black lamb

I behaved like a professional guide as we hurried out of the 
station, waving my hand to indicate the wealth that lay 
behind the darkness. The station lies in the new part of 
Skoplje, at the end of the main street, which resembles some 
hundred yards cut out of a secondary shopping centre in an 
English industrial town, saving the dimness of its lighting, the 
cobbles and the lack of automobiles, and gives the same im- 
pression that the scalp of the years has become dandruffed 
with undistinguished manufactured goods. But behind the 
station a tableland was Atlas to a sky marbled with moonlit 
clouds, and about us there was warm air and the scent of lilacs, 
and the sound of playing and singing, the astringent sound of 
Macedonian playing and singing, from the little cafes hidden 
away in side streets and courtyards. And an event was imposing 
on the city a rhythm, an excitement. Little fiacres with two 
horses were clattering over the cobbles, people were hurrying 
along on clattering heels, all in the same direction. “ Look, 
they are all going to the church for the Easter ceremony,** said 
Constantine ; we must just deposit our luggage in the hotel 
and start out again, if we are not to miss it, for it is nearly 
midnight.** ** I am afraid that I will have to get some other 
shoes,** I said, for one heel of the pair I was wearing had come 
off as I got out of the train, ** But meantime you can tell them 
to get us a fiacre.** 

But when we came downstairs again they had done nothing. 
In the lounge Gerda was sitting quite still, dazed in contempla- 
tion of my inconsiderateness as an antique monk of Mount Athos 
in contemplation of his navel, and Constantine was nervously 



4 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

broke this rule. There is a step running round the edge of the 
church, so that there was a line of people behind the others and 
raised above them, which gave a handsomeness to the scene, a 
superfluity of grace ; it might have been so ordered in the chapel 
of a great palace, by an emperor. But even now many people 
still pressed about the table to greet the body of Christ. The 
holy table was painted blue-green with some flowers here and 
there, and it had a canopy rising to a battered trellis canopy ; 
some eighteenth-century bedsteads look so. It was curtained 
with machine-made lace, and on the embroidered cloth lay a 
heavy volume of the Gospels and some coins, none of them of 
great value, which the congregation had left there. Old men 
whose faces were scored by hard work and poverty as by actual 
wounds ; young men sleek as seals in Western clothes ; old 
women with grey plaits hanging to their waist, in white serge 
coats covered with black embroideries which were beginning 
to break away from the stuff, because they had stitched them 
when they were young and it was too long ago ; young girls, 
who had flowers in the hair yet were rolled into the wintry 
thickness of sheepskins, and others who were dressed as they 
are in Palmers Green or Rochester, New York : all these came 
and looked down on the embroidered cloth, and were tranced 
in sorrow. They stooped and kissed it with that unquestioning 
worship which every woman wants to feel for the man whom 
she loves, but which, should she be able to feel it for him, is 
more likely to bring their relationship to a painful end than 
any disagreeable action she might commit against him. It was 
strange to recognise this kind of worship performed by men as 
well as women, and not to have to fear that it would arouse 
resentment and caprice in its object. 

There passed to the table a young woman with a round face 
almost stupid with sweetness, who was wearing the Debar head- 
dress, which I think one of the most beautiful garments in the 
world : a handkerchief of fine linen, scattered with a few circles 
of solid red or rose embroidery, in which there is inscribed, as 
if to hide it from the public note, a cross, often of crimson or 
purple. Every woman sews it according to her own vision, but 
it is always a masterpiece, a sublime symbol of a persecuted but 
gorgeous religion. As she bent over the table I twitched at my 
husband’s sleeve and said, “ Look, she is from Debar,” and he 
repeated, nodding his head, “ Yes, she is from Debar,’’ and I 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 5 

marvelled at his amiability, for I had never told him anything 
about .Debar. Then, suddenly, the full crash of the Easter 
ritual was upon us. In an instant the procession of priests 
came through the door in the iconostasis,, there was the gentle 
lion roar of hymns sung by men of a faith which has never 
exacted celibacy from its priests nor pacifism from its congrega- 
tions, and flames had run from wick to wick of the tapers in our 
hands, till the whole church was a field of gentle primrose fires. 

This is the supreme moment of Easter, when the priests 
lift up the embroidered cloth from the table, take it out 
into the open air, and walk round the church three times 
at the head of the congregation, all carrying their lighted 
tapers and singing a hymn proclaiming that Christ has risen. 
Constantine and I had walked in this procession when we had 
come to Skoplje the year before, and I had wanted to do it 
again. It is the very consummation of the picturesque, with the 
flower-like yellow brightness of the tapers, the coldness of the 
starlight and moonlight, the glittering crosses and vestments 
of the priests, the dark people leaning from the lit windows of 
the houses in the square, which seem themselves to waver with 
the pulse of the advancing and receding lights and shadows. 
But there is here more than that, there is true Easter, the recog- 
nition of the difference between winter and summer, between 
cold and heat, between darkness and light, between death and 
life, between minus and plus. Something important which 
passes unnoticed because it is continually experienced is felt 
again in its real importance. But now we could not join the 
procession, for we had been at the iconostasis end of the church 
when it started, and it had accomplished its three circuits 
before we reached the door. When the Metropolitan who was 
at the head of the priests halted in the doorway to make his 
sermon, we were in the antechamber, called the narthex, which 
runs across the front of any Byzantine church, which here was 
specially large and secular, because the architects were accus- 
tomed to the great porches of mosques, where Moslems are 
accustomed to sit and gossip and settle business and talk 
politics. 

I was extremely frightened as we stood there, for I thought 
it possible that a number of people, packed together and con- 
stantly stirring in their discomfort and all holding lighted tapers, 
might set themselves on fire. But I forgot my alarm, because 



6 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


I was standing opposite a peasant woman sitting on a window 
ledge who was the very essence of Macedonia, who was exactly 
what I had come back to see. She was the age that all Mace- 
donian women seem to become as soon as they cease to be girls ; 
a weather-beaten fifty. There was a dark cloth about her hair 
and shoulders, and in its folds, and in her noble bones and pain- 
grooved flesh, she was like many Byzantine Madonnas to be 
seen in frescoes and mosaics. In her rough hand she mothered 
her taper, looking down on its flame as if it were a young living 
thing ; and on the sleeve of her russet sheepskin jacket there 
showed an embroidery of stylised red and black trees which 
derived recognisably from a pattern designed for elegant 
Persian women two thousand years before. There was the 
miracle of Macedonia, made visible before our eyes. 

This woman had suffered more than n.ost other human 
beings, she and her forebears. A competent observer of this 
countryside has said that every single person born in it before 
the Great War (and quite a number who were born after it) has 
faced the prospect of violent death at least once in his or her 
life. She had been born during the calamitous end of Turkish 
maladministration, with its cycles of insurrection and massacre, 
and its social chaos. If her own village had not been murdered, 
she had certainly heard of many that had, and had never had 
any guarantee that hers would not some day share the same 
fate. Then, in her maturity, had come the Balkan wars and 
the Great War, with a cholera and typhus epidemic in between. 
Later had come I.M.R.O. ; and there was always extreme 
poverty. She had had far less of anything, of personal pos- 
sessions, of security, of care in childbirth, than any Western 
woman can imagine. But she had two possessions which any 
Western woman might envy. She had strength, the terrible 
stony strength of Macedonia ; she was begotten and born of 
stocks who could mock all bullets save those which went through 
the heart, who could outlive the winters when they were driven 
into the mountains, who could survive malaria and plague, who 
could reach old age on a diet of bread and paprika. And 
cupped in her destitution as in the hollow of a boulder there 
are the last drops of the Byzantine tradition. 

With our minds we all know what Byzantium was. We are 
aware that the Eastern continuance of the Roman Empire was 
a supremely beautiful civilisation. It was imperfect because it 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 7 

was almost totally ignorant of economics, and the people were 
distraught with hungry discontents which they could not name. 
We know that by the Golden Horn the waning empire developed 
a court ceremonial, which the earlier emperors had borrowed 
from Asia, until it made all those who watched it wise about 
the symbols of spiritual things that can be expressed by sight 
and sound. The Church itself learned from its partner the State, 
and raised the Mass to a supreme masterpiece of communal art ; 
and the people, saturated with ritual impressions of the idea of 
God and of the Emperor, who was by theory the Viceroy of 
God, produced an art that is unique in its nobility, that in its 
architecture and painting and mosaics and metal-work and 
textiles found a calligraphy for the expression of man’s graver 
experiences which makes all other arts seem a little naive or gross. 
We know that these achievements were not technical tricks but 
were signs of a real spiritual process, for the Byzantines were 
able to live in dignity and decency for four centuries in the 
knowledge that they were doomed, that one day they would 
be destroyed root and branch by the merciless Turks. They 
were not merely stoical in that shadow ; they continued to live 
in the fulness of life, to create, even, in the very last phase of 
their doom, to the point of pushing out the shoots of a new 
school of painting. 

All this we know with our minds, and with our minds only. 
But this woman knew it with all her being, because she knew 
nothing else. It was the medium in which she existed. Turkish 
misrule had deprived her of all benefit from Western culture ; 
all she had had to feed on was the sweetness spilled from the 
overturned cup of Constantinople. Therefore she was Byzantine 
in all her ways, and in her substance. When she took up her 
needle it instinctively pricked the linen in Byzantine designs, 
and she had the Byzantine idea that one must decorate, always 
decorate, richly decorate. As she sat there she was stiff, it 
might almost be said carpeted in the work of her own hands. 
The stiffness was not an accidental effect of her materials, it 
was a symbol of her beliefs about society. She believed that 
people who are to be respected practise a more stately bearing 
than those who are of no account ; her own back was straight, 
she did not smile too easily. Therefore she found nothing tedious 
in the ritual of her Church. She could have sat for long hours 
as she was then, nursing her taper in quiet contentment, watch- 



8 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


ing grave and slow-moving priests evoke the idea of magnifi- 
cence, and induce the mood of adoration which is due to the 
supremely magnificent. She was not gaping at a peepshow» 
she was not merely passing the time. She was possessed by the 
same passion that had often astounded the relief workers who 
came here at the beginning of the century to fight the famine 
that always followed the suppression of the Christian revolts. 
Again and again in villages which had fallen under Turkish 
disfavour and were therefore subject without cease to murder 
and arson and pillage, they urged inhabitants to emigrate to 
Serbia and Bulgaria ; and the peasants always answered that 
that might be the wisest course, but that they could not desert 
their churches. This was not superstition. Before the altars, 
the offshoot of Byzantinism had passed the same test as its 
parent ; it had prevented doom from becoming degradation. 
This woman’s face was unresentful, exalted, sensitive to her 
sorrows yet preoccupied by that which she perceived to be more 
important, magnificence and its adoration. 

Now the Metropolitan was at the door, a gorgeous figure, 
not only because his vestments were bright with gold thread, 
and his high mitre and pastoral staff and the cross on his breast 
glittered with jewels. There is inherent dignity in the lines of 
a costume that has incorporated the philosopher’s mantle of 
the ancients, the Roman consul’s scarf, and the tunic and gaunt- 
lets of the Byzantine Emperor. In a rich voice the Metropolitan 
announced that Christ had risen, and from the faces above the 
primrose flames came sharp cries of belief. Then he uttered a 
prayer or repeated a passage from the Gospels, I was not sure 
which, and went on to deliver an address which compared the 
resurrection of Christ and the liberation of Christian Macedonia 
from the Turks by Serbia twenty-five years before. It was, in 
fact, straight Yugoslavian propaganda, and most of it could 
have easily been delivered from a political platform. 

It was only our modernity that was shocked. This was not 
an innovation, but a continuance of the ancient tradition of 
the Church. ** As the body politic, like the human body, is 
composed of parts and members, so the most important and the 
most vital parts are the Emperor and the Patriarch,” wrote a 
Byzantine theologian, “in the same way that the peace and 
happiness of the human being depends on the harmony of body 
and soul, so in the polity there must be perfect Agreement between 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 0 

the Emperor and the priesthood.” Since the Orthodox Church 
does not pretend to be anything but a religion, since it does not 
claim to be in possession of the final truth about philosophy and 
ethics and political science, this does not raise such difficulties 
as it would in the West. The Orthodox Church conceived, 
and still conceives, that its chief business is magic, the evoca- 
tion by ritual of the spiritual experiences most necessary to 
man. It has also the duty of laying down a general pattern 
of moral behaviour. If the civil authority assists at the ritual 
and accepts this pattern it has a right to demand the support of 
the ecclesiastical authority, and the ecclesiastical authority has a 
right to give it, save when its own sphere is invaded. It will, in 
fact, support the civil authority politically if the civil authority 
does not meddle in theology. This is an attitude that is bound 
to be adopted by any State Church, and that involves no 
difficulties in the case of a Church which does not claim final 
wisdom on profane subjects as well as divine. 

