an astounding profusion. It could be understood that Kossovo had really been fertile, that it had once supported many fat villages. The two soldiers who were guarding the monument came down to the gate to meet us, two boys in their earliest twenties, short and sturdy and luminous with health, their skins rose under bronze, their black eyes shining deep and their black hair shining shallow.

When I admired the garden one of them fell back and picked some flowers for me from a bed, not in the main avenue, lest the general effect should be spoiled, and Constantine said to the other one, ‘You are a Serb from the North, aren’t you?’ He answered smiling, ‘Yes, I am from the North, I am from the same town as you, I am from Shabats.’ ‘What!’ exclaimed Constantine, looking like a baby that has seen its bottle. ‘Do you know me?’ ‘Which of us in Shabats does not know the great poet who sprang from our town?’ replied the soldier; and I liked the people of Shabats, for I could see from his face that they knew the best as well as the worst of Constantine, and revered him as well as mocked him. ‘But tell me,’ interrupted Dragutin, ‘is that other one not a Croat?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘he is from Karlovats.’ ‘Is it not hard to be here all day with a Croat?’ ‘No, indeed,’ said the soldier, ‘it is most surprising how pleasant he is; he is my true friend, and he is a good soldier; I never would have believed it.’ ‘You don’t say so!’ said Dragutin. ‘I tell you,’ said Constantine, ‘there are many good Croats, and we Serbs must make friends with them.’ ‘So,’ said Dragutin.

We were silent for a time at the foot of the memorial which bore the appalling words, ‘To the heroes who fell for the honest cross, freedom, and the right of the people, 1389-1912, erected by the people of Prishtina.’ It made the head ache with its attempt to commemorate people who were utterly outside the scope of memory; slaves born of slaves, who made their gesture of revolt and died, isolated by their slavery from the weakest, furthest light and warmth of fame. When we turned our faces to the garden again, we found the other soldier standing beside us, holding out a bouquet that was like a bouquet on a fire-screen made for a court, that had form and a tune of colour. All Slavs, except those who become florists, have a natural genius for arranging flowers. After I had thanked him, Dragutin said, ‘Hey, Croat! You’re a brave fellow. How do you like us Serbs?’ ‘Very well, very well!’ he answered smiling. ‘Everybody is kind to me here, and I had thought you were my enemies.’ ‘Eyah!’ said Dragutin, twisting the lobe of the boy’s ear, ‘We’ll kill you all some day.’ The boy wriggled and laughed, and they all talked till we turned to go, and Dragutin gave the boy a great smack on the back, saying, ‘Well, you two, if you come to Skoplje, you’ll find me at the Ban’s garage, and maybe there’ll be some paprikasch for you. You’re what Yugoslavia needs.’ On this little ledge they met and clung together, on this cross-wide space from which the dark grasses of Kossovo had been driven back, they who had been born under different flags and had to beat down a wall of lies before they could smile at each other.

If the battle of Kossovo was invisible to me it was because it had happened too completely. It was because the field of Kossovo had wholly swallowed up the men who had awaited destiny in their embroidered tents, because it had become sodden with their blood and now was a bog, and when things fell on it they were for ever lost. Constantine said, ‘Now I am taking you to the mausoleum of the Sultan Murad, who was commanding the Turkish forces and was killed the night before the battle by a Serb called Milosh Obilitch, who had been suspected of treachery by our people and wished to clear his name.’ The Sultan Murad, or Amurath, was the son of Orkhan the Victorious and a Greek girl raped from her bridegroom’s arms, whom the Turks called Nilufer, the Lotus Flower, and his records suggest an immoral attempt to create the kind of character admired by morality, for an astounding cruelty seems to have been introduced as an alloy to harden the soft gold of his voluptuous delight in all exercises of the mind and body. ‘His mausoleum,’ said Constantine, ‘was built where he fell.’

A track led from the road across the opaque and lustreless pastureland characteristic of this place, to what looked like a deserted farmhouse. As we came to the gate in the farm paddock it was as it had been at the tomb of Gazi Mestan: the bare countryside exhaled people. They came to meet us at the gate, they whipped round the corners of the paddock, men in Western clothes who had the look of Leicester Square or Place Pigalle touts, not that they knew much or perhaps anything of infamy. The resemblance lay in their terrible desire to sell what they had, which since they had nothing caused them to make piteous claims to the possession of special knowledge, the power to perform unusual services. Their bare feet, treading softly on rag-bound leather sandals, pattered before us, beside us, behind us, as we followed a stone path across a grassy quadrangle. A house looked down on us, its broken windows stuffed with newspaper, its wall eczematous where the plaster lacked.

Through another gateway we came on a poor and dusty garden where the mausoleum stood. A fountain splashed from a wall, and there was nothing else pleasant there. The door of the mausoleum was peculiarly hideous; it was of coarse wood, painted chocolate-colour, and panes of cheap glass, all the wrong shape. Public libraries and halls in small provincial towns in England sometimes have such doors. Beyond was a rough lawn, cropped byaafew miserable sheep, which was edged with some flowers and set with two or three Moslem graves which were of the handsome sort, having a slab as well as a column at the top and bottom, but were riven across by time and neglect. On the grass sat some veiled women picnicking among their pretty, sore-eyed children, with the infinitely touching sociability of Moslem women, which reticently reveals a brave and frustrated appetite for pleasure, doling itself out crumbs and making them do. On a fence made of small sticks, defending a young tree from the sheep, hung a line of many-coloured rags, just recognizably garments that had been washed very clean. At least one of these women lived in a cottage so far from all other water that it was worth her while to bring her washing to the fountain; yet on these bare downs it could be seen there was no cottage for a mile or two.

We drew near to the hideous door of the mausoleum, and it was opened by an old man whom we knew to be an imam, a priest, only from the twist of white cloth about his fez; not in his manner was there any sign of sacred authority. He greeted us blearily and without pride, and we followed him, our touts padding behind us, into the presence of the Sultan Murad. The walls of his last lodging were distempered in drab and ornamented with abstract designs in chocolate, grey, and bottle-green, such as Western plumbers and decorators loved to create in the latter half of the last century, and its windows were curtained with the intensely vulgar dark green printed velvet used in wagons-lits. In a sloping gabled coffin such as sheltered Gazi Mestan, but covered with velvet and votive offerings of stuffs by some halfpence costlier, lay Murad. His turban hung from a wooden pole at the head of the coffin, a dusty wisp. The priest turned blindish eyes on Constantine and told him something; after the telling his fishlike mouth forgot to close. ‘This old one is relating that only the Sultan’s entrails are here,’ said Constantine, ‘the rest of him was taken away to Broussa in Turkey, but I do not know when.’ Even the most rational person might have expected that the priest would have shown some slight regret that this shrine held the entrails of the Sultan and not his heart or his head. But in the pale luminousness of his eyes and the void of his open mouth there was seated the most perfect indifference.

Two of the touts padded past us and sank mumbling into the prostration of a Moslem prayer, in the hope that we might gape and tip. It is impossible to have visited Sarajevo or Bitolj or even Skoplje, without learning that the Turks were in a real sense magnificent, that there was much of that in them which brings man off his four feet into erectness, that they knew well that running waters, the shade of trees, a white minaret the more in a town, brocade and fine manners, have a usefulness greater than use, even to the most soldierly of men. They were truly aristocratic, they had prised up the clamp of necessity that fixes man with his belly close to the earth. Therefore it was painful to see these Turks to whom two full meals in succession were more remote objects of lust than the most fantastic luxuries had been to their forefathers, to whom rags and a dusty compound represented a unique refreshment. These mock devotions were disgusting not because they were prostitutions of a gallant religion, since that represented an invincible tendency of mankind, but because they were inspired by the hope of dinars far too few for any purchase worth making. I turned away; and the tail of my eye caught the touts in a furtive movement betraying an absolute bankruptcy of the vital forces, an inability to make an effort except when financed by some expectation for that specific purpose. Once they saw they had not interested us they stopped their prostrations in mid-air, wearily straightened themselves, and shuffled after us into the paddock.

‘It is silly to bring foreigners to see these old Turkish things,’ said Dragutin to Constantine. ‘Everything Turkish is now rotten and stinks like a dunghill. Look at these creatures that are more like rotten marrows than men, they ought to be in mausoleums themselves, their mothers must have been dead for years before they were born.’ His animal lack of pity was the more terrible because it was not even faintly malicious. We hurried out of the paddock, some of the touts gaining on us and pattering ahead, looking back at us with their terrible inexorbitant expectancy. One could easily have become cruel to them. Beyond the gate Constantine led us along the plasterless walls till he found the spot where, it is said, the man who murdered Murad was put to death. ‘His name,’ he said, ‘was Milosh Obilitch; but to tell you the truth it was not. It was Kobilitch, which means Brood-mare, for in those days our people, even in the nobility, did not have surnames but only Christian names and nicknames. But in the eighteenth century when all the world became refined it seemed to us that it was shameful to have a hero that was called Broodmare, so we dropped the K, and poor Milosh was left with a name that meant nothing at all and was never his. What he would have minded worse was that many people nowadays say we should not honour him at all, because he gained the Sultan’s presence by a trick, by saying that he was a deserter and wished to join his enemies. He felt, and patriots still feel, that he had to clear his name in the eyes of his people from the suspicion of being a traitor, and that he had bought the right to play that trick on the Turks because he gave them his life in return.’

‘It is strange,’ I said, ‘that the Turks were not disorganized by the murder of their Sultan.’ ‘Nothing could have disorganized them,’ said Constantine, ‘they were superb, they had superbia, they were all as Mohammed would have had them, they were soldiers ready to submit to all discipline because they believed that they had been enlisted by God, who at the end of the world would be with them as their general.’ ‘Our Sir Charles Eliot,’ I said, ‘wrote of them that “The Sultan may be a Roman Emperor, but every Turk is a Roman citizen with a profound self-respect and a sense not only of his duties, but what is due to him.”’ As I spoke I noticed that my husband was no longer walking beside me, and, as wives do, I looked round to see what the creature might be doing. He was some paces behind us, giving some dinars to the touts, who were taking them with a gentle, measured thankfulness, unabject in spite of their suppliance, which proved that what Eliot had said of them had once been true, though the total situation showed it to be now false. They stopped following us after that, and remained staring mildly after us, boneless as flames, their pale faces and dusty clothes dingy in the sunlight. They stood wide, wide apart on the dark grass of Kossovo, for their flesh was too poor to feel the fleshy desire to draw together. A people that extends its empire too far from its base commits the sin of Onan and spills its seed upon the ground.

We had not been driving very long when the road ran through a grove, and Dragutin brought the automobile to a halt. ‘Here we will eat,’ he said, holding the door open. ‘What do you mean?’ asked Constantine. ‘Well, did you people not bring bread and wine and eggs from Skoplje?’ asked Dragutin. ‘This is the best place to eat them, and it is high time too, for it is very late and the English are accustomed to meals at regular hours. So get you out and eat.’ ‘No, no,’ said Constantine, taking out his watch and shaking his head, ‘we must push on to Kossovska Mitrovitsa, and it may be dark before we get there.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ said Dragutin. ‘It is about three in the afternoon, this is May, and Kossovska Mitrovitsa is not two hours away. Step quickly, you must get out.’ He did not speak out of insolence, but in recognition that Constantine had suffered some sort of disintegrating change during the last few days, and that his judgment was not now to be trusted. Constantine looked at him in unresentful curiosity, as if to say, ‘Am I as bad as that?’ and obeyed. Dragutin put out the rugs and the food on the grass and said, ‘There now, you can have fifteen minutes,’ and walked up and down the road in front of us, eating an apple. He called to me, ‘You don’t much like being here.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s too sad. And just now I have been thinking of the Vrdnik monastery in the Frushka Gora, where I saw the body of the Prince Lazar and touched his hand.’ ‘Ah, yes, the poor saint,’ said Dragutin, ‘they cut off his head because our Milosh Obilitch had killed their Sultan, though doubtless they would have done it anyway. They were wolves, it was their nature to shed gentler blood. Well, it could not be helped. We were not of one mind.’

He took another mouthful of apple and munched himself down the road, and I said to Constantine, ‘It is strange, he does not blame the nobles for quarrelling among themselves.’ Constantine said thoughtfully. ‘No, but I do not think that is what he means.’ ‘But he says, “We were not of one mind,” he has said it twice today, and in all the history books it is said that the Slavs were beaten at Kossovo because the various princes quarrelled among themselves. What else can he mean?’ ‘It is true that our people always say that we were beaten because we were not of one mind, and it is true that there were many Slav princes before Kossovo, and that they all quarrelled, but I do not think that the phrase has any connexion with that fact,’ said Constantine. ‘I think the phrase means that each individual Slav was divided in his attitude to the Turk, and it makes an allusion to our famous poem about the grey falcon.’ ‘I have never heard of it,’ I answered. Constantine stood up and called to Dragutin, who was now munching his way back to us, ‘Think of it, she had never heard of our poem about the grey falcon!’ ‘Shame!’ cried Dragutin, spitting out some pips, and they began chanting together:

‘Poletio soko titsa siva, 

Od svetinye, od Yerusalima, 

I on nosi titsu lastavitsu....’

‘I will translate it for you,’ said Constantine. ‘In your language I cannot make it as beautiful as it is, but you will see that at any rate it is not like any other poem, it is peculiar to us....

There flies a grey bird, a falcon, 

From Jerusalem the holy, 

And in his beak he bears a swallow.

That is no falcon, no grey bird, 

But it is the Saint Elijah. 

He carries no swallow, 

But a book from the Mother of God. 

He comes to the Tsar at Kossovo, 

He lays the book on the Tsar’s knees. 

This book without like told the Tsar: 

‘Tsar Lazar, of honourable stock, 

Of what kind will you have your kingdom? 

Do you want a heavenly kingdom? 

Do you want an earthly kingdom? 

If you want an earthly kingdom? 

Saddle your horses, tighten your horses’ girths, 

Gird on your swords, 

Then put an end to the Turkish attacks! 

And drive out every Turkish soldier. 

But if you want a heavenly kingdom 

Build you a church on Kossovo; 

Build it not with a floor of marble 

But lay down silk and scarlet on the ground, 

Give the Eucharist and battle orders to your soldiers, 

For all your soldiers shall be destroyed, 

And you, prince, you shall be destroyed with them.’

When the Tsar read the words, 

The Tsar pondered, and he pondered thus: 

‘Dear God, where are these things, and how are they! 

What kingdom shall I choose? 

Shall I choose a heavenly kingdom? 

Shall I choose an earthly kingdom? 

If I choose an earthly kingdom, 

An earthly kingdom lasts only a little time, 

But a heavenly kingdom will last for eternity and its centuries.’

The Tsar chose a heavenly kingdom, 

And not an earthly kingdom, 

He built a church on Kossovo. 

He built it not with floor of marble 

But laid down silk and scarlet on the ground. 

There he summoned the Serbian Patriarch 

And twelve great bishops. 

Then he gave his soldiers the Eucharist and their battle orders. 

In the same hour as the Prince gave orders to his soldiers 

The Turks attacked Kossovo.

There follows,‘ said Constantine, ’a long passage, very muddled, about how gallantly the Tsar fought and how at the end it looked as if they were to win, but Vuk Brankovitch betrayed them, so they were beaten. And it goes on:

Then the Turks overwhelmed Lazar, 

And the Tsar Lazar was destroyed, 

And his army was destroyed with him, 

Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers.

All was holy, all was honourable 

And the goodness of God was fulfilled.‘

I said, ‘So that was what happened, Lazar was a member of the Peace Pledge Union.’ Through a long field of rye on the crest of a hill before me, a wind ran like the tremor that shuddered over my skin and through my blood. Peeling the shell from an egg, I walked away from the others, but I knew that the poem referred to something true and disagreeable in my own life. ‘Lazar was wrong,’ I said to myself, ‘he saved his soul and there followed five hundred years when no man on these plains, nor anywhere else in Europe for hundreds of miles in any direction, was allowed to keep his soul. He should have chosen damnation for their sake. No, what am I saying? I am putting the state above the individual, and I believe that there are certain ultimate human rights that must have precedence over all others. What I mean is rather that I do not believe in the thesis of the poem. I do not believe that any man can procure his own salvation by refusing to save millions of people from miserable slavery. That it was a question of fighting does not matter, because in actual fact fighting is not much more disgusting, though probably slightly so, than many things people have to do in order that the race may triumph over certain assaults. To protect us from germs many people have to perform exceedingly distasteful tasks in connexion with sewage, and to open to the community its full economic resources sailors and miners have to suffer great discomfort and danger. But indeed this poem shows that the pacifist attitude does not depend on the horrors of warfare, for it never mentions them. It goes straight to the heart of the matter and betrays that what the pacifist really wants is to be defeated. Prince Lazar and his troops were to take the Eucharist and they were to be destroyed by the Turks and then they would be saved. There is not a word about avoiding bloodshed. On the contrary, it is taken for granted that he fought as well as he could, and killed every Turk within reach. The important thing is not that he should be innocent, but that he should be defeated.’

I realized fully why this poem had stirred me. When I had stood by the tomb in the monastery at Vrdnik in the Frushka Gora and touched Prince Lazar’s mummied hand, I had been well aware that he was of a pattern familiar to me, that he was one of that company loving honour and freedom and harmony, which in our day includes Herbert Fisher and Lord Cecil and Professor Gilbert Murray. Such people I have always followed, for I know that they are right, and my reason acknowledges that by their rule and by their rule only can a growing and incorrupt happiness be established on earth. But when all times have given birth to such good men and such as myself who follow them, why has this happiness not long been accomplished? Why is there still poverty, when we are ready for handsomeness? Why is there carelessness for the future of children? Why is there oppression of women by men? Why is there harshness of race towards race? I know the answer. I had known the answer for long, but it had taken this poem to make my mind admit that I knew it.

It is revealed at all meetings addressed or attended by the lesser of those who care for the freedom and the well-being of others, which often exhale a strange sense of danger. Meetings of the opposite party, of those who desire others to be enslaved for their benefit or to preserve iniquitous social institutions because of the profit they derive from them, offer the simple repulsiveness of greed and stupidity, but not this sense of danger. It is evoked in many ways: by the clothes worn by the women among the speakers and the audiences, which are of a sort not to be accounted for by poverty and by overwork, since they are not specially cheap and must indeed require a special effort to find, so far do they depart from the normal. They can serve no purpose save to alienate public opinion; and it is sad that they should not do all that they can to secure the respect of the community when they are trying to revise communal beliefs. It appears possible that they do not really want to succeed in that attempt; and that suspicion is often aroused by the quality of the speakers’ voices and the response of their audiences. The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue; but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. And their audiences also do not seem to regard themselves as predestined to rule; they clap as if in defiance, and laugh at their enemies behind their hands, with the shrill laughter of children. They want to be right, not to do right. They feel no obligation to be part of the main tide of life, and if that meant any degree of pollution they would prefer to divert themselves from it and form a standing pool of purity. In fact, they want to receive the Eucharist, be beaten by the Turks, and then go to Heaven.

By that they prove themselves inferior to their opponents, who do not want to separate themselves from the main channel of life, who believe quite simply that aggression and tyranny are the best methods of guaranteeing the future of man and therefore accept the responsibility of applying them. The friends of liberty have indeed no ground whatsoever for regarding themselves as in any way superior to their opponents, since they are in effect on their side in wishing defeat and not victory for their own principles. Not one of them, even the greatest, has ever been a Cæsar as well as his kind self; and until there is a kind Cæsar every child of woman is born in peril. I looked into my own heart and I knew that I was not innocent. Often I wonder whether I would be able to suffer for my principles if the need came, and it strikes me as a matter of the highest importance. That should not be so. I should ask myself with far greater urgency whether I have done everything possible to carry those principles into effect, and how I can attain power to make them absolutely victorious. But those questions I put only with my mind. They do not excite my guts, which wait anxiously while I ponder my gift for martyrdom.

