CHAPTER XV
THE SHUMADIA AND SOUTH-WEST SERVIA
Everyone said I must go to the Shumadia, because it is the "heart of Servia," the centre in which arose her struggle for freedom. So to the Shumadia I went. Having read in a German book that it was quite impossible to explore that part of the country without a guide and letters of introduction, I took only as much luggage as I could carry easily in one hand and set out by train for Kragujevatz. As the best-laid plans are apt to go wrong, I left this expedition entirely to Fate. People like being trusted; often, in fact, serve you much the better for it. Fate did this time. She put me into the carriage with a gentleman who most kindly furnished me with an introduction that took me round all the rest of Servia. That I should have been thrown on the land quite unassisted distressed him. "You must yourself see," he said, "that if your Consul and Minister have given you no letter, it looks very bad. But that is the way your country behaves. If you had been German, for example, you would have had plenty of letters." This astonished me; my new friend, on the other hand, seemed still more astonished that I had got so far letterless. Servia loves letters of introduction and is not happy without them. From this time forward I made a sort of triumphal progress, was passed from town to town, and received so much hospitality and kindness that Servia and the friends that helped me on my way will ever remain in a warm corner of my memory. I changed my plans from day to day, and I went wherever the police captains and the district engineers advised me; nor can I wish anyone better guides than these gentlemen. They lent me maps, they planned my routes, they took me walks, they hired my carriages, found my guides and horses, and drove my bargains. What they were pleased to consider the mad Englishness of my enterprise appealed forcibly to their sense of humour, and my various adventures made them shout with laughter. I cannot repay their kindness, but I certainly amused them.
The Shumadia takes its name from "shuma," a forest; the woods of Servia were the last shelter of a desperate people and the rallying-point of the nation. If it be true that "all that is most Servian is in the Shumadia," it is here that we should look for the type of the race. The peasant of the Shumadia is tall, fair, and blue-or grey-eyed. He is more strongly built and more active than his brethren in other districts, and is more like the fair type of Montenegrin than are the men of any other part of Servia. The race question in the Balkans is so exceedingly complicated that I cannot attempt to unravel it, and can only note marked types where they occur.
So much for the peasant. The country now is no longer a forest, though well supplied with woods and trees; it is a most fertile district, and is better cultivated and far more enterprising than any other part of Servia.
Kragujevatz, Milosh' capital, is a very go-ahead place, and next to Belgrade is Servia's most important commercial town, busy and flourishing, with some 14,000 inhabitants. It has a fine gymnasium and a large girls' school, both handsome and spacious buildings very well fitted; the girls' school built by private gift. All trace of the Turk has been wiped out of the town, but the relics of Milosh are carefully preserved. His konak, a medium-sized whitewashed house, now forms part of the officers' quarters. The old church stands near, a small plain whitewashed building with a wooden annexe for the women, who were not then admitted to worship in the main body of the church – which shows forcibly how deeply the Turk had set his mark upon the Servian people. By the church stands the long low whitewashed shed that was Servia's first parliament house. Milosh, like Karageorge, took care to assemble his parliament very seldom and to pay little or no attention to it then. Kragujevatz otherwise is brand-new, and here as elsewhere it is easy to see that the Servians have done more in fifty years for the improvement of the place and the conditions of life than the Turk did in four centuries. Much yet remains to be done, nevertheless a journey from Servia into Turkey is like stepping off the pavement into the sewer.