The Orthodox Church did not renounce that claim by choice. 
The renunciation was forced on it by the troubled character of 
Byzantine history. One can claim final wisdom on a subject to 
the degree that life as regards that subject is predictable. Now 
life in Europe has never been orderly for more than a few years 
at a time and in a limited area ; but in the West it has been 
orderly enough, if only in the homogeneity of its disorder, to 
allow clever men to lay down principles that they could safely 
claim to be eternal, since they afforded useful bases for action 
and thought during some considerable period of time. In the 
East of Europe it has not been so. Continual and astonishing 
were its historical convulsions. The Byzantine Empire, which 
suffered invasion by bloodthirsty and pitiless fellow- Christians 
who had come to redeem the tomb of Christ in Jerusalem and 
stopped to taste the more immediately delectable pleasure of 
looting Constantinople, and which knew itself certain to be in- 
vaded by Asiatics as inaccessible to appeal as the personages in 
a nigljitmare, could not prophesy. Hence its genius turned away 
from speculative thought to art, and its Church preserved its 
dogma without developing it and concentrated its forces on the 
glory of the Mass, which gave a magic protection against evils 
that were unknown as well as those that were known. Thereby 
it brought on itself the criticisms that it was sterile and archaic 
in teaching and an arcanum of superstition ; but it could not 

VOL, II B 



lo BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

have served its people better in their special tribulation. 

For these historical reasons nobody in the congregation was 
shocked because the Metropolitan's sermon was a speech in 
support of the Government ; and I am sure also, since the circum- 
stances of Balkan life have forbidden any intertwining of religious 
and pacifist sentiment, that nobody was shocked because the 
Metropolitan had in his young days been a comitadji. The 
comitadji who waged guerilla warfare against the Turks in 
Macedonia before the war covered a wide range of character. 
Some were highly disciplined, courageous and ascetic men, 
often from good families in the freed Slav countries, who harried 
the Turkish troops, particularly those sent to punish Christian 
villages, and who held unofficial courts to correct the collapse 
of the legal system in the Turkish provinces. Others were 
fanatics who were happy in massacring the Turks but even 
happier when they were purging the movement of suspected 
traitors. Others were robust nationalists, to whom the pro- 
ceedings seemed a natural way of spirited living. Others were 
blackguards who were in the business because they enjoyed 
murder and banditry. All intermediate shades of character were 
fully represented. This made it difficult for the Western student 
to form a clear opinion about Near Eastern politics ; it also made 
it difficult, very difficult, for a Macedonian peasant who saw a 
band of armed men approaching his village. 

The Metropolitan had, in point of fact, belonged to one of 
the most admirable among these bands ; but if he had been 
careless about the choice of his companions it would not have 
troubled the peasant woman who was nursing her taper and 
gazing at him in thankfulness over its glow. He was a good 
magician. He knew how to wear the garments, how to speak 
the words, how to make the obeisances, that gave her the 
beautiful experience of loving a flawless being. He was a 
magician, and, what was a great marvel to her, he was not her 
enemy. For two centuries her people had been under the horrible 
necessity of seeking this magic, which was their sole consola- 
tion, from agents who, in the intervals of dispensing it to them, 
contrived their ruin and death. In the eighteenth century the 
Church fell into the power of the Phanariots, the wealthy Greeks, 
who established themselves in Constantinople, and worked hand 
in glove with the Turks ; not least joyfully when their Moslem 
masters set them on the Slavs though they themselves retained 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) n 

their Christianity. They persuaded the Sultan to put the whole 
of the Balkan Church under the power of the Patriarchate of 
Constantinople, an institution which they kept in their pocket. 
They then turned the Church into an elaborate fiscal system for 
fleecing^the Slavs, by exacting enormous fees for the performance 
of all religious functions, even stripping the peasants of their 
last farthing as a charge for saying prayers for the dead. They 
not only robbed their congregations of their material possessions, 
they strove to deprive them of their most treasured immaterial 
possession, their racial identity. There were always a number 
of Slavs so devout that they insisted upon becoming priests ; 
if these were not prepared to forget that they were Serb or 
Bulgar, and play traitor to their own blood, they were enlisted 
as the servants of the Greek clergy, and if they displeased their 
masters they were beaten during divine service before silent 
congregations of their own people. There was also a ruthless 
campaign against the speaking of the Serbian and Bulgarian 
languages, and an attempt to enforce the use of Greek over 
the whole of Macedonia, instead of the small Southern district 
to which it had long been limited. 

But as the nineteenth century progressed the Ottoman 
Turks began to conceive a great fear of the Greeks, some of 
whom had already achieved independence in the kingdom of 
Greece ; and the unrest of the Serbs and Bulgars grew with 
every decade. So the Sultan worked out a new application of 
the fiendish rule divide et imperay and in 1870 he appointed a 
Bulgarian exarch to rule over the Churches of Bulgaria and 
Macedonia. The term exarch shows the curious persistence of 
the Byzantine tradition in these parts. It was originally used 
by the Eastern emperors to denote a viceroy ; the Exarch of 
Ravenna was the governor who represented their power in Italy. 
But it exemplifies the degradation which the Byzantine tradition 
had suffered in Turkish hands that it is hard to define the 
ecclesiastical office to which the name was given in modern 
times, and it seems indeed to have held a different meaning at 
different times. In this case it meant the patriarch of this 
province, appointed to fulfil a political mission but with un- 
certain guarantee of support against the opponents of his mission. 
The situation can be grasped if we imagine the British Govern- 
ment sending out an Archbishop to Australia to carry on his 
ecclesiastical duties, and also to compel the Irish and the Scottish 



xa BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

to lose their identities and become English patriots, while at 
the same time doing nothing to prevent the existing Scottish 
and Irish religions and political organisations from opposing 
him. The Sultan-did not recall the Greek priests, who were 
already in Macedonia, and they fought savagely to retain their 
power. As the Serbs naturally found Bulgar control of their 
Church no more admirable than Greek they too were up in 
arms. Thus, at the cost of all peace and gentleness in a com- 
munity of over half a million people, the Ottoman Empire 
preserved itself from the risks arising out of a union between 
its Greek and Serb and Bulgar subjects. 

This horrible confusion of religion and bloodshed persisted 
till the end of the Balkan wars. The woman sitting on the 
window-ledge was certainly not too young to remember a 
certain Greek Archbishop of a Macedonian diocese to the south 
of Skoplje, whose hatred of the Slavs in his spiritual care was 
indeed spiritual, since it could hardly be satisfied by anything 
he could do to their bodies. Once he commissioned a band of 
assassins to murder a Bulgarian leader who was lying wounded 
in a hideaway. They were successful. As proof they cut off 
his head and took it back to the Archiepiscopal Palace, where 
the Archbishop received it and paid them well. It offered an 
unpleasing appearance, as a bullet had smashed the jaw. 
Nevertheless he had it photographed and hung an enlargement 
on the wall of the room where he received his flock, so that they 
might take a lesson. Many a woman, such as this one, sensitive 
and exalted, could never hear the proclamation that Christ had 
risen except from the lips of this atrocious enemy of her kind. 
The Archbishop was a man of extreme personal beauty and 
the graduate of a Western university. At the thought of this 
unpleasing incongruity, one of a million omens that the world 
is not simple, not consistent, and often not agreeable, my hand 
shook and my taper shivered. 

The Metropolitan was still speaking, it was becoming 
enormously hot, and the heat was laden with the smell of honey, 
for it is ordained that all tapers used in churches must be made 
of beeswax. There came back to me the fear of fire which I 
had felt earlier in the service, and this was accompanied by 
a revulsion from the horror of history, and a dread that it might 
really be witless enough to repeat itself. Fire spreads, and the 
substances it enflames put up no defence, burn and become 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 13 

ashes. Human beings love to inflict pain on their fellow- 
creatures, and the species yields to its perverse appetite, allowing 
vast tragedies to happen and endure for centuries, people to 
agonise and become extinct. The pleasantness of life which is 
so strong when it manifests itself that it is tempting to regard 
it as the characteristic and even determinant quality of the 
universe, is of no real avail. I could be burnt to death in this 
church, though the air smelt of honey. In moonlight, by 
fountains where roses grew and nightingales sang, all less 
tangible and superior beauty could be beaten down into earth, 
not to emerge itself again until freed by another Creation. I 
let myself feel these fears to their extreme, with a certain sense 
of luxury, for facing me was this Macedonian woman, who 
could, better than anybody else I had ever met, give me an 
assurance on these points. There was nothing over-positive in 
her statement. One can shout at the top of one^s voice the 
information that the 11.15 for Brighton leaves from platform 
6, but subtler news has to be whispered, for the reason that to 
drag knowledge of reality over the threshold of consciousness 
is an exhausting task, whether it is performed by art or by 
experience. She made no spectacular declaration that man is 
to be saved ; simply her attitude assumed that this Easter 
would end with no more fatality than any other Easter she had 
known, and her body, wasted yet proud in its coarse and 
magnificent clothes, proclaimed that death may last five hundred 
years yet not be death. 


Skoplje II 

Before we went down to breakfast my husband called me to 
look out of the lavatory window. The part of Skoplje behind 
the hotel exhibits a form of urban economy which I find it 
hard to understand : in paved gardens crammed with lilac 
bushes and fig trees, all now bobbing under heavy rain, stand 
new and trim little houses, each alongside a hovel where a 
craftsman, who seems to have nothing to do with the house- 
owner, exercises his skill on the top of rickety stairs under 
sagging roofs of red-brown tiles. These stucco houses are 
designed in a vein of pleasantly vapid romanticism. Minnie 
Mouse might well have chosen one for her first home with 



14 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

Mickey, for they bristle with towers and loggias and a great 
many silly little balconies, on which she could be discovered by 
Mr. Disney’s lens, watering flowers and singing a tender lyric 
in that voice which is the very distillation of imbecile sweetness. 

On the pavement, under one such balcony, lay a Turk, a 
Moslem of true Turkish blood, as most of the Moslems are, 
here in Macedonia. He was in rags, his head was covered with 
the imperfect memory of a fez, the upturned points of his 
sandals had broken off. The shelter of the balcony afforded him 
enough dry pavement for his body, and there he stretched him- 
self, looking out at the rain, and slowly eating something, with 
a notable economy of effort. He was resting his elbow on the 
doorstep, so that he had to lift his hand not nearly so far as one 
would suppose to raise the food to his bearded mouth. ‘‘ I 
never saw quite such a hopeless proposition,** said my husband. 
** I Siee he is a Turk, he has that indestructibly handsome air, 
but he is so unlike the Turks I have seen in the Ataturk’s 
Turkey.” ” Poor man,” I said, ” he is the residue of residues. 
The Turkish population in Skoplje, which used to be called 
tjskub, was increased in the seventies by the Turks who left 
Bosnia when the Austrians occupied it. The Slav Moslems 
stayed, and a few Turkish Moslems of the better sort, who could 
cope with Western ways. Probably a large number of these 
Turks never found a place to fit into here, for this was already a 
contracting society. Then there has been a further winnowing 
since the war, by the repatriation of all the Balkan Turks who 
were willing to face life under the reforms of the Ataturk. But, 
all the same, I like this man.” ” Yes,” said my husband, ” this 
is not lethargy we are regarding, it is an immense capacity for 
pleasure, which is being exercised in difficult circumstances.” 

We went down to breakfast and sat at a table by the window, 
drinking coffee full of the sweet broken curds of sheep’s milk, 
eating the peculiarly excellent rolls that Moslems bake, and 
enjoying the show of Skoplje. This is one of the best spectacles 
I have ever enjoyed, and it is due to the presence of the Turk. 
There are about 75 inhabitants of the town, of whom over 
10,000 are Turks who gave the town its colour in the first place. 
There are fewer minarets than there are in Sarajevo, but they 
are potent. And because there is so strong a Christian element 
in the town, there are constant dramatic disclosures of the 
essences of Christianity and Islam, each being shown up by its 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 15 

opposite. Soon there came past the window some Albanians, 
to begin the revelation. Though I had my back to them I 
knew they were on their way, for a look of fatherly concern on 
my husband^s face told me that he had just caught sight of his 
first Albanian. “ They are not really coming down,*’ I said. 
No Westerner ever sees an Albanian for the first time without 
thinking that the poor man’s trousers are just about to drop 
off. They are cut in a straight line across the loins, well 
below the hip-bone, and have no visible means of support ; and 
to make matters psychologically worse they are of white or 
biscuit homespun heavily embroidered with black wool in 
designs that make a stately reference to the essential points of 
male anatomy. The occasion could not seem more grave, 
especially as there is often a bunch of uncontrolled shirt bulging 
between the waistcoat and these trousers. Nothing, however, 
happens. The little white skull-caps they all wear, which have 
an air of second-rank haloes, of commoners’ aureoles, suggest 
that there may perhaps be a miraculous element involved. There 
is of course a partial explanation in the stiffness of the material, 
which, where it is reinforced by embroidery, must be nearly as 
stiff as a boned corset. But all the same the cause of the 
phenomenon lies in the Albanian nature. There is something 
about the Moslem Albanians which would make them take 
chances with their national costume: it is as if they had not 
eaten of the tree of good or evil, as if they were unalloyed 
by the seriousness that Christianity adds to the soft metal of 
human nature. A lovely facile charm hangs about them, comes 
to dazzling crystallisation in their smiles. 