‘If this be so,’ I said to myself, ‘if it be a law that those who are born into the world with a preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable are born also with an impulse towards defeat, then the whole world is a vast Kossovo, an abominable blood-logged plain, where people who love go out to fight people who hate, and betray their cause to their enemies, so that loving is persecuted for immense tracts of history, far longer than its little periods of victory.’ I began to weep, for the leftwing people among whom I had lived all my life had in their attitude to foreign politics achieved such a betrayal. They were always right, they never imposed their rightness. ‘If this disposition to be at once Christ and Judas is inborn,’ I thought, ‘we might as well die, and the sooner the better, for the defeat is painful after the lovely promise.’ I turned my back on the plains, not to see the sodden grass, not to think of the woman stupid under her ploughshare in Prishtina, the weak-eyed loving brothers embracing feebly in the standard-bearer’s mausoleum, the pale touts falsely and hungrily genuflecting about the Sultan’s coffin, not to imagine the lost glory of the Christian Slavs, the glory, different but equal and equally lost, of the Ottoman Turks. Even when I saw none of these things with the eye of the body or the mind I felt despair, and I began to run, to be more quickly with my companions.

The party I had left had now been joined by a fourth, an old Albanian wearing the white skullcap which is as the fez to the Moslems of that people. He had been invited to share our food, and he was sitting on the ground with his back to me. When I drew nearer he turned about to greet me with the smiling social grace peculiar to Albanians, and I saw that in his arms there was lying a black lamb such as I had seen sacrificed at the rock of the Sheep’s Field; and the meaning of Kossovo was plain.

The black lamb and the grey falcon had worked together here. In this crime, as in nearly all historic crimes and most personal crimes, they had been accomplices. This I had learned in Yugoslavia, which writes obscure things plain, which furnishes symbols for what the intellect has not yet formulated. On the Sheep’s Field I had seen sacrifice in its filth and falsehood, and in its astonishing power over the imagination. There I had learned how infinitely disgusting in its practice was the belief that by shedding the blood of an animal one will be granted increase; that by making a gift to death one will receive a gift of life. There I had recognized that this belief was a vital part of me, because it was dear to the primitive mind, since it provided an easy answer to various perplexities, and the primitive mind is the foundation on which the modern mind is built. This belief is not only hideous in itself: it pollutes the works of love. It has laboured for annulment of the meaning of Christianity, by insinuating itself into the Church and putting forward, by loose cries and the drunkenness of ecstasy, a doctrine of the Atonement too absurd to be set down in writing. By that doctrine it is pretended that Christ came to earth to cook up a senseless and ugly magic rite, to buy with his pain an unrelated good, and it is concealed from us that his death convicted us of sin, that it proved our kind to be so cruel that when goodness itself appeared amongst us we could find nothing better to do with it than kill it. And I had felt, as I walked away from the rock with Militsa and Mehmed, that if I thought longer about the sacrifice I should learn something more, of a nature discreditable to myself.

Now that I saw the lamb thrusting out the forceless little black hammer of its muzzle from the flimsy haven of the old man’s wasted arms, I could not push the realization away from me very much longer. None of us, my kind as little as any others, could resist the temptation of accepting this sacrifice as a valid symbol. We believed in our heart of hearts that life was simply this and nothing more, a man cutting the throat of a lamb on a rock to please God and obtain happiness; and when our intelligence told us that the man was performing a disgusting and meaningless act, our response was not to dismiss the idea as a nightmare, but to say, ‘Since it is wrong to be the priest and sacrifice the lamb, I will be the lamb and be sacrificed by the priest.’ We thereby set up a principle that doom was honourable for innocent things, and conceded that if we spoke of kindliness and recommended peace it was fitting that afterwards the knife should be passed across our throats. Therefore it happened again and again that when we fought well for a reasonable cause and were in sight of victory, we were filled with a sense that we were not acting according to the divine protocol, and turned away and sought defeat, thus betraying those who had trusted us to win them kindliness and peace.

Thus it was that the Slavs were defeated by the Turks on the field of Kossovo. They knew that Christianity was better for man than Islam, because it denounced the prime human fault, cruelty, which the military mind of Mohammed had not even identified, and they knew also that their essential achievements in conduct and art would be trodden down into the mud if they were vanquished. Therefore, because of the power of the rock over their minds, they could not go forward to victory. They knew that in this matter they were virtuous, therefore it was fitting that they should die. In that belief they betrayed all the virtuous who came after them, for five hundred years. And I had sinned in the same way, I and my kind, the liberals of Western Europe. We had regarded ourselves as far holier than our tory opponents because we had exchanged the role of priest for the role of lamb, and therefore we forgot that we were not performing the chief moral obligation of humanity, which is to protect the works of love. We have done nothing to save our people, who have some little freedom and therefore some power to make their souls, from the trampling hate of the other peoples that are without the faculty for freedom and desire to root out the soul like a weed. It is possible that we have betrayed life and love for more than five hundred years on a field wider than Kossovo, as wide as Europe. As I perceived it I felt again that imbecile anxiety concerning my own behaviour in such a crisis, which is a matter of only the slightest importance. What mattered was that I had not served life faithfully, that I had been too anxious for a fictitious personal salvation, and imbecile enough to conceive that I might secure it by hanging round a stinking rock where a man with dirty hands shed blood for no reason.

‘Is this not a lovely old Albanian man?’ asked Constantine. Indeed he was; and he was the lovelier because he was smiling, and the smile of an Albanian is cool and refreshing as a bite out of a watermelon, their light eyes shine, their white teeth gleam. Also this old man’s skin was white and transparent, like a very thin cloud. ‘I think he is very good,’ said Constantine, ‘and he is certainly very pathetic, for he has guessed we are going to the Trepcha mines and he wants us to get a job for his grandson, who, he says, is a clever boy. I wonder if we could not do something about it.’ Constantine was always at his happiest when he was being kind, and this opportunity for benevolence made his eye shine brighter than we had seen it for many a day; but the cheek below was pouched and raddled like a weeping woman’s. Perhaps he had been weeping. The grey falcon had visited him also. He had bared his throat to Gerda’s knife, he had offered his loving heart to the service of hate, in order that he might be defeated and innocent.

‘Naturally,’ said Dragutin, speaking broken German so that the old man should not understand, ‘this one must be something of a villain, since he is an Albanian. The Albanians, having the blood-feud and being brigands and renouncers of Christ, are great villains. But this one is poor and very old, and whatever harm he does he cannot do for much longer, so let us do what we can for him.’ He shuddered, then laid his open hand on his chest and breathed deeply, as if he had thought of old age and was restoring himself by savouring his own health and strength. It would have been possible to take him as an image of primitive simplicity had he not, only a little time before, recited this subtle and complicated poem about the grey falcon, and had not that poem survived simply because his people were able to appreciate it. This is the Slav mystery: that the Slav, who seems wholly a man of action, is aware of the interior life, of the springs of action, as only the intellectuals of other races are. It is possible that a Slav Cæsar might be moved in crises by a purity of metaphysical motive hardly to be conceived elsewhere, save among priests and philosophers. Perhaps Stephen Dushan was not only influenced by thoughts of innocence and guilt, as all great statesmen are, but was governed by them almost to the exclusion of simpler and more material considerations. Perhaps he died in his prime as many die, because he wished for death; because this image of bloody sacrifice which obsesses us all had made him see shame in the triumph which seemed his destiny. He stood at his doorway in the Balkan mountains and looked on the gold and ivory and marble of Constantinople, on its crosses and its domes and the ships in its harbours, and he knew that he was as God to these things, for they would cease to be, unless he retained them as clear thoughts in his mind. He feared to have that creative power, he stepped back from the light of his doorway, he retreated into the blameless world of the shadows; and Constantinople faded like a breath on a windowpane.

‘Yugoslavia is always telling me about one death or another,’ I said to myself, ‘the death of Franz Ferdinand, the death of Alexander Obrenovitch and Draga, the death of Prince Michael, the death of Prince Lazar, the death of Stephen Dushan. Yet this country is full of life. I feel that we Westerners should come here to learn to live. But perhaps we are ignorant about life in the West because we avoid thinking about death. One could not study geography if one concentrated on the land and turned one’s attention away from the sea.’ Then I cried out, for I had forgotten the black lamb, and it had stretched out its neck and laid its cold twitching muzzle against my bare forearm. All the men laughed at me, though the Albanian was careful to keep a central core of courtesy in his laughter. I returned their laughter, but I was frightened. I did not trust anybody in this group, least of all myself, to cast off this infatuation with sacrifice which had caused Kossovo, which, if it were not checked would abort all human increase.

Kossovska Mitrovitsa I

The town lay on the limits of the plain, at the threshold of the warm, broken Serbian country that reminds Somerset men of Somerset and Scots of the Lowlands, a little town, a standard town, with barracks on a hill, some minarets, the main body of its houses round the bend in the river; some exquisite old Turkish houses, with their beautifully proportioned upper stories and intricately carved lattices, notably in the street where we found our hotel. ‘Go in, go in,’ said Dragutin impatiently, ‘do not look at the rat warrens left by the abominable, look rather at this hotel, which has been built since the mines at Trepcha were opened, and is fino, fino.’ Certainly the large café we entered was very clean and proud and well found, and entirely lacked the Balkan touch: that is to say, nothing in the place looked as if it had been brought from somewhere else and adapted to its present purposes by a preoccupied intellectual. But the people who were sitting there were Balkan enough. Four men were playing cards with their hats on, and a young priest was circling round them with a glass of tea in his hand, looking at their cards. He was supremely beautiful; his long hair and beard were wavy and blue-black, his eyes were immense and gentian-blue. At the sight of one man’s hand he flung back his head, cried out something mocking, sat down, and sipped his tea between gusts of silent laughter. ‘From his accent I think he is Russian,’ said Constantine; and indeed he had the spiral and ethereal air, as of one formed from smoke-wreaths, which I had noticed in some of the Russian priests and monks I had met in Yugoslavia. ‘Yes, he is a Russian,’ said the waiter; ‘there are people of all nations working in the Trepcha mines, and among them are many Russians, and this is the son of one amongst them.’

‘Now I have engaged our rooms,’ said my husband, ‘I must go and telephone to the people at the mines, to see if it will be convenient for them to let us go up and see them now.’ ‘Certainly, certainly,’ said Constantine, ‘I will tell the waiter to show you the telephone and get you the number.’ But when my husband came and told us, ‘It is all right, they sound very nice people, very Scotch, and they say they will be very delighted to see us, and that we are to come up at once,’ Constantine said with a sad smile, ‘I hope that you did not frighten your friends by telling them that you were bringing me with you, for I am going to excuse myself.’ ‘But why?’ exclaimed my husband. ‘They sounded as if they would really be so pleased to see you, it was not merely a matter of politeness. And I am sure you will be interested to visit the mine.’ Constantine shook his head and continued to smile. ‘I do not think they will really be very disappointed if I do not come with you,’ he said. ‘I understand the English too well to believe that. I think you and your friends will be happier if you are all English together and you can say what you really think of my country.’ He said it with Gerda’s accent. ‘And as for seeing the mine, I am a writer and I do not really need to visit a mine to know what it is like.’ He added, that I might not fail to note that he had let fly at me, ‘I am not a journalist, me. I am a poet.’

He was depriving himself horribly. If he had come with us there would have been new people to impress and charm; and his mind, which was actually not at all autokinetic, but which, like a New Zealand geyser, let loose its fountains only when some solid object had been dropped into it, would have been inspired to its best by the spectacle of anything so remote from his experience as a mine. But it was no use arguing. One by one he was closing the shutters of all his windows. We sat for a moment in silence drinking our coffee. A waiter came in with a plate of sweet cakes, slices of the Dobosh and Sacher Torten that in the Balkans mean sophistication and pride and contact with the West, and put it down by the card-players. The young priest took one and began to circle round the players again, eating it upwards instead of downwards, pressing it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue, as the bears in the zoo do when they are given a spoonful of honey. The upper half of the tall café windows nearly touched the projecting first floor of a Turkish house opposite. Two bare hands gripped the top of the lattice; we were being watched by a hidden face.

Dragutin walked through the café and Constantine called out, ‘Are you ready to take them to the mines in a minute or two?’ He answered, ‘Yes, indeed. I have put my head in a basin of cold water, and I am just as fresh as if I had just left Skoplje. And if I had not I should still be ready to go to the mines, for that place up there is fino, fino. There would I live if I were not the Ban’s chauffeur, and I say it seriously.’

Before Dragutin shut the automobile door on us, he cried again, ‘Fino, fino!’ and waved his arm in promise that we were going to drive to Paradise. ‘I wonder what it is that Dragutin considers fino, fino,’ said my husband, ‘I fear it may be something quite terrible in concrete.’ Looking out of the window, I said, ‘There are an extraordinary number of shops, and they sell excellent things, really quite excellent fruit.’ ‘I see that everybody moves quickly and lightly,’ said my husband. ‘This little place has a pride, as if it were somewhere like Bitolj.’ The road took us out of Kossovska Mitrovitsa, into a valley, hugging the base of steep hills covered with dwarf beechwoods and winding with the willow-hung course of a river, and brought us soon to a succession of prodigies alien from the idyllic character of the countryside, which suggested the more delicate type of folk-song, just a little more robust than the written lyric. There was a multiplication of railway tracks by the river-bank; and then there was a low hill, not a mound but a hill, square-cut and the colour of death. ‘That is waste from the mines,’ said my husband; ‘nothing can ever be done with it, nothing will ever grow on it.’ Then came a group of pale corrugated buildings, fantastic according to the whimsey of engineering, straddling high on stilts here, there dropping long galleries from third floor to ground like iron necks that want to drink, or lifting little tanks that stand on thin legs among the roofs like storks. ‘This is an immense place,’ said my husband happily. Then the river regained its peace and ran among its water-meadows again, and the road forsook it and swung up the southern incline of a steep hill. ‘Fino, fino!’ cried Dragutin, waving at the hillside; and he was perfectly right. The upper half of the hillside was unreclaimed from wild nature and wild history; above beechwoods and thickets, a slope of long grass harlequined with flowers ran up to a pinched peak confused with the ruins of a castle. This was lovely enough, but not so lovely as what lay below. The lower half of the hillside was entirely covered with villas of the Golder’s Green sort, standing in little gardens; and it was indeed fino, fino. I would not have thought so before I went to the Balkans, but now I knew it.

‘I never realized before,’ said my husband, ‘that a garden is a political thing.’ For weeks past we have never seen a country house which was not planned on the definite understanding that the people living in it were bound to be frightened most of the time, and for very good reason. Unless houses were in the centre of a town they turned blank sides to the road, and surrounded themselves with high walls, to halt the attack of the Turkish soldier, the brigand, or the tax-collector. But here we saw windowed walls freely exposed to the four quarters, their irises and their roses and green peas and runner beans left unguarded before every eye. Here nobody’s grandmother had been raped and hamstrung, nobody’s grandfather had had his entire crop stolen by brigands and been marched off by the disappointed tax-collectors to do a season’s forced labour for the Pasha and never been seen again. Some of the windows were brightly giving back the westering sun, and it seemed like a blast blown by a jolly trumpeter who had never known despair. ‘These houses belong to the chiefs,’ said Dragutin, ‘but the men also have beautiful homes. Look down in the valley! But let us go on, for the Gospodin Mac’s home is at the very top, and it’s the most beautiful of all!’ Thus we ascended to heights superior to Golder’s Green, to Chislehurst, to very Heaven, which is indeed what Chislehurst is, can one but see it for a second brushed clear of that dust which settles on institutions, not when they are disused but when they have been so long in use that they are taken for granted.

There was a gravel sweep, and beds of standard roses on each side of the front door, and Dorothy Perkins all over the white rough-cast walls, and a perambulator on the porch. An Aberdeen terrier waddled out to meet us, and we acclaimed him, since not for weeks had we heard a country dog bark so comfortably, with so palpable a mere feint of exasperation. But this dog had known no graver incident in its life than a moment’s uncertainty about the verdict of the judges at Crufts‘; he did not come of a line of dogs trained to take food only from their master’s hands lest his enemies should poison them. Within the villa there was English chintz, fatly upholstered armchairs and sofas, polished floors, and, as so often in an English home, a Scottish family. There was the Gospodin Mac, a Scotsman of the toughly delicate type, whose sharp features and corded neck and lean body looked as if the east winds that had blown on him in his childhood had twisted and wrung every part of him save the head and the heart. His wife was a sample of the other Scotland, the abundant Scotland, the one country which knows how to make its cakes rich enough, that scorns the superficial voluptuousness of icing and cream fillings and achieves the sober luxury of shortbread and Scotch bun. She was strongly built; Ayrshire-born, she used the deep soft speech of the Western Lowlands; and she moved slowly and confidently, as those do, no doubt, who work in the Mint. For she too had behind her a store of wealth, in her mother wit and powers of observation, her invincible curiosity, and her unalterably high standards. There was a married daughter, who wrung my heart without knowing it by her resemblance to the dearest friend of my schooldays, whose angular grace and fine cheek-bones and clear colouring and sweet voice she had borrowed without the slightest excuse of a blood tie. These people instantly entranced us. I hung round them shamelessly, like a hungry dog at a larder door. We stayed with them too long that day, for we accepted when we were asked to supper, and did not go back to the hotel afterwards as soon as we should. Indeed, whenever I found myself in their presence I stayed with them exactly as long as I could, because they knew all sorts of things that I and my friends do not know, they were all sorts of things that I and my friends are not.

‘Neither this nor any of the mines we own in Yugoslavia is being worked for the first time. First the Greeks worked them, and then the Romans; then in the Middle Ages the Serbs brought in the Saxons to work them. Then under the Turks the work stopped, stopped dead, for five centuries, until we started it again. And the funny thing is that you can tell each period by its style, without looking at its age. The Greeks had great fancy, they seem to have been wonderful at guessing where the stuff was likely to be and finding the most ingenious way of getting at it. But their construction was only fairish. The Romans don’t seem to have had such good ideas but they were grand on construction. They always made a lovely job of the building. And the Saxons just came along nicely, without adding anything, but following on well. And we’re using a lot of it just as it was. I never go by the stone seat where the Roman sentinel sat, without giving it a pat, and wondering too. For just by that seat there’s a bit of construction that none of us can understand. There’s a long piece of tunnelling, too small for even a child to crawl through, running from one full-sized gallery to another, and no way of getting from one to the other that I can see. We’ve all puzzled our heads over it, and not one of us can work out an explanation. But sometimes that happens, you find workings in old mines that are incomprehensible to the finest engineers.’ It was disconcerting, this emergence of mystery, constant character of human activities, in anything so concrete as mining.

There was an offer to take us up to the mine next day, which I accepted so eagerly that the Gospodin Mac brought forward his immensely thick eyebrows and made his terms plain. ‘I said up to the mine, not down the mine, mind you.’ My husband and I smiled at one another, for I have a terror of going below the earth, which has kept me out of London and New York subways for twenty years; but I said, ‘Is it so dangerous, then?’ But it was not a matter of danger; it was the men’s feelings that had to be considered. ‘They believe that if women come down the mine there is bound to be an accident. Now will you explain me that? They had just that same belief out in the mines where we were in South America, and they have it in mines all over the world. But elsewhere than here you have miners whose families have been working below surface for generations and who have worked in different countries. It’s natural they should have developed their superstitions and then pooled them with the miners of these other countries. But the people here haven’t worked in a mine for five hundred years; in fact I don’t think these people have ever worked in mines, because under the Serbian Empire it was Saxons and Saxons only who were miners. The foreign miners who taught these chaps their mining work can’t have given them these ideas, for they couldn’t speak Serbian enough for general conversation, indeed they have to teach them largely by the look-see method. Well, how does it happen that miners here now hold, and hold passionately, as if they had held them for generations, exactly the same superstitions that miners hold all over the world? I wish somebody would explain me that.’ His daughter said, ‘And there’s no use arguing with them over this superstition, for whenever Dad’s insisted on letting a woman go down the mine there’s been an accident just afterwards.’ ‘A serious one?’ The Gospodin Mac shrugged his shoulders. We paused, confronted for a moment by the suspicion that the universe was idiotic; or that man was idiotic, made idiotic to the point of suicide, which would make his unconscious self pull down a prop and let blackness devour him, rather than that his libel on the female of his kind should be proved untrue.

