Part 8 (1/2)
”I am English.”
”Dear G.o.d!” he cried, and came out into the corridor to have a better view of me. ”You are English and you come from a town in the middle of Servia! Ach! how dangerous! Now I am a man. I am making a pleasure trip to Constantinople with my friends. _We_ should never think of stopping in a country like this. We are travelling straight through from Vienna.”
”I also am making a pleasure trip, but it is possible that the same things are not interesting to us. I am going to Pirot.”
”My G.o.d, how Englis.h.!.+ Look you, Fraulein, your nation does things that are quite fearfully silly, and it succeeds because the things are so unexpected that no one is prepared for them. You are like your own army, some day you will walk into an ambush.”
”But it always comes home when it has done all that it meant to do,” I persisted; for I never allow the Empire to be scored off if I can help it.
Then he told his friends of the strange wild beast he had found in the corridor, and they looked at me cautiously and discussed the propriety, or perhaps I should say the impropriety, of my proceedings in awful whispers, with many Teutonic invocations of the Deity, until I had a hail-Caesar-we-who-are-about-to die-salute-thee feeling, which became less and less dignified as the West Balkans themselves came into sight.
We reached Pirot, and I descended from the train in a state not unlike ”funk.”
No one else got out, and I crossed the rails, with the eyes of all the officials upon me. As the gentleman in the corridor had remarked, Pirot, unprepared for such an event, was temporarily paralysed. I walked straight to the exit and held out my ticket to the man in charge. He promptly blocked the door and, though he wore a revolver, called for help. There now being need of immediate action on my part, I began to enjoy myself. I offered him my pa.s.sport by way of soothing him, and mentioned my nationality, but it made him more agitated. He told me to ”come,” conducted me back into the station and shut the exit door. Then he left me in a small office and told me to ”wait.” I waited. Nothing happened. I remembered the ambush I was to fall into, and thought it would be better to meet the enemy in the open, so went in search of it.
It was holding a council of war on the railway lines. I walked into the middle and said, ”Please, I want to go to the Hotel National.” The shot told, and the enemy scattered in all directions. The first who rallied was a young officer, who spoke a very little German. He was very polite, but said I must state how long I meant to stay. He added that there was a train in the afternoon by which I could depart. As I had not yet seen the place, I did not know at all what its attractions might be, so I repeated, like a lesson, a simple and pleasing little Servian composition I had made up the day before. ”I am English. I travel that I may see Servia. Servia is a very beautiful country. Everything is good. I learn the language. The Servian language is very beautiful.”
Seeing how perfectly innocuous I was, the officer promptly said it was all right, but I must deposit my pa.s.sport in the station and reclaim it on leaving. I was not to leave Pirot except by train. By this wily ruse he saved the Servian nation from the possibility of my negotiating with Bulgaria in some lonely spot upon the frontier. I thanked them, escaped from the station, called a cab and drove to the town.
The Hotel National, though the best in the place, was not cheering. It was a large bare barrack, with a billiard-table in the middle, and a pale-brown, skinny boy of about fourteen was its only apparent manager and proprietor. I never saw another. He showed me a free bedroom somewhere at the top of a wooden ladder. A piece of torn sacking was nailed over one side of the window. There were two beds, neither clean, and a man's coat and other garments lay on one of them. The youth collected them, and considered the room ready. I thought we would not begin to disagree at once, so I descended the ladder again and had breakfast, for it was now eight o'clock and I had had to leave Nish on one small cup of coffee. I then felt exceedingly brave, and reflecting on the importance to an army of the commissariat, went out to explore Pirot.
It was Sunday. Of all Continental nations Servia's Sunday is the most Britannic, and there was no buying nor selling of any kind, and scarcely any life in the place. It is a largeish town, with about 10,000 inhabitants; a street of modern houses, a maze of little tumbledown Turkish mud hovels in gardens, and a mosque--a dilapidated, melancholy collection as a whole. For Pirot, taken by the Servians in 1877, was taken by the Bulgarians in 1885 and looted, and is not yet healed of her wounds.