The group of Albanians who had startled my husband 
passed, and were followed by some of their antithesis, women 
from the villages on Skopska Tserna Gora (the Black Mountain 
of Skoplje). The tragic majesty of their appearance, which is 
unmitigated by beauty, and hardly ever put to the slight test 
of a smile, is consonant with the history of their breed. These 
villages were never fully conquered by the Turk during the 
five hundred years of the Turkish occupation, they murdered 
most of the Turkish landowners who tried to settle amongst them 
and an unending tale of tax-collectors, and they dourly clung 
to their Christian tradition. They wear the most dignified and 
beautiful dresses of any in the Balkans, gowns of coarse linen 
embroidered with black wool in designs using the Christian 



i6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

symbols, which are at once abstract (being entirely unrepre- 
sentational) and charged with passionate feeling. Their wide 
sleeves are thick as carpets with solid black embroideries, 
stitched in small squares, with often a touch of deep clear blue, 
which, (gives the effect of an inner light burning in the heart of 
darkness. Such garments, worn by grim women whose appear- 
ance announces that they would not do a number of things 
possible to less noble natures, have an effect of splendid storm, of 
symphonic music, and make no suggestion of facility or charm. 

The contrast is presented by the town itself, as we saw when 
we went on for a stroll after our breakfast, as soon as Gerda 
and Constantine had joined us. We crossed the bridge over the 
Vardar, which was brownish with the late rains To the left we 
looked past a screen of willows at the foot of the cliff on which 
the garrison fortress stands, on the site of a castle built by the 
famous Serbian Tsar Stephen Dushan, and we saw the snow 
mountains from which the river derived its cold breath. To the 
right there ran along the embankments lines of new dwellings, 
offices and public buildings, interspersed with the hovels that 
are the tide-marks of the Ottoman Empire ; and behind was 
the old town of Skoplje, which has an inveterately country 
quality, because terraces of rough farm land and orchard fall 
headlong into the heart of it from the landward side of the 
fortress. This was a town as the West knows it, exhausting, 
however picturesque it might be, because of the fret of effort. 
We took a road that ran uphill into the Turkish quarter, and 
knew a different sort of town. 

Sarajevo is a Moslem, but not a Turkish town : a fantasia 
on Oriental themes worked out by a Slav population. Here in 
Skoplje we saw what the Oriental himself does with Oriental 
themes. Gone was the sense of form ; we were faced with an 
essential discontinuity. It was explicit in the shops. They are 
at once neat and slovenly, they have been organised by minds 
that attack any enterprise with brilliance and fluency and then 
flag. A shopkeeper spends incredible ingenuity in displaying 
articles of only one or two kinds, and will put the most appetising 
of them alongside others that have been unsaleable not for mere 
months but actual decades. In one shop playing-cards of 
exquisite seventeenth-century design were displayed beside 
boxes of candles that had once been coloured and fluted, that 
were now merely stained and collapsed, and that bore a date- 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 17 

stamp of 1921. There is at work also a love of bright colours, 
which never passes on to the natural development of modifying 
them and fitting them into designs, but monotonously presents 
them in their crude state ; there are windows piled with skeins 
of silks, more lustrous than our shamefaced Western yarns have 
dared to be for many years, and to be bought only in white, 
yolk-of-egg yellow, prussian blue and Jezebel scarlet. Yet, in 
their very triviality, these shops afforded delight. I never 
made a more agreeable purchase than a halfpenny cone of 
roasted nubs of sweet corn. The shop sold nothing else : they 
lay in great scented golden heaps, through which there ran a 
ghostly crepitance as soon as one grain was touched. The 
owner must have heard it a million million times ; it still amused 
him. 

But this lack of psychological staying-power has, perhaps, 
a physiological basis. I realised that in the slight disappoint- 
ment I felt at our visit, since the quarter was not so vivacious as 
I had remembered it on my last visit. Now some veiled women 
were padding by, some bearded men were sitting in caf6s as 
good as veiled by their expressions, which announced a restric- 
tion to the pure field of sensationalism utterly outside the 
comprehension of the Western mind, which can hardly conceive 
of existence apart from the practice of analysis and synthesis. 
Blit before these streets had been like a scene in an operetta. 
It had seemed probable that tenor strains might proceed from 
the young baker, ox-eyed and plumpish, but shapely, who 
leaned over his long trays of loaves and covered them with linen 
cloths crossed with delicious lines of reds and blues, and that 
the black wisps of women bargaining behind those veils might 
turn out to be the ballet and coalesce in some dance gaily 
admitting their equivoque of concealing and proclaiming their 
sex. But I had made my earlier visits at seven and eight in the 
morning, and now it was eleven, and I had noticed before that 
the Turks cannot keep abreast the twenty-four hours anything 
like so well as Westerners. The afternoon finds its vitality 
clouded ; the evening is sluggish ; and at night one crosses the 
Vardar from the new town, where any number of Slavs are 
sitting in the restaurants, talking politics, drinking wine, eating 
spiced sausages and listening to music, into darkened streets 
where there are bursts of singing from a few shuttered caffe, 
and for the rest houses fast asleep. 



i8 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

The Turks, I fancy, are a people who tire easily. When 
they are wildly excited, as they often are by militarist ardour and 
religious fanaticism, they cannot be fatigued ; the reward for 
total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be 
the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it. But in 
ordinary life they seem subject to a languor that comes on in the 
day far too soon after dawn, and in a man^s life far too soon after 
youth. The young Turk, as one sees him with his friends in 
the cafe or in a park, is a laughing and active creature, but 
after thirty-five he acquires a stolidity which might be mistaken 
for the outward sign of wisdom, were it not that it is impossible 
for so many to be in possession of that rare quality. He is 
given to a gesture that claims to express deliberation, that is 
actually an indefinite postponement of thought ; and as he 
makes it his hand, even if he be scarcely middle-aged, looks 
sapless and old. It may be that the breakdown of the Turkish 
administration was not only a matter of political incompetence 
but resulted from a prevalent physical disability affecting men 
precisely at an age when they would be given the most re- 
sponsible administrative posts. 

But, if the morning glory had left the quarter, there was 
much still to delight us. I remember someone who took drugs 
once attempting to explain to me the charm of the habit, by 
saying, ‘‘You know, one gives oneself an injection and I do not 
know how it is, but one spends a delightful day. Nothing 
happens, but somehow every tiny incident of the routine is 
interesting and enjoyable. If one is sitting in an armchair and 
someone comes in to lay a tray on the table, one watches the 
action as if it were a most exquisite miming, and the simplest 
remark, a ‘ Hello, are you there ? * on the telephone, sounds 
like an epigram.” The East is said to have the same effect 
as drugs on those who frequent it, and certainly this town, 
which was so much next door to the East that one was as good 
as through the door, exercised that same power of making the 
ordinary delicious. We turned aside into the garden of a 
mosque, not an extraordinary building, save for the light cast 
on the cross-currents of Balkan culture by the contrast between 
its ancient and fine design and the white crudity of its substance. 
It was a famous sixteenth-century mosque which had been 
allowed to fall into ruins by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, 
fanatical yet far too indolent to defend their sacred places ; and 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 19 

it had been restored by a Yugoslav official, a Herzegovinian 
Moslem, who had fought against the Turks in the Balkan wars 
because he was a Slav patriot, was now a freethinker, and was 
inspired to this act of architectural piety by aesthetic passions 
engendered in him no further east than Paris, where he had 
taken a degree in Oriental studies. Everybody in the garden 
of this not extraordinary mosque was behaving in the most 
ordinary way. At the fountain before it some young men were 
washing ; two prosperous middle-aged men were sitting on 
the domed and pillared white porch, and talking not more 
dramatically than two Londoners at a club window ; round 
the corner some older and poorer men were sitting on the grass 
by the tomb of a saint, wagging their beards in a conversation, 
portentous yet as light in weight as could well be, like the 
conversation in a morning train from an English suburb. 
There was no forrnulable reason why these people should afford 
a ravishing spectacle, but so they did. It was perhaps because 
irritability was absent from their world. To watch one’s kind 
and find no trace of this disease, which in the West is so prevalent 
that it might be mistaken for a sign of life, was like looking in 
a mirror and seeing one’s skin unlined as a baby’s. We our- 
selves fell into the serene mood of the place and sat there for 
longer than we meant. 

But there was a view : the garden was built on a terrace 
high above the domes and minarets and russet roofs of Skoplje, 
and showed us the green hills surrounding the town, spiked with 
the white toothpicks of nameless Moslem graves, and the bare 
blue mountains beyond, shadowed violet by the passing clouds. 
Our Western conscientiousness made us go to look at this view 
from the best advantage and we went to the wall of the garden, 
where we forgot our purpose, for the hills fell steeply to a 
street where people of a wild and harlequin sort were leading 
an entertaining life. A load of hay had been flung up against 
the wall of one house, and was munched by three ponies, raw- 
boned and flea-bitten. Another house, which had a square of 
periwinkle blue affixed on its white front for no particular 
reason, had a mistress who was evidently an indefatigable but 
eccentric housewife : through its door there flew every few 
minutes a jet of water from an emptied basin, discharged with 
the extreme of shrewishness. Outside another house sat a 
pretty woman and two pretty girls, smiling and bright-eyed in 



20 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

perpetual pleasure, cooking something on a tiny brazier and 
drinking from an amphora they passed from one to another. 
One had a kerchief, one a jacket, one trousers, of bright, rich, 
shallow red. Soon they noticed that we were watching them, 
and cried out to us and waved their long narrow hands ; and 
presently, as if to show off their treasures, one of the girls ran 
into the house and came out laughing, holding up a baby for 
our admiration, naked and kicking and lustrous brown. 

This was Slav sensuousness, European sensuousness, quite 
unlike its Turkish, its Asiatic analogue. At the first stimulus 
from the outside it had refused to confine itself to mere blandness, 
it insisted on involving itself with material which, though it 
certainly can evoke pleasure, can unleash tragedy also. The 
wom^ who took her child in her arms was raising trains of 
thought that could lead far beyond the fields of pleasantness, 
that referred to the pain of childbirth, the aching inadequacy of 
love, which cannot keep safe what it loves, the threat of estrange- 
ment and death. She would have been safer if she had con- 
tinued to sit with her friends laughing at little things beside 
the small flame of the brazier, and drinking cool water out of 
the amphora, and that is what the true Turk would have done. 
All over this city of two natures there is demonstrated this 
contrast between Christian imprudence, immoderation, audacity 
in search of delight, and the Turkish thrifty limitation to the 
small cell where anything not delightful cannot enter. We saw 
an illustration of it that first morning, arising out of the attitude 
of common men to roses. 

We owed the lesson to our intention of visiting the great 
caravanserai which lies among the little Moslem houses, where 
the diplomats and merchants stayed on their way from Dubrovnik 
to Constantinople, a superb memorial of the Ozymandian sort, 
too huge as a whole and in every part to have been dictated 
by necessity, with its full-bodied arcades round its marble 
courtyard, and its inordinate thickness of mulberry-coloured 
brick. Beside it are its baths, long grass growing like hair 
from its domes, with a poppy here and there. But there was 
no way through the hoarding across its Arabian Nights gateway, 
and when small boys in fezes told us that the key could be 
found in a cottage down an alley, they were perpetrating what 
seemed to them an exquisite witticism at the expense of the 
stranger. This little pavilion standing among lawns hemmed in 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 21 

with lilac bushes and rose trees, which should have been the 
home of a virtuous young girl supporting herself by her needle, 
was in fact a police station. We looked through the open case- 
ments and saw, not Gretchen at her spinning-wheel, but five 
gendarmes sitting at table, one purple-faced and mountainous, 
others with the fine seams of their uniforms running down to 
tough and slender waists, but all iron-jawed and far too large 
for the low room. A ray of sunshine showed the red glaze 
of paprika on their plates and a pink wine oily in their glasses, 
and shone through one sprung petal of a crimson rose in a little 
tin cup. They sprang to their feet as we looked in at the 
window, and came out of a door that was not high enough for 
any of them, so that they ail straightened up as they greeted 
us, like genial pterodactyls. They explained that for some 
final reason the caravanserai was closed, and led us back 
through the gardens with official but unimpassioned courtesy, 
which suddenly glowed into a warmer emotion when Con- 
stantine, in saying good-bye, complimented them on their roses. 