The women talked too, always well, always of known things. They spoke of the people in the town. Yes, there were still some Turkish families who had not gone back to Turkey, who were indeed too wealthy to abandon their interests here. There was one family which Mrs Mac knew quite well, who still kept a nice house outside the town. There were some fine sons, but they were all at odds, all pulled apart because they wanted to fit in with Yugoslavian life but had their family pride and tradition keeping them to Mohammedanism, which made them aliens in their own country. One had recently consented to obey his parents and marry the daughter of a merchant in Bitolj, in order to cement some business alliance. ‘But the boys here get used to seeing the girls that work in our offices down at the mill,’ said Mrs Mac, ‘and right smart they are; indeed, I think the White Russians almost overdo it.’ The girl from Bitolj did not satisfy these standards, and it was the habit of the young husband to get drunk every now and then and go with his wife to some public place and twitch off her veil and cry, ‘Look at the dreary piece I’ve been given!’ But he always woke up afterwards a good Turk, and suffered agonies of repentance for his outbreak, so he had the worst of both worlds.

‘Most of the Moslems we have working for us are Albanians,’ said the Gospodin Mac, ‘and everybody likes the Albanians.’ That is universally said: the enmity the Turks fostered between the Albanians and all the other Slav races is being allayed simply by Albanian charm. They began to talk of their old gardener, an Albanian Moslem, whom they had loved dearly, and who was now desperately ill of an internal disease. ‘I doubt his wife’s any great help to him,’ said Mrs Mac. ‘It’s a funny thing, these Moslem women aren’t so domesticated as you would think. They say they don’t take any pleasure in cooking, and that if they’re by themselves they just live on black coffee, drinking it all the day through. I don’t think they know how to make their men comfortable. But the people round here were in a terrible state until the mine started. Lots of them had no notion of cooking. They’d bake a kind of unleavened bread in the ashes and that’s all they’d do; and in the time when the gourds are in they’d mix up some gourds and dough and bake it into the most awful mash you ever saw, just like the dog’s dinner. Meat they’d never see from one year to another, so they just lived on this mess.’

It is written in the history books that three hundred years after Kossovo the Serbs of this district tried to find a remedy for their misery by emigration. They had never been subdued and had spent those intervening centuries in perpetual revolt, but after they had aided the Austrians in their attacks on the Ottoman Empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century and had seen the Westerners, with all their advantages, fail, they lost heart. Then came the time that is written of again and again, when the Patriarch Arsenius III accepted the Austrian Emperor Leopold’s offer to receive hospitably all Serbians migrating into his territory, and he marched at the head of thirty-seven thousand Serbian families across the waste lands of the Slavs into Hungary in 1690. That is what is set out in the history books. But of course it is not the whole truth. Nothing is written of the people who did not join in the trek, for of course not all of them did. When Caulaincourt passed across Russia at the side of Napoleon they found that none of the towns which had been evacuated were quite empty. In each of them were ‘Quelques malheureux de la dernière classe du peuple,’ ‘quelques vieils hommes et femmes de la dernière classe.’ It would be so here. There would be some people who would not join in the emigration because their extreme misfortune made them unacceptable even by their own unfortunate community: the old, the sick, the criminal, women without men, victims of odd obligations, those on whom the enemy had some hold. They stayed behind, and the generations after them forgot. Forgot everything, even how to cook. So what they ate looked like the dog’s dinner. History came up in its real colours, blown on by this woman’s breath.

We said good-night and stood in the porch under the Dorothy Perkins roses waiting for Dragutin. In the valley below a dog howled, and howled again: a bore of a dog that had never been told about climax. ‘Confound that dog,’ said Gospodin Mac, ‘that’s the one that keeps me from sleeping. We must see about that tomorrow; this is the third night that it’s been giving us a concert.’ ‘It’s the German’s dog,’ said his daughter. ‘Do you have many Germans working here?’ asked my husband. ‘Only the one that takes care of the rope-way,’ said the Gospodin Mac. ‘Well, if you have to have a rope-way, you have to have Germans,’ said my husband. ‘I don’t think I like that, the way that all the decent funiculars in the world are made by a German company.’ ‘I don’t like it myself,’ said the Gospodin Mac, ‘but we console ourselves with thinking that they won’t make a funicular except with English steel rope.’ His happy knowledge of material objects made me think of two lines of a poem taught me in my childhood, which had always till now seemed ironic:

‘The world is so full of a number of things, 

I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.’

The night wind blew through the women’s thin dresses, and I murmured apologetically, ‘That chauffeur is a very long time in coming.’ Then we heard through the darkness the voice of Dragutin making his farewells to the butler and the cook at the kitchen door, slow and deep-chested and rhetorical, and he came striding along with primitive but superb panache: so might a subject of Stephen Dushan’s have borne himself, sure that at any moment now he might receive the horse and armour which would make him a noble. With a new breadth of style, he drove us down the hillside, where naked lights over gateways carved out of the blackness a white cell of garden that would be for ever England as far as Carter’s seeds could help it, along the dark highway, through the sleeping town, to the hotel, which was oddly at this late hour a square of light. The café was still half full of people. It had the same air as all places where Slavs sit up at night: it was as if time had precipitated itself in the artificial light and hung there suspended, brooding before it again committed itself to the curious course of life. ‘You are up late,’ my husband said to the proprietor. He answered, ‘It is the White Russians from the mines, they never want to go to bed.’ And indeed it could be seen that it was so, for these people had the Russian quality which, not the same as merit, nor even beauty, makes them a point of departure for the imagination, that special quality which makes any actor or actress with Terry or Barrymore blood light up a stage, whether he or she can act or not. ‘I do not complain,’ said the proprietor, ‘it means money. We had no money till the mines opened, but now it comes in, more and more every day. God be thanked!’ he said.

We were in a town drenched with a rising tide, but the tide had not yet risen so far as one might suppose. That we learned next morning as we went about making purchases before they came to take us up to the mines. This was an island: parts of it were even now incommunicado, not having had whispered to them the words we all know. We realized this when a photographer from whom we had bought some films halted us at the show-case outside his shop, saying, ‘Look! Of these I am unusually proud!’ He spoke of several pictures representing a middle-aged woman, wearing the full trousers and embroidered jacket of an odalisque, and offering the spectator a cup of coffee with a leer which indicated that it was a symbol for the joys of the harem. The portraits were in fact not unattractive. It is true that she was plump as an elephant, but she was so beautiful that the resemblance only served to explain what it is that male elephants feel about female elephants. ‘Very nice,’ said my husband, ‘who is she?’ ‘The wife of the general in command of our garrison,’ said the photographer. It was as if a show-case in Aldershot High Street should be filled with portraits of the wife of the general in command of the district, clad in the coquetry and localized plumage of Mistinguett.

But we spoke no more of her, for my husband had caught sight of another photograph, set just below these portraits, which were so exuberant in the literal sense of the word. It strangely contrasted with them. Four astonished mourners presented to the street a lidless coffin, in which there lay a bearded man with closed eyes, death collecting visibly in the hollows of his cheeks. About the coffin stood some children, wild-eyed with grief, and a woman putting her hand to a forehead blank with distraction. ‘My God, who was that?’ my husband asked. ‘It is our late Mayor,’ said the photographer. ‘He was a very good man.’ ‘Was he assassinated, or was it an accident?’ asked my husband. ‘Who? The Mayor?’ said the photographer. ‘No, no, it was remarkable how everybody liked him. He died of something wrong with his stomach.’ ‘Then what is this scene?’ ‘It is just his funeral.’ ‘But look!’ I said, pulling at my husband’s sleeve, for I had found yet a third indication of a life different from ours. It was the photograph of a young black-haired man wearing the kind of face which Slavs assume when they intend to look romantic, which all Russian ballet-dancers use when they are teetering for balance: it resembles a sad spoon. The portrait showed his nude torso to the waist; and between his mammary glands, which were a shocking waste, a chain suspended that most innocent exemplar of jewellery, a heart-shaped pendant with a seed pearl in its centre. ‘Who is this young man?’ asked my husband. ‘He is a lieutenant in the garrison here,’ replied the photographer, wholly without embarrassment. ‘He is a funny fellow, always coming to be photographed, always in fancy dress, sometimes in woman’s clothes.’ ‘Are there many such young men here?’ asked my husband. ‘He is the only one,’ said the photographer.

At our hotel a car waited to take us up to the mines and Constantine sat dunking a roll in his coffee. ‘Good-morning!’ we called, and he answered us civilly, but with a look of condemnation checked only by the painful exercise of courtesy. It was apparent that we were committing the same crime as those who are not sea-sick when others are. ‘Will you be ready soon?’ we asked. His forehead contracted in agony. It was apparent that we spoke too loud. ‘Ready for what?’ he asked. ‘To go up to the mines,’ I said, ‘it will all be very interesting, and you’ll like the manager, he is a most wonderful person.’ Constantine laughed silently into the distance. It was apparent that we had shown gross insensitiveness. ‘No, I do not think I would like the manager,’ he said. ‘I have read of such people in Dickens, and I think we are of quite different sorts.’ ‘Oh! Come on!’ we pleaded, but he raised his eyebrows and pulled his mouth down and looked down at the tablecloth, slowly shaking his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘where men claw at the sides of the noble mountains, for the sake of money, mere money, there I would be quite out of place. But you go,’ he said kindly, ‘you go. I shall not blame you. We cannot all feel the same repugnances. Go up there and be happy. And I will get Dragutin to drive me to some place where the mountains have not been violated. And there I will be at peace, and I will remember that I am a poet, and I will be very happy. Happier than I think you could understand.’ We murmured and left him, not because we were angered by him, for we were not. Both of us loved him, and he was at this moment most piteous, for his floridity was purplish and the whites of his eyes were dun. But it was as physically exhausting to talk to him when he was fixed in this preverse attitude as it would be to talk to a contortionist whose mouth spoke out of the shadow under his crooked knee.

The chauffeur who had come to take us to the mines was the personal chauffeur of the Gospodin Mac; and it appeared that there are some who are heroes to their valets. ‘Does he hope we will repeat all this to his employer?’ my husband wondered; but answered himself, ‘No, he is too noble a creature and anyway he conceives his relationship with the Gospodin Mac as already ideal.’ We went out of the town and received proof that we were indeed in the South, where the land burns in summertime like the human skin; a bridge joined brown land to brown land, and in a brown river there swam brown youths. In a valley where still browner babies kicked and squealed among bulrushes in a shallow stream, there marched over the mountainside the pylons of a rope-way, with here and there a carrier riding down from the mines to. the mill. Thereafter there was a group of gay new houses up on the hills, and the chauffeur halted us. ‘Our workmen live there,’ he said, and we responded that they were very beautiful; and so they were, they had the same lyrical quality as some modern French industrial garden cities, such as those on the Seine near Caudebec where the hydroplanes are made. ‘Some of the houses you will see later on are built by the company, and they are magnificent,’ continued the chauffeur, ‘but these are built by the workmen themselves, and they are fine enough. They also have the wonderful thing that the Gospodin Mac has brought to our country. They also have the septic tank.’ He turned towards us passionately. ‘Is it not a most wonderful thing, the septic tank? All this filth that gushes out’—his arms drew on the sky an image of the impurity that floods the universe, not to be beaten back by the spirit, only to be conquered by the talisman of the Gospodin Mac—‘turned into water, clear water!’ His hands fluttered, saluting salvation. ‘Many centuries after my master is dead,’ he cried, ‘he will be honoured because he brought us the septic tank.’ The primal idea of sanitation surprised us by its angelic appearance. Yet the memory of the obscure apartment at Prishtina, with the age-old coat of slime on its floor, made it not so surprising.

I would never have known the mine-head for what it was. It looked like a railway station, standing under a scar in the wooded hills at the valley-head, with a goods tram loaded with lumps of ore, the colour of ageing and desperate silver, puffing away from it. In what looked like a waiting-room, and was a kind of office, we found two young Englishmen wearing overalls and carrying electric torches, who paused to tell us before they went off to take baths that they had just been down the mine with the Gospodin Mac, and that he had come up first and would be with us as soon as he had bathed and dressed. They were admirable young men, neatly shaped by their profession, like well-sharpened pencils. Not theirs the long points of the artists and scientists, which are as like as not to break and necessitate a fresh use of the knife; not theirs the bluntness of those who know no craft. They were just right. As they went I looked at the map of the mine that was hanging on the wall and said, ‘I cannot understand the name of this place—Stan Trg. Trg I know to be market, but what is Stan? It does not seem like a Serbian word at all.’ ‘Neither it is,’ said one of the Englishmen, ‘it is simply a mistake. Somebody copied the name wrongly when the mine was started, and nobody about the place knew enough Serbian to correct it. But it ought to be Stari.’ They left us marvelling at the impersonality of the governing demon of mining, which goes into a country of which it knows nothing, not so much of its language as the word which means ‘old,’ and digs down into its vitals for its secret wealth.

By daylight the Gospodin Mac’s wind-bitten fragility looked even frailer than on the night before, his strength more apostolic in its meek sternness. We walked out of the office with him and the drivers of some passing ox-carts turned their heads to look at us, strangers partaking in the local glory. Each of them was enough to ravish the heart of woman, for they wore the Lika cap. This is the most attractive form of headgear ever designed for men. It is a round black cap with a red edge to it, and a bunch of fine black braid falling to the left shoulder where it gives any man an air of gallantry and amusing faithlessness. By itself it would explain why Lord Byron loved the Near East. ‘But Lika is far away,’ I said. It is on the Karst, on the limestone behind the Dalmatian coast, to be reached from Kossovo only through Montenegro or by by-ways in the Bosnian hills. ‘We are full of those chaps,’ said Gospodin Mac, ‘the Government sends batches of them down here to work for us, from the villages up there on the mountains, where they can never make a decent living, because there’s literally no land, just pocketfuls of earth in the rock. We have all sorts of people here, you know. It’s a fine mix-up of races and religions. We have the Catholic Croats from Croatia, Catholic Croats from Dalmatia, the local Orthodox Serbs who were here when we came, the Orthodox Serbs from Serbia who are quite different, some Orthodox Serbs from Montenegro, who are quite different again, the local Albanians, who are some of them Moslems and some of them Catholic and a few of them Orthodox, some White Russians in the offices and in the mill, and us Scotch and English and Americans. Yes, they get on well now. At first it wasn’t good. Sometimes it was very bad indeed. We had a Croat foreman who engaged the hands, and there was a devil of a row about him with the Serbs, they swore he was favouring the Croats. But he was a good man, and I thought there was nothing in it, and I wouldn’t fire him. So one day the poor fellow was sitting in his office and a Serb workman who had had too much to drink came in and shot him dead. It was a terrible business. But we caught the murderer, though he had gone up into the hills, and he was sent down for a long sentence, and that got us all on a stage further. They saw that the old days were over, and that you didn’t pay for a life with a life, but with a life in a prison. That they don’t like so much, and they began to see things differently.’ ‘Had the Croat foreman been favouring the Croats?’ I asked, and when he did not answer but talked of something else, I asked him again at his first pause: I never learned better when I was a child, though they often tried to teach me. ‘We have a Croat now in much the same position, and no man could be fairer,’ was his answer, and I fell behind, staring in the dust while the two men talked mineral technicalities. ‘I thought there was nothing in it.... We have a Croat now who ...’ I saw him sitting alone in an office, turning over a dead man’s papers, growing suddenly white and pinched round the nostrils as he recognized some obstacle to order which had taken the mean advantage of being ideological and not metallurgical, of not being amenable to treatment on sound mining principles.

A winding road took us up a steep hill through a garden city of white houses and pink roofs, set about with orchards. It was exactly like such places in the West and totally different. With us they mean an attempt to mitigate a victory of darkness over decent earth; but here it meant that the decent earth had for the first time in centuries known other than darkness. With us industrial workers appear as victims of a social system that has prevented them from enjoying the relatively agreeable existence of a free peasant or an artisan, and has condemned them to a standard of comfort far below that enjoyed by other classes who do easier work or none at all. That view was moonshine here. For five centuries no way of living had been within reach of these people which could be considered as a preferable alternative; this was not so in Macedonia and not so in Serbia, but it was true of this particular area. For five centuries there had been no class in this community which enjoyed such a high standard of comfort, and there still is none; the functionaries and Army officers are far more pinched for means. In the porches of these little houses women were sitting as the blessed in Paradise, with the reinforced satisfaction of those who have known a previous inferiority. Their children, playing among the flowers, turned on us eyes that, whether black or that profound yet light Slav blue, seemed to lack something and be the better for it; and we realized how many of the children we had seen lately had been solemnized by the knowledge of hunger and peril. ‘Running water in every house,’ murmured the Gospodin Mac, ‘and they keep them like new pins.’ We passed through this ordinary yet authentic Eden, and came to a canteen where the unmarried workers eat their midday meal. There cooks stood smiling with the special pride of those who practise mysteries not only beneficent but novel, beside cauldrons where bean soup bubbled brown and sooty black, and lamb chops simmered in gravy peat-red with paprika. I know of at least one English public school where the food is not so good. There was no mistake about it, here mechanical civilization was enticing. This modern industrial unit pleased like a paper transparency held against light, for the double reason that it was a superb specimen of its kind, and that there was behind it the vacuum of Turkish misrule.

It was as touching as the glow of contentment in the eyes of the foreign immigrants in the United States during the good old days before 1929, who were entranced to find themselves where there was an abundance of food, no matter what the weather might be, warm and cheap clothing, comfortable footwear, water-tight housing, and, not easily to be acquired but within the possibility of acquirement as never in Polish Galicia or Portugal, radios, refrigerators, and automobiles. They had not realized that in this new industralized world there are seasons other than those determined by the course of the sun, which are both crueller and longer; and that the urban versions of blizzard and drought are more terrible because they must be suffered in an absolute destitution, unknown to communities where each owns or has the right of access to at least a strip of land, and where all are joined by ties of blood or friendship cultivated through generations. The process had been slower in our own country, but I had seen its last lamentable phase. The English manufacturers of the nineteenth century had appeared as redeemers to the downtrodden agricultural labourers who were dying rather than living under a land system which would have shocked the Balkans, and who found food and warmth such as they had never known in the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire and the Midlands; but they have no such reputations among the vast unhappy army of the unemployed. My instinct therefore was to warn the miners who were coming in at the door, grinning with happy appetite, ‘Do not be deceived. Whom you suppose to be your benefactor is in fact your enemy, and will enslave you and take from your children what you never lost even under the Turk, the right to work.’

They would have answered, ‘What, we are to count as an enemy one who gave us food for our bellies and clothes for our back, and a reasonable chance of dying in our beds? If you ask that, then you can never have known hunger and cold and fear.’ And they would have been right. It is a monstrous piece of bogus liberalism to deny that industrialism has done much for the highest interests of humanity by raising the standard of living. It is as foolish as to deny the harm it has done them by not raising it enough, by poisoning the skies and fields with cheap cities, and taking away the will of its employees by keeping them in political and economic subjection. I was at fault in assuming that because English and American industry had proved unable to maintain its workers as it had at first promised, that must be so in Yugoslavia. The slow decline of prosperity in England was due to the shrinkage of markets, caused largely by the increasing capacity of the Orient to produce its own requirements, to the defects of the upper-class education which put all industrial undertakings with the promise of stability into the hands of heirs incapable of adapting themselves to altered conditions, and to overconservative banking. The quick decline of prosperity in America was due to industrialists who had lost sight of the existing limitations of consumption, and to reckless banking. In both England and America the ultimate blame lay, of course, deeper than this: in the insistence of the richer classes in keeping too large a proportion of the profits of industry, and all its control, in their own hands. This meant that it was exploited for the benefit of their immediate needs and not with regard to its perpetuation. That deepest factor of all was present in the Yugoslavian situation. These miners were working for the share-holders, whose interests came first. But the mine had been started after the war, when European aspirations had become more modest, by Anglo-American financiers of the more stable sort, who had never suffered from the gambling fever that swept Wall Street and the Middle West. It was probably under cautious and disillusioned management, and was certainly staffed by men who had no hopes of rising to permanent grandeur in a Scotch baronial mansion with twenty-five bedrooms, all kept up by grinding the faces of the poor. It might well be that the industrial unit would last so long as there was metal to be fetched out of the ground, prudently and patiently.