On leaving Kragujevatz I left the railway. None exists in West Servia, which has to rely entirely on ox-carts for the transport of its produce. Carriage travelling in Servia is, as I have said before, but slow work. But it gives one excellent opportunities of seeing the country. The start must be made early. The man usually suggested 4 a.m., but I made it 5 when possible. The peasant was always on the road or already at work; for he, like the coachman, likes to take his time about things, and has to get up very early in order to spread a six or seven hours' job very thinly over sixteen. This gives him ample leisure to lie under a beech tree and play upon a wooden pipe (a double pipe it is, too, two pipes with one mouthpiece), but in spite of the old proverb it has not yet contributed much either to his wealth or wisdom. He is descended from a long line of forefathers who lived oppressed by foreign rule in troublous times, when the accumulation of property would have been labour in vain and would have but enriched the pocket of Pasha or Janissary. He sees no object in exerting himself; it is unjust to call him lazy. He is undeveloped; his wants are so simple that he can satisfy them easily without working up to his full power, and he has no ideas beyond. He walks, thinks, and acts in leisurely fashion, and appears to be slow to wrath and very good-natured. The spare time which remains upon his hands unfortunately is not always harmlessly employed upon the penny whistle, for your Servian peasant is a great politician. Slow to grasp a new idea on this as on all other subjects, and with no traditions of good government behind him, he is eternally dissatisfied with the government he happens to be under. For centuries "government" in Servia meant "the Turk" and was a thing to be resisted or at least evaded, and the Servian peasant still ascribes every evil to it. So the corn waited while the reaper sat in the shade and discussed the latest scandal about Queen Draga. "If our women," said a Serb to me, "took to politics like yours do, I do not know what would happen. All work would be at a standstill."
Very early in the day, even before the peasant has begun politics, the coachman is ready to rest at a "mehana" (inn), and in spite of all my efforts I became acquainted with the interior of a vast number. The bare whitewashed room with fly-blown portraits of Milan and Natalie, and new and gay ones of Alexander represented as about forty, and Draga as, say, five-and-twenty; the boarded floor; the rush of chickens in at the door when they heard the refreshments coming; the cavern in the brick wall where the little copper pots of black coffee are heated in glowing charcoal; the miniature glass bottles about three inches high, in which the slivovitz (plum brandy) is served; the white-kilted, sandal-shod men who sat round on rough benches and consumed it; and the host and hostess eager both to serve me and to find out all about me, made up a homely and not unpicturesque scene. And a plateful of white curd cheese covered with clotted cream (kaimak), a lump of rye bread, some onions, and some thin red wine, are a breakfast a Prince would not disdain, after driving for three hours with nothing but a thimbleful of black coffee inside him. By midday every inn has dinner ready, and supplies food, which is generally far better than the outside of the den leads one to expect, at a very cheap rate. The penny wine of the country is good of its kind, and shows that Servia only requires science to become a first-class wine-growing country. The untravelled Serb has at present but vague ideas as to what West Europe considers first-class wine. "Our wine," said a Serb to me, after I had tasted a thin red variety, "is not so well known as it ought to be. We send a great deal of this to Marseilles and sell it very cheap. The French probably sell it as the best champagne, at a high price!" which showed he had much to learn as yet about vintages.
I had long days upon the road, but was never lonely. All the country life of Servia dawdled past; living pictures of which I never tired. The school children, who often have to tramp a great distance, are out early, carrying their books and inkpots. In bad winter weather they are often unable to return, and are put up at the school for many nights. Or there will pass a gang of Albanian horse-dealers, their tight striped leg-gear, their scarlet sashes and shaven heads looking outlandish even in this out-of-the-way spot. Sitting high on their saddles, they amble smartly past, driving a herd of ponies in front of them. The Albanian does not let the grass grow under his feet, and his movements are full of nervous energy.
