As the time for the departure of the train drew near the gendarme grew anxious. Something weighed heavily on his mind, and that was that he had to write the name of each departing passenger in the police-book and did not know how to manage mine. He wrote down everyone else, and then shook his head despairingly. He restored me my passport and explained that he could not read the name on it, for it was printed in "Latinski." I boldly offered to write it myself in the sacred volume. He was incredulous of my powers. It must not be written in Latinski, he said. I promised, took the pencil and wrote my name very large in Cyrillic; he was delighted, and everyone came to see. "It was a great wonder," they said, and they all wanted to know where I had learnt it.
"In London," said I.
"Of a Serb?"
"No, of a Pole."
"Of a Pole! That is impossible."
"But it is true."
Then a superior person explained to me, "It is impossible that you should have learned these letters of a Pole, because Poles are Roman Catholic, and these letters are Orthodox." I stuck to my statement. Then the superior person, who even spoke a little German, had a bright idea. "This Pole," he said, "was Catholic, but has now become converted." And this explanation amply satisfied everyone, for it is obviously easier to change one's religion than to learn the alphabet belonging to an opposition one – if you are a South Slav.
My leaving Pirot was very different from my arriving. Now they said it was a pity I was going. The stationmaster thanked me for trusting a Balkan state, and I promised to look in next time I was in the neighbourhood.
CHAPTER XIV
EAST SERVIA
At Nish the hotel received me on my return with much friendliness, but, though evidently anxious to oblige, was quite unable to give me any information as to East Servia, and prayed me to return to Belgrade by train. This not suiting my ideas at all, I started from Nish at 5 a.m. for Zaichar, and trusted the unravelling of the route to luck and my driver, one Marko, a stolid and friendly being.
Servia is an amazing land. The more I saw of it the more struck was I with its great fertility and its great capabilities, its rich and breezy uplands and its warm well-watered valleys. Corn, vines, tobacco, green crops, and every variety of fruit grow luxuriantly even with the present most primitive methods of cultivation. With knowledge and a little capital Servia should be a rich land. Unluckily both are wanting; the lamentable political differences which tear the kingdom make both almost impossible of attainment, and the small minority of plucky and intelligent men are struggling against almost impossible odds.
Nish had suspected me vaguely, but the farther I got up country the more forcibly did I realise that Servia was a raw quivering mass of politics, and that a change of some sort was imminent. Being provided with no letters of introduction, no one knew to which party I belonged, and I was cross-questioned and re-questioned with a persistency that, to put it mildly, was fatiguing. Before I had realised the extreme state of political tension, I rashly revealed, in reply to a straight question, that I had come direct from Cetinje, and was at once supposed to be supporting the possible succession of Prince Mirko to the Servian throne.
"If you say such things," said a man to me, "you must expect to be suspected, because we have no heir to the throne."
"But what is that to me? I have no wish to occupy your throne."
"Why have you come here?"
"To see Servia."
"Why do you wish to see Servia? Have you ever spoken to Prince Mirko?" and so on and so on, a long string of questions directed towards finding out which of the possible successors to that rickety seat I favoured.
I replied, "I am English, and naturally I prefer the Prince of Wales," and laughed so much that to my no little relief everyone else did so too, and the examination came to an end. By and by people began to confide in me, and I got used to "I tell you this that you may know the truth and tell it abroad. You are English, and I trust you not to say that I told you, nor that you heard it in this town." It was pointed out to me that had I come provided with introductions I should have been spared much annoyance. That is true. But I should not in that case have "seen Servia," nor – for my tormentors always ended by being amiable – should I have learnt how kind the Servian can be to a friendless stranger.
I drove through this beautiful and sunny land much harassed by the pity of it all. Marko was a cheerful companion, and did his best to amuse me. He pointed out that there were always at least three women to one man working in the fields and that the "man" was usually a boy. Men, he explained, did not like working in fields. Moreover, the women did it so well that he seemed to think that it would be a pity to dissuade them. And so long as there was enough to eat, why trouble? For a man it is much better to be a "pandur" (policeman), especially in a large town. Then you do nothing in the streets, and are paid for it; also you wear a revolver and a uniform. Even this delightful career has its drawbacks, for it means a lot of standing and walking about. Best of all is to be a "gazda" (head of a large household or family community), then you tell all the others what to do, and you spend your leisure elegantly in a kafana. A coachman's lot was very hard and ill-paid. Thus Marko, and his astonishment was intense and genuine when I walked up all the hills. I think he ascribed this act of folly to the fact that I was a woman, for he pointed out that the women in the fields had to tramp long distances to work. They have a hard time of it, poor things, for they carry their tools and their babies with them; and babies rolled in shawls and slung up hammockwise dangle like gigantic chrysalids from the branches of the trees round the fields where their mothers toil. "Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree-top; when the wind blows, the cradle will rock," is true in Servia. Probably our own nursery rhyme dates from days when field labour in England was in just such a primitive state.