Was there, one wondered, unity among these workers? Were the English and Americans, who formed the high command of the mines, as it were, sensible of the necessity to make this enterprise an instrument of life instead of death? That depended on what mining engineers were like, which was a matter wholly veiled from me. I knew that the one beside me was fully aware of the issues within his control.

The Gospodin Mac was pointing to a hillside that showed the particular charm of Serbian scenery, the upland lawn among woodlands, proper place for nymphs to dance, and he was saying, ‘That’s our land too. And I was sorry to buy it, though it’s as well for us to have as much land as we can round here. There was a piece down on the other side of the valley that we couldn’t snap up in time, and some blackguards started a red-light district there that’s the source of almost all the trouble we have with the men. But this land up here I was sorry to buy, because the Albanian who owned it hadn’t wanted to move out of it, and he was a really decent old man. He came to me and he said, “Here you’d better have my land. It’s no use to me any more. My women can’t walk about unveiled on the place, and we can’t live the same sort of life we used to before you came. So give me some money for it and we’ll go down and live in the town.” And mind you, I think the family had been there for ever. We gave him two thousand pounds for the place and every step of the transaction was a pleasure, he was so honest and polite, and he knew perfectly well we were being fair with him, and he would have cut off his hand rather than not be fair with us. I often grieve that we should have put an end to the way he and his family were living, for it was producing fine people. Every now and again he comes in for advice, because he trusts us, but I don’t know that there’s much of his two thousand left. It’s not easy to find investments in this country that give as good return as land, and it’s not easy to live a life in a little town that’s as good as life in your own place up in the hills. There’s no sense trying to fool oneself, not every change is for the better.’ That is the sort of ancient wisdom modern man must have.

He added, ‘But anyway I’ve a soft spot for the Albanians. We all like them. And it’s not just because they knuckle down to us. They’ve got plenty of spirit. They’re good trade unionists. When we had a wages dispute some time ago the Albanians stood firmer than anybody, and I admired them for it. Afterwards the Government sent a commission down to inquire into the causes of the strike, and they hinted to me they thought it a pity we employed so many Albanians, but I wasn’t having any. I said straight out we employed them because we found them decent, hard-working fellows, and we’d go on employing them. But that’s something that’s getting better. The Serb administrators all get to like the Albanians and less and less make a distinction between them and their own people. This country’s getting over its past nicely.’ We paused to take breath on a steep turn in the road, and looked down on the workmen’s canteen. My husband asked me, ‘Did you see the two men who just went into the building? No? Well, I thought one of them was Dragutin.’ ‘It could not have been,’ I said confidently, ‘he is taking Constantine somewhere up into the mountains.’ At the thought of Constantine both of us felt guilty, as if we had failed in charity by being happy away from him, with this whole and untroubled man.

But this man was a genius: the unique exception that not only fails to prove the rule, but leaves it in doubt what the rule may be. Nor could one judge anything from Gospodin Mac’s predecessor, Mr Cunningham, whom we found higher up in the road, a broad grizzled Scotsman standing in his garden with a monk, both intent on a beehive. It seemed that bee-keeping was his hobby, and he spent much of his time teaching people of the district to make and use modern hives instead of the primitive sort which have to be broken every time a comb is removed; and this was of special interest to the poorer monasteries, which could not afford to buy sugar. When the monk had left us we walked among Mr Cunningham’s flowers, which were magically not desiccated by the South, which grew as if the earth were cooled by the Highland air that had nourished his accent. I said to him, ‘What columbines! They look like living things that might fly away at any minute,’ and he answered, ‘Ay, you know they call them the fairy flowers.’ His Scottish r’s roared past me like the March wind in Princes Street. ‘Fehrrry flowerrrs....’ Presently Mr Cunningham said, ‘I’ll be telling Sasha to send a bottle of absinthe up to the mess for our cocktails, if the company is as partial to it as I am,’ and he called to the house, ‘Sasha! Sasha!’ He explained to us, ‘Sasha’s our factotum here; he’s a great character. Lord knows what would happen to us all if Sasha wasn’t here to look after us.’ When Sasha came out into the garden this conversation followed the pattern so often to be remarked in countries where people of a mechanized Western race live among people of a more primitive race whom they have dominated. The Scotsman opened the conversation in the peremptory tones of a nurse speaking to a child, and the Serb answered like a child who accepts the authority of a nurse, but made a further remark in which he in his turn spoke like the nurse, and was answered by the Scotsman as if he were the child. It is thus that an English officer in India talks with his Hindu batman, it is thus that a Southerner talks with his coloured butler, it is thus that a Canadian holiday-maker talks with his Indian guide, should they be intelligent people. Only stupidity fails to recognize that each of the parties in such a relationship has command of a store of information almost wholly forbidden to the other; so that each, in the other’s sphere, is helpless and astray unless his host is generous. That recognition was fully present in the Scotsman’s voice. His climate-toughened shrewdness made him sensitive to the problems of his profession, the nature of ore and its hiding-places under the earth. It made him wise also about bees, flowers, and men, and not to be deflected from his wisdom by vanity. He could not have borne to sacrifice his just perception of Sasha in order to exaggerate his sense of superiority to Sasha. Such men favour the growth of civilization.

But the ordinary run of mining engineers might not be of the same breed as their leaders. There was this inveterate disposition to care only for their hard inorganic quarry, and to leave the state of living men which was the mine’s matrix unnoticed and uncomprehended, which had been responsible for the naming of a Serbian mine with the gibberish of ‘Stan Trg,’ which had been a characteristic of those who had worked here before them, in the days anterior to the Turkish night. On a plateau by this hillside road stood the ruins of a chapel where the Saxon miners, brought here by the medieval Serbian kings, had worshipped according to their faith. Those Saxons were not Serbs, nor Saxons either, but simply miners. They formed a state within the state. The Serbian laws did not bind them; they were subject to the code, which was not borrowed from Saxony, but was simply and purely of the mines. It was not, as might have been suspected, a permit to laxity, extorted by those who rendered essential services to an expanding state; it was a juristic provision for the miner’s mystery, to use that admirable English word meaning all information relating to the theory and practice of a craft, which we borrowed from the Old French mestier, and by carelessness amounting to genius confused in spelling with the word we derive from the Greek for occult. It made that craft an iron-bound dedication: a man found damaging a mine was hung by a rope downwards in the pitshaft, and the rope was cut. For their Catholic worship these separate people had taken a church such as was built by the natives of this soil, a Byzantine church planned for the Orthodox rite, and had brought a German artist to paint it with frescoes. Centuries after, now that its vaults were broken and its frescoes washed pale by rain and sun, it was apparent that something had happened which had left this not a true growth of the genius of the land. These were true internationalists, disregarding the nation’s peculiar soul.

So, too, were the young men we met in the mess at the top of the road. They were mining engineers, without any doubt. Other things they might be, sons and lovers, husbands and fathers, saints and sinners, philosophers and natural men; but each of them, picked up between divine finger and thumb, and asked by the thunder who he was, would have answered, ‘I am a mining engineer.’ Their preoccupation with their calling was so great that it excluded any dangerously excessive intensification of itself. A mining engineer must keep fit; he must not be irritable and he must be able to bear up under physical strain. Therefore they played tennis, they read a bit, they took photographs, they learned languages; and they faced life with smooth brows and not a paunch among them. And they presented, as a shining tiled wall, this detachment from the life around them

There was one Serbian among them, a doctor, a jolly soul with reddish hair and a face that had begun to wrinkle not because he was older than his age but because he still loved to laugh like a child. When we said we had been in Bitolj he told me he was a native of that city, and we talked for a little about the place, its mosques, its lovely girls, its acacias, and the rich civilization that lay under its surface. It was his belief that the town, though so much poorer than it was when it was the capital of Macedonia, was still enormously rich. ‘Many, many of the women that shuffle about the little shops by the river in the morning, in their cotton wrappers,’ he said, ‘have more gold round their necks and their wrists than five hundred Viennese ladies who wear silk dresses ever see in their lives. I tell you the city is full of gold, is stuffed and crammed with gold.’ He spoke, too, with Balkan gusto of a perilous childhood. ‘My father was a schoolmaster,’ he said, ‘he was the head teacher of the first Serbian school that was ever in Bitolj. The Bulgarians had their schools and the Greeks had their schools, but we Serbs had none. So my father, who was a Serb from the Shumadiya, came down and taught his own people. So my mother was always very nervous, for of course any day he might have been killed, whether by the Turks or the Bulgars or the Greeks, she did not know.’ ‘But why should he be killed because he was a schoolmaster?’ asked some of the engineers. ‘And why was Bitolj such a rich city?’ They knew nothing of the tradition of the Turkey in Europe which had shaped the land in which they lived.

They were ignorant too of something which was more recent, and had been commemorated in print, for even the English to read. I said to the doctor, ‘And what happened to you during the war?’ and he answered, clapping his hand over his laughing mouth, ‘You will never guess! Do you know, I went with the retreating Serbian Army through the Albanian mountains down to the sea. You see, I should have gone with my mother and my brother and sisters in the refugee train to Salonika, but I was sent with a message to an old grand-uncle of mine in another part of the town, and on the way home I began to worry about a little boy I liked very much, so I went to see what he was going to do, and by the time I realized I could not find him I was too late to catch the train. So I joined some soldiers whom I saw walking in the street, and I went off with them to Ochrid, and away into the Albanian mountains. And, do you know, it was not so terrible. Yes, all you have heard is true. There was snow and ice, and very little to eat, and the Albanians sniped at us from the rocks. But I felt very grown-up, and all Serb boys want to be grown-up and to fight, and the soldiers made a great pet of me. When we got up into the mountains, they took a coat off a dead soldier and put it on me, and of course it was far too big for me, it came right down to my feet, so they called me “General Longcoat.” They were really very kind to me; when there was any food I always got the first of it. So, when we got to Corfu and they found my family was at Salonika, and sent me off to find them, I really was not so pleased. Think of being told to go to bed when you had been through all that!’

It was as astonishing as if one day a fellow-guest announced that he had been to Moscow and back with Napoleon; but it was not less astonishing that most of the Englishmen who were listening had never heard of the retreat through Albania, and not one of them had ever heard the folk-song which commemorates that agony: ‘Tamo Daleko, Daleko od mora. Tamo ye selo, Tamo ye Serbiya.’ Yonder, far yonder, far from the sea, is my village, my Serbia! It meant that they could not know Yugoslavia; or rather that they could not synthesize all the valuable information they held regarding her into any valid picture of her. It seemed to follow from this that they were a danger to the state, because they would not be controlled by regard for her interests of which they were ignorant. Such would have been the opinion of Brigham Young, who was one of the few really great statesmen of the nineteenth century. He always regarded as enemies of the state the prospectors and miners who came to Utah in search of her mineral wealth. They were not part of his people, and therefore would not serve its interests. That was his theory; but in this mess-room above the mines of Stan Trg it emerged that there was nothing in it so far as this part of the world was concerned.

These men were not free to turn against their fellows. A force bound them. They fell to recounting tales of their beginnings; all, it seemed, had gone into strange lands as youths, it might almost be said as children, and had been assailed by climates that were torturing misconducts of the sun and snows, and events that were monstrous births that should have been kept in bottles in the Surgeons’ Hall of circumstance. They had, however, not been perturbed. They had been, and were still, sustained by a code. They believed ... what did they believe? That one must be clean in body; that one must not tell lies, or suffer lies to be told to one; that one must do whatever work one was paid for doing, and do it well; and that one must not cause pain in other people, and must let them make their own souls as far as possible. This is the ethical tradition built into the English and American mind by Protestantism, and it is easy to deride it. There is indeed positive need that it should be derided, since it is an insufficient prop, and worse, for people who are prosperous; it is to them actually a prescription for ruin. Any Englishman of the upper bourgeoisie and the classes above it finds no difficulty about being clean; he can persuade himself that what he says is true, and can compel his economic inferiors to tell him the truth; he has probably chosen work that makes no great demands on his powers; and the duty to leave others in peace may be construed as permission to indulge in the pleasures of indifference. But this same code, applied by such as these mining engineers, was a discipline that can even become an instruction in mysticism. To be clean in lands where nature intends one to be sweaty and unkempt; to tell the truth and exact it in circumstances so difficult that cautiousness cries out to let all be glossed over; to do work well, far away from criticism, and in fatigue of the flesh and spirit; to respect the rights of alien people, who are uncomprehended and therefore terrible: this rule makes no man an enemy of the state. There are, of course, mining engineers who follow this discipline imperfectly or not at all. But since these in this mess were chosen by the Gospodin Mac, who was himself that discipline made visible, they were not of that sort. Though the West has again and again infected the Balkans with corruption, it seemed probable that this contact was innocent.

In the afternoon we drove away from the mines, down the valley to the town and the pale sprawling buildings where the ore was milled; about us conveyor belts went on their endless journeys to nowhere and puffs of smoke at escape-valves registered the culmination of a process which, so far as I, with my mechanical incompetence, was concerned, had never begun.

‘It is no use whatsoever for you to explain these things to me,’ I told the Gospodin Mac; ‘to me it is all magic and nothing but magic.’ ‘It is funny you should say that just here,’ he answered, ‘for that’s exactly what these particular machines are to me, and to everybody else in the outfit.’ We were standing among a number of tanks, all filled with a seething solution of ore, but each bubbling in a different tempo and stained to a different shade of grey. ‘These machines are the most valuable we have,’ he continued. ‘They’re the last word. They’re wizards. In each bath the ore throws off one of its constituents, either silver or magnesium or sulphur or whatever, so that by the time it’s got through this room all the goodness has been taken out of it and we’ve just to collect the various minerals from the baths. But I can’t understand the theory on which these machines work, nor does anybody else here that I know of. I don’t mean that we can’t mend them when they break down. We can, just as you could correct the faults of grammar in a book of mining, though you wouldn’t be able to make the sense of the book. But the principle of the things is far beyond me. The chaps who brought them over from America understood them all right, and they stayed here for a bit. But the machines were their life-work, they’d specialized on those lines, and we’re general-purposes fellows who have to get on with the business of running the mine.’ ‘Do you mean that in mining also there is too much to be known?’ I asked. ‘Much too much,’ he said, ‘for any one man.’ There is no escape from mystery. It is the character of our being.

But this man was not perturbed. We stood on the bridge that crossed the railway line, running from the mill to the high-road. On our left was the rope-way, striding across the hills up to the high mines; on our right was the steep wooded peak, crowned with the fortress. The afternoon was golden on these heights, but the Gospodin Mac looked before him at the square-cut hill of waste which in the sunshine was the colour of something deader than death, of death without the hope of wholesome putrefaction and dissolution. ‘That worries me a lot,’ he murmured. ‘So far as we can see, nothing will ever grow on that, not to the end of time. Well, it’s an eye-sore. And this was a bonny place before we started on it.’ On the line below us a dozen men were digging a pit, Albanian Moslems in their white fezes and linen tight-waisted shirts and trousers. I levelled my camera on them, and one looked up and saw me. Instantly he was transformed, and so, the instant after, was the whole group. Gallantry ran through their bodies, turning their heads to a provocative angle, setting their hands on their hips; their eyes and teeth flashed through the distance. Perhaps they could not see that I was no longer young, or perhaps their romanticism forbade them to notice it, so that they could go through the day with the idea that they had attracted the admiration of a beautiful Englishwoman.

The Gospodin Mac brooded over them as over his children. ‘I tell you they’re fine, these Albanians,’ he said. ‘And I think this lot have got over the blood-feud. That’s the curse of Albanian life. But they say they’re dropping it. It stands to reason they will. Give a man a decent job and a house and a garden he likes, and he’ll think twice about trapesing off to kill the uncle of a man who killed his second cousin, particularly if he knows he’ll go to jail. That blood-feud, you know, it made everything impossible. When the Yugoslavs took over this country after the war, it was hard to get the roads safe for travelling. Under the Turks, people simply did not travel, unless they were rich enough to have an armed escort or unless they had to for some reason. There were whole villages up in the hills where every single family was in the brigandage business. You couldn’t blame them. They’d been pushed into it. Maybe they’d fallen foul of the authorities at some time and got driven on to the land that can’t be cultivated. Or maybe there’d been a strong character born who’d turned the whole lot of them wrong. Anyway they used to sweep down on the roads round here and rob and murder. It had to be stopped. And the only way the gendarmes could stop it was by going up into these villages and killing every man, woman, and child. Mind you, nothing less would do. If they’d let one child get away, as soon as it had grown up it would have had to carry on the blood-feud against the gendarmes, or the people who were supposed to be responsible for the gendarmes’ attack. And that was a cruel hard thing, not only on the villagers but on the gendarmes, who are usually very decent fellows; and it was hard on the whole people. It lowered their standards. If you made the gendarmes as tough as that they were as tough with everybody. But settling down, it was just a phase....’

So it went on, this living exposition of the trials of a state engaged in resurrection, and therefore ravaged by the pangs of both death and birth.

When we went back to the hotel we were still glowing with satisfied listening, and we hushed each other as we caught sight of Constantine, sitting florid and miserable in the café, alone among the White Russians, a newspaper spread out on the table before him. ‘May we sit down with you and have coffee?’ I said timidly. ‘Certainly, certainly,’ he replied, but once we were seated, imposed on us hurt and smiling silence. My husband cleared his throat and asked, ‘Did you have a good day in the mountains?’ ‘I did not go. I did not care to go.’ Constantine answered shortly, and the silence fell again. At last he asked, ‘And you, I suppose you have had a charming day with your friends in the mines?’ With an air of guilt, we admitted that we had. ‘I am very glad,’ he said, ‘I am exceedingly glad, for maybe it will not always be so happy for you and your countrymen up at the mines.’ He tapped on the newspaper that lay before him. ‘It is all written here.’ ‘What is it?’ asked my husband. ‘An attack on the British company’s title to the mine?’ Constantine grimly nodded his head. ‘Yes. The concession was given as a reward to one of our great statesmen, and his son sold it. But he was perhaps not very clever; and all the world knows that to do business with the English one must be very clever indeed, perhaps more than clever.’ He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. ‘So perhaps a wrong was done, and perhaps it will be righted.’ ‘But the deal cannot have been crooked,’ said my husband. ‘I know the chairman of the company and what is more important I know his reputation in England and America, and the reputation of the company and its associates, and that’s not how they behave. Besides, it would have meant taking an immense risk. The company put a million pounds of their money into the mine before they got a penny out. If they did that on a property out of which they might be kicked at any moment because they had stolen it, they wouldn’t come out of it so well.’

Constantine shrugged again. ‘You are a city man,’ he said, ‘a man of the city of London. No doubt all your countrymen do looks well to you. But we are a simpler people. We see things from a different angle, and perhaps on what we see we shall some day act.’ A silence fell. We sadly drank our coffee and would have risen to go had not a young man, dressed rather in the style of a French romantic poet in the nineteenth century, paused before our table. ‘Good evening, Monsieur Constantine,’ he said in French, giving us a side-way look, ‘Monsieur Constantine, who was a poet, who is a Government servant.’ We saw that here also there were young intellectuals, as there had been in Belgrade and in Sarajevo and in Zagreb, who could not forgive Constantine for having left the opposition, who said of him quite unfairly, ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a ribbon to stick in his coat.’ ‘Good evening,’ said Constantine, and he explained to us, ‘This is a young writer who works by day in the laboratories at the mine. I know him well. All people are my friends everywhere.’ The young man continued, ‘Why are you sitting with that abominable rag in front of you? You know that it is full of the most abominable lies. These people at the mines are part of the filthy capitalist system, but they are as good as they can be in that condition. And it is all nonsense, it is galimatias, it is Quatsch, about the title to the mine. You know all that quite well, and you know that these papers are financed by German money, simply so that the Nazis can get their claws into our country. But you and your accursed pack of gangsters in Belgrade, you let the blackguards bring out these lying papers and threaten one of the few decent institutions in our unhappy country.’ ‘We do not,’ cried Constantine, ‘we suppress them as soon as we find out they are being published! Again and again the miserable things appear, and always we send out our forces after them and we destroy them, we stamp them into the dirt as they deserve!’ He looked miserably round at us, realizing as he spoke that he had contradicted himself; and he was now so disintegrated that he could not take any of the obvious ways out of the situation, he could not laugh at himself or pretend, as his talent for sleight of mind would have enabled him to do better than most men, that there was some subtle consistency behind his apparent inconsistency. There was nothing for us to do but rise and say good-night.

