The screaming continued, heart-rending, eviscerating shrieks. Benham, still confused, lit a match. All the men about him were stirring or sitting up and listening, their faces showing distorted and ugly in the flicker of his light. "CHE E?" he tried. No one answered. Then one by one they stood up and went softly to the ladder that led to the stable-room below. Benham struck a second match and a third.
"Giorgio!" he called.
The cava.s.se made an arresting gesture and followed discreetly and noiselessly after the others, leaving Benham alone in the dark.
Benham heard their shuffling patter, one after the other, down the ladder, the sounds of a door being unbarred softly, and then no other sound but that incessant shrieking in the darkness.
Had they gone out? Were they standing at the door looking out into the night and listening?
Amanda had found the c.h.i.n.k and her voice sounded nearer.
"It"s a woman," she said.
The shrieking came nearer and nearer, long, repeated, throat-tearing shrieks. Far off there was a great clamour of dogs. And there was another sound, a whisper--?
"RAIN!"
The shrieks seemed to turn into a side street and receded. The tension of listening relaxed. Men"s voices sounded below in question and answer.
Dogs close at hand barked shortly and then stopped enquiringly.
Benham seemed to himself to be sitting alone for an interminable time.
He lit another match and consulted his watch. It was four o"clock and nearly dawn....
Then slowly and stumbling up the ladder the men began to return to Benham"s room.
"Ask them what it is," urged Amanda.
But for a time not even Giorgio would understand Benham"s questions.
There seemed to be a doubt whether he ought to know. The shrieking approached again and then receded. Giorgio came and stood, a vague thoughtful figure, by the embers of the fire. Explanation dropped from him reluctantly. It was nothing. Some one had been killed: that was all.
It was a vendetta. A man had been missing overnight, and this morning his brother who had been prowling and searching with some dogs had found him, or rather his head. It was on this side of the ravine, thrown over from the other bank on which the body sprawled stiffly, wet through, and now growing visible in the gathering daylight. Yes--the voice was the man"s wife. It was raining hard.... There would be shrieking for nine days. Yes, nine days. Confirmation with the fingers when Benham still fought against the facts. Her friends and relatives would come and shriek too. Two of the dead man"s aunts were among the best keeners in the whole land. They could keen marvellously. It was raining too hard to go on.... The road would be impossible in rain.... Yes it was very melancholy. Her house was close at hand. Perhaps twenty or thirty women would join her. It was impossible to go on until it had stopped raining.
It would be tiresome, but what could one do?...
7
As they sat upon the parapet of a broken bridge on the road between Elba.s.san and Ochrida Benham was moved to a dissertation upon the condition of Albania and the politics of the Balkan peninsula.
"Here we are," he said, "not a week from London, and you see the sort of life that men live when the forces of civilization fail. We have been close to two murders--"
"Two?"
"That little crowd in the square at Scutari-- That was a murder. I didn"t tell you at the time."
"But I knew it was," said Amanda.
"And you see the filth of it all, the toiling discomfort of it all.
There is scarcely a house here in all the land that is not filthier and viler than the worst slum in London. No man ventures far from his village without arms, everywhere there is fear. The hills are impa.s.sable because of the shepherd"s dogs. Over those hills a little while ago a stranger was torn to pieces by dogs--and partially eaten. Amanda, these dogs madden me. I shall let fly at the beasts. The infernal indignity of it! But that is by the way. You see how all this magnificent country lies waste with nothing but this crawling, ugly mockery of human life."
"They sing," said Amanda.
"Yes," said Benham and reflected, "they do sing. I suppose singing is the last thing left to men. When there is nothing else you can still sit about and sing. Miners who have been buried in mines will sing, people going down in ships."
"The Suss.e.x labourers don"t sing," said Amanda. "These people sing well."
"They would probably sing as well if they were civilized. Even if they didn"t I shouldn"t care. All the rest of their lives is muddle and cruelty and misery. Look at the women. There was that party of bent creatures we met yesterday, carrying great bundles, carrying even the men"s cloaks and pipes, while their rascal husbands and brothers swaggered behind. Look at the cripples we have seen and the mutilated men. If we have met one man without a nose, we have met a dozen. And stunted people. All these people are like evil schoolboys; they do nothing but malicious mischief; there is nothing adult about them but their voices; they are like the heroic dreams of young ruffians in a penitentiary. You saw that man at Scutari in the corner of the bazaar, the gorgeous brute, you admired him--."