Pirot is very poor, miserably so, and many of the people have a starved and wretched look. But poor though it is, Pirot is important, owing to its situation on the way to Sofia and Constantinople. It is an old, old town on an old, old trade route, and it remains simple and childish. I was perfectly frank with it, and I told it I meant to see all I could, and wished to draw and perhaps to photograph. And the virtuous inhabitants who had questioned me were shocked; ”for,” they said, ”we have a fortress, and only yesterday a stranger was arrested for attempting to photograph it. At this very moment he is in prison, and we do not know what will happen to him.” I asked the criminal's nationality, and learnt that he was a Bulgarian. Being in Servia, I was horrified at his iniquity, but, being English, did not wish to be turned from my purpose. I explained that I wished only to note things characteristically Servian, such as the costumes of the peasants, the houses, and so forth. ”In short,” said a gentleman, ”you are making geo-ethnographical studies.” This struck me as a remarkably luminous idea; I should never have thought of it myself. I said I was, and everyone was very pleased.
As it was Sunday, I went to the church, and the church gripped me at once, for it is unpretentiously barbaric. There is an arcaded porch frescoed with bizarre, colossal archangels, not a bit like people; I entered, and it was all as picturesque as it ought to be, with a blue haze of incense through which gleamed the great gold ikonostasis. All was primitive, as befits the oldest form of the Christian faith in Europe.
The service was just over; some women in front were kissing a holy picture before leaving. Round the gate was a little group of the poor and afflicted, all either blind or horribly maimed, who were waiting for their usual dole. As the congregation began to file out of church, two bakers with loaves and rolls hurried up and set their trays opposite the gate. As they left, folk bought pieces of bread and distributed them in the wooden bowls which the suppliants held out. It was pitiful to see the anxious quivering fingers of the blind feeling the crusts before transferring them to the bag each one wore for the purpose, and the eager eyes of those who could see, as they watched expectant. I had no idea of the price of bread, so I laid down the smallest coin I had, and received such a huge loaf in exchange that I knew that I was behaving with the vulgar parade of a Carnegie or a Vanderbilt. I dealt round the bread rather shamefacedly, for I felt unpleasantly as though I were feeding animals at the Zoo, and escaped hastily from a storm of blessings, with a new idea about the power of twopence to relieve misery.
I walked through the town. The remains of a mediaeval castle at the foot of a hill struck me as a suitable subject for a drawing, and I crossed the road to find a point of view. As I did so I ran my eye over the castle and became aware suddenly that there was a sentry in front of it, and that behind it rose innocent-looking gra.s.s slopes that mean mischief. It was the fortress, with which I had promised to have nothing to do, and I retired hastily, filled with sympathy for the incarcerated Bulgarian, who, after all, was perhaps only making geo-ethnographical studies.
By the afternoon I was an accepted fact in Pirot and had several friends. By Monday morning Pirot was ready to show me everything.
Pirot is the only town in Servia which carries on a beautiful and original local industry, and its rugs and carpets deserve to be far more widely known than they are. They are hand-woven, and the process is incredibly simple. Four roughly hewn tree stems, or big branches, are pegged together into a frame, which either leans against the wall of the house or is supported by struts, and a sufficient number of strings is bound across it. The woman squats on the ground in front of the frame with her shuttles of coloured wools beside her. With the fingers of her left hand she pulls up the requisite number of threads with great swiftness, slips the shuttle beneath them with her right, and, with no pattern to copy from, carries out very complicated designs with astonis.h.i.+ng speed and precision. When she has put in some dozen threads, she takes up a heavy wooden mallet with a row of teeth in it and with a few blows drives the threads very tightly together. Thus she works hour after hour for a franc a day. The colours most largely employed are scarlet, indigo, black and white, with sometimes touches of green and yellow in the border; the designs are bold and effective. The weavers, dark women with coins plaited in their hair, were cheery and friendly, and always asked me in to have a look. An ordinary-sized rug takes about a fortnight to make, and many of the big carpets occupy several women for months. I was glad to hear that the Town Council, which looks after the carpet trade, is on the look-out for good old designs for the workers. Also that it had forbidden imported dyes, as these were in many instances found not to be permanent, and the wools used are coloured by local and traditional methods. Pirot is justly proud of a medal won in the Paris Exhibition, and the trade, if carefully looked after, should greatly increase. I made one bad mistake; I suggested that the work was of Turkish origin. My friends would not hear of this, and declared that it was Servian, purely Servian. I felt crushed, but am by no means sure that they were right.
There is not entertainment for more than a day in Pirot, and the hotel accommodation is lean. I said good-bye that evening. At the station I met the gendarme who had originally blocked my pa.s.sage. Now he regretted my departure. He seemed a childlike and simple personage, not at all intended by nature for a policeman. He carried my bag in for me, and beamed with joy when he felt its weight. ”May I open it?” he asked. When he found the weight was entirely caused by three dictionaries and an old pair of shoes, he was disappointed. ”I thought it was all English gold!”
he said.
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 pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sport 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.