Kossovska Mitrovitsa II

We stayed another day in the town, but we never got Constantine near the Gospodin Mac, whom he would have been bound to like and to love, both because of his connoisseurship of greatness, and because of their common love for Yugoslavia. So that afternoon, while the Gospodin Mac and my husband indulged in some last orgies of technicalities in the mill, I sat alone with Mrs Mac on the terraces of her garden, overlooking the hills and the valley where the river ran, reflecting willows, between the sweet green pastures. I was a child who had been left alone with a honeypot, for this woman, like so many Scotswomen, had all the essential gifts of the novelist. She had been long an exile, and was homesick: half her talk made a palimpsest of the scene before us, overlaying old Serbia with Ayrshire, coloured as it lives. Touch by touch she built up a picture, harsh and honest like the portraits Degas painted in his youth, of the terrific ceremony that was performed every time her mother, a widow in the Scotland of forty years ago, arrayed herself in her weeds to leave her house: I saw and smelt again the thick black blistered crape, and felt the cutting edge of the starched white collar, and was awed and perplexed by the drugged and thickened expression, characteristic of widows in those days, which suggested that their state had about it some joyless and degrading satisfaction. Soberly but with the feeling she described flowing as fresh through her words as when it had first gushed from her eyes and heart, she told how the character of her youth had been changed, to something precious but less gay than youth should be, by her long engagement to Gospodin Mac, who was then seeking his fortune abroad, and who had been too unsure of himself to make their betrothal more than a matter of murmured vows. All her spring days had been clouded by heartache: ‘It’s not good, running for the post, year after year.’ Often she had felt that people thought her dull and a failure, and she had longed to tell her secret; but that would have been to tempt the gods by speaking of what she desired to happen as if it were already happening. Her story had the depth and vigour of early Scots poetry, of William Dunbar and Douglas’s Æneid.

This woman, with her masterly power of observation, with her inflexible standards, had been married nearly thirty years to the Gospodin Mac, and marriage is not so much a mystery as a microscope; but he had survived all her scrutiny, he had passed all her tests. Now he was the test she applied to life. She spoke constantly of Dad. ‘You see that big square white building at the foot of the hill facing this one? That’s the school the company gave the district. They were delighted with it and there was a tremendous to-do when the foundation stone was laid. And will you believe it? There was a priest, and we thought he had just come to say a prayer and give the place his blessing, but suddenly they upped with a lamb and he cut the throat of the poor wee thing all over the foundation stone. That’s nothing to do with Christianity, I thought. But it’s their own place. That’s what Dad always says. It’s their own place. They must do things their own way. They’re funny, mind you. They built the school too big. That’s one of their weaknesses. They build everything too big. They’re building a town hall down in Mitrovitsa. You’d think the place must be the size of Glasgow to look at it. But Dad says it’s no use raging at them for it. Just reckon with it on your side, and see that when they get in trouble on their side that they understand just how they caused themselves the trouble.’

She knitted a row or two of a jumper, and laid it by to say, ‘It’s time Dad retired. We’ve lived long enough abroad. We were twenty years and more out in South America. Both the children were born out there. Then we came back, and we had taken a house in Scotland, and they asked Dad to come out and have a look at this mine. They’d got the concession, you see, and they couldn’t find the right way of tackling it. So Dad came out and he saw that they had to go after the ore in a roundabout way, that they’d never get it by going any of the ways that looked direct. And then it fascinated Dad, the whole problem of the place, all the labour being different sorts of people and all wanting to cut each other’s throats. So I had to sell the furniture I’d just bought and the house, and come out here. And it’s been a great piece of work for him. But now it’s time both of us went home. We need a rest.’ She ran a knitting needle reflectively through her hair.

‘It’s difficult, you know, retiring now. Because there aren’t the middle-aged men to take over the responsible jobs. There’s plenty of good youngsters, but not men of forty to fifty. They’re the ones that got killed in the war. So it’s a temptation to the old ones to wait on till the youngsters get a bit older. And Dad’s got together a nice crowd here. He’s got the right spirit. You see it’s difficult here, they’ve got to be good in the mines and good with the people. There has to be a clear understanding about that in this sort of country. Dad always says to everybody who comes out here to the mines, “Now, you’ve got to be polite to the Yugoslavs, for it’s their country, and we’re only guests here.” But some of them don’t take the hint, particularly if they’ve been nobodies at home. They look to lord it over the Slavs here then. Sooner or later we get to hear of it if they do. The Yugoslavs only report it if one of our people is rude to an officer. The Army is sacred to them, you know. I do believe it’s more sacred than the Church is at home for we don’t think it’s so terrible to laugh at a minister. But anyway it comes out one way or another. I caught a common wee body making a face after I had taken a doctor’s wife from Belgrade round the bridge club when she thought I’d turned my back, and we watched the husband and found he was just the same. So they found themselves in the train for London before they knew where they were.’

She drew her hand across her forehead and down till her chin was cupped in it and then sighed into the palm, looking downward: the most Scots of gestures. ‘But it’s terrible here in some ways! The way they treat the women! And the law’s behind them, mind you!’ She shuddered, and told a story of a cultivated Bosnian woman, a graduate of Belgrade and Vienna universities, who had come to the mines to work as a chemist, had married a Serbian mining engineer, and been left a widow after some years; and had found herself visited by his peasant family, who seized all her furniture and every penny of the dead man’s savings, as the inheritance laws of the country permitted them to do, and made the startling demand that she should return with them and marry his brother. She spoke as one who had savoured the full horror of the subjection of women, as it is when it is actually practised and not merely dreamed about in a voluptuous reverie: a plundering, a mutilation, an insult to the womb and life, an invocation to mud and death. It was evident that, like all people who have lived long in exile, she sometimes felt that everything peculiar to the strange place where she found herself was a spreading sore, bubo of a plague that will infect and kill if there is not instant flight to the aseptic. But she was disciplined. She knew what shadowed her for the mere shadow that it was. After she had shuddered she instantly grew stable. She turned her head, which was lioness-massive, towards the green and red hills, the willowed stream in the valleys, and said she loved them all.

At half-past four we were to go down the hill to the tennis courts; for it was a saint’s day that was a public holiday, and the whole mining staff was to be there, because a famous professional player had come down for the day from Belgrade. First we had to perform some of those trivial domestic rites which are delicious to women like myself, who have had to work at a specialized task all their lives. Mrs Mac’s knitting had to be rolled up and her work-basket set in order. She moved with a slowness that was a sign of richness; cream does not pour quickly. We had to persuade the Aberdeen terrier to be shut in the house lest he should follow us. It seemed that the creature who had been sitting at my feet so gravely all afternoon, putting himself in just the right position to be scratched under the left ear, was the victim of an intemperate passion for balls. It was like hearing that a good sound Hegelian philosopher was given to drink. ‘Well, we’ll away!’ sighed Mrs Mac. We passed down a path through an orchard, round a curve to the tennis ground. It was superbly placed. Beyond the courts rose the peaked hill crowned with ruins, creamy with wild flowers that grew strong among the bushes.

The game had already begun, and it had fallen, as games between professionals and true amateurs are apt to do, into the pattern of a dance. The Serb professional sent the ball first into the left-hand corner of the court, and the English amateur returned it; then the Serb professional sent it into the right-hand corner of the court, and the English amateur returned it. Then the ball fell just over the net, and stayed there. Though the professional had not to exert himself to impose this pattern on the game he was nevertheless still working out a problem: how to economize his expenditure of effort to the minimum degree. He had succeeded so far that he never needed to hurry, he was always moving slowly to where the ball was going to be. It would have been entertaining to watch him had not the spectators been as remarkable on precisely the same count of graceful economy. An audience proves its discipline by its capacity for stillness. Those who have never practised continuous application to an exacting process cannot settle down to simple watching; they must chew gum, they must dig the peel off their oranges, they must shift from foot to foot, from buttock to buttock. But the people round this tennis court were calm and true in their attention. Their eyes and chins smiled neatly from left to right and from right to left, no further than was necessary to follow the ball, and their lips were quiet mouths, their fingers quiet hands, their bodies closely furled.

There were present most of the men who worked at the mines and mills at other than manual labour, and two sorts of women: their wives, and the women who were themselves working here, as secretaries and scientific workers and household administrators. Sight could not tell one the difference between the two sorts. They were alike curled and shining about the head, for here, as everywhere in Yugoslavia which has seen the glint of money, the women are at least as well coiffed as they are in Vienna, and their clothes were discreet yet gay. Many were beautiful. There was one White Russian, always to be remembered: an office worker, whose face was clear-cut and cold yet tender, whose figure was armoured with elegance yet fluid with a grace wilder than ordinary motion. There was a Montenegrin girl, handsome as a hero, born to live under black heights crowned with snow, under skies where eagles circle. There were Englishwomen, to go with gardens. But even these highly individualized women were, like the men who sat with them, rubbed down by the pressure of a common purpose to what was not uniformity so much as unanimity. The mine shaped them. They worked in the interest of the maintenance of themselves and their kind, as peasants do, though modern industry was their medium; and they had joined to their educated brilliance the sacred grimness of the peasant that will not be vanquished by his environment. Here, certainly, Yugoslavia might take the gifts of the West without fearing that they were poisoned, and might learn a formula for prosperity that would let it exploit its economic resources without danger to its human resources.

The slanting sunshine of late afternoon emphasized with bright light and black shadows the sugar-loaf sharpness of the peaked hill above us, the fishbone fineness of the ruins on its summit. Some cattle wandered up there among the burning bushes, incandescent like pious beasts that had received their reward here on earth and been transfigured; it could be seen that some purple flowers as well as white grew among the long grasses. There stood at my side the Gospodin Mac: he and my husband had just arrived, hot but contented, from their tour of the miracles in the mill. ‘I see you’re having a good look at our castle,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that’s where Stephen Dushan strangled his father, Stephen Dechanski.’ I exclaimed, ‘But I thought that happened at Zvechan, not at Trepcha.’ He answered, ‘But this is not Trepcha. Trepcha is the valley-head where the mine is, down here we are at Zvechan.’ I said, ‘I wish I could go up and look at it,’ but the woman beside me objected, ‘There is nothing to be seen now, only some broken walls. And you could not go up in those shoes, there are snakes up there.’

That there should be snakes in the castle of Zvechan was most fitting. The event which had come to pass on that cone had not been compact; it had dragged along its deadly length. There were the years when Stephen Dechanski and his father Milutin had hated one another, when the son had, like a hunted beast, imitated the stillness of a stone, that he might not be struck dead. There were the years when Stephen Dechanski might have lived according to his nature, Milutin being dead, but instead provoked a repetition of his earlier peril by the offence he offered to a son, of whom nothing was more certain than that he was the most dangerous of all his stock. Again he imitated the stillness of a stone, but not in order that he might escape destruction. Here on this bronze crest he had lain quiet in order to be the doomed mark of the sweeping sword, wielded by an executioner whom he had begotten by his flesh and instructed by his policy. Destiny is another name for humanity’s half-hearted yet persistent search for death. Again and again peoples have had the chance to live and show what would happen if human life were irrigated by continual happiness; and they have preferred to blow up the canals and perish of drought. They listen to the evil counsel of the grey falcon. They let their throats be cut as if they were black lambs. The mystery of Kossovo was behind this hill. It is behind all our lives.

It was behind this community. It was childish to suppose that these people of the mine could offer a formula for the future well-being of the South Slavs; or even for themselves. It was not childish to regard them and their effect on their surroundings as wholly admirable. But this was only a clearing in the jungle hewn by pioneers whom some peculiar genetic excellence, some inspiring oddity of environment, had made superior to their fellows. These people could not save South-Eastern Europe, because they could not save England: which, indeed, would certainly not save them, if their existence was at stake. These people stood for life; it is impossible to maintain that a large part of England does not stand for death. The men and women of Trepcha were not of the highest social or economic importance in their origins. None, I imagine, had had a duke for a father or was heir to a million. They came from homes where there was upheld a tradition of comfort and fine manners, but where there was no chance to enjoy either unless each generation worked. They therefore knew better than those above them, as a paid athlete earning his keep by daily performance realizes more intensely than any amateur that he must not poison his strength by alcohol or unwholesome food, that it is good for a man to be temperate and precise and to respect the quality of others. But the people who determine the fate of England have not learned that lesson; for we are still governed by our great houses.

There is no sense in a house of extravagant size, unless it is the seat of a small court such as all forces in European history have combined to eliminate, or the home of a devotee inspired by passionate charity to feed and house all comers. Yet the pride of those who occupy such ‘places’ is quantitative. They exult in the number and magnitude of their rooms, the extent of their gardens and glass-houses and stables, the troops of their servants and grooms and gardeners. It is rarely the harmonious proportions of their homes that please them, and there indeed lies their true destruction. For they have lost their taste, which left them during the nineteenth century, and has scarcely been recovered save by those separated from their own class by some barrier such as exceptional gifts, physical weakness, or homosexuality. The proof is written on their walls by their family portraits; beside their Holbeins and Van Dycks, their Gainsboroughs and Reynoldses and Lawrences, hang their Dicksees and Millais’ and Herkomers, Sargents and Laszlos and Birleys. The eye has lost its acuteness because the well-being of the whole organism does not depend on sight or any other of its senses. These people would eat well, if they were blind and deaf and dumb, because the Industrial Revolution and colonial expansion had in the past combined to drop food into their mouths.

Having lost their taste, they lost their souls. For they could no longer base their standards on quality, and so developed their pride in quantity. But a quantity of possessions, on the scale that they have learned to enjoy them, can only be the massed result of past achievements. They cannot have any relation to present achievement. Therefore these people turn away from life. The best of them escape into concentration on the craft knowledge of certain pursuits, such as horsemanship and shooting and fishing, which does not give them the general good sense that often follows from the practice of a craft, because of the insane emotional exaltation engendered by their sense of superiority to those who, by reason of intellectual preoccupations or economic insufficiency, are unwilling to exchange all other interests for these exercises. It cannot be conceived, if the proposition is examined coldly, that a conservative society, which behaves as if hunting were as sacred as the practice of religion, does not make each of its members a fool for life. Those who preserve enough mental vigour to make their mark in public life sit on the benches of Parliament with a majesty related to some other period in our history; and their contact with the present is the reading of memoranda prepared by experts, whom they are apt to distrust because of their different social origins. They have certain principles to which they are ponderously loyal; they protect mass accumulations of past effort and deny the claims of the present. They would not lift a finger to defend the Gospodin Mac and his officers. They would not understand the beauty and ingenuity of their work at Trepcha, because it was not hunting and shooting, because it was modern. They would become moderately excited about it as a source of dividends, but they would let international politics take a direction perilous to the maintenance of the mine, because they were still in the nineteenth century and could not believe that English authority was not absolute the whole world over, and English capital inviolably safe. This governing class meant death for England, however well scattered Englishmen might serve life; and therefore English example could not mean salvation for Yugoslavia.

I said to the Gospodin Mac, ‘Are the Foreign Office and the Legation people interested in you?’ He answered, ‘Not in the least. Though I’ve often thought they might be. After all we’re an important British influence in the Balkans. But they’ve never even told me what to do in case of war. I should ask them more insistently, I suppose. But you know what these diplomats are, they’re bored with you, and you get bored with them.’ There is nothing more to the discredit of the great house than the tendency of its children to fret for their homes in the Foreign Legations. Social extremes meet in exile. The average English diplomat en poste anywhere but the great familiar capitals, in Paris, Berlin, Rome, or Vienna, reacts exactly like a young woman who has given up duty at the haberdashery counter to marry a young man in a Continental branch of a bacon firm. There is the same frenzied interest in clothes, and the same resentful indifference to the exotic surroundings. This is not an aristocratic attitude, but the great house no longer produces aristocrats but only the privileged.

Their privileges are enormous, and they afford ill examples for the ambitions of other classes. Their wealth fascinates and impresses the rest of society because it is inherited. To be fortunate from the womb, to be so fortunate that we can outstrip the curse of Adam all the way from the cradle to the grave, this is the fate we would have chosen for ourselves in our childhood; and therefore it is what we would desire for our children, since when we think of them we are all childish. We look at the great house, with its obvious foundation of secular wealth, and we regard it as evidence that our hopes can be gratified; and thus thrift, that most innocent of virtues, which is rediscovered every time a child puts by a sweet for tomorrow, is enlarged and degraded into that swollen monster of insensate expectation, the desire to invest savings in return for enormous and eternal dividends.

We have no basis for our hopes in practice or theory. The wealth that sustains the great house was usually made by ancestors who had the luck to seize land or mineral rights or a monopoly of trade in the days before society had learned to protect itself from exploitation, or to discover some means of cheapening articles for which there is a widespread and permanent demand. The first form of luck cannot be enjoyed in the present stabilized world, and the second occurs more and more rarely in our highly competitive industrial system. Nor can it be believed that ordinary savings are so scarce that borrowers need pay a very high and perpetual rate of interest on them. But the whole of our economic structure is based on that pretence, and a millstone of greed is tied round the neck of every industrial enterprise, calculated to be just as heavy as its power can bear without collapse. Even here at Trepcha the dividends that were paid out to the shareholders must have been a handicap on the mine’s social value. It was true that a million pounds had been put into the mine before it yielded its ore, but the price which is paid for all such advances is altogether excessive. Much went to the distant dividend-drawer, who cared not a hoot for the miners or for Yugoslavia but he, poor dog, helpless as anyone else in this chaotic world, was facing enormous political risks, and might presently draw no dividends at all. International finance is not so Machiavellian as the simpler forms of Socialist and Fascist propaganda pretend. Its fault is probably that it pulls too few strings rather than too many, and it can no longer be counted as among the major causes of war. But it is like a learned but deaf and prejudiced judge sitting on the bench as a trial raising tremendous issues of personal destiny and juristic principle. Sometimes it hears and is wise. Sometimes it babbles.

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 will 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.’

We both hung about him and made penitent and sympathetic murmurs, and suddenly we were friends as we had been at the beginning. He was to us as our child and a great man, and we were to him as his father and mother and his pupils, and there was no barrier between us and our words. But soon his face grew vacant, as if he were listening to a distant voice, and then hardened. He said, ‘Yes, I feel very ill, but you need not bother, I will come downstairs, and though I will not be able to eat one mouthful, I will sit with you when we have dinner, and afterwards I will take you a walk round the town.’ ‘You will do nothing of the sort,’ said my husband, ‘you will go to bed and have some dinner sent up to you.’ ‘No,’ said Constantine. ‘I know your habits very well now. The walk round the town after dinner, you would feel terribly if you missed it. And I know what you English are.’ My husband said suddenly a short word which has so rarely been spoken in my presence that I wonder how it is I understand it, and taking Constantine’s arm in his led him from the room. When he came back, he said, ‘Forgive me, my dear. But I thought this situation could only be handled by the natural man. And do not worry. He was quite happy to be sent to bed.’

We dined in the restaurant of the principal hotel and there we ate excellent trout, but not until after an immense delay. The apartment was so large that as soon as a waiter took an order he broke into a trot towards the kitchen; and I have no doubt that the kitchen was also vast, and that the cooks had to stop their work every now and then to re-build a wall or re-lay a floor. We passed the time in spelling out the news in the Belgrade newspapers which were constantly brought in by little dark boys of distinguished appearance in very ragged clothes, and in talking to a young man who came up to us and asked in German if he could be of any help to us, since we were strangers. He told us he was a Croat lawyer, come to be clerk of the local law court, and he gave a very pleasant impression of youthful simplicity and courtesy, of a real knightliness. He left us when our trout was brought, and as soon as we had finished it we had another visitor. A dark full-bodied man, more smartly dressed than anybody else in the restaurant, had been watching us from a near-by table for some time and now came up to us. He said to my husband, ‘Good evening. It is interesting to meet a German so far from home.’ ‘I am not a German,’ said my husband, ‘I am English.’