Immediately all the gendarmes uttered cries of delight and 
began to strip roses from the bushes, and pressed them into our 
hands, giving the men rather more than to Gerda and myself. 
** Are these flowers not more pure than the snows of the 
mountain ? ** demanded the purple-faced one, tenderly taking 
some clusters from a white rambler. Then an idea struck him 
and he cried an order towards the little house in the voice 
peculiar to sergeant-majors all the world over. It brought out 
the gendarmerie servant, a young woman who looked robust 
but tired, carrying the tea-cup containing the rose we had seen 
on the table. ** This,^’ he said, pressing the flower into Con- 
stantine’s hands with the air of one who pretends for politeness’ 
sake that he gives little but who knows well that he gives much, 
** this we think the most perfect bloom we have yet had from our 
garden this spring.” 

Later we saw a rose of that same sort, or as like as makes no 
matter, in the hand of a butcher sitting outside his shop. He 
was a modish young man who wore his fez at an angle, and was 
distinctly handsome in spite of a measure of cosy Oriental 
plumpness. But that is always less deterrent than our Western 
obesity ; while we put on weight because of some defect in our 
organisation, some fault in our digestive or glandular systems. 
Orientals seem to grow stout because they are fond of their 



2t BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

food and their food grows fond of them, and it and they elect to 
live together in a happy symbiosis. This young man’s rounded 
cheeks and dimpled hands suggested a tranquil and unregretted 
union with mounds of rice ashine with fat, and soup-platefuls 
of such Turkish sweets as hot butterscotch. He was doubtless 
thinking of his approaching dinner, and he had a right to take 
his ease, for behind him what was left of his wares was arranged 
with as much taste as the flowers in a Bond Street florist’s. It 
was surprising, in view of that exquisite neatness, that he showed 
no emotion when his shop was entered by an extravagantly 
dirty old Albanian, who set about pinching all the meat between 
his finger and thumb. The prepossession of the West that a 
person who is neat will also be clean breaks down at every 
corner in the East. So the young butcher had nothing to 
distract him from the perfume and colour of the rose, which he 
slowly twirled between his fingers, and sometimes slowly raised 
to his dilating nostrils. He was so well justified, so thoroughly 
wise, in his enjoyment. If a turn of earth’s wheel had brought a 
moment when it was foolish or dangerous to enjoy a rose it 
would have fallen through his fingers to the dust. But the 
purple-faced gendarme who had cried out his demand for 
perfection to the house, his iron-jawed men who had run about 
from bush to bush, they had committed themselves to their 
roses. They would have worked with sweat and without dignity 
to grow them. If there had arrived a person of influence who did 
not share their liking for them they would have disputed their 
point with him. It must be owned that they were lacking in 
repose and in discretion. 


Skoplje III 

Skoplje reveals a difference between the Slav and the Turk, 
the European and the Asiatic, at every turn of the street, and as 
we went about on our sightseeing it revealed hardly fewer 
differences between Gerda and ourselves. There was, some 
time before lunch, a painful scene in a seventeenth-century 
church we visited, which is in itself an amusing consequence of 
racial differences. It is sunk deeply in the earth, because it 
was built in the days of Moslem fanaticism, when all churches 
must be set underground. That ordinance had been the fine 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) as 

flower of Turkish spite, for the Turk loves light and makes his 
mosque a setting for it, but it wholly missed its mark, for the 
Christians liked their church dark, as good hatching-places for 
magic. Indeed, they still like them so, for a couple of women 
and an old man who were shuffling about from icon to icon in 
the darkness explained to Constantine that they had a special 
devotion to this church because of its mystery. Rocking and 
murmuring, they led us to its chief treasure, which was an 
iconostasis intricately carved with scenes from the Bible by 
three brothers, ancestors of the craftsmen who made the 
screen we had seen in the little church of Topola. This work is 
Byzantine in its recognition of the moral obligation to decorate, 
as extensively and intensively as possible, yet in its spirit it is 
purely peasant. When Abraham sets about sacrificing his son 
the boy stands in stockish obedience, as sons do in a good 
patriarchal society, and when the angel prevents him he looks 
up in exasperation like a farmer interrupted in a heavy job ; 
and the angel’s wings were plainly copied from a bird killed 
for the table, which was probably already inside the sculptor 
when he settled down to the secondary task of imitating the 
feathers. Gerda was irritated by this carving, both as a 
bourgeois and as an intellectual. ** This is not serious art,” 
she said, and went to the back of the church. There we found 
her when we came to leave, lighting a candle before a fourteenth- 
century icon of the Virgin Mary, which in its dim presentiment 
of worn melancholy was yet precise and radiant. My husband 
and I exclaimed in admiration, and Gerda said with extreme 
bitterness, “ Now, I suppose, it will go to the British Museum.” 

I took it for granted that her attitude could be explained 
by certain factors we already knew : she disliked my husband 
and myself, both as individuals and as representatives of one 
of the powers which had conquered Germany, and she regarded 
us as traitors to the bourgeoisie. But after lunch we perceived 
that her distress proceeded from roots deep in her philosophy, 
of which we had not yet been made fully aware. Skoplje, 
which had that morning at every turn of the street illuminated 
a difference between the Slavs and the Turks in their way of 
taking pleasure, now revealed st difference between Gerda on 
the one hand and the Slavs and the Turks and us on the other, 
which touched a more fundamental problem : whether pleasure 
has any value. 



24 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


We started the afternoon standing on the embankment 
watching the Easter Sunday procession which was making its 
way along the other embankment facing us on the opposite 
side of the river and would presently cross a bridge and pass us 
on its way to the cathedral. The sun was striking gloriously 
through the storm clouds on the cross and the vestments of the 
Metropolitan and the clergy who headed the long line of towns- 
people and peasants, and it lit up the crocus-coloured kerchiefs 
that many of the women were wearing on their heads. A gipsy 
girl so liked the show that, once it had gone by her, she jumped 
on the embankment and raced along to a point nearer the bridge 
to see it again, her rose-coloured trousers ballooning in the 
wind and casting a blurred image on the waters below. But 
the crowd near by were as entertaining as the procession itself. 
There was a group of formidable old men from some mountain 
village, each with the eye and lope of a wolf, and all with 
tender pink rosebuds embroidered on their woollen socks. 
There were some superb women whose fine and bitter faces 
were unveiled, and therefore must be Christian, yet wore the 
Turkish trousers, and strode along in a gait that knew nothing 
of Islam or, indeed, of Christianity but remembered a primitive 
matriarchy. There was a group of Tsintsari (or Vlachs) at a 
street corner sitting on their haunches, feet flat on the ground, 
buttocks on their heels, chins in a line with their knees, all steady 
as rocks, and playing with amber rosaries as they gossiped. 
But most strange of all to Western eyes was a detachment of 
men, in black uniforms, carrying rifles and wearing cartridge 
belts, waiting to join the procession under the leadership of a 
magnificent old man who carried the standard the comitadji 
always used in the old Turkish days, a black flag printed with a 
white skull and cross-bones. These seemed at first an odd 
addition to an Easter Day procession, until one remembered 
the logical consequences of a nationalist Church, and the 
complete lack of any association between Christianity and 
pacifism in these people’s minds. But I was puzzled by the 
youth of many of the men in the detachment, which made it 
quite impossible for them to have fought against the Turks. 
They were, I suppose, Macedonian Serbs who had aided in the 
suppression of I.M.R.O. But nobody knew for certain, not 
even the friend of Constantine’s who had just joined us, a 
Professor of Ethnology in the University of Skoplje. I cannot 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 25 

understand it/* he said, for the comitadji have long been 
disbanded.*’ 

I asked no more, for now the procession was mounting to the 
crown of the bridge, the cross-bearer was immense against the 
sky, and the Metropolitan with his tall veiled mitre was still 
more immense. As they turned the corner of the embankment 
and came towards us, each squatting Tsintsar rose upright in a 
single movement with the ease of a stretching cat. Gerda said 
into my ear, ‘‘ Do not believe a word of what these people say 
to you. Of course there are still comitadji, the only difference 
is that they are now called chetnitei. They kill and beat people 
as they like. All these Yugoslavs are lying to you all the time. 
I said to the Professor, ‘ But why do you tell them there are no 
more comitadji ? * and he answered, ‘ They are foreigners, it is 
better that they should think so.* ** 

There was nothing to be said. Of course I knew about the 
chetnitsi. I had in my handbag at that moment a pamphlet 
concerning the doings of these Apache fascists in the Voivodina. 
It had never occurred to me that such an institution as the 
comitadji should not, when the legitimate need for it had ceased 
to exist, survive in a disagreeable and degenerate form. I knew 
that in America the guerrilla forces which had fought so well 
in the Civil War had not been easy to disband, and that the 
wilder members of them had become roving adventurers who 
had progressively deteriorating progeny in Jesse James, the St. 
Louis gangsters and the bootleggers and hi-j ackers of Prohibi- 
tion. I had not thought that it could be otherwise in the 
Balkans ; and in any case it seemed to me that I, who am 
English by origin and of French sympathy, had little right to 
despise Yugoslavia for her chetnitsi when England and France, 
with far less excuse, had their British fascists and their Camelots 
du Roi, and that a German, whose fatherland was ruled by the 
Nazis, had far less right to exercise her fastidiousness. I 
could not answer truthfully for the sake of politeness so I meant 
to answer evasively ; but I met Gerda’s eyes and saw that she 
was blind to everything before her, to the procession, to the 
crowd, to Skoplje. Instead of sight there was the working of a 
cloudy opacity that wanted to precipitate contempt and violence, 
and whatever I said would have been turned to its gratification. 

The procession reached us, the Metropolitan halted and 
shook hands with the old comitadji, and the skull and cross- 

VOL, II C 



26 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


bones took its place among the religious banners. We saw 
them move towards the cathedral, and we started to saunter 
along the embankment, while the Professor gossiped about the 
holiday-makers around us. He showed us some peasants from 
the villages down on the Greek border, who could neither read 
nor write, but got the silly fellows who have gone to the bother 
of learning such stuff to tell them the commodity prices on the 
foreign exchanges, and on that information they very cunningly 
calculated what crops to sow. He showed us also a superb 
being, like a Cossack in a Russian ballet, who went strutting 
by in a wide-skirted coat made from the wool of a brown sheep. 
This, he told us, was a wealthy Tsintsar, a true nomad, who 
moved with his herds between summer and winter pastures and 
hoarded all his wealth, according to the classic nomadic fashion, 
in the form of necklaces and bracelets worn by his womenfolk. 
And he-hurried us across the road to see a family of gipsies who 
were clearly natives of fairyland. Only there could a father 
and mother still shapely as gazelles and bloomed with youth 
have eight children ; only there could they have arrayed their 
coffee-brown beauty which fastidious nostrils, secretive lips and 
eyes like prune-whip made refined and romantic, in garments 
of chrome yellow, cinnabar, emerald, royal blue and vermilion, 
which were so clean that they made the very sunlight seem a little 
tarnished. Never have I seen a group so ritually, orgiastically 
unsullied. “ They are Gunpowder gipsies,” said the Professor ; 
“ we call them that because they used to find saltpetre for the 
Turkish Army, and they are renowned for their cleanliness and 
their beauty.” ” But they are like Hindus ! ” I exclaimed. 
” They might be from the Mogul court.” ” They are something 
of that sort,” said the Professor ; ” when Gandhi's private 
secretary came here he could make himself understood to our 
gipsies in Tamil. We think that they are the descendants of 
some conquered Indian people who fled out of Asia after some 
unrecorded catastrophe in the Middle Ages, and certainly these 
Gunpowder gipsies represent the ruling castes. But come, let 
me take you to our gipsy quarter, you are sure to be interested.” 
“All, all is in Yugoslavia,” said Constantine, glowing happily, 
trotting beside the tall Professor. 