Wildest of all in appearance are the gipsies – brown untamed animals, long, lean, sinewy, and half-clad. As a matter of convenience they adopt the dress of the country they happen to be in; their individuality they never change. The Servian looks down on them with contempt; they are the lowest of the population. "Tsiganin! do this," shouts a Serb to any of the swarthy young rascals who are hanging about the street corner, and the boy obeys like a dog. But the gipsy is fiercely proud of his race. "You are English, but I am a Gipsy!" said an old woman to me, with indescribable majesty, as she drew up her head; the coins glittered in her filthy elf-locks, and she fixed me with her eagle eyes. She took the black pipe from her mouth and waved it round her head till she was wreathed in blue smoke, and she smote her bare breast dramatically. "I am a true Gipsy," she repeated. In a piece of a dirty shirt and half a petticoat, she looked like an empress. Yet the savage who possesses a hut, even the wild beast with a den, is a more civilised being. Without any kind of a tent, much less a cart, will they camp; some poles propped against a bush and covered with an armful of fern are often their only covering from the weather, and a couple of lean unhappy bears may share with them the bundle of filthy rags that is their bed, for your gipsy is a great showman. I once passed a group encircling a caldron, asquat and eager for the pot to boil; they turned as I drove by to look at me, and I saw, with something of a shock, that one of the party was a huge blue-nosed baboon. He wore about as much clothing as the others, and it was not till I saw his face that he was distinguishable from his friends. The cavemen and the prehistoric lake-dwellers cannot have lived less luxuriously than do these strange wild folk now, in Europe in the twentieth century. When I met them upon the road, they seemed to have walked out of another age, another world. Untrustworthy and dishonest are the mildest terms applied to them, and they are said to be responsible for a large proportion of the crime of the land. More extraordinary than their filth and their savagery, more wonderful than their superb vitality, is their marvellous gift – a gift that amounts to genius – for playing stringed instruments. It is in the blood to such an extent that there are fiddlers in every gang; it seems as natural for a gipsy to fiddle as for a fish to swim. I am not speaking of those who wear civilised garments and perform in the large towns, – many of these are known to fame, – but of the ragged ruffians who fiddle for their own amusement on the road, by the camp fire, or sprawled under a tree, and who display a command of the instrument and a technical facility that tends to confirm the theory that music is the least civilised of the arts. I have seen a child, of certainly not more than ten years, perched on the top of a loaded waggon, executing the wildest runs, turns, and flourishes upon his fiddle with an ease and certainty that the industrious student of a conservatoire does not attain to after years of labour, the ease and certainty of a singing skylark. But he and his associates were such that it was disgusting to pass on the lee side of that waggon. How these people have attained this art is an insoluble mystery; that it belongs pre-eminently to them as a birthright is shown by the curious fact that most of the world's fiddlers hail from gipsy-haunted lands.
And these strange wild things, with life running fierce in their veins, passed in their turn, and I was alone with the dead.
By every roadside, even by lonely mountain tracks, stand the monuments of the soldiers who have fallen in war – tall stones, sometimes solitary, sometimes in groups of two or three, almost all carved in very flat relief or incised with a rude full-length portrait of the dead man, painted in bright colours. Some of these stones are small, others five or six feet high. With a blue coat and black moustachios, with his arms and fingers straight and stiff by his side and his feet turned out at right angles, stands the soldier, staring straight in front of him with round black eyes, and presents arms to the passer-by. Upon the older stones, he wears a scarlet tarboosh and carries a sword; upon those put up since the last war, he carries a gun and wears the present uniform. An inscription tells how he met his death: "For the Glory and Freedom of his brother Serbs." The monument is usually near his home, but sometimes on the actual spot where he fell. To the Serbs these stones are an everyday sight. To me it seemed sometimes that I was the only thing left alive out of the slaughter and was passing constantly through the ranks of a phantom army awaiting the trumpet call. Their grotesque and childish simplicity added a strange pathos. Thus I travelled through a land green as our own, with oaks and beeches and fern, and everywhere the print of war was upon it, and through storm and sun and wind and rain I passed from town to town.
Chachak, on the Morava, stands on flat land down by the river. I drove through the ford by moonlight and entered the town with a terrible clatter, but, having come properly introduced, I met with a very hospitable reception. I was travelling to see Servia and the Servians; that was now a recognised fact. Should I like to see something truly Servian? It was fortunate that I had arrived this night, for I was in time to see four murderers shot on the spot where they had committed their crime! I was urged to go, and offered special facilities. Taken aback, I listened, speechless, while the plan was unfolded. I was to rise very early and to drive for three hours up the mountains with the condemned men and the file of soldiers who were to carry out the sentence. The words called up before me a picture of the grisly little procession crawling uphill in the grey of the dawning. Adding up the pros and cons rapidly, I said to myself that it was my duty to see everything, but searched my brains for a decent way out of it. Then I recollected that if I went, for the next fifty years it would be said that all Englishwomen were in the habit of seeing men shot before breakfast. Gripping thankfully at this idea, I said I had rather not accept the invitation; I had not come so far to see Servians killed. My reply caused disappointment, and I was strongly urged to go. The murder had been a peculiarly atrocious one, so that I need not mind seeing the punishment; for the murderers, after cutting the throats of their victims, had gouged out the eyes and otherwise barbarously mutilated the corpses. Twenty men had been arrested, the last gang of Hayduks on that side of Servia. Four were to die to-morrow. Moreover, my route lay that way, and there was nothing at all to be seen in Chachak. My coachman listened anxiously for my decision, but was doomed to disappointment. I did not go.