The dark man looked at his reply as if it might be picked up, carried away, dropped down, buried, or accorded any treatment except belief. ‘Yet you speak German like a German,’ he said. ‘That is because I spent some years as a boy in Hamburg,’ answered my husband, ‘and I have spent much of my life doing business with Germans.’ The dark man said nothing to distract us from his disbelief, and my husband said testily, ‘And you? You are a German; what are you doing here?’ ‘Oh, I am not a German!’ exclaimed the dark man with an air of surprise. ‘Yet you speak like a German,’ said my husband. ‘That is because I am a Dane,’ said the dark man. After an instant he appeared to become intensely irritated with my husband’s face, which is long and intelligent, and he left us with a curt farewell. ‘He does not believe me when I say I am English,’ commented my husband, ‘but he is infuriated when I do not believe him when he says, “I am a Dane.” He feels I am not playing the game. That means that he is a German.’ ‘Could he possibly be a Dane?’ ‘Not possibly,’ said my husband; ‘he does not even speak with a North German accent. That man has spoken Berliner German from his infancy.’

At that point Dragutin, who had been sitting on the other side of the room, came up to say good-night to us. We gathered that he was telling us that Petch was very depressing after Trepcha, and that he had never seen anything more wonderful than the house and works he had seen at Goru. After he had gone it struck me that Goru is not the name of a place but a word meaning ‘up in the mountain.’ He had, in fact, been to the mine-head. ‘This is too frightful!’ I said. ‘Do you remember when I thought I saw Dragutin at that canteen just before we had lunch in the mess? Well, I did! He must have got a friend to take him up there!’ ‘What is so frightful about that?’ asked my husband. ‘It means,’ I answered, ‘that he went off and left Constantine, probably without asking permission, so that instead of Constantine going off for a solitary drive and feeling superior to us and all the people at the mines, because he was a poet and acting poetically, he had to sit in the hotel feeling left out and despised.’ ‘My God, I believe you’re right!’ exclaimed my husband. We gazed at each other in real horror. ‘I do not think Dragutin would deliberately disobey Constantine,’ he said, ‘I think he simply forgot him. He knows quite well that Constantine is not a whole man, and that he has been in some way destroyed, and he fears an infection. Now I understand another cause for anti-Semitism; many primitive peoples must receive their first intimation of the toxic quality of thought from Jews. They know only the fortifying idea of religion; they see in Jews the effect of the tormenting and disintegrating ideas of scepticism. Dragutin sees a man made as miserable as sickness, as poverty, as disgrace could make him, by an idea which is so mighty that it can exercise this power even though it was let loose on him by a woman. No wonder he is appalled. Well, let us go and get some sleep.’

So we climbed the creaking staircase and came to our room, passing the little Hungarian chambermaid as she burrowed among candles in a store cupboard, still busy; and we slept well, though once I woke and turned on the light and watched a frieze of five mice pass along the skirting. In the morning as many beetles watched me as I dried after my antique bath. But all was clean, aseptically clean; and for the explanation there was the chambermaid down on her knees, her right hand swishing the suds across the flimsy floor, her head rolling from side to side and a tune coming in a half hum, half whistle, through her teeth. We bade her good-morning and told her she worked too hard for a pretty girl, and she looked up laughing, and from a plank in front of her broke off a huge splinter like a piece of toast. ‘Yes,’said Constantine, who just then came out of his room, ‘she is a good girl, and she has great sensibility. Last night she came into my room and she said so kindly, “Ah, I would so like to be with you, for there is something about you very sweet, and you are far more cultured than most men who come to this hotel, but I see you are too ill, and so I will bring you a little orange drink instead.” ’

We went down and had our breakfast outside the principal hotel, and sat over our coffee for an unnecessary length of time, enchanted by the scene. The most enchanting element in it was a number of pretty little girls with dark hair sun-bleached on the surface, and fair delicate bronze skins, who darted about in most beautiful costumes, consisting of fitted jackets and loose trousers gathered at the ankles, cut out of brilliant curtain material with an extreme sense of elegance that was not of an Oriental sort. The effect is too feminist. The little girl is set apart as a little girl, as a possible object for poetical feeling, but her will is respected, she can run and jump as she likes. We ceased to look at them only to wonder about several cheap cars waiting in front of the hotel, which as we breakfasted filled up with people apparently strangers to each other, who all held lemons in their hands and looked exceedingly apprehensive. ‘They fear to be sick,’ explained Constantine, ‘and it is to prevent it that they are going to suck lemons. They are going to travel through Montenegro, to Kolashin or Tsetinye or Podgoritsa or Nikshitch, and they must go by motor bus or by car, since there is no railway in all Montenegro, it is too mountainous.’ And looking up the road at the walls of rock which barred the way, that seemed obvious. Nothing but a Simplon tunnel that took a whole day to pass could meet the case. ‘The poor passengers,’ continued Constantine, ‘they have reason for fearing to be sick, and even to die. For the Montenegrins are a race of heroes, but since the Turks have gone they have nothing to be heroic about, and so they are heroic with their motor cars. A Montenegrin chauffeur looks on his car as a Cossack or a cowboy looks on a horse, he wishes to do tricks with it that show his skill and courage, and he is proud of the wounds he gets in an accident as if they were scars of battle. It is a superb point of view, but not for the passenger. One cannot work out a formula, not in philosophy, not in aesthetics, not in religion, not in nothing that would make it good for the passengers. Yet there have to be passengers for there to be a chauffeur. It is a very grave disharmony.’

There came to our table at that moment a lean and hard-bitten and harassed man in uniform, who introduced himself as the Chief of Police at Petch. He spoke American English, for he had been in the Middle West nearly twenty years, and he was consumed by that emotion so socially disruptive, so critical of all our sentimental pretences, that it has no name: the opposite of nostalgia, a sick distaste for the fatherland. ‘All here is as strange to me as it is to you,’ he complained. ‘They asked me to come back from the United States and become Chief of Police, and because I was for Yugoslavia I obeyed, but I made a mistake. There is too much to do. These folks here won’t act right unless you make ’em, and to make ‘em you have to know every one of them by sight. Will you believe that I have to come down every evening and watch the corso, just to see how they all act and get in my mind who’s who? Can you imagine folks acting that way in the States?’ There are nearly fourteen thousand inhabitants of Petch; in the plain which stretches from Petch south to Prizren, a matter of fifty-five miles or so, there were in Turkish days a steady six hundred assassinations a year; I found some pathos in the lot of a gentleman who was trying to induce by individual attention such a large number of people, who had been shaped by such a tradition, to behave like good Babbitts. My husband said, ‘But many of your charges look very charming,’ and I added, ‘The little girls are really lovely.’ The Chief of Police said in astonishment, ‘Do you really think so?’ ‘But certainly,’ we said. ‘Oh, no, you are mistaken!’ he exclaimed. ‘But we have seen the most exquisite little girls,’ I began, but Constantine interrupted me. ‘The Chief of Police,’ he explained, ‘is a Montenegrin, and he is trying to tell you, if you would only let him, that only up there behind that wall at the end of the street in Montenegro are people really charming and little girls really lovely.’ ‘Well, I doubt if a man not fortified by such beliefs would accept such a post,’ said my husband. I asked, after the Chief of Police had made exactly the speech that Constantine had anticipated, ‘But are not the people influenced a great deal by the monks at the Patriarchate church and the Dechani monastery?’ He looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Influenced? But in what way?’ ‘Why, for good,’ I stammered; ‘the monks, you know.’ He continued to look at me in perplexity, but just then a gendarme came in and, after saluting, whispered in his ear; and he jumped up and left us in the manner of a mother who has just heard that two of her children have been fighting and have hurt themselves.

‘It is hotter than it has been,’ I said, as we drove out of the town, along the road towards Montenegro, on our way to the Patriarchate church of Petch, which is nearly as famous as the monastery of Dechani.

It was a very pleasant drive, with the houses thinning and showing us the rich pastures that ran up to the wooded foothills, and the brilliant river that dashed down from the gorge. ‘I do not think that it is hot at all,’ said Constantine. ‘But the sun is strong,’ I said. ‘I find it very weak,’ said Constantine. ‘Oh, no!’ I exclaimed. ‘This morning at eight the stockings that I washed last night and hung at the window were quite dry.’ I realized that I had spoken foolishly even before he had sneered, ‘You have proof for everything.’ His face was heavy and swollen, half with fever, half with the desire to hurt. Gerda had convinced him that being a Jew he was worthless, and he wanted to establish that everybody else she despised was worthless too, so that we could crash down together to common annihilation under her blond, blind will. The three of us kept silent till we came to the Patriarchate, which lies in a walled compound among the foothills at the opening of the gorge, low by the river under the wooded cliffs.

Through an archway we entered what seemed a decent little country estate, with proper outbuildings and a trim wood-stack, a kitchen garden as neat as a new pin, and an orchard with its trunks new-washed against blight. A very old monk, lean and brown as a tree-trunk, smiled at us but did not answer what Constantine said, and led us along an avenue to a round fountain shaded by some trees. We thought he was deaf, but he was a Russian who had never learned any Serbian during his seventeen years of exile here. While he fetched the Abbot from his house, there appeared at our elbows Dragutin, to enforce the observance of his special rite and see that we drank from the fountain. It cured all ills, he said, and bestowed also the blessing of Christ. He had brought tumblers from the automobile, so that we could drink in comfort, and indeed it was delicious beyond the nature of water.

When I had finished drinking, I looked round with satisfaction. This was a fat little estate: the buildings were not only new, they were well kept, and on the finely tilled terraces behind the guest-house there were trim beehives of modern pattern, and the stone runner that took the fountain’s overflow to a stream was weedless. I remembered the account of the Patriarchate in that valuable book, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-in-Europe, by Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby, so penetrating in its view of the Balkans that, though it was written seventy-six years ago, it still answers some questions that the modern tourist will find unanswered anywhere else. These two ladies arrived here with a guard of Moslem Albanian soldiers, with the intention of staying the night, and found terrified monks who, with an inhospitability most uncharacteristic of the Slav or the Orthodox Church, made every effort to turn them away. The ladies, who were, like so many Victorian women outside fiction, models of courage and good sense, turned their guards out of the room and talked to the monks privately, and found that the poor wretches had had all their food seized by a passing troop of Moslem Albanians, and were terrified lest the new invaders should punish them for their empty cupboards. When the ladies met the situation by sending their guards not only out of the room but out of the monastery, there was still some delay before they could get to bed, since the relative flea population of the different rooms had to be considered, and empty windows had to be fitted with glazed frames, which were not brought out till the soldiers had gone. It is a very strong compact of medieval discomfort and medieval insecurity. Nothing could be more remote from the present atmosphere which could be best expressed by the Scottish word ‘douce.’ Yes, we were standing in as douce a wee policy as could be wished.

The Abbot still did not come. We passed some time looking at the carvings on the fountain, which had an extremely primitive air yet in one panel represented a man carrying a fairly modern rifle, but Constantine grew nervous and restless and we took him off to look at the church. It lay on our right, among some walnuts and mulberries and pines, the green ground rising steep behind it. ‘I have a prejudice against this church,’ said my husband, as we went towards it, ‘because a French author wrote of it, “Elle a la couleur tendre de la chair des blondes.” ’ I said, in some bewilderment, ‘This is even more than I should have asked of you, my dear.’ ‘I felt strongly,’ he explained, ‘that he should not have followed that sentence with his next, “Elle est bâtie de gros blocs rectangulaires, irréguliers.” The picture one is left with is hardly pleasing.’ But indeed what was in the French author’s mind was very apparent. The church is actually the colour of a fair woman’s skin, where it gets some weathering but not much, say in the throat or just above the wrist; and in form it is a many-breasted Diana of Ephesus. It is an assembly of three small churches lying side by side, each with a cupola and a rounded apse, and all its masses are maternally curved. It seemed very fitting that there should come out of the porch a company of matrons in whom age had destroyed all that is evanescent in womanhood, all that is peculiar to the period of mating and child-bearing, yet who might have served gloriously as types of their sex because what was left was so plainly dedicated to all its essential purposes, the continuity of life and its harmony. They were slender and erect, like the old women of Ochrid, but lacked that aristocratic and even luxurious air which was natural enough in a town with its Byzantine past; they might have been Romans when Rome was still a sturdy republic. All of them were old enough to remember the bad days in Petch when the Turks had so encouraged the Albanian Moslems to ill-treat their Christian fellow-Slavs that at every Serb funeral the corpse was pelted with stones and filth; but they carried themselves with the most untroubled dignity. It came back to me that Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby had been immensely impressed by a woman of Petch called Katerina Simitch, a childless widow who carried on a Christian school for girls, with a courage that never broke before the persistent hostility of the Moslems. She was a nun solely because the status was useful to her in her nationalist work; the Englishwomen’s descriptions of her evoke the calm and wise personality of a great statesman. Yet it is safe to say that she took her vows without impiety, for in those days Christianity and Slav nationalism must have seemed, even to the most spiritual, almost one and the same. These women who were coming out of the church would certainly be kin to Katerina Simitch’s pupils, and some might even be of her blood. If she had seen them she would have felt pride. She would have taken for granted their quiet fierceness and their fleet dignity for it was hers also, and she could not have conceived Slav women otherwise; but she would have recognized a sign of new times, and rejoiced at it, in the white sleeves which were disclosed by their black cloth boleros. They were made of the striped silk which is woven in the district; in Katerina’s day only a few Christian women could afford to buy it, or even to make it, since the mulberry leaves for the silkworms cost more than Christians could afford.

We went into the porch, which formed a long hall outside the three churches. There were two more old women sitting and talking thoughtfully on a stone bench that ran round the wall, one holding a branch cut from a walnut tree. Their ease, and a proud and hospitable gesture that this woman made with her walnut branch when she saw we were visitors come to admire, recalled the history of these churches.

The first had been built in the early thirteenth century by a Patriarch named Arsenius, by order of St Sava, who felt that the seat of the Serbian archiepiscopate, Zhitcha, was dangerously exposed to Hungarian invasion from the West and Tartar invasion from the East, and told him to find a safer shelter for it in the South. Here the growing Serbian civilization had the centre of its spiritual life, and when Stephen Dushan was obliged to detach his Church from the domination of Constantinople this became the seat of the Patriarchate. It was to meet the needs of this increasing importance that two other churches were joined to it in the following hundred years. When the Turks came the independence of the Serbian Church was destroyed, and for a time the Christian Slavs were again subject to Constantinople. But in the sixteenth century there took place the drama of the Sokolovitch brothers, which we had already heard of at Grachanitsa, to which their complicity had added the great porch. One, known as Mehmed, was taken by the Turks as a child and reared as a Janizary, and had risen to be Grand Vizier, in which office he restored the Serbian National Church and made his brother, the monk Macarius, Patriarch of Petch with many privileges. It would be interesting to know how seriously the state of such a renegade as Mehmed was regarded: whether time and repetition rubbed down the crime till it was accepted as a legitimate ruse of Christian self-preservation, or whether it preserved its primal horror. Through this porch Macarius must have walked many thousand times, and either he was not glad, not sorry, child of a twilit age, where faith was grey with incrustations of compromise, or he believed that his brother must burn in Hell, and must have been sorely perturbed to consider that he could not give the saving bread and wine to his people had not his brother chosen damnation. But there exists no record of these people’s interior lives. As yet humanity has chronicled little more than its simpler and more agreeable experiences.

In any case Macarius carried on his work efficiently; and he was succeeded by a number of able patriarchs until the Great Trek to the Danube in 1690, when the Patriarchate was transferred to its present seat at Karlovats, which we had visited among its lilacs from Belgrade. But that did not mean that the building was ever wholly abandoned. There was always some ecclesiastical activity here, even in the darkest days of the Turkish subjection during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This continuity of Christian worship resulted, as it often does, in destruction of the most valuable part of the Christian heritage. St Mark’s would be far more beautiful if Venice had not been prosperous enough to alter and adorn it for some hundreds of years after it had attained its perfection; and here in the three churches of Petch the most exquisite Serbo-Byzantine frescoes were covered over during recent times with pious trivialities paid for by peasants who wanted to mark their appreciation of the comfort they had received there throughout the long ages of their servitude. These are now, as at Neresi, being removed from the walls, so that one may see the old beside the new, and learn again the paradox by which the greatest tragic art has been produced. In the happy Austria of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Mozart and Beethoven both looked into the dark springs of human destiny; in the petty and sordid Austria of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which every day carried the plot for the doom of itself and Europe a stage further, there was heard the clear ripple of the waltz and the operetta. Here at every ragged edge that joins the frescoes which were divided by from three to four hundred years it is shown that the free and fortunate subjects of the Nemanyas could bear to contemplate the mystery of pain, while the downtrodden Christian rayahs asked only to think of favour and of prettiness. The contrast was at its most positive where a charming fresco, visibly affected by what I have called the Turkish Regency style, depicting some bland and chic angels having a party at a table obviously arranged by someone with a modish sense of fun, before a window hung with coquettish muslin curtains, was being hewn asunder and flaked off to bring to light an enormous and merciless presentation of the relationship between man and his mother.

All these early frescoes, though they range in date over two hundred years and show marked variations in style, are alike in being merciless. Here the angels sweep down like furies, the Holy Ghost is seen as a bird of prey, and at the Transfiguration the multitude is aghast, as well it might be at that demonstration that man is wholly deceived by the material world, and there is another one beyond for him to master. In the dome of one of the three churches there is a Christ Ruler of All, dressed in an amber robe and crowned with a golden halo against a silver background, confined by a whirlwind of angels, which puts before the eye, as some great music has put before the ear, the ecstasy of pain that comes from great gifts, great power, great responsibility. Sometimes this central core of harshness is disguised by the most delicious grace. One fresco represents the Mother of God feeding the infant Jesus at her breast while three women adore him and two angels stand in waiting, which recalls a Duccio or a Giunta Pisano, but shows an even greater refinement, an ethereal force very rarely present in Italian painting. It is as if the artist was working in a world where grossness and feebleness were almost unknown, or at least under the ban of the common consciousness. But even here there is a lack of mercy. The infant Jesus is not so much a baby as a reduced adult, a miscroscopic sage and ruler, and he is sucking his mother’s nipple with mature unsmiling greed, as if he meant to take the last drop and give her no payment of gratitude, although her body is a soft mass about him, protecting him as the pulp of a ripe fruit about its kernel. The resemblance between the Nemanyan and the Tudor ages is strong. So did the Elizabethan poets know that though Elizabeth was Gloriana and England glorious, God is not kind to man, not here on earth.

But the most merciless of all these frescoes was the Virgin and Child that stared out through the angels’ tea-party. This is terrible, with a terror that makes the efforts at realism of later artists such as Rouault seem the fee-fo-fum of a child playing at ogres in the nursery. A vast Virgin is massive as a mother must seem to the child she picks up in her arms and carries where he has not wished to go, that is, unfairly massive; and she grips him with fingers of masonic strength, which are as ten towers, ten lighthouses, affixed to her huge palm. Her features are as gigantesquely marked as all adults’ must seem to a baby’s hand, and she appears unreasonably stern, as those yet unacquainted with the dangers of this world must consider their mothers. The love and kindness published on her huge face is as a huge army entrenched about its object. At her bosom the Christ child is poised like a tiny fettered athlete, his muscular legs bared by runners’ shorts, his glittering enraged face proclaiming revolt against this imprisoning benevolence and shining with the intention of flight to a remote and glorious goal which is his secret. A mind unaware of timidity had considered those questions, ‘Who is my brother or my brethren?’ and ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ and had taken into account certain agonizing arguments he had heard in the world about him.

They were still, it seemed, being carried on. Constantine turned his back on the fresco and took two letters out of his pockets, which he had already told us in the automobile he had received from Gerda and his mother that morning. He opened them both, stared at them in turn, and seemed to grow hot though the shadow of the church was cool about us. ‘You are worried,’ I said. ‘Why do you not leave us and go straight home to Belgrade?’ He answered in a whining tone, ‘But if I go home I will only have to take round a French woman journalist who is coming early next week to write about us barbarians. I do not like these political Frenchwomen, they are all the same; they are all like Geneviève Tabouis and Andrée Viollis, they drag round the world and disapprove of all that real men do.’ He looked up at the tremendous Virgin, his upper lip lifting from his teeth in a sneer; his eyes left her and stared apprehensively into space. ‘I have other ideas what women should do,’ he said weakly, as if he were very tired. We turned away and looked at other frescoes and the great marble tombs of the patriarchs, but he followed us restlessly, and we went out of the church.