We made no long pause save at Kniazhevatz (= "Prince's Place"), a little town that was formerly almost on the frontier, and was burnt to the ground no less than three times in the nineteenth century by the Turks, the last time in 1876. It consists mainly of wooden frame houses with mud walls and big eaves and balconies, and the streets are straggly and irregular. This makes it quite the most picturesque town on that side of Servia. What the Serb likes is a perfectly straight street in which all the houses are as much alike as possible. This is, however, also the modern Parisian's idea, and some people admire Paris, so perhaps the Serb is right.
I was supposed to "rest" at Kniazhevatz, but did nothing of the sort. I had not long swallowed my lunch when I was told that "a gentleman who spoke German" wished to talk to me. He and his friends had previously interviewed Marko. He now offered to show me the town. I accepted, and we started. His idea of "showing the town" turned out to be to walk me up and down the main street and let loose a perfect torrent of questions about me and my affairs. I grasped this fact, and ran my eyes over him. He was youngish, fair, and far too stout for his years. A Teutonic ancestor somewhere, I thought. I replied cheerfully to his questions, and walked at a fair pace. When we arrived at the top of the street again, I did not turn back; I pursued bye streets and side streets, and walked on the sunny side of the way. I reckoned on his being in very bad condition, and he was; moreover, he had just dined solidly. The more personal his questions became, the faster I walked. Till a week or two ago I had been panting after tireless Montenegrins, now the situation was reversed; the perspiration stood on his brow, and he had not yet discovered what I was worth in pounds sterling. He asked if I did not find the sun too hot, and I replied that I liked it. He kept up manfully, and inquired the incomes of my father, my brothers, and my brothers-in-law. Baffled on these points, but still persuaded that I was a multi-millionaire, he suggested that I should remain permanently in Servia; this with noble disinterestedness, for he was already another's; but in the middle of the good old tale of how Someone-avich had married an English-wife-who-was-extremely-happy, he was forced for lack of breath to suggest that there was no need to walk fast. "No," said I, "it is very foolish to walk fast, for then one can see nothing." As there was rising ground before us and the "going" was very bad, I forced the pace slightly, his questions died away, and I brought him back uphill to the hotel a limp and dripping thing, with the great problem still unsolved. He threw himself into a chair and called for beer. I jumped into my carriage, which was by this time ready, and drove off without enlightening him. "That man," said Marko, "wanted to know everything, but I told him nothing." As Marko knew nothing at all about me, I was not surprised.
We arrived at Zaichar late at night, after a fourteen hours' drive. Zaichar had little to detain me. Beyond the motley crowd of Bulgarian and Roumanian peasants – for this is very much a borderland place – there is nothing to see. Some villages in the neighbourhood have scarce a Serb in them. Gold is found not far off at the Maidan Pek, and I was strongly urged to go and see the diggings. By way of an attraction, I was told that I should find specimens of every race in Europe there except English, and as by no means the best specimens of humanity haunt gold diggings, I thought that a herd of them loose upon the Servo-Bulgarian frontier might be more than I could grapple with single-handed. So I contented myself with looking at some small nuggets in a bottle. The mines, I was told, pay fairly well, and I enough alluvial gold is also found in the bed of the river Timok by the peasants to make the search worth while. The Timok forms the frontier for a considerable distance, and as a river is a clearly marked line that all can see, the frontier is a quiet one, and no "mistakes" occur upon it.:
We started for Negotin as a heavy thunderstorm! cleared away and a big rainbow overarched the sky. "When the old people see that green and red thing," said Marko, pointing to it, "they say, 'Now we shall have good wine and maize.' Red for wine and green for maize." It was an uneventful drive over land that once produced Servia's best wine, and is now but slowly recovering from the phylloxera. As we approached Negotin, Marko became more and more uneasy. He told me repeatedly that the people of Zaichar had asked him all about me and he had told them nothing; merely that I was English; otherwise nothing at all! This he considered very meritorious. As he knew nothing more about me, I did not see the extreme virtue of his reticence. However, as he was dying for information and I was going to part with him in the evening, so should be no more bothered, I thought I would gratify him, and told him the number of my brothers and sisters, etc., all of which crave him infinite satisfaction. We arrived at Negotin the best of friends.