Chachak is proud of being the first town taken from the Turks by Karageorge. It is a bright and enterprising place, and dreams of constructing an electric railway that shall connect it with the world. It boasts a church that was church, then mosque, and is now church again. At least so I was told, but I believe myself that it was born a mosque and that the old bells belonging to the former Christian period, which were found recently when digging the foundations of one of the public buildings, belonged to an early church long since destroyed and forgotten. I spun out the resources of Chachak as long as I could, and my coachman hung about, buoyed up by the hope that we should yet be in time. I even found the horses harnessed and ready, waiting for me, a most unusual event in Servia, and he started off at a great pace for the first and last time in that land. He had a pleasant, smiling face, and was very civil, and as he looked at his watch every few minutes, I marvelled that he should crave so ardently to see red blood run in the sunshine. To have once seen it hurrying down an Italian gutter was enough for me.
So we drove on through woods that I knew were beautiful, but they gave me only a sickly feeling of being on the track of death, and the farther I got, the less I liked it. In starting, I had calculated that I was late enough, and then began to wonder if there was any limit to the lateness that a Servian is capable of.
When we arrived at Markovich, the village nearest the top of the pass, I saw the soldiers stopping outside the inn to cheer themselves with rakija on their homeward march, and I knew that the deed was done. An officer rode up, touched his cap and told me politely where I should see the graves; he expected me to be disappointed, but I was greatly relieved. We reached the top of the hill, a large grassy plateau, and there were the four raw heaps of damp mould. A peasant was patting down the last one, and a stake had been driven in at the head of each. My coachman pulled up and said regretfully, "We are only three-quarters of an hour too late!" "Drive on," said I, cutting short the details of how they had stood in their graves and been shot down into them, and as the peasant shouldered his spade and turned away too, we left them alone on the hilltop.
At Pozhega we had to put up the horses for an hour and find food for ourselves. The landlady – a stout woman with a good-natured face – was considerably exhausted, having been to the top of the hill to see the men shot. She had risen very early and had walked all the way, but there was a great crowd, and much to her annoyance she had not got a good view of the end. Nor could I make her understand that I had purposely avoided the sight myself.
From Pozhega it was but a few hours' drive to Ushitza, my next stopping-place, the prettiest little town that I know in Servia – a place that no traveller in the country should omit to visit. It sprawls through two wooded valleys in a mountainous country as beautiful as anyone need wish to see. It is hospitable and cheery, and should make an excellent centre for a sportsman, for I am told that the surrounding mountains are well supplied with game birds, that there is no lack of wolves and bears, and no difficulty about procuring permission to shoot. I clattered up to the inn, and it received me with characteristic simplicity; its landlady asked if I wanted a place as chambermaid, and was much mystified, for it seems that she had never before seen a lady travelling alone. Laughing over this, I gave my letter of introduction to the master of the establishment and asked him to have it delivered at once. It seemed a simple enough request, and I sat down to some coffee without any anxiety, unaware that he had stowed the letter away carefully behind the rakija bottles in the bar and had sent the potboy to tell the gentleman that his sister had arrived! He turned up in a great hurry, much mystified, as his only sister lived in America and had shown no symptoms of visiting him. The innkeeper then produced the letter and explained that, as the gentleman was a Bohemian and possessed the only pair of blue eyes in the town and I also was a blue-eyed foreigner, it had never occurred to him to doubt our relationship. I had a gay time in Ushitza. The schoolmasters, the head of the police, and other local authorities all came to call on me and devise plans for me, and we drank beer festively by the market-place, for as I was the first Englishwoman in Ushitza, health drinking was necessary.