Outside I saw a monk, whom I knew to be the Abbot because he wore the broad scarlet sash of his office, standing under a very twisted old nut tree, talking to the old women who had passed us as we went into the church. Now that I saw them from a distance I noted, what I had not seen before, since my eyes had been fixed on their magnetic faces and their snowy sun-bright sleeves, that they wore not skirts but trousers of dark flowered material, gathered at the ankle into a black braided cuff, which seemed incongruous garments on women who might very well have been heads of colleges. They were speaking to the Abbot with a charming reverence which was due partly to their sense of his priesthood and partly to his special suitability for it; for they were looking at him with calm and chaste approbation of his extreme good looks. He was a tall man with a clear white skin and a dark wavy beard, like one of the Assyrians in the British Museum; everything about him spoke of quiet strength and good health. He must have pleased them by the proof he gave that their darling care, the race, was still sound. There was standing a little distance off a monk of very different appearance. He was extremely short and so round-shouldered that he was nearly hunchbacked, and his long hair and beard shone chorus-girl golden. The Abbot looked up and saw me coming out of the church with my husband and Constantine just behind me, and with a curious combination of a welcoming smile and an embarrassed gesture he moved towards us, joined by the small blond monk. He was glad to see us; he was a Serb from Serbia and knew Constantine’s name, and in any case he came of good Orthodox stock with its tradition of hospitality; yet he was not at ease. After he had greeted us he introduced the short blond monk, saying, ‘This is a brother from the monastery at Dechani who came over to help me at a special service we had this morning. I am afraid he will have to go at once, if he is to catch his motor bus back.’

But the little creature pressed forward and with the pinched and dwarfish vivacity of a pantomime child shook his finger at us, crying, in a peculiar German, ‘I know what you are thinking about me!’ It was an intensely embarrassing remark coming from one so physically odd, but at once he continued, with a great deal of trilling laughter, ‘You are thinking, “How fair he is! How can he be so fair, being a Yugoslavian? He is fair as a German!” ’ We had, of course, been thinking nothing of the sort, for a number of Slavs, particularly Bosnians, are fairer than Germans, are as fair as Scandinavians. All that had struck us about his hair was the peculiar harshness of its colour. ‘I will explain the mystery to you,’ he tittered. ‘I am a Croat, yes, I am a Croat from Zagreb. But my mother, my beloved and saintly mother, she was a true German born in Austria, and she it was who gave me my golden hair!’ His little fists swept forward the curls that hung down his back so that they covered his eyes and became tangled in his beard. ‘Always when I was a child people stopped in the street and said, “Who is this child that is fair like an angel, that looks like a real German child?” and my mother would say, “It is a German child, and yet it is not a German child.” ’

The creature reeled about in paroxysms of laughter, and the Abbot said, ‘If you do not hurry you will miss the motor bus.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the little creature cried, ‘I must not do that, for I receive all the distinguished visitors who come to Dechani. I speak to them my mother-tongue, the beautiful German. This afternoon I must receive an Italian general, and his wife who is a princess; tomorrow morning I must receive a professor who is at the head of the greatest university in France. They will have to be shown round by me, for the other monks do not know German, it is only I who speak German.’ ‘The motor bus,’ said the Abbot. ‘Oh, isn’t it a shame that I must go! Well, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!’ He ran away from us with tiny twinkling steps, smiling at us over his shoulder and undulating his outstretched arm, like an old-fashioned fairy queen quitting the stage of a pantomime.

The Abbot took off his tall hat, blew into it, replaced it, and evidently felt much better. It was an odd gesture, but we all knew what he was feeling and sympathized. He had suffered acutely from this bizarre interlude, because, as we were to find out later on, he was primarily a country gentleman. That was why he had been made the Abbot here. It was his duty to restore the estate of the Patriarchate to order and productivity, so that the Christians of Petch might see how their God wished them to live in fair weather, when martyrdom was no longer required from them. In this he was succeeding admirably, for the monastery had that look of agrarian piety to be seen in many French and some English farms and market gardens. I do not think that the frescoes meant very much to him, but he spoke with great pleasure of the two visits that Bernard Berenson and Gabriel Millet had made for the purpose of examining them. He had his full measure of the countryman’s feeling for craftsmanship, and he could see that these people knew their jobs. Also, he explained with enthusiasm that he had derived great enjoyment from the handsomeness of Mr Berenson and his personal exquisiteness. ‘He is like a prince!’he said. ‘With his white hair, and his fine hands, and his slender body, and all his clothes so neat and clean, he is like someone from a great court. I hope that there are many pictures of him all over England and America.’

He took us up to his parlour, which was sweet and clean, and we drank good coffee and ate crystalline spoonfuls of quince jam, while he talked of his work and the place. Yes, it was beautiful, though in winter the winds came down the gorge from Montenegro very bitterly, and there was a great deal of snow. The land was very good, though this monastery was far from being rich like Dechani, and he found the people who worked for it very pleasant indeed, particularly the Albanians. We noted again the liking that most Serbs now feel for the Albanians, who during the Turkish occupation were their most constant tormentors. His congregations, he went on to say, were very good and pious, and came many miles to the services. Yet the Abbot’s large handsomeness, which should have been as placid as cream, was dimmed by a cloud of perplexity and exasperation immediately he had given us an assurance of his satisfaction with the district. His dark brows drew together under his clear fleshy forehead, and his eyes, luminous as a peat stream, seemed to see something not very far off and not entirely gratifying, perhaps the main street of Petch as it would appear to eyes for whom nothing in it had the charm of unfamiliarity, a track, too wide for any traffic that could conceivably pass this way, with telegraph posts marching along it in full futility, bringing no useful messages to the town.

We should have gone to Dechani that afternoon, but at lunch it was plain that Constantine’s fever had come back to him, so he telephoned to the Abbot and arranged that we should go the next morning instead. We sent Constantine to bed and tried to sleep a little ourselves, for we were both deadly tired. But I found it difficult to rest, because whenever my mind was not preoccupied by some new sight it was invaded by the recollection of some of the tremendous events which had been shown or explained to me during the last two months: the struggle of the Croat soul between its Slav self and its Western education, the outlawry of the Dalmatian Uskoks, the martyrdoms of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek and Princip and Chabrinovitch, the conflict between the Obrenovitches and the Karageorgevitches, the magical practices of Macedonian Christianity, the rites of St George’s Eve, the glory of Grachanitsa and the self-slaughter of Kossovo, the noble effort of Trepcha, and the nihilism of Gerda, with its demand that all these efforts of the human spirit should be set aside and that all the forces of the universe should be directed to the purpose of cramming her with whatever material belonged to others. When at last I slept a dream distressed me by its proof that the thing which stung Constantine’s hand was his wife. She did not want him to write any more poetry, because he was a Jew like Heine.

My husband was awakened by the scamper of mice among our shoes, so we gave up and went for a walk on the hills overlooking the Patriarchate on the other side of the river, among budding woods and through meadows tangled with pale-purple and blue flowers. We met a good-looking young man who was stripped to the waist and carried a bright-blue shirt and wet bathing dress. He looked at us very hard and then turned back, and asked if he might walk with us and show us one of the hermits’ caves which are so numerous in this district that they gave the town its name; for Petch is an old word for cave. He spoke a didactic kind of English which he said he had learned in America as a child, during a visit to an uncle, but which had the hollow ring of the propagandist printed word. ‘You may wonder why I approached you when my torso is nude,’ he said, ‘but I did so in full confidence for I am sure that you are people who have swept all unwholesome prejudices out of your minds, and are open-minded and receptive to such healthful ideas as sun-bathing.’ ‘How did you know that?’ asked my husband. ‘I watched you last night as you had dinner outside the hotel,’answered the young man, ‘and I am sure of it.’ ‘But what did we do as we dined that convinced you we’re in favour of sun-bathing?’ pursued my husband. ‘You are very polite to your wife,’ said the young man; ‘it is evident that you have conquered your animal instinct to oppress the female and have accepted intellectually and emotionally the point of view that by child-bearing she contributes as much to the state as the male by his characteristic activities. You talk together very intently also, so it is evident that you have raised her to your intellectual level. Yesterday I went back to my house and made my wife come out and look at you as an example, for she is of these parts, and she is not always sure that she ought to be advanced. She is dragged down by her early surroundings. But she is very beautiful and very good, and there is something special about her which would be difficult to describe. But besides your attitude to each other, you have the appearance of cultured people. I am sure you read many books. What sort of books do you prefer and why?’

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 pleasant 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 mouth 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.

At this moment, in any case, it was hard to give it its due of admiration, although its perfection could not be disguised by the scaffolding. The trenches and rubble-heaps among which we walked had a look of more than necessary disorder, as if nobody had tried to mitigate it out of pride in the place; and there had come to stare at us several young monks, students in the theological college, who were as unkempt as they were uncouth. Their clothes were dirty and neglected. The cassock of one had no buttons at the chest, and the gap showed an equally buttonless shirt, from which there projected a bunch of matted and lustreless hair. Nobody can blame a monk if the intensity of his religious life leaves him no attention to spare for his body. But the lax faces of these young men, which were spongy with boredom, showed that their untidiness was due to no such preoccupation. Simply they had been removed from the discipline of their peasant homes and no other discipline had been imposed on them. But they were silent as they dragged after us, and we were getting on with our inspection of the outside of the church, until there suddenly ran out on us from behind a corner the golden-haired little monk we had seen at the Patriarchate the day before.

‘Do you remember meeting me yesterday?’ he cried, clapping his hands and making movements which, though contracted and not particularly agile, nevertheless indicated a feeling for ballet-dancing. ‘I am the monk who you thought must be a German because I am so fair, and I told you that I am a German and not a German! Well, here I am. I told you that I receive all visitors because I alone know German, the other monks know none.’ He kept on talking in the same strain of racial and personal coquetry, while we irritably tried to go on looking at the church, until an older monk, a man of dignity and fine manners, came out and wearily rebuked him. He had, it seemed, been sent out to bid us to come at once to lunch, since the Abbot had to start on a journey early in the afternoon and could not wait. The golden-haired monk said immediately, ‘That is what I have been trying to tell them, but none of them understands German very well.’ We went into the monastery buildings which formed three sides of the courtyard, and were taken to a dining-room where the Abbot, a middle-aged man with black hair and a multivermiform beard of tight, black, corkscrew curls, sat at a table with four or five monks. He greeted us in fluent but not very good French, and proposed the health of our English King in a glass of rakia. When we had swallowed it and my husband had made a short and suitable speech, he proposed the health of our Queen; and before the meal began we had to toast most of the royal family. Fortunately, he had not yet learned of the existence of Princess Margaret Rose.

The occasion was not without liveliness. The Abbot was far from unintelligent; as well as his fair French he spoke Russian, Greek, and Turkish, and he talked with some vivacity. All the monks, except for one of Oriental appearance, across whose yellow face there passed no shade of expression, hung on his words and sometimes threw in laughing remarks. These last phrases would have been used if this had been a meal in a girls’ boarding-school, but they were not therefore inappropriate. This establishment might easily have been named St. Hilda’s or St. Winifred’s. The most talkative monk, who was plump and dark and intense in manner, closely resembled many an art mistress. In spite of this light-hearted and quite innocent atmosphere the meal was not altogether agreeable. It was served on a cloth filthier than I have ever seen in any Balkan inn, and it was gross in quantity and quality. Since it was Friday this was a fast; and for that reason we were given barley soup, a stew of butter beans, a purée of potatoes with onion sauce, a very greasy stew of sardines and spinach, and a mess of rice cooked with fried potatoes. Of each dish we were given enough for a whole meal, and each was cooked without skill. The wild disregard of this menu for the digestive weaknesses of mankind reminded me of St. Augustine’s monastic friends, mentioned in The City of God, who were able to produce an effect of singing by unusual means.

But there was here a lack of perception about other things than food. The Abbot politely mentioned Miss Muir Mackenzie and Miss Irby and their account of their visit to Dechani, and we tried to return the courtesy by speaking of other foreigners who had come to the monastery in the last few years. Constantine had sent many on their way from Belgrade, and I too knew several. We found that not one had made the slightest impression on the Abbot. He did not remember a single one of them. Nothing about any of them, no matter of what nationality or rank or profession, had excited his interest. He had forgotten the British Minister, a distinguished French diplomat who is also a man of letters, and an American scholar and an Italian philosopher, both eminent. At first we thought that these people had visited the convent before he had assumed office, but on examination of the dates we found it was not so. It may be objected that there was no reason why the head of a great religious institution should be interested in casual foreign tourists, but one of the personalities he had ignored was a Dutch artist who was also a mystic and a devout member of the Eastern Church.

The truth was, we discovered as the meal went on, that nothing in the West had any meaning for him; and, by an unfortunate historical accident, nothing had any meaning anywhere else either. His face was turned, as his repertory of languages suggested, towards the East, which was natural enough in an Orthodox priest who had taken orders before the Balkan wars, when his home was Turkish territory and the ally who promised to alter this was Tsarist Russia, and the new Turkey had no desire to be seen by him. He was therefore left isolated in a provinciality that would have been tolerable only if it had been transformed by spiritual genius. But of that there was no trace whatsoever. He spoke of the plot which Stoyadinovitch had made to placate Italy and the Croatian priests by a Concordat which gave the Roman Catholic Church an unfair advantage over the Orthodox Church; and he used just such words as might have come to any politician, untempered by charity or resignation. He spoke of the Montenegrins who worked on the monastery farmlands and lived in the neighbourhood with an unrestrained hostility very different from the discretion usually observed by priests in this country laid waste by racial enmities. There was no attempt in anything he said to improve upon the natural man or his natural state; and the effect was of a chattering lethargy, fatiguing to the ear, alarming to the heart.

‘It is very interesting,’ said Constantine; ‘the man with the yellow face who is so silent and does not laugh, he is the son of a Turk and a Serbian woman. His mother seemed very happy with his father, and she grieved very much when he died, and then she and her son lived very happily. But when she came to die she had a long illness and often did not know what she spoke, and then he found out that it had always been a horrible grief to her that he and his father had not been Christians, so he promised her that he would become a monk, and she died happy.’ There was no difficulty in understanding why he did not laugh. It would be a mystery past comprehending why one’s best-beloved should have known no peace till she had condemned one to sit in this little room, listening to littleness.

But the church remained, and we went back to it as soon as the Abbot left. Its interior was far more beautiful than the exterior, for here the Serbian genius had not commissioned an alien to make it a masterpiece but had worked according to its own nature. Though the church had been built by Stephen Dechanski, it was given its frescoes and its furnishments by his son Stephen Dushan; and these bore further witness to the resemblance between his reign and the Elizabethan age. In each there was a coincidence between national expansion and a flowering of creative art. The flesh and the spirit waxed in a common beauty. There were several royal portraits, radiant with a Tudor positiveness, notably one of Stephen Dushan himself, which showed a tall, hale man of whom it could well be believed that, as his chroniclers tell, he was sometimes shaken by tremendous laughter. It is easy to imagine that his people thought of him as Elizabethans thought of Elizabeth, as a fountain of plenty, irrigating his land with richness. The astonishing degree of that plenty, the quality of that richness, was by an odd paradox supremely illustrated by a fresco depicting a martyrdom. An executioner waits ready to decapitate St. Barbara, his feet in dancing stance, his long fingers trying his sword edge. On his head is a high yellow hat, not lower than a couple of feet; his mantle is rose his tunic green. His victim bows before him, a rose-and-gold mantle swathing her blue robe. She too has assumed a dancing stance, for they are performing the well-known dance and counter-dance of sadist and masochist. This fresco proceeds from an intense experience of luxury. The painter has seen many kinds of textiles dipped in many dyes; he formed part of a society which treated even its most sinister functionaries honourably, so sure was it of its own honour; his kind had outstripped necessity and had therefore full leisure to examine their uncomprehended hearts.

But I could not look at these frescoes as I wished, for there was running and jumping around me the little golden-haired monk, who was talking insistently and, as time went on, impertinently and angrily. As soon as we had come in, Constantine, who was genuinely impassioned for the history and historical monuments of Serbia, had taken us to see the coffin lying on the marble tomb before the iconostasis which holds the masked and silk-shrouded body of Stephen Dechanski, and the other relics of the church, but now the tiresome little creature wanted to show them to me all over again. I looked round for Constantine and my husband, but they were out of sight. When I started to look for them the little creature ran in front of me, so I decided to wait where I was till they returned. I had therefore to look for a second time at the giant candle which was given to the monastery by the widow of the Tsar Lazar who was killed at Kossovo, with the direction that it should be lit only when that defeat was avenged, and which was duly lit by King Peter Karageorgevitch in 1913. But my eyes ranged round me to such wonders as an astonishing fresco which showed the martyred St. George, a beautiful creature bearing the signs of all mundane distinction who neither moves nor speaks because he is the victim of a murderous death, and two bishops and a fury-like angel, who lean over and, by a miraculous power impersonal and unloving as the force of a magnet, raise him back to life. ‘You are not listening!’ cried the little creature. ‘Why will you not listen to me?’ ‘I am listening,’ I said.

But he knew I was not. He had been telling me a story about his brother, which apparently made some claim on my sympathies, and had I been listening I would have been sure to make certain responses. ‘I am afraid I do not understand German,’ I pleaded. ‘You understand it well enough,’ he replied, ‘it is simply that you are not attending; I will say it all over again.’ I saw my husband come back into the church and I walked towards him, clapping my hands over my ears, mocked as I went by glimpses of magnificence, here a superb group of lions fighting with sphinxes, there an Annunciation that annihilates time by showing a rooftree throw the shadow of a cross between the Virgin and the angel, which I should not see again perhaps for years and could not look at under these conditions. When I reached my husband I forgot why I had come to him, for my eyes followed his to the chandelier above us, which was one of the glorious kind to be found in all Byzantine churches from the beginning. There is one in St. Sophia, and in every church on Mount Athos. Chains drop from the drum of the central dome and support a horizontal ring of metal links, closely set with candles and ornamented with icons. These links are very loosely joined, for at a certain point in the great nocturnal services the chandelier is set slowly swinging, and this covers the whole church with a shifting pattern of light and shadow, which is regarded as a symbol of the dance of the angels and saints before the heavenly throne. ‘What sound, sober work, what sound, sober taste!’ sighed my husband. The golden-haired monk pressed in on us, scolding and complaining, and I cried out, ‘What can we do to get rid of him?’ My husband said to him severely, in German, ‘What is all this yammering about?’ The little creature fell silent, looked down at his slippers, and cried out, ‘Oh, dear, I must go and put on my galoshes!’ As we watched him run away, my husband said, ‘Here is Constantine, I must ask him to stop this.’ But as Constantine came towards us he pointed over his shoulder, and again we forgot our irritation, this time out of interest in the party which one of the older monks was leading into the church.

There were two men, three women, one holding a baby in a wicker cradle, two little boys. They were Albanian Moslems. The men wore the white skullcaps that are to them as the fez to other Moslems, and their characteristic white serge trousers, braided with black about the loins and ankles, and clinging miraculously to the hip-bone. The little boys wore tiny skullcaps, tiny braided trousers. The women were veiled and wore floppy white dresses that fell in deep, limp frills like old-fashioned lampshades. In the tall multi-coloured square of painted walls, among the shafts of yellow light that drove down from the high windows, they looked pale and dusty like moths. The priest spoke to the men and they took off their white skullcaps and saw to it that the boys did likewise. He spoke to the women and they took off the veils slowly and clumsily, perhaps because they were reluctant to break a lifelong pious custom, but also for the reason that one strand of Islamic custom (though not all) seems to insist on lack of fleetness and grace as part of the feminine ideal. But their faces bore the slight lubricious smile of those who perform a forbidden action, and this expression seemed particularly ghastly and frivolous because one of the women revealed the livid skin and preoccupied stare of the typical cancer patient. ‘It is their Friday,’ whispered Constantine, ‘that is the Moslem’s holy day, it is to them as Sunday is to us. And they bring their sick to be cured by our Christian saints. See what they do.’ They made their way to the tomb of Stephen Dechanski and stood there in a hushed fluttered group, summoning up their intention.