"The man with the gold inlaid pistols and the diamonds on his yataghan.
He wanted to show them to us."
"Yes. You let him see you admired him."
"I liked the things on his stall."
"Well, he has killed nearly thirty people."
"In duels?"
"Good Lord! NO! a.s.sa.s.sinations. His shoemaker annoyed him by sending in a bill. He went to the man"s stall, found him standing with his child in his arms and blew out his brains. He blundered against a pa.s.ser-by in the road and shot him. Those are his feats. Sometimes his pistols go off in the bazaar just by accident."
"Does n.o.body kill him?"
"I wanted to," said Benham and became thoughtful for a time. "I think I ought to have made some sort of quarrel. But then as I am an Englishman he might have hesitated. He would have funked a strange beast like me.
And I couldn"t have shot him if he had hesitated. And if he hadn"t--"
"But doesn"t a blood feud come down on him?"
"It only comes down on his family. The shoemaker"s son thought the matter over and squared accounts by putting the muzzle of a gun into the small of the back of our bully"s uncle. It was easier that way.... You see you"re dealing with men of thirteen years old or thereabouts, the boy who doesn"t grow up."
"But doesn"t the law--?"
"There"s no law. Only custom and the Turkish tax collector.
"You see this is what men are where there is no power, no discipline, no ruler, no responsibility. This is a masterless world. This is pure democracy. This is the natural state of men. This is the world of the bully and the brigand and a.s.sa.s.sin, the world of the mud-pelter and brawler, the world of the bent woman, the world of the flea and the fly, the open drain and the baying dog. This is what the British sentimentalist thinks a n.o.ble state for men."
"They fight for freedom."
"They fight among each other. There are their private feuds and their village feuds and above all that great feud religion. In Albania there is only one religion and that is hate. But there are three churches for the better cultivation of hate and cruelty, the Latin, the Greek and the Mahometan."
"But no one has ever conquered these people."
"Any one could, the Servians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Italians, the Austrians. Why, they can"t even shoot! It"s just the balance of power and all that foolery keeps this country a roadless wilderness.
Good G.o.d, how I tire of it! These men who swagger and stink, their brawling dogs, their greasy priests and dervishes, the down-at-heel soldiers, the bribery and robbery, the cheating over the money...."
He slipped off the parapet, too impatient to sit any longer, and began to pace up and down in the road.
"One marvels that no one comes to clear up this country, one itches to be at the job, and then one realizes that before one can begin here, one must get to work back there, where the fools and pedants of WELT POLITIK scheme mischief one against another. This country frets me. I can"t see any fun in it, can"t see the humour of it. And the people away there know no better than to play off tribe against tribe, sect against sect, one peasant prejudice against another. Over this pa.s.s the foolery grows grimmer and viler. We shall come to where the Servian plots against the Bulgarian and the Greek against both, and the Turk, with spasmodic ma.s.sacres and indulgences, broods over the brew. Every division is subdivided. There are two sorts of Greek church, Exarchic, Patriarchic, both teaching by threat and ma.s.sacre. And there is no one, no one, with the sense to over-ride all these squalid hostilities. All those fools away there in London and Vienna and St. Petersburg and Rome take sides as though these beastly tribes and leagues and superst.i.tions meant anything but blank, black, d.a.m.nable ignorance. One fool stands up for the Catholic Albanians, another finds heroes in the Servians, another talks of Brave Little Montenegro, or the St.u.r.dy Bulgarian, or the Heroic Turk. There isn"t a religion in the whole Balkan peninsula, there isn"t a tribal or national sentiment that deserves a moment"s respect from a sane man. They"re things like n.i.g.g.e.rs" nose-rings and Chinese secret societies; childish things, idiot things that have to go. Yet there is no one who will preach the only possible peace, which is the peace of the world-state, the open conspiracy of all the sane men in the world against the things that break us up into wars and futilities. And here am I--who have the light--WANDERING! Just wandering!"