Ushitza is plucky and enterprising. It not only makes plans, but it carries them out. It is blessed with good men at the head of affairs. For all the world over, in spite of the old saying, the voice of the people is very seldom the voice of a god; it is far more frequently simply a "row," and in most places we find that all good work is due to the brains and energy of a few individuals, and not to the collective wisdom of the mass, except in the sense that the mass has had the wit to know a good man when they see him and to follow his lead.
Ushitza, poked away in a lonely valley in a far corner of Servia, has a very good school, well fitted with modern apparatus, maps and diagrams and plaster casts; is well lighted by electricity, and has started an electric cotton and linen weaving factory, which is the pride and joy of the town. Three years did it take in the making; every bit of the machinery had to be imported from abroad and carried over the mountains on ox-carts, but in spite of all difficulties it is well started and beginning to pay its way, and Ushitza, like Chachak, is trying to find the ways and means for an electric railway.
Ushitza was Ushitza in the glorious days of the Servian Empire, and was the seat of its first arch-bishop, the great St. Sava. Stefan VI. transferred the archbishopric to Ipek (Petch), that lies in Stara Srbija waiting to be redeemed; but Ushitza worked out her own redemption in 1862, and after severe fighting evicted the Turk, and is once more the seat of a bishop. The Djetina, a tributary of the Morava, rushes past the town from a narrow valley, where leaps the fall that works the 150-horse-power electric engines, and high on the opposite hill tower the ruins of the big castle that once guarded the town. Fortified by the Turks, it was taken by the Servians and blown to pieces, and its shattered walls hang perilously on the precipice edge. I was told it was a Turkish building, but I scrambled all over it, and believe it to be a Servian mediæval castle belonging probably to the palmy days of the Empire.
Everything else in Ushitza is new, except the stone bridge over the river, which is mediæval, and the big Roman altar stone found in the neighbourhood that stands in the entrance of the school; but the town, though so new, is very picturesque. I left Ushitza with regret, for it was very good to me. I said good-bye for ever and ever, promised to send picture postcards of London, and was soon again on the road.
Ivanitza was my destination, and my midday halt at Arilje, where I arrived cold and damp in a heavy rainstorm. The police captain and the priest were kindly folk and offered to take me to see the church. According to tradition, it is the oldest church in Servia, and is said to have been built to the memory of one Aril, a Christian priest martyred by heathen Servians early in the ninth century. It is a cruciform building with a central dome, a very flat apse, the usual narthex, and is barrel-vaulted. My guides could tell me nothing at all except that it was "very old." I suggested thirteenth century, which astonished them. That the building itself had anything to say on the subject was a new idea to them. After a little discussion with the priest, the captain said that someone had said it was of the time of King Milutin, and added naively that they did not know when that was. Milutin (Stefan Milutin Urosh) reigned from about 1275 to 1321. This date fits in with its appearance, but not with the tradition that it is the oldest church in Servia. Probably it is a later building on an old site. It is old and dim enough, at any rate, to have seen the Great Servian Empire and the rise and the fall of the Ottoman. Frescoes stiff and Byzantine in style cover its walls. Big saints in long straight white robes with bizarre black patterns stand in a row along the walls, and a king (Milutin himself) in a high crown and a long cloak decorated with large discs of gold. The faces have been scraped out by the Turks, and the whole of the paintings are dim and faded, but they are scarce examples of early art, and appear to have never suffered restoration. I am sorry that I allowed damp, cold, and general discomfort to prevent my staying to draw them.