We went up the steep hill to the Moslem quarter, passing 
the cabaret where I had first met Astra, the stomach dancer 
whom we had seen at Sarajevo. Outside it were sitting three 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 27 

of the singers : a great distended blonde and two dark girls 
with that beauty which those who have not got it think must 
bring its owners all they wish, but which actually seems to have 
a commercial value just enough to bring them into the sphere 
of commerce. They blinked into the sunlight, turning their 
faces from side to side, their hands tucked into the bosoms of 
their cotton dressing-gowns which were faded and stringy with 
washing and re-washing. Above all Slav life which touches on 
prostitution there is a strange lustral and expiatory cleanliness. 
We passed the sunken church we had visited that morning and 
the mosque garden, and came taow on poorer and smaller 
houses. Suddenly we stopped, because a crowd of laughing 
people ran out of an alley and came to a halt just in front of us, 
turning their backs on us and forming a circle. They rocked 
from side to side, holding their hips and shouting with joy, 
while there staggered out of the alley, holding himself very 
stiffly, a gendarme who was very drunk. He was greenish, he 
held a wavering hand before his eyes to shield them from the 
sunlight ; it could be seen that for him his riding-boots were 
at the other end of the earth, his dead face muttered. Somebody 
cried out something from the back of the crowd, and a shout of 
laughter went up ; and he found that he could not put down 
the foot that he had raised. His other foot wobbled, and it 
seemed that he must fall. But just then there came out of a 
cottage a woman with an ageing and compassionate face, who 
went to him and caught him round his hourglass waist with an 
arm shrouded in a rose-coloured scarf. The crowd turned 
about, and walked off, as if the incident had now changed its 
character and was no longer amusing. She led him into a yard 
behind a house, and when we looked back a few paces further 
on, we saw her through a wide gap in a wall, pressing down his 
rigid body with long fine hands till he knelt, and then bringing 
his head forward by the temples so that he could be sick, all 
with a great piety of movement. 

“ It is here,” said the Professor, just after that, “ here is 
our gipsy quarter.” From a rise in the road we looked down on 
a colony of one-storeyed houses that lay, a sharply distinct 
entity, on a spit of sand running for a quarter of a mile or so 
into the green fields surrounding Skoplje. The houses were 
whitewashed and many were decorated with simple stylised 
paintings of trees, some dark blue, some mustard yellow. We 



28 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

had a clear view along one or two narrow alleys running down 
from the high road into this quarter, and we saw a number of 
people, all gaily dressed in window-curtain material, sitting on 
the pavements with an air of comfort and even formality, and 
looking up with intelligent but not impertinent curiosity into 
the faces of others who were hurrying by, swift and preternaturally 
sure-footed, never stumbling over those at their feet. They were 
all of them extremely Hindu in appearance, but their behaviour 
showed such a strange ease, such a lack of the constraints that 
are characteristic of every conceivable society, that the scene 
seemed illusionary, a stereoscopic presentation of a panel from 
a painted screen. Look, are they not exotic and wonderful ? 
said the Professor proudly. ** There are two thousand houses 
here, which means ten thousand gipsies.** Yes,’* said Gerda, 
her voice hoarse with indignation, “ that there are thousands of 
them I can easily see, but the question is, why are they allowed ? ’* 
** Why are they allowed ? ** repeated the Professor. “ I don’t 
understand.” ” Yes, why have you allowed them to come 
here ? ” persisted Gerda. ** But, Gospodja, they have always 
been here,” said the Professor, ‘‘ they have always been in this 
district, for six hundred years at least, and most of these people 
have been actually settled here in Skoplje since the time of the 
Balkan wars.” ” They should be driven out,” said Gerda, 
trembling with rage. She pointed at six children who were 
making mud pies outside a cottage just beneath us, under the 
care of a grandmother who had the delicate profile of an elderly 
Maharanee. ” Look at them ! They should be driven out ! ” 
The Maharanee, who would have been well able to defend 
her own, heard the vehement accent and turned on us the veiled 
eyes of a hawk. “Now it might be agreeable to go to the 
gipsies* corso,” said the Professor hastily. “ But there,” he 
added, “ I must leave you, for I have another engagement.” 
Every evening the Slavs of Skoplje, who are of the modern 
world, the functionaries and the professional men walk up and 
down the High Street that leads from the station to the chief 
bridge over the Vardar, and the Slavs who are of the old world, 
the artisans and the peasants, walk up and down a section of 
the embankment. But the Moslems and the gipsies have their 
corso at this end of the town, on the top of a hill, where there 
is a French war cemetery, crammed with the flimsy little 
wooden crosses that make them so much more pathetic than 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 29 

any other burial-places. There is such an effort to make the 
crosses pretty, with the white paint and the touches of the 
tricolour, and they are so pitifully cheap, and the reason for the 
need of cheapness is so plainly the enormous number required. 
On the edge of this cemetery, fringed with beds of purple iris, 
there runs a promenade from which a hillside of grass and 
fruit trees drops steeply to the Vardar river, winding silver 
among its golden poplars and willows. An immense prospect 
looks over a broad valley at mountains, so well watered by 
springs that their pastures are like emeralds and their ploughed 
fields like rubies, and beyond them to a wall of snow peaks. 
Along this promenade walk many Moslem men, mostly youths, 
since their elders prefer td stroke their beards in the mosque 
gardens, some Moslem women, who usually come to sit in black 
clutches of three or four in the grass under the fruit trees, and 
many gipsies, men, women and children, who pass through the 
more stolid Moslem crowds with the slippery brilliance of fish. 
The gipsy women, though most of them are Moslem, go un- 
veiled, which is an extreme example of the position their kind 
has won for itself as professionally free from ordinary social 
obligations ; and this means that a thread of beauty, never 
troubling because never marked by profundity, runs through the 
crowd. 

As we came to this promenade through the afternoon, that 
was still violet with the threat of storm and gilt with spring 
sunlight, we heard the throbbing of a drum that announces a 
kolo, a communal dance. Looking down towards the river, we 
saw that on a little knoll projecting from the hillside some 
soldiers were dancing the kolo in a circle of young men in 
civilian clothes, a knot of olive and black against the distant 
poplars and willows and silver waters. But there was another 
drum throbbing somewhere and we found it at the end of the 
promenade, where the ground fell away and there was nothing 
but a little plateau, wide enough for twenty or thirty people, on 
the edge of a cliff ; and there the gipsies were dancing a kolo. 
Because they were Moslems and Easter was no festival of theirs, 
the girls were in everyday dress, and this was fortunate ; for 
their best clothes are usually made of artificial silk brocades, 
which shine with a horrid yellowish lustre, destructive to the 
subtle loveliness of their complexions. They were wearing 
window-curtain material that had been steeped in sunlight and 



30 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

rain till every crude colour was its own fair spectre, and the 
prevailing note was a light, soft, plum purple ; so their skins 
showed honey-gold, and their lips pale carnation. On the 
intricate rhythm of the music these girls and their boys floated 
like seaweed on the tide, just not quite freely, just tenuously 
attached to the solid universe. Their linked hands, which they 
raised higher than is the custom of kolo dancers, pulsed in the 
air, bigger than butterflies but more ethereal than birds. 

Gerda said, ‘‘You like it?” I murmured, “Of course, of 
course.” Beautiful boys and girls were dancing in the open 
air, wearing clothes lovely as flowers, against a background of 
snow peaks, trees palely incandescent with spring, and shining 
waters. Who on earth would not like it ? Gerda said, “ I do 
not like it. See, I have lit a cigarette. I must smoke here to 
disinfect myself. When I see these people I feel I am not in 
Europe.” I said nothing ; it would have been so natural to say, 
“ I wish to God that were so.” She went on, ” Why do you like 
these people ? How can you possibly like them ? Do you not 
see that they are dirty and stupid ? ” I looked at them again 
and marvelled at their bodies, which were as economical as a 
line of poetry. As I looked the music changed its rhythm, 
but it took none of these bodies at a disadvantage ; they hovered 
for a minute, then received the new measure into their muscles 
and their blood, and were at one with it. I said, “ They have 
something we have not got.” And I meant to add, “ A kind of 
nervous integrity, of muscular wisdom.” But Gerda said 
savagely, rooting out the double happiness of despising the 
gipsies and despising me, “You think that merely because you 
do not know these people. You are mystical about them, you 
think they have occult knowledge ; I know what you think.” 

She did not. Gipsies are, in all but their appearance, 
particularly what I do not like. I am told that these at Skoplje 
are the most admirable of their kind, reasonably honest and 
wholly innocent of the charge, laid against all other Balkan 
gipsies, of stealing Christian children and deforming them so 
that they make appealing beggars. But I am cold towards 
them all, largely because they are the embodiment of that de- 
testable attribute, facility. They never make music of their 
own, but they take the music of whatever country they happen 
to be in, play it so slickly that they become the recognised 
musician caste, and then turn music into a mere titillation of 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 31 

the ear, a pleasant accompaniment to an evening^s drunkenness. 
There is no design in anything they do. On my previous visit 
to Skoplje I had attended their grand annual festivity, a whole 
day’s picnicking in the huge football stadium just outside the 
town ; and for the first five minutes I thought I had never seen 
a more gorgeous spectacle. After that I spent half an hour 
speculating if I found it more bearable seen with my sun- 
glasses or without. By normal vision the atrocious smear of 
lustre from the coarse fabrics they preferred spread a smear of 
grease over the scene ; though the dark lenses removed this they 
thereby exposed the monotony of pattern, the scamped crafts- 
manship, the lack of embroidery. Then I went home, under- 
standing what the Scandinavians meant to express when they 
made their Troll-women hollow. A human being ought not 
to be too light, its experience should silt up inside it and give 
it weight and substance. But, all the same, when gipsies are 
so beautiful and do beautiful things I experience the reaction 
that all normal people give to beauty ; and I would not that it 
were otherwise, for, like the Slav and the Turk, I value delight. 
But Gerda, intent on something other than delight, insisted, 
** It is because you are a foreigner, you do not understand these 
people. You think they are wonderful. But you are from the 
north, you should see that they are nothing but dirty and un- 
civilised savages, who ought not to be in Europe at all.” 

I began to walk away from the kolo, which I could no 
longer enjoy, partly because I thought the gipsies might notice 
Gerda’s undisguised disapproval of them, and I made my way 
towards Constantine and my husband, who were going across 
some broken ground back to the high road from Skoplje. But 
Gerda hurried along beside me, saying, “ I do not understand 
you, you go on saying what a beautiful country this is, and you 
must know perfectly well that there is no order here, no culture, 
but only a mish-mash of different peoples who are all quite 
primitive and low. Why do you do that ? ” I said wearily, 
“ But it’s precisely because there are so many different peoples 
that Yugoslavia is so interesting. So many of these peoples 
have remarkable qualities, and it is fascinating to see whether 
they can be organised into an orderly state.” ” How can 
you make an orderly state out of so many peoples ? ” she asked. 
” They should all be driven out.” I quickened my steps, and 
soon we came level with Constantine and my husband. At 



32 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


once Gerda began to reproach Constantine angrily for the 
repulsiveness of the gipsies, and for the shameful compliancy 
of his country in harbouring them. We stepped on to the high 
road in broken order, just in front of an old man who was on 
his way into Skoplje. He was plainly very poor. Indeed I do 
not think that in all my life I have ever seen anybody poorer. 
His coat and breeches were so much patched that it was hard 
to say whether either had originally been black or brown, and 
the patches had themselves been patched ; and his broken 
sandals were bound with rags but, even so, showed his bare 
feet. He had been greatly injured by his poverty. He leaned 
heavily on his staff, and he mumbled sadly through his beard 
to the ground. Gerda walked up to him and stood in front of 
him so that he had to stop, and then turned to us. “ Look ! ** 
she cried, pointing to his tattered clothes and his broken sandals 
and laughing, ** if a great producer like Reinhardt had tried to 
invent a figure of misery he could not have thought of anything 
so dreadful ! ** I said to my husband, ** I cannot bear this,’’ 
and he answered, No, you must cheer up, spme day she will 
do this to somebody who will hit her, and hit her hard.” Con- 
stantine betrayed all his sweetness of character out of loyalty 
to Gerda, and joined in her laughter ; but she rejected this 
sacrifice and made an angry gesture at him. ** Your Yugo- 
slavia ought to do something with all these horrible people ! ” 
she said, and they went ahead of us loudly quarrelling over the 
gipsies and the poor. I turned round and saw the old man 
staring after us in stupefaction. 

The road ran now between barracks that stood in gardens 
full of fruit trees, lilac bushes, beds of purple and white iris. 
Soldiers were sitting at tables among these flowers, some playing 
cards, some singing songs to the sound of the gusla, but very 
softly because it was now the evening, and it had been a holiday, 
and everyone was tired. At one table a young soldier sat be- 
tween two peasants, his parents ; he was looking at them 
reverently because they were his father and mother, they were 
looking at him reverently because he was their son and a soldier. 
On a balcony some soldiers were going through a burlesque of 
drill. We walked on, and the road came out on the naked hills, 
and we looked over the turf to the ruins of an aqueduct which 
was pre-Byzantine, which was built when the Roman Empire 
was still governed from Rome. But the first stars were shining 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 33 

over the mountains, and dusk was already in the valleys, so we 
turned back, and saw the soldiers at the tables rising and stretch- 
ing themselves and yawning, gathering up the dealt cards, 
picking up their guslas and going on with their songs without 
an accompaniment, because a bugle was calling. As we drew 
near the gipsy quarter we heard its polyphonic voice across the 
fields and saw a bonfire on its outskirts with dancing figures 
black between us and the flames. Nearer Skoplje still, where 
there was a steep embankment sloping to a little stream we 
passed the old man whom Gerda had used for purposes of racial 
demonstration, who was sitting ori the grass in the cold twilight 
and, with an air of shame, which increased when he saw us, was 
washing his feet. 