The priest withdrew from them and came over to us, murmuring with a smile, ‘They have worked out this ritual themselves; it is entirely their own idea, we have nothing to do with it.’ First the cradle was set down on the floor and the child taken out of it; its cry expressed the accumulated griefs and the final weakness of a nonagenarian; its mother pressed its face against the coffin-lid and then knelt down beside the tomb while one of the men knelt at the end. Trembling, she held the wailing baby under the tomb and the man took it from her and passed it round the end back to her. Three times the baby was passed under the tomb and back again. By this tenuous contact with the man whose father had burnt out his eyes, who had killed his brother and who had been killed by his son, it was presumed that the baby would now enjoy physical health. Then it was put back in its cradle, and one of the little boys kissed the tomb and crawled under it three times. After that the woman with the livid skin and the stare slowly performed the ritual, so stiffly and mechanically that it was as if her own malady were hypnotizing her from within. The third time she could not pass under the tomb by her own volition. She had to be dragged out by the two men. Even if the ritual were effective she had come too late; it was no longer for her to say if she would dispense with her malady or not, it was now for her malady to decide when it would dispense with her. The two men got her on to her feet, and they became again a huddled, over-awed group. Softly they padded across the church towards the porch. One of the women and two of the men looked up at the frescoes with the conscious calm of tourists who in a tropical island see the natives practising what in their country of origin would be considered indecent exposure: Islam forbids the representation of living creatures. We followed them to the archway and watched them in the sunshine among the trenches and the rubble-heaps, reassuming their veils and their skullcaps.

At Sveti Naum they had told me that the Moslems brought them their lunatics to be cured, but I had never seen it for myself. Of course this was not an actual flouting of the theory of Islam. We remember only that Mohammed bade his followers strike off the heads of all misbelievers; we forget that in the Koran he alluded to Christ with deep respect, and held that Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Christ, and himself were God’s best-beloved. These Moslems had been brought here by several motives. First, and most piteous, they had already cried to their own God and found Him indifferent. Also this was a place of great past and present prestige. Before Dechani was a monastery it was a palace of the Nemanyas; though most of it was destroyed by the Turks after Kossovo an indestructibly solid kitchen still survives. The memory of its grandeur would certainly have still lingered in this country where a century seems less than a decade elsewhere; and that the monks who a generation ago lived here in poverty and fear should now be among the rulers of the land, while the Sultan and his pashas had been driven out, must have given the ignorant a sense of phœnix-like resurgence, triumphant over death. But whatever the motives of the people were, the visit itself made a painful impression, because they were getting so little good from it. This crawling under Stephen Dechanski’s tomb was not a vicious ritual, but it was idiotic. It was a plain piece of infantilism, purely regressive. The human being pretended it was a child again by going down on its hands and knees, and by crawling under a symbol of authority enacted a fantasy of flight from responsibility, of return to dependence. That was all these people got from a visit to this church which on its walls bore such strong and subtle evidence of the support that Christianity can give to the tortured human animal. On the dome, and again behind the altar, was Christ Pantocrator, the Ruler of All: that magnificent conception of man which shows him worn with care, utterly defeated by necessity, utterly triumphant because he continues to exist under the defeat and exercise his will. On the wall the Mother of God holds up her thin and loving hands in prayer; the folds of her gown are cut from the very stuff of religion, for in their long fall they make an image of endurance, continuance. She too is utterly defeated, she too is utterly triumphant in her refusal to abandon under that defeat her preference for love. People who grasped those conceptions would for ever know some measure of comfort. I think that they, as well as Aberdeen, accounted for the peculiar sweetness and serenity of our friend the seller of ready-made clothing. But there seemed to be no force working in the life of the monastery which would make these conceptions clear to those who were not prepared for them by their own tradition. No one could have entered Sveti Naum, not the wildest mountain Moslem, without receiving some intimation of what its founders and those who lived under their influence had believed about life. But though there were several monks here at Dechani who looked as if they were wise and would have transmitted wisdom, they all wore an air of helplessness and frustration.

‘I am taking your husband to look at some carving on the outer wall,’ said Constantine. ‘Will you come?’ But I stayed where I was among the frescoes, which the afternoon light was now irradiating and showing more and more manifestly superb as pure painting, quite apart from their revelation of the sensibility of a demonic people. Suddenly the little golden-haired monk was back at my side. I had thought that he had said he was going away to put on his galoshes as a pretext for escaping from my husband, but he had actually changed into curious flapping footwear of blue cloth. I heard again Mrs Mac’s words, ‘I hope you’ll not be shown round by that wee monk with the awful galoshes.’ Apparently such imbecile scenes were the usual lot of the visitors to Dechani. ‘You must give me your passport,’ he said. ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘It is a rule,’ he said, ‘that everybody who comes to the monastery must give me his passport.’ ‘But we are not staying here.’ I objected. ‘We are going back to Petch quite soon, before evening.’ ‘That does not matter,’ said the little creature, ‘everybody who comes here, even for a few moments, must give me his passport.’ This was, of course, perfect nonsense. ‘Give it to me, give it to me,’ he clamoured. I knew well that if I handed it over to him I would never see it again. He would probably take it away, tear it up, and come back saying that he had never had it. ‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got it with me. We all left ours at the hotel at Petch.’ His face screwed up in anger. ‘But I know you have got it!’ he insisted. ‘I saw it inside your bag when you took out your handkerchief! Give it to me at once!’ I made a ridiculous flight out of the church and, since I could not see my husband and Constantine anywhere, began to run round it in search of them, jumping over the trenches and rubble-heaps. Round the first corner I found them talking to one of the older and more dignified monks. The little monk, who was scrambling and jabbering at my heels, came to a sudden halt and scuttled away, crying over his shoulder, ‘I am looking for the Hungarian count I have to show round the monastery. I cannot think what has happened to him.’

I said angrily, ‘It really is not fair to have this disgusting little pest running about this lovely place, preventing people from looking at it.’Though I spoke English the monk had caught my meaning, and, looking distressed and embarrassed, he suggested that we go down to the stream which runs through the farmlands a short distance from the monastery and drink from a famous healing spring that rises on its bank. We followed him down a steep path through an orchard, and met three Moslem women, coming up, leading a pack-horse. They asked breathlessly, their black veils shaking and twitching with their agitation, ‘May we go into the church?’ and the monk answered, ‘Yes, but you must leave the horse outside.’ The stream ran shining in and out of the shadows cast by poplars and oaks, willows and acacias; like the quite distinct river which runs through Petch, it is called the Clean One. From the bridge we looked on a far panorama of operatic picturesqueness, a nearer composition of water-meadows and woodlands that was limpid and lovely as ideal flute-music. The only touches in the scene not exquisitely fresh were the filthy black coats of the young theological students who stood about and gaped at us.

As we sipped the spring water we found pleasure in watching some young Albanians who were kneeling between the willows on the river’s brink and were bathing their faces and heads. It is a salient difference between the Serbs and Albanians that, whereas a Serb boy baby looks definitely and truculently male as soon as it is out of its mother’s arms, the sex of many Albanians is not outwardly determined until they are in their late teens, and these boys, who were perhaps thirteen to seventeen, might have been so many Rosalinds. They had long lashes, bright lips, bloomy skins, and a nymph-like fluency of movement. I said, ‘Why are they bathing their faces and heads like that? It is not so very hot.’ The monk answered, ‘It is a ceremony of purification which they have invented themselves. They like to come up to the church every Friday, and always they come here first and wash as you see them doing now. We never ask them to do it, they do it of their own accord. I suppose that they feel guilty, for they are not like the Turks, who have always been heathen. They were Christians when this monastery was built, in the fourteenth century, and I think they know they should be as they were then, and should come back to us.’ I thought to myself, ‘But the trouble is that you too are not as you were in the fourteenth century, and that there is not so much as there ought to be for them to come back to. This reconquered country is like a chalice waiting to be filled, and it seems to me that the wine is lacking.’

At that moment an elbow was thrust into my side, and the little golden-haired monk forced himself between Constantine and myself. He waved a disparaging hand at the landscape and cried, ‘I too have made sacrifices for my religion. For this have I left all the pleasures of city life. Hierfür hab’ ich das schönste Stadtleben aufgegeben.’ Constantine turned on him with a shout of rage, and the other monk flung out an arm at him and told him to go away. Tossing his head defiantly, like a character in an old-fashioned book about schoolgirls, he scampered away and ran up the steep path through the orchard, sometimes pausing because he had lost one or other of his galoshes. The Albanian boys tilted up the lovely ovals of their faces towards the bridge, the unkempt students gathered closer and stared harder, while Constantine kept on shouting. ‘For a Croat, and a Schwab Croat at that, to speak so of one of our holiest Serbian places!’ he ended, and the monk shrugged his shoulders wearily.

‘Let us go away,’ I said, ‘let us go away at once.’ As we passed through the quadrangle the church was glowing more brightly than a pearl, like a lily in strong sunlight, in spite of all the scaffolding and hugger-mugger. ‘Do you want to go in again?’ asked Constantine. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I only want to walk for a little in the woods outside.’ When we had said good-bye to the monk and given him some money for the church, we went out to the road and found Dragutin standing beside the automobile with his arms folded, while the little golden-haired monk skipped round him. ‘Yes,’ he was crying, ‘and that is not the end of the famous folk who are proud to be our guests! For today we have had great news, we have heard that next Whitsuntide we will have the great honour of entertaining at Dechani Herr Hitler and General Göring!’ ‘Drive us a short way down the road,’ said Constantine; ‘the Gospodja does not want to stay here any longer, she would rather walk in the woods.’ ‘I don’t wonder,’ said Dragutin; ‘this isn’t my idea of a holy place. If this little one had a dancing bear I’d think we were in the gipsy quarter.’

We found a path through very still and fragrant pinewoods, leading to a holiday camp for children, not yet opened for the summer, and we sat down on one of the seats. Soon Constantine fell into a doze, and I went for a stroll among the trees, and came back with a handful of peppermint. My husband too was asleep now, and I sat down between the two men till they wakened. When Constantine opened his eyes he asked, ‘What are those things on your lap? I like those dark-green leaves, and those sad, middle-aged mauve flowers. Peppermint, you say? But what have they to do with peppermint? Do they smell like it?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it is peppermint itself.’ ‘What are you telling me!’ he exclaimed. ‘I am like a little one who has thought all his life that babies came in the doctor’s bag and is suddenly told the truth by a cruel schoolmaster. Always I have thought that peppermint came simply from a shop, or at furthest a jar in a shop, and now you tell me brutally that it grows out of the earth, in my own land, in woods such as I have seen all my life.’ I crushed a piece and held it under his nose. ‘Hey, it is truly peppermint,’ he cried ecstatically, for he loved pungent scents and flavours. But suddenly his expression changed from a grin of delight to a rictus of horror. He pushed my hand away and groaned. It was as if he suddenly rebelled against the intensity of sensation, as if he loathed the acute quality of experience. ‘I am very ill,’ he sighed. ‘I am in great pain. And there is nothing whatsoever the matter with me,’ he added, more faintly still.

My husband and I put our arms round him because we were afraid he would fall off the bench. He remained with his eyes closed for a moment, then said, ‘I am quite all right. It is the sting on my hand that has given me fever. That is all.’ ‘No,‘ I said, ’there is more than that the matter with you. You are very tired.‘ I paused, at a loss for words. I did not know how to say that he was dying of being a Jew in a world where there were certain ideas to which some new star was lending a strange strength. But my husband said, ’Dear Constantine, you know you are tired to death. Why do you not go straight away back to Belgrade and let us find our way over Montenegro to Kotor? You think we are English and stupid, but not a dog could lose its way from here to Dubrovnik.‘ ’How bored you are with me,‘ said Constantine. ’I have seen that coming for a long time.‘ ’Dear Constantine, that is not true,‘ I said. ’We could not have had a more wonderful companion,‘ said my husband. ’Is it so?‘ asked Constantine very earnestly. We patted his hand, but he looked away as if he found our reassurance not so interesting as he had expected. ’I will come with you,‘ he said. ’Montenegro is a very interesting country and nobody can explain it to you so well as myself. Now, let us sit here and enjoy the calm. Breathe, breathe deep! This is the sweetest air, such as you have not in England.‘

When we returned to Petch Constantine went to bed at once, and we sat for a time drinking plum brandy outside the hotel, watching the corso. ‘Our relations with Constantine are painful but very interesting,’ I said; ‘it is as if we had ceased to be people, and had become figures in a poet’s dream.’ ‘I cannot help feeling,’ said my husband, ‘that there are more restful ways of taking a holiday than becoming characters in the second part of Faust.’ Before us streamed the mountain people, large-boned and majestic, and always tragic when old; the trim functionaries moving whippily, as if they were determined to dodge out of the path of destiny likely to work such a change on them between youth and age; lads ranged in groups yet loosely, like skeins of wool, as they do in the distressed areas of our own country; grave and pallid little boys circled between the tables selling newspapers and picture postcards, gay little girls ran through the crowd in their enchanting costumes of flowered tight jackets and loose trousers.

Suddenly we were jerked out of our contented drowsiness. Two lads were talking at the edge of the stream that runs down the roadway; they drew apart, one struck the other on the chest, not violently, but with an intention of insult; before he had well delivered the blow its answer came to him. He was struck with a force that had at least thought of murder. His body pivoted on one heel and fell obliquely, with the arms wind-milling, into the middle of the stream. As he scrambled out of the water a silence fell on the whole street. Not a shocked silence; simply the silence of a circus audience watching the acrobats as they hang impaled on the climax of their great trick. Maybe many of the audience thought that the old days had come back when men were allowed to be men and have their excitements. But the silence was broken. A sword rattled. It had not been drawn, it had got caught in the legs of a chair. The Chief of Police had risen from his table in the café, with a look of extreme exasperation on his hard-bitten face, and was hurrying across the street to the two lads. He boxed the ears of the one who was standing on the edge of the stream; the other he helped out of the water, and then cuffed him with just as little tenderness. Then he stood over them and scolded them in the very pose of a nursemaid. The corso shuffled on again, the newsboys once more shouted ‘Pravda!’ and ‘Politika!’ Doubtless many hearts were the heavier as they realized, as they must have done many times, that the old days were over.

We strolled along the main street, passing some bright caves in the dim simplicity of the low buildings, where the functionaries and their wives could buy Kolynos and Listerine, Coty powders and Lenthéric lip-sticks. At length we came to a point in the road which we had remarked on our way to the Patriarchate, where objects not in themselves remarkable, a disused mosque of no great architectural distinction, a square Turkish tower two or three hundred years old, a patch of grass and some trees, and a gravelled open space, were set at angles which gave them a mysterious and exciting value. We stood for a while and enjoyed its challenge to the imagination. Twilight was falling. The brilliant sky was bluish and white, lit with stars that minute by minute grew more immense. The mountains were the colour and texture of lamp-black and the woods on the foothills looked liquid as green water. Beside the mosque a puddle lay pure white. We heard a drumming, throbbing sound, and thought that the mosque could not be disused as we were told, since surely this was the chanting of a service. But when we drew near the mosque the droning grew fainter, and bats flew straight out of the walls, and our search for the sound led us to round the open space to a little cottage with a garden where somebody was giving a party and entertaining his guests with very old records played on a very old gramophone. It must have been a very small party, for it was the smallest of cottages. I do not think there can have been more than two or three guests; but there were the solemn, self-consciously orgiastic noises of a Slav party.

As we looked and listened there was a scuffle behind us, and a tug at my coat. One of the little girls in flowered jacket and trousers was there behind me, panting through her laughter, ‘Parlez-vous français, madame?’ The golden patina on her sun-bleached brown hair shone like a halo through the half-light. Softly shrieking with laughter, hampered and delayed by laughter, she fled back to a group of shadows that was hiding at a corner of the Turkish tower and now scattered, laughing as she had laughed, into the dusk. Though we called her she would not come; but it did not matter, for she had no more need than a kingfisher to break her flight to prove her loveliness. The town seemed the quieter for this sudden unfolding and furling of wings in its stillness. We turned at random down a street, where white houses showed blank and secretive faces, and were defended by a broad stream that flowed between them and the roadway. We did not hear a human sound until we met a Turk, wearing a red-and-white turban of archaic fashion, and carrying two amphoræ; as he passed us his spectacles flashed at us but he went on talking contentiously to himself. I said to my husband, ‘Miss Kemp says in her book, The Healing Ritual, that she met a young man here who studied occultism and had in his home two hundred ancient manuscripts and books dealing with the art.’ ‘If one lived in Petch one would do queer things,’ said my husband; ‘its dignified decay makes me feel like a fly walking over velvet.’

At last we heard voices. On a bridge leading over the stream from a house stood a young girl in a white blouse and black skirt, holding a lantern with one hand while her other arm was laid about the shoulders of four young children as they all looked earnestly along the street. ‘They are coming!’ cried a little boy at the sight of us. ‘No, they are not!’ jeered the others. ‘These people are not they! Do you not know them better than that?’ That broke the tensity of the children’s interest, and they ran back into the house, but the young girl continued to look down the street, even when a glance had told her that we had come to a stop in front of her, startled out of our good manners by her incomparable beauty. The slight change of expression by which she rebuked our impudence was neither excessive nor complaisant; she was noble in her manners as well as her appearance. I thought it probable that she too was of the strain that had produced the great Katerina Simitch, or at least her followers, and I hoped that the visitors she awaited would bring her some food for her splendid appetites, some opportunity to coerce life into a superior phase by an act of courage. But, if they came on such an annunciatory errand, I could not think that they would belong to the same organization that had fostered the genius of Katerina Simitch: I could not think that they would be sent out by the local church. The Abbot of the Patriarchate was performing his pious and non-mystical function to perfection; when this girl was older his monastery would be a refuge and a refreshment to her. But there was no force here to tell her youth, as the Church had told Katerina Simitch when she needed the lesson, how to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. I looked nervously over my shoulder lest I should see the only emissary of the faith that was likely to appear in this place at this hour, since he was likely to appear anywhere at any hour. I could well imagine him caponing and curveting down the twilit street, coquetting with his shadow, while his blond curls swung.

The starlight waxed stronger, and colour drained out of the world. The stream in its deep channel glittered like a black snake; the houses were pale as chalk, as a ghost, as a skeleton. I might be wrong; I would be able to check it when I got back to the high-street, where Petch was sitting down for its evening meal, for this was Friday, and a fast-day. When we got back to our hotel and sat down in the restaurant, I said to my husband, ‘Eat what you like, I want to make an experiment.’ I asked the waiter what I could eat, and he mentioned dish after dish containing meat or eggs or butter, or fish cooked in butter, or cheese or milk, and all these things are forbidden by the Orthodox Church on fast-days. ‘These will not do,’ I said; ‘though I am a foreigner I want to keep the fast. Have you no dish that fulfils the condition? Haven’t you any beans, or fish fried in oil or boiled in water?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Is that because this is the evening meal?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps at midday you had such dishes.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘we are never asked for them.’ I said, ‘Very well, then, I must eat somewhere else.’ My husband by this time had become interested in the test I was applying. We went up and down the high-street from inn to inn, and they were all full of people eating their evening meal, none of whom was fasting. This was a strange sign in a town which lies in the shadow of Dechani, which for centuries lived not only in a state of ecstatic faith, but by it; for man loves his little abstinences, and he does not abandon the obscure pleasure of fasting until he actually wishes to dissociate himself from the belief which is its apparent justification. If the West had failed to provide Yugoslavia with a formula for happiness, it could not be pretended that the failure of new things did not matter, because there were old things here which were all the country needed. In parts of the country these old things are as valuable as they ever were, as they have ever been. In other parts they are not valid. The people will no longer accept them as currency; and here, since no new currency has been minted there is bankruptcy. As we went back to the restaurant the wind came down from the gorge ice-cold, and like a battering-ram; there was a sound of splintering wood and the crash of sheet-iron. A small shop had come to pieces.