Negotin stands in a swamp; there are water-meadows and marshes full of frogs and reeds all round it, but I saw no mosquitoes, and the town did not look unhealthy. There are about 6000 inhabitants, a new and unlovely church, and a newly-erected bronze statue to Milosh Obrenovich, but the chief glory of Negotin is the monument to Hayduk Veljko, – Veljko, the popular hero, the story of whose career casts a fierce light on the condition of Servia less than a hundred years ago, and makes one wonder not that Servia should be, as some folk say, so backward, but that in so short a time she should have reached such a high point of civilisation.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Servia was resolved no longer to tolerate Turkish tyranny, the land was overrun with bands of desperate men, who sheltered in wood and mountain, lived on plunder, and perpetually harassed the enemy by guerilla warfare. They called themselves Hayduks (brigands), and they gloried in the name. To-day, just one hundred years later, the same conditions exist in Macedonia, and the causes are the same. Dreaded, beloved, and admired, these Hayduks were the heroes of the peasants, whom they alternately protected and oppressed; their names and deeds were sung in songs, and they cast a halo of glory round the profession of brigandage which has only lately faded from it. The greatest of all was Hayduk Veljko. Associated with Karageorge at the beginning of the uprising, his extraordinary lawlessness and ferocity made it impossible for him to work in co-operation with any plan or person. With a gang of followers, he carried on war in East Servia on his own account. Insatiable for plunder, he would risk his life for a few piastres, but what he had he would give away lavishly. He boasted that he grudged his goods to no man, and that it was better for no man to grudge his goods in return. When the Russians reproached him with calling himself "Hayduk," he answered, "I should be sorry if there were any greater robber in the world!" Drunk with blood and the lust of battle, he prayed "Give us war in my time, O Lord!" for though he was kind enough to wish Servia peace after his death, the joys of the insurrection quite obliterated for him its object, and any form of government was intolerable to him. He was a terror to the Turks, whom he was always surprising, and his reputation was so great that it excited the jealousy of the other Servian leaders. He and his men held all East Servia, and without further assistance kept the foe at bay. Negotin was his stronghold. The Turks, enraged by the heavy losses he repeatedly inflicted upon them, determined to destroy him, and besieged him with a force of 18,000 men. Undaunted, he made sallies at night, harassing the enemy, slaughtering many, and retiring into his fortifications with slight losses. But his garrison gradually became smaller. When he saw that it was impossible to hold out much longer, he was forced to humble his pride and send for help to Karageorge. Alas! Karageorge had no force to spare, and the other leaders were reluctant to help. Hayduk Veljko had always wished to stand alone, they said, and he might do so now. The Turks were reinforced by artillery, and Veljko's fate was sealed. They battered down his towers; the buildings within the walls were smashed: still the garrison held out and sheltered in the cellars. Hayduk Veljko grew desperate; every scrap of metal, spoons, lamps, even coins, were made into bullets, and no help came. When at length it came by the Danube, in the shape of a ship full of men and ammunition, it was too late. Veljko was dead. His prayer was fulfilled, and he did not live to see peace. Making his morning rounds, he was recognised on the redoubts by a Turkish artilleryman who fired at him. He fell terribly mangled, and with his dying breath urged his men to stand firm. They buried his body at night, and tried to conceal his death from the enemy; but the spirit which had animated them had fled, and the garrison, which had not before thought of retreat, held out for a day or two only, and then escaped at night across the marshes. A panic ensued among the Serbs of the district when they learnt the death of Veljko, nor do the other Servian leaders seem to have realised what a power Veljko was till it was too late. The Turkish army pursued the fugitives, and for the losses that Veljko had inflicted upon them exacted an awful vengeance at the first place they came to, the little town of Kladovo, where they impaled the men alive, captured the women, and immersed the children in boiling water, in derision of baptism.