Matka 

After a ten-mile drive from Skoplje we arrived at the little 
monastery which is called Matka, or the Mother, because it is 
kind to barren women, though it is dedicated to St. Andrew. 
I was a little disappointed because last year it had been painted 
Reckitts blue and what is known in Scotland as sweetie pink, 
but this year it was plain white. I thought we would have a 
change,*^ the priest said. It is hard to imagine such a radical 
change being applied to, say, the parish church of Steeple Ashton 
without some letters being written to The Times, We looked 
over the monastery, which was typical of its kind. There is the 
outer gate, the orchard and paddock, and then the enclosure con- 
taining the church and the priest^s little house and a building 
with a stable underneath and a staircase running up to a gallery 
with guest rooms opening off it. It was in fact something of 
a religious centre, something of a fortress where Christians 
could foregather without being sniped at by the Moslems, and 
something of a country club where the peasants could have their 
bean-feasts and be sure of decent company. This last purpose 
the monasteries still subserve : many people came out to Matka 
from Skoplje to have lunch in the orchard. We told the priest, 
who was a handsome and intelligent young Serbian, that we 
would do the same, after we had been to see another monastery 
a mile or so away. 

Our path ran towards a mountain gorge along a river-bank 
that was torn by the rawness of some engineering enterprise ; 



34 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


on a wooden platform by the water we saw a score or so of white- 
capped Albanians, flung down in sleep. We passed through a 
little makeshift village, plainly built for workmen, which ended 
in a pretty house with a well-kept garden, where a handsome 
family were eating their midday meal. “ Priyatno,^* called Con- 
stantine, using the Serbian equivalent for bon appitit. “ Priyat- 
no,” they answered in chorus, the children chirping like little 
birds. The road became a rough path overhung by rock, the 
river a torrent running far below, the valley a narrow gorge 
penetrating densely wooded hills rising to barren peaks. On 
a broad ledge under dripping cliffs, here hung with purple 
flowers, among wind-swept trees that leaned laterally over the 
abyss, we found the little monastery. It was minute and in 
poor repair, but it had kept its frescoes. A bar of sunlight 
struck through a gap in the wall and lay on the anguished 
figure of the Virgin Mary lifting Christ down from the Cross, 
like a finger laid by nature on the corrupt spot which the animal 
world has contracted by its development of consciousness ; its 
liability to grief. Bitter what consciousness brings us, yet bitter 
beyond anything the loss of it ; that the painter showed us in the 
figure of Christ which was typically Serbo-Byzantine. In too 
many Western pictures Christ looks as if He were wholly dying, 
and as if He were making an unmanly fuss over it considering 
his foreknowledge of the Resurrection. But in all these Mace- 
donian frescoes death is shown working on the body that is 
bound to the spirit of Christ, wringing the breath out of the 
lungs as a laundress wrings water out of a shirt, taking the 
power out of the muscles and nerves like a dentist drawing a 
tooth whose roots drive down through the whole body. There 
is demonstrated that separateness of the flesh which Proust 
once noted, in a passage which describes how we think in our 
youth that our bodies are identical with ourselves, and have the 
same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless 
companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who 
are as likely as not in our extreme sickness or old age to treat 
us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands 
of the worst bandits. 

“ Are they not beautiful, these frescoes ? ** Constantine said 
to my husband. ‘‘ You will see that in all these Serbo-Byzantine 
works the feeling is terribly deep. It is ecstatic, yet far deeper 
than mere ecstasy, far deeper than Western art when it becomes 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 35 

excited, as in the case of Matthias Griinewald.’' What is 
that ? ” asked Gerda, who had been quite quiet all the morning. 

You are not going to tell me that the man who painted these 
wretched daubs and smears was greater than our wonderful 
Matthias Griinewald ? ** “ No, no,*' said poor Constantine, 

** I only said that here was a different feeling." " Then what 
is the use of comparing them ? " said Gerda. “ I know you 
did it for only one purpose, to prove that everything here is 
finer than in Germany.** We left them in the monastery to 
settle this disagreement, and went a little way along a path that 
led to the head of a gorge, but it was slimy with recent rains, 
and we turned back. Oh, God, I am so tired of this ! ’* my 
husband said. " It is all very well for you to say that some day 
somebody will hit her,** I said, " but when will it begin ? ** 

Constantine and Gerda were ready to go when we got back, 
but it was evident as they walked in front of us that.he was still 
making every effort to placate her. ** It is horrid,** I said, " to 
see him being specially nice to her because she has been specially 
nasty.** ** He is preposterously good to her,** said my husband, 
“ but why is it that Jews like Germans so much, when Germans 
do not like Jews ? You know, they were very happy in Germany 
until Hitler came ; and I honestly believe that if you gave Con- 
stantine the chance of getting rid of Gerda, he would not take it, 
not only because he is a faithful soul and she is the mother of 
his children, but because he really likes her society.** I 
believe Constantine is moved by prestige,** I said. ** Most 
Western culture comes to the Slavs and to the Jews of Central 
and Eastern Europe through Germany and Austria, and so they 
respect everything German and Austrian, and are left with an 
uneasy suspicion that if Germans and Austrians despise the 
Slavs and the Jews there must be something in it.*’ " What 

you are saying is frightful,** said my husband, " for it means 
that there is no hope for Europe unless in a multiplication of 
nationalisms of the most narrow and fanatical sort. For 
obviously Slavs and Jews cannot counteract this influence 
except by believing themselves rather more wonderful than 
the truth can guarantee, by professing the most extreme Zion- 
ism or Panslavism.** 

In front of us Constantine and Gerda had stopped, just 
above the tangle of engineering works by the river. When 
we came up Constantine said, “ I would like to see what is 



36 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

going on here, for it seems to me that it may be something very 
interesting. For we are doing the most wonderful things here 
in Macedonia. If the Italians and Americans had done them 
the whole world would be clapping their hands.” This is a 
boast for which there is a good deal of foundation. Until the 
war Skoplje was a dust-heap surrounded by malarial marshes, 
and most of the towns in the province were as unhealthy. Now 
many people brought up in Serbia or Hungary live here all the 
year round, with at most the months of July and August on 
holiday, and keep their health and spirits. This is the result 
of much competent engineering, often planned with genius. 
” So let us go down,” said Constantine, and we started to look 
for a path. But before we could find it, a man with grey hair 
and burning black eyes hurried out to us from the house where 
we had seen the family eating in the arbour. Yes, we might 
see the wo^ks, indeed we must see them, for he was in charge 
of them and he could tell us that they were going to result in a 
hydro-electric plant such as the world could never have dreamed 
would be set up in Macedonia, that had been the wash-pot of 
the Turks, a large hydro-electric plant, a huge one, a colossal 
one ; in default of another adjective, his hands fluttered across 
the sun as he explained its vastness. ” A pride,” he called over 
his shoulder as he led the way down the hillside, ” a great pride 
for Yugoslavia ! ” Talk of an angel, as the vulgar say ; we 
had been talking of nationalism. 

There was a ladder to drop down ; and we stood in the 
river-bed, drained now of its water, so that a dam might be 
built. Here it had been wholly overhung, so it was as if we 
stood in a cavern. Above us was the gleaming nudity of the 
rocks uncovered now for the first time since prehistoric days, 
and sculptured here and there by the eddying waters into 
whorls like castes of gigantic muscular arms ; and in wooden 
galleries pinned to the rock face Albanians were working by the 
light of lamps that gave their white skull caps and clothes a soft 
moth-wing brightness. From them proceeded the ringing sounds 
and the sudden flares of riveting. It was entrancing to contem- 
plate the state of their minds, which knew nothing at all between 
the primitive and hydro-electricity. The man with grey hair 
and burning black eyes was pouring into our ears explanations 
of which we could not understand one single word, since it isThe 
flaw in the state of mind of our sort — hardly indeed preferable 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 37 

to that of the Albanians — that we know nothing whatever of 
the mechanical means which condition our lives at every turn ; 
when Constantine interrupted to ask him if he employed only 
Albanians. The man with grey hair glared at us out of the 
terrible sober drunkenness of fanaticism, which is punished by 
no deterrent headache, expelled by no purging sickness. ** Why 
do you call them Albanians ? ” he cried. “ Now all are Yugo- 
slavs ! ** In the dusk his eyes were flames. 

I grieved. It is notorious that many of the Albanians who 
became Yugoslavs under the Peace Treaty consented to the 
change with the utmost reluctance, and that the Government 
was obliged to adopt an extremely stern policy against them. 
I use the word ‘‘obliged'* because I do not believe that any 
government in the history of the world has ever conducted such 
an enterprise as the pacification of Macedonia without resorting 
to ferocity. But I suspected the manager of being one of those 
bigots who would keep up this severity after the time for it had 
passed. However, he went on to say, “ I do indeed try to employ 
this particular kind of Yugoslav, because they are such excellent 
fellows. That foreman over there, you cannot believe how good 
he is, how loyal, how careful of the work and his workmen. I 
feel to him as if he were my brother.** I had seen this happening 
before in Macedonia ; the irresistible charm of the Albanians 
works on all Slavs, even on the most hard-hearted patriots sent 
down from the north, and the ancient grudge is forgotten. 
Men are wiser than they mean to be, and very different from 
what they think they are. Looking round the echoing cavern, 
before we left it, the grey-haired man said, “ It was hard to 
get the river-bed dry for the building of the dam, for there were 
many springs gushing out of the rock. Many wonderful 
springs,** he repeated reverently, speaking more like a Serb, 
born with an inherited instinct for water worship, than like an 
expert on hydro-electricity. 

When we were at the top of the shaft again we said good-bye 
to him, and the parting was deeply emotional on the part of the 
grey-haired man and Constantine. “You have done a heavy 
work for Yugoslavia ! ** cried Constantine, shaking both his 
hands. “ What work is heavy if it is done for Yugoslavia ? ** 
answered the other. When we went on our way Constantine 
was still hopping and jumping with excitement and cried out, 
“ Is it not wonderful what difficulties we have surmounted ? 



38 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

And think what it will mean when it is finished ! The whole 
of the valley down to Skoplje shall be full of light, and there will 
be many factories, and we will be rich, rich, like Manchester 
and America.” ” Really,” said Gerda, ” one would think you 
had done it yourself.” ” Well, did I not do a little of it myself ? ” 
shouted Constantine. “ Did I not fight in the Great War, and 
was I not terribly wounded ? Did I not so buy Macedonia with 
my blood ? And shall I not then be glad because it is no longer 
the desert and shambles it was under the Turks ? ” Gerda 
shrugged her shoulders and walked on with an air of cool good 
sense. Constantine threw himself in her path so that she should 
not go on, demanding, ” Do you laugh at your husband because 
he has paid a price of blood for his country ? ” My husband 
said, in a voice which suggested that he was also willing to pay 
a price of blood, ” I think it is time we had lunch.” 

In the paddock a table had been laid for us under an apple 
tree, now in the last days of its flowering time, and the priest 
sat waiting for us there. At another table there was a party 
of young men who were getting drunk, not hastily nor greedily, 
but slowly and gently. The apple blossom was drifting down on 
our table at about the same pace. One of them was already 
quite drunk and was lying asleep on the grass, covered by a 
blanket. The priest had filled our glasses with some wine of the 
Macedonian sort which is good to drink but which tastes hardly 
at all of grapes, which might just as well be distilled from pears 
or quinces, and had set out some good rough bread and a 
plate of dyed Easter eggs. The priest pressed us to eat the eggs 
so warmly that I thought they must be all we were to have for 
lunch, and I took two. But there came some sheep’s cheese, 
which, when it is fresh and not too salt, is as bland to the 
palate as its shining whiteness is to the eye. Oh, there is 
more to come,” said the priest, when I made my enquiries. 
” We have good food here, thank God, though we do not get 
such good fish as easily as we used to do before they started 
building the dam. But it is wonderful the snares the devil lays 
for us. It was through that fish that my poor old predecessor 
got into such trouble, you know.” 