We pushed on through the storm along a richly wooded defile through which tears the Morava, and arrived chill and stiff in the evening at Ivanitza, where the mere sight of the inn made me feel much worse. As it was not possible to get anything to eat till supper-time, and as the bedroom offered me was uninhabitable, and as both my letters of introduction were to gentlemen who only spoke Servian, I wondered why I had come. It was too wet to go out, so I sat in the doorway and drew the shops over the way, and soon forgot all the surrounding circumstances. I was aroused by the most cheery police officers, in very smart uniforms, who came in answer to my letters of introduction, and who were extraordinarily amused to find me already settled down to draw. They brought the burgomaster, called for drinks, and in the approved fashion each stood me a glass. When the doctor, who spoke German, turned up and tried to stand me one on his own account, I cried off. My Montenegrin sketches here were the topic of the day; for the nearer you get to the frontier the more beloved and admired is Montenegro. Central, Eastern, and Northern Servia seem to dislike it. Everyone here wanted to hear both about the place and the people, and I sat in that little low-ceiled, dark, messy, stone-floored room filled with officers and peasants, and explained things as best I could, the company all helping me out with the language. The rain poured in torrents outside and splashed in at the open door; everyone offered me tobacco, which I declined; and there was a good deal of glass clinking. Helped out by German and the doctor, I told tales of Skodra, which Ivanitza thought was a place perilous. And we talked of the virtues of the Black Mountains and the sins of the Turks. The two oil lamps made the black corners blacker and threw odd shadows of fur-capped peasants on the walls, and as I looked at my surroundings, saw the white kilts, the leathern sandals and the uniforms, and heard the clank of sword and spur, I wondered to which of my ancestors I owed the fact that I felt so very much at home. Presently two men slunk in who were greeted by a roar of laughter. "How are the Turks?" cried everyone. Chaff flew much too thickly for me to see my way through it. When it cleared, I was told that the two had strayed over the frontier, had been caught by the Turks, and, as they had no passports upon them, were promptly put into prison. There they had stayed some days, and they had only just been released. Everyone treated this as a huge joke except the victims, who looked extremely silly. There was more in the episode than met the eye, for in the course of the arrest shots had been exchanged, and two Servians – a shepherd and a border patrol man – killed. My officers told me seriously that I was to keep off the edge. Never having lived on a ruddy frontier, I was much interested. All my life I had heard of the value of our "silver streak," but I had to go to a public-house in South Servia before I realised it.
The fact that I had come so soon after the affair of Miss Stone charmed everyone, as it conclusively proved that England had a high opinion of Servia. I was, as someone naively stated, the most remarkable event since the war. An English officer had ridden through the town three years before, but he had had an interpreter and had carried a revolver. Also two Frenchmen had once passed that way. That was Ivanitza's complete visitors' list for the last twenty years. I was the first who had tackled it alone and unarmed. When a fresh arrival turned up, he was told "She is English; it is not a joke; she really is"; and I was shown to some children as a unique specimen: "Look at her well; perhaps you will never see another." Yet the country is so beautiful that it only requires to be known to attract plenty of strangers.
Having first asked me if I were quite sure I had a room that I could sleep in, they all wished me good-night. I said the room was good enough, and went to find out if I had spoken the truth, through into the stableyard. It was pitch dark and the rain was falling. I called for a light. Something came out of the night, and I followed it up a rickety ladder and on to a wooden gallery. It thrust a tallow candle into my hand, and struck a match. The light revealed a lean, hairy man, bare-legged, bare-chested, and sparsely clad in dirty cotton garments. Clasping the candle, I followed him into a very small room. It was a different one from the one I had been shown on arriving. There was an iron bedstead in it, covered with a wadded coverlet, and there were three nails in the wall. Otherwise, nothing; not even a chair. The gentleman produced an empty bottle, stuck the candle into it, put it on the window sill, wished me good-night, and was going. "The room is not ready," said I firmly. He looked round in a bewildered manner and said it was, and shouted for female assistance. A stout lady panted up the stairs, beaming with good-nature. She apologised for the room. The best one contained four beds and they had quite meant me to have one of them, but unfortunately a family had arrived and taken all of them! It was most unlucky! I assured her that I did not mind having to sleep alone. But this room was not ready. She glanced round, appeared to realise its deficiencies, rushed off, and returned in triumph with a brush and comb. I thanked her, but said that what I wanted was some water to wash in. She seemed surprised at this, but went off again, and came back this time with a small glass decanter and a tumbler. I ended by getting a very small tin basin and a chair to stand it on. The seriousness of my preparations then dawned upon her, and of her own accord she brought me two towels and a little piece of peagreen soap stamped, in English, "Best Brown Windsor." I had met this kind before. It is, I think, made in Austria.