Such is the story of Hayduk Veljko. His was a strong soul blackened by the terrible times into which he was born, and in spite of his many faults he played a great part in the freeing of Servia. His monument, an obelisk with commemorative lines and the date of his death (1813) on the four sides of its base, stands in a little flower garden. His portrait, fierce with black moustachios and a scarlet fez, is carved and painted on the stone. I spelt slowly through the inscriptions; the old woman, caretaker of the spot, came out and picked me some roses. "He was a very good man," she said; "here are some roses from his garden." Poor plucky barbarian, whose ambition it was to be the greatest robber in the world, he had come to this – roses and a very good man! I took the flowers and strolled back; I looked at the older people and reflected that they had heard these things from the living mouth, for their grand-fathers had seen them. Yet with these traditions barely a century old the land is now orderly and peaceful; in this short space of the world's history it has leapt from savagery to civilisation. It has yet far to go, but it has done much.
When I returned to the inn, I found the landlord beaming. "You have two brothers and five sisters," he said. "It is so pleasant to know all about one's guests!" Marko had lost no time in spreading short biographies of me, and had done his work effectually. He parted from me with regret, for with recollections perhaps of Veljko, he had overcharged me liberally, as I learned when I was older and wiser; barring this slight defect, he was a most agreeable travelling companion, and, as he himself pointed out, "gave me Servian lessons for nothing."
The landlord was all friendliness. He knew all about the English, and he told me about Someone-avich-who-married-an-English-wife. "She is so happy," he added rapturously, "and he is now just like an Englishman!"
"What does he do?" I asked.
"Do? He does not do anything. He sits in Idepark like an Englishman."
"She must be an American," I said firmly; "Englishwomen are not rich enough for that."
Radujevatz, on the Danube, the port for Negotin and the last station before reaching the Bulgarian frontier, is but a couple of kilometres away. I returned to Belgrade by boat. All the world and Cook go down the Danube, so it needs no description. My guardian angel was as kind as usual, and gave me two most courteous Servian artists as travelling companions. There is nothing like a "brother brush" for help in need, and as a general rule my sketch-book is a great passport and finds me more useful friends than does my Foreign Office one. These two gave me lessons in the language and told me of their fatherland. That I should have come so far to see it pleased them greatly, but they were both, especially the elder man, very sad about it, and told me mournfully that I could scarcely have come in a worse period of its history. "Our old patriarchal system is dead, and we have nothing to replace it. Our people have had thrust upon them too suddenly Western ideas which they do not understand; we are in the most critical period of a nation's history, the half-educated period. The nations that criticise us passed through this period so long ago that they have forgotten it." He talked of the Great Empire and of Kosovo and of the black years that followed. "Look at the few old churches that the Turks have left us. In those days we were not behind the whole of Europe. Our past was heroic; our future looks black. I am an old man, and I shall die with all my hopes disappointed. No one in the West knows how we have suffered. I, of course, remember when the Turks still occupied our forts." They sang me snatches of Servian ballads – all monotonous wails over the slaying of someone by the Turks, ending in a cry for vengeance. I commented on their unrelieved melancholy. "Ah, Fräulein," said the elder, "it is the suffering of five hundred years, and it is your nation that keeps the Turk in Europe. The Crimean War was a blow to us, and the Berlin Treaty was only a shade less bitter. They did not consider us as peoples. They marked out the Balkan peninsula into spheres of influence awaiting the pleasure of the great Powers, and we are in the Austrian sphere. England has never troubled about us. Russia is our only friend; Russia could save us, but she is too busy in the Far East. The only other land situated as we are, with no outlet to the sea, is Switzerland. All Europe takes care of Switzerland. We have no one to help us in the whole world."
We reached the Iron Gates. The stream was enormously swollen, and we steered up the middle, a huge wide swirl of water eddying and coiling with terrible rapidity. The boat began its upward climb, shuddering and trembling violently; it seemed to be straining every nerve, and the deck vibrated underfoot. Beyond and above gleamed the line of smooth water, and the panting vessel struggled into it and regained its breath. As I stood in the bows and watched the struggle and heard the tale of Servia's woes, Servia seemed to me like the struggling boat, with the melancholy difference that there was no strong hand at the helm to save her from shipwreck.
This was, however, the boat's supreme effort. We lay off Orsova all night, were more and more behind time next day, and did not lounge up to the quay at Belgrade till very nearly midnight. Belgrade was fast asleep when I walked through the silent streets that were entirely deserted save for the sentinels standing motionless at the street corners with rifle and revolver. Belgrade, I had been told in West Europe, was a gay, reckless, dissipated capital. In outward appearance it is about as wild as Little Peddlington. Appearances may be deceptive. I do not know.