” What was that story, now ? I’ve never quite got the 
rights and wrongs of it,” said Constantine, who had of course 
never heard of it till that moment. ” Well, the root of the 
trouble was that our fish was simply the best in the neighbour- 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 39 

hood and we were famous for it,” said the priest. ** So when 
Mr. Yeftitch, who was Prime Minister before Mr. Stoyadino- 
vitch, came to stay with the Metropolitan at Skoplje, the 
Metropolitan was very anxious to give him the best entertain- 
ment he could, so he sent a hundred and twenty dinars to the 
old priest who was here then, and told him to send back as much 
fish as he could. But the old priest was too old to fish for him- 
self, so he asked a peasant to do it for him. And the peasant 
was full of the honour of the occasion, and said, ‘ Here is a matter 
of a Prime Minister from Belgrade and the Metropolitan, I 
must do the best that I can,* so he got a stick of dynamite, for 
though he knew it was unlawful he did not think there would 
be any question of law when a Prime Minister and a Metro- 
politan wanted a good dinner. So he got an immense load of 
fish, and he took it to the old priest, and the old priest said, 

* What have you done ? * But he was a very honest old priest, 
and he felt that the Metropolitan had paid for this fish, so he 
sent it to him, but as it went into the town the customs officers 
saw it and said, * But what is this great load ? * And they were 
answered, * Fish for the Metropolitan ! * So the police went to 
the Metropolitan, and said, ‘ But you must not dynamite fish, 
even though you are the Metropolitan.* So he said, * But I have 
not dynamited fish,* and when the matter was explained he was 
very angry with the old priest. And as the police did not believe 
the Metropolitan, and as the Metropolitan did not believe the 
old priest, I do not think the matter was ever made quite clear 
to everybody, though it will be in Heaven.** 

There came then a tureen of very strong chicken soup, 
which we ate with great pleasure, while the young men at the 
other table sang a melancholy folk-song very, very slowly. It 
was as if they had put their arms round the neck of the emotion 
of unrequited love and were leaning on her while, preoccupied 
with her sadness, she led them to the end of the song. In the 
middle of it one of them realised that the music was in charge 
of them and that they were not in charge of it, and he sang a few 
notes with the force and decision of a sergeant-major. This 
aroused the man who was lying on the grass, and he threw the 
blanket back from his face. A flower petal fell on his face, 
which was clouded with a look of caution and guile until he 
recognised what it was. After the effort of bringing his hand 
up to his face to brush it away, his eyes closed again, but a 



40 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

sheepdog that was nosing around the paddock came and sniffed 
him, and ran away before he had time to push it away. He 
began to feel that too much was happening to him, he sat up, 
he cast away his blanket and revealed that he was in acrobat’s 
clothes, in a striped vest and shorts. Angrily he stared about 
him, saw his friends and shook his head, grieved at their con- 
dition. Alone he must assert control over this universe which 
was getting out of hand. He rolled over and began to perform 
athletic feats, to lie on his abdomen and slowly lift his chest 
and his knees from the ground, to bend backwards and make a 
bridge with his hands and his feet. 

There was admirable cold lamb next, and the sheepdog came 
for the bones. ** It is a good dog, a very good dog,** said the 
priest. ** He is wonderful with the wolves. Last winter my 
servant called to me when I was in church and told me she had 
seen him outside the wall fighting with two wolves, and one he 
had hurt so that it ran howling into the hills, and the other one 
had turned tail and had run down the valley with him after it. 
And I went after him, because he is a very good dog, and I 
found he had chased the wolf for three kilometres till he came 
to a village where a peasant shot the wolf. I had this dog as a 
puppy from an old woman they called Aunt Persa in these 
parts, and he has something of her nature. She was a comitadji, 
just like a man, and she had three husbands, and all she killed 
because they were not politically sound. One would go with 
the Turks, and one would go with the Bulgars though he was a 
Serb because there were so many Bulgars in the village that he 
felt safer so, and one would go with the Greeks. She was a 
nurse in the Balkan wars, but she fought as much as she nursed, 
and she was wounded many times. Then when she was too 
old to marry or to fight she became a nun and lived as a hermit 
in a monastery up in the mountains here, that is a thousand 
years old. She made a very good nun.** I remembered 
Pausanias and his sensible opinion that the worshippers at a 
lonely temple who were always losing their priestesses through 
rape and flight should choose a woman, old in years, who had 
had enough of the company of men. “ I used to go up and see 
her, and one day she gave me this puppy which her dog had 
had. But now she is dead, and the monastery is deserted. 
Last summer I went up to see how it might be, and the porch 
had fallen in, and in the paddock I saw twelve wolves. They 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 41 

would not have been there if Aunt Persa had still been alive.’' 

There came yet another dish, a curious and admirable 
mixture of trout and chicken. Our distended stomachs thanked 
God it was the last. When the priest had stopped piling our 
plates he sat with his chin cupped in his hand and his elbows on 
the table, enjoying the rosy pleasantness of the early afternoon. 
Behind us the drunken young men at the table confided them- 
selves to another song which they sang so slowly that to all 
intents and purposes it ceased to have a tune, but simply 
reserved the atmosphere for its rnelancholy. The acrobat was 
now standing on his head with an uncanny air of permanence. 
** I would like,” said the priest, looking up at the grey peak 
which dominates this valley, ” to have a huge flagstaff planted 
in the rock up there, to fly the hugest Yugoslavian flag ever 
made.” He cast a defiant glance at us. ” I suppose your 
European friends will despise me for that wish. I said the 
same thing to a French doctor who was here last summer, and 
he said, * If you were a Catholic priest you would want to set 
there an enormous statue of the Virgin Mary, but because you 
are an Orthodox priest you want to put up a huge national 
flag,* and I think he meant it as a reproach. But I said to him, 
‘ You speak as one who does not know that this country was 
not for the Virgin Mary until our flag had flown here.’ ” The 
acrobat quivered, collapsed on the grass, and instantly fell 
asleep, and his friends began to sing ‘‘ John Brown’s Body 
” It is an old song of our comitadji,” explained the priest. 


SkopljVs Black Mountain 

On our way from Matka we stopped at the ruined mosque 
which is a landmark on the eastward road out of Skoplje. It is a 
small and lovely thing, with a tomb almost as large as itself 
beside it, and it suffers gracefully the growth of long grass and 
yellow flowers on its crumbling cupola. Within, a score of 
ravens sat immobile on the iron grills of the glassless window, 
dark against the outer sunshine. I clapped my hands and they 
flew out, and a score more dropped from the vault of the cupola, 
and hovered a second, croaking a complaint, before they too 
went out into the light. We heard music, and when we went 
out we found a concert was taking place on the grass between 

VOL. II D 



4a 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


the mosque and the road, for a gipsy band, trudging its way 
to a village for the Easter Monday celebrations, had stopped 
for a moment to play to some holidaymakers in a cart. A man 
in the cart leaned forward as we approached, and threw a coin 
on to the tilted forehead of the gipsy who was playing the horn, 
and a roar of laughter went up. The gipsy was careful not to 
shift his head as he went on playing, so that the coin continued 
to stick where it was. This seemed to me most exciting, because 
I had read that it was a favourite diversion at the feasts of the 
Byzantines to throw coins on the faces and bodies of courtesans 
who were singing and dancing, and see how long the women 
could go on with the performance without letting them drop ; 
and as the gipsy played he was smirking and waving his eye- 
lashes in the classic imitation of a courtesan.. Actually it seems, 
apart from its historical interest, an unamusing habit, with an 
alarming implication that the Byzantines liked a pork-like 
richness of physique in their women. I even prefer the allied 
habit that Christians cultivate all over the Near East of throwing 
coins at certain icons and attaching great importance to the 
length of time they remain without falling. This is of course 
irreverent, though not more so than, say, Pascars wager. 

We took a road across the wide valley, through fields of 
young corn that were edged by the first poppies, and bumped 
up to the range of hills that is known as the Skopska Tserna 
Gora, the Black Mountain of Skoplje. There are a group of 
eight villages on it, of which only a couple are Bulgarian in 
feeling ; all the rest are strongly Serb. They are famous for 
the dour and fierce character of the inhabitants and the beautiful 
embroideries worked by the women : the thick, dark, tragic 
embroideries we had seen some passers-by wearing when we were 
breakfasting the previous day. They are very large villages. 
It is an odd circumstance that the disadvantageous political 
conditions of the Balkans produced an indubitable social 
benefit in keeping the villages large and compact. As the 
farmers feared raids from the Turkish troops and all the 
numerous armed forces begotten by the maladministration, 
they built houses side by side in some convenient spot and went 
out to their fields in the morning with their livestock, and 
brought it back at night ; so the most discouraging features of 
agricultural life, as we know them in England and America, 
the loneliness of the women and the development of eccentricities 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 43 

due to isolation, are not present in the Balkans. 

We came to the first village, a huddle of white houses with 
dark-brown roofs wedged in a valley rich with poplars, and 
found a great square choked with peasants watching their 
young men and women dance the kolo. They were certainly 
enjoying themselves, yet the effect was not joyful. The young 
people were wearing clothes covered with the most beautiful 
designs being invented in any part of the world to-day, master- 
pieces of abstract art, yet the effect was not of beauty. They 
were dancing, and yet the effect was not ecstatic. There was a 
profoundly depressing element in the scene, which was, quite 
simply, the women. The men were handsome, but nobody 
could have got a moment’s pleasure from looking at any of the 
women. I have never seen a plainer-looking lot. This was 
partly because they were wearing head-dresses and clothes heavy 
enough to wear down the strength of a bullock. Where a good 
tradition has not kept the women’s head-dresses to simple 
embroidered scarfs and kerchiefs, as in Debar and some other 
districts, they become shapeless piles of assorted haberdashery, 
mixed up with coins and cords and false hair and flowers ; 
and I have never seen any more cumbersome than those of the 
Skopska Tserna Gora. Their bodies were padded with gowns 
of the coarse Macedonian linen which is said to be so thick that 
worms cannot gnaw through a shroud of it ; over these they 
wore sleeveless coats made of rough serge, and many oddments 
in the way of aprons and belts, and sometimes sheepskin jackets 
over these. From the strained expressions on these women’s 
faces it was quite plain that they were suffering the same nervous 
and muscular inconvenience that we would if we were obliged 
to go about all day wearing our bed-clothes applied to our 
persons. 

But such head-dresses, such clothes, do not come into 
existence by chance. They are usually imposed by a society 
that has formed neurotic ideas about women’s bodies and wants 
to insult them and drive them into hiding, and it is impossible 
for women to be happy in such a society. The pattern traced 
by the kolo confirmed that these women were the victims of 
such social persecution. One’s first impression was that the 
kolo was very lively, and so it was, but only so far as the first 
half of it was concerned. That half was composed of men, who 
leaped and twirled high in the air, in the happiest abandonment 



44 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

to the rhythm of the gipsy band ; the second half, which was 
composed of women, shuffled along with their heels never 
leaving the ground and not a muscle of face or body answering 
to the music. It is true that Slav women never dance in the 
same way as men, since the feminine ideal is the stiff and stylised 
Virgin on the icons, and they therefore prefer to posture rather 
than to trip, but this was a stockishness surprising to find any- 
where but among the inorganic or the dead. It was exhibited 
still more grossly in the second village we visited, where they 
danced the kolo on a patch of sloping grassland beside a willow- 
hung stream. There it was as if the first part of the kolo were a 
broken-backed snake, the first half rearing and twisting in 
liveliness, the second half a limp length dragging on the ground. 

It was strange, for the women who sewed these embroideries 
were plainly not lacking in the capacity for excitement. It must 
be that these women are not allowed to dance, and it could be 
read in their sullen, colourless faces that there was not much 
they were allowed to do. I remembered then that I had heard 
it said in Skoplje that on the Skopska Tserna Gora wives are so 
harshly treated by their husbands that if they are left widows 
nothing will induce them to remarry. No degree of privation 
could approach in horror that masculine tyranny. I also 
remembered a curious conversation I once had with a young 
woman who had washed and waved my hair in a shop at Skoplje. 
She was in her early twenties, she was pregnant with her second 
child, she rose at five and did the housework and got her elder 
child ready for the day, and then she worked at the coiffeur’s 
from half-past eight in the morning till half-past seven at night, 
with a midday interval which she spent in cooking and serving 
her husband’s dinner. On her Sundays she did the family 
laundry and made clothes. When I told her that this seemed 
to me a hard life she laughed heartily and said that it was 
nothing to what she would have had to do if she had stayed at 
the village where she was born, in the Skopska Tserna Gora. 
The men, she said with great bitterness, left all the work they 
could to the women, even if it were far beyond their physical 
strength. 

At the third village we saw more than the dancing. The 
car we were in was flying the Government flag, because Con- 
stantine had borrowed it from the Ban of the province ; and 
it happened that the people here were not only fanatically pro* 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 45 

Serb but wanted something from the authorities. So they broke 
into cheers as we got out of the car, an action I always dislike, 
as it never fails to mean that I have been mistaken for someone 
else. But still Constantine was a Government official, and this 
was enough for them, so after the young people had danced a 
kolo for us we were taken to the house of three handsome 
elderly brothers, who were the chief men of the village. It was 
the usual Balkan house, with a stable for the livestock on the 
ground floor and an outside staircase leading up to a balcony 
off which open the living-rooms. The men put out on the 
balcony a long table and two benches, covered with rugs. 
Several other important men of the village came in and were 
introduced to us, and we all sat down and drank musty red 
wine, and ate sheep’s cheese and hard-boiled eggs, which the 
brothers shelled for us with their own hands. We were joined 
by the wife of the eldest brother, a woman of about forty, 
wearing a dress on which the Persian design of the moon tree 
was adapted to a Christian purpose, with her healthy and well- 
mannered youngest child in her arms ; and I think other women 
were listening and whispering behind a half-open door. 

When we had eaten and drunk, the men, who were all of 
dignified bearing and decisive manner, began to instruct 
Constantine in the message he was to take back to the authorities. 
It was cool and logical. Yes, it was true that they were having 
great trouble with another village, grave trouble. It was true 
that three men had been killed and one wounded. But it was 
no use sending gendarmes with instructions to keep order, for the 
trouble was about something, and it would not cease until that 
something was settled. It was not merely that the other village 
was Bulgarian ; there was a real conflict of interests concerning 
the water rights ; and as they all realised by now, the dispute 
had gone on for so many generations and there had been so 
much ill-feeling engendered that it would go on for ever if some 
independent person did not intervene and arbitrate. So would 
the Government please send a Commission to look into the 
matter at once ? They had already sent a request for it, but 
they knew theirs would only be one among innumerable 
petitions from villages, and would probably not be dealt with 
for years, or at least months, and this matter was urgent. It 
ought to take precedence of requests for better roads or lighting, 
because as long as it was not settled there would be clashes, and 



46 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

there was certain to be more loss of life. So would Constantine 
please inform the proper people ? 

He said that he would ; and indeed the next day he did. 
Then these men of the Skopska Tserna Gora went on to talk 
of other matters. ** And you ? they said. ** We can put our 
house in order if you put your house in order up in Belgrade. 
Are you doing that ? Sometimes we doubt it.’* They said 
that they saw the economic necessity of the pact with Italy, but 
they did not believe that it could mean much. ‘‘ Those people 
have worked against us here in our own country, they have 
spent money like water raising up Macedonians against their 
brothers, they put bombs in the hands of those who killed our 
king. Why should they suddenly be our friends ? They will 
steal all they can from us. It is a pity that anything should be 
done which will make our young men forget that they are enemies 
and that we must be ready to defend our country against them.*’ 
But they were still more perturbed by the pact with Bulgaria. 
“ It is impossible,” they said, ” to make peace with the Bul- 
garians. They are our non-brothers'' Then the woman with the 
child in her arms spoke, and all the men fell silent. ” I have 
seen with my own eyes my brother and my brother’s son killed 
by Bulgarians,” she said, and the statement was even stronger 
than it sounds to Western ears, because of the special tie that 
exists between Serb brothers and sisters. ” They killed them 
without mercy, as if they were not Christians but Turks.” The 
words came down like a hammer. She closed her lips in a 
straight line, and the men began to speak again, urging the 
implacability of their enemies and its everlasting quality. 

It was horrible to hear these primitive people speak with 
such savagery, and to realise that they were savage not because 
they were primitive but because they had been deliberately cor- 
rupted by the Great Powers. The prime cause of Macedonian 
violence is, of course, fi\e hundred years of misgovernment by 
the Ottoman Empire. But it would never have assumed its 
recent extreme and internecine character, had it not been for 
England’s support of the Ottoman Empire when it would have 
fallen apart if it had been left to itself ; had it not been for the 
artificial Bulgarisation of the Macedonian Serbs which was 
carried on generation after generation on money supplied by 
the Tsardom ; had it not been for the Austrian Empire, which 
was so ambitious in its Drang nach Osten that it created by 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 47 

reaction a Serbian chauvinism which made Serbs not the most 
ideal administrators of a province far from unanimous in its desire 
to be administered : had it not been that Italy had perverted 
the Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation by finance and 
villainous tutelage. What I saw was not the darkness of these 
dark men*s hearts, as a hostile traveller might have imagined, 
but the announcement of their legitimate determination to 
defend the tables and benches we sat on, the musty wine and 
the hard-boiled eggs and the sheep’s cheese, the woman and her 
child, the breath in their bodies, from the criminal intentions 
of the silly-clever in great cititjs, who fancied that the rape of 
these might secure them some advantage. 

As we drove away, my husband said to Constantine, Those 
were magnificent people. They had form, they had style. 
They were not at all overawed because you came from a big 
town, and they need not have been, because they knew what 
was necessary in town or country, to think clearly and put clear 
thoughts into clear words.” “ Certainly they were magnificent 
people,” said Constantine, “ they are what the Serbs were 
before the battle of Kossovo, they have maintained themselves 
in these hills for five hundred years without giving up what 
they have. Never were the Turks able to settle here, which they 
would have liked to do, for nature is everything to them, and it 
is very beautiful here. But when they came it was well with 
them only for a few days, and then they died. These men of 
the Skopska Tserna Gora, they could not be conquered.” 

Later I said, ” It was strange how they all fell silent when 
that woman spoke, they behaved as if they had a great respect 
for her. Yet the women outside had the air of downtrodden 
drudges. . . .” But it was easy to see what happened. This 
was a situation common enough among individuals and among 
races. There is an attitude of contempt for women in general, 
a pretence that women are worthless, even though the fullest 
advantage is taken of their worth. At times that advantage is 
taken in circumstances so spectacular that it cannot afterwards 
be repudiated. The woman in the house of the three brothers 
had plainly proved her quality by some act of courage or cunning 
in the face of the enemy which could not be forgotten. Yet the 
general attitude of men to women was still maintained. All the 
women in the village were treated as if courage or cunning on 
their part was inconceivable, as if they were lucky to be used as 



48 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

beasts of burden. This cannot have been agreeable, even to the 
woman who had established herself as an exception. If all 
Englishmen were compelled by a taboo to be treated as an 
inferior by all female beings over the age of fourteen, forbidden 
to move or speak freely in their presence, and obliged to perform 
all menial duties without thanks, an Englishman who happened 
to have won the V.C. would still not find life enjoyable. 

Yet it has to be recognised that these men of the Skopska 
Tserna Gora could not be conquered. We must admit here a 
process that at one and the same time makes life possible and 
intolerable for women. If there is one certain difference be- 
tween the sexes it is that men lack all sense of objective reality 
and have a purely pragmatic attitude to knowledge. A fact 
does not begin to be for a man until he has calculated its prob- 
able usefulness to him. If he thinks it will serve his purposes 
then he will recognise it ; but if it is unwelcome to him then he 
will deny it. This means that he is not sure of the existence 
of his own soul, for nothing is more debatable for any of us than 
whether it is a good or a bad thing that our souls should have 
come to be. That life is preferable to death is a conviction 
firmly held by our bowels and muscles but the mind has never 
convincingly proved it to the mind. Women, however, do not 
greatly trouble about this, since we have been born and we shall 
die, and even if the essence of our existence should be evil there 
is at least a term set to it. Therefore, women feel they can allow 
themselves to enjoy the material framework of existence for what 
it is worth. With men it cannot be so. Full of uncertainty, 
they sweat with fear lest all be for the worst. Hence the dicho- 
tomy that has been often observed in homes for the aged : the 
old women, even those who in their time have known prosperity, 
do not greatly distress themselves because in their last days they 
must eat the bread of charity, and they accept what pleasure 
can be drawn from sunny weather, a warm fire, a bag of sweets ; 
but the old men are perpetually enraged. 

Therefore men must be reassured, hour by hour, day by 
day. They must snatch every aid they can in their lifelong 
fight against seen and unseen adversaries. It would comfort 
them enormously if they knew that they were stronger than 
others. But what others ? It would seem obvious to answer, 
their enemies. But little comfort can be derived from them, 
for sooner or later comes the battle, to settle the value, never 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 49 

satisfactorily : for an enemy that defeats is plainly superior, in 
some sense, and an enemy that is defeated appears so contempt- 
ible that it is no comfort to be above him. There are, however, 
exquisitely convenient, all women. It need only be pretended 
that men’s physical superiority is the outward sign of a universal 
superiority, and at a stroke they can say of half the world’s 
population, I am better than that”. The declaration is the 
more exalting because that half includes the people on whom 
the man who makes it had been the most dependent, even the 
person through whom he received his life. 

If the community is threatened by any real danger, and only 
a few fortunate communities are not, women will be fools if they 
do not accept that declaration without dispute. For the physical 
superiority of men and their freedom from maternity make them 
the natural defenders of the community, and if they can derive 
strength from belief in the inferiority of women, it is better to 
let them have it. The trouble is that too often the strength so 
derived proves inadequate for the task in hand. The women 
in the Skopska Tserna Gora were repaid for their subordina- 
tion by a certain mitigation of their lot, which is proved real 
enough when it is compared with the darker misery of the women 
on the plains below, who suffered far worse at the hands of the 
Turks, but which was far from giving them security in any 
ordinary sense of the word. Intense and lifelong discomfort 
seems an excessive price to pay for this ; and they might easily 
have gone on working out this inequitable contract till doomsday, 
since their menfolk were never able to liberate their community 
from the Turks until they were aided by the Serbians, who were 
outside their sexual transaction. In far worse case were the 
Turkish women of Macedonia, who received nothing in return 
for their subordination except the destruction of their com- 
munity. 

Even when the men of the community derive an adequate 
amount of strength from the suppression of their women, the 
situation is ultimately unsatisfactory ; for it undoes itself, to 
the confusion of both parties. When men are successful in 
defending their community they engender a condition of general 
peace, in which people attempt to live by reason. Then women 
use their full capacities of mind and body, not because they 
want to prove their equality with men, for that is a point in 
which it is difficult to feel interest for more than a minute or two 



50 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


unless one has an unusually competitive niind, but because in 
such use lies pleasure. In such a world the young woman and 
the young man dash together out of adolescence into adult life 
like a couple of colts. But presently the woman looks round 
and sees that the man is not with her. He is some considerable 
distance behind her, not feeling very well. There has been 
drained from him the strength which his forefathers derived 
from the subjection of women ; and the woman is amazed, 
because tradition has taught her that to be a man is to be strong. 
There is no known remedy for this disharmony. As yet it seems 
that no present she can make him out of her liberty can com- 
pensate him for his loss of what he gained from her slavery. 
The disagreeable consequences of this are without end, and 
perhaps it may be counted the worst that there never can be a 
society where men are men and women are women, that human- 
ity never reveals the whole of itself at one time. Until there is 
achieved a settled condition of world peace hard to foresee 
an5rwhere nearer than the distant future it will always be more 
necessary that the revelation should be male. Therefore it will 
perhaps be reasonable till the end of all time within imaginable 
scope, to follow the ancient custom and rejoice when a boy is 
born and to weep for a girl. But there are degrees in the female 
tragedy. It is our tendency nowadays to deplore as worse than 
all others the woes of the woman whom modern capitalism 
allows to earn her own living but deprives of a husband and 
children, since the wage-slave is an uneager lover and a worse 
provider. But nowhere have I seen such settled and hopeless 
despair, such resentment doubled by its knowledge that it 
might not express itself, as on the faces of the women of the 
Skopska Tserna Gora. 


A Convent somewhere below the 
Skopska Tserna Gora 

It is said that many have been cured of madness by drinking 
of the spring in the orchard of this convent, and I do not doubt 
it, for this is a very pleasant place, and I fancy that in Mace- 
donia, as in the rest of the world, the mad are usually those who 
have been surfeited with the unpleasant. We met the fat old 
abbess in the poplar avenue, and she said, ** I am so glad that 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 51 

you have come back to see us again,*’ and there was written in 
her eye, ** now that I have a rare, an inestimable, and sacred 
treasure to show you, far more precious than any icon or holy 
spring,** for she was infatuated with the child she led by the 
hand. She took us up into her parlour and a nun was sent to 
bring us brandy and sugar and water, and she explained how 
she came to have this unique treasure in her possession. The 
child’s mother was a French schoolmistress at Bitolj, and 
had sent her there to make a good convalescence after scarlet 
fever and diphtheria, a story which explained much that 
had been puzzling, for indeed this was the plainest little girl 
one could well imagine, a spindly little girl, an Indian-famine 
little girl. 

You must recite, my dear,” said the abbess, ” you must 
recite to the foreigners and the gentleman from Belgrade.” She 
could not bear us to go home without seeing the prettiest thing 
we should ever see. So after the child had stood on one leg and 
then on the other, and had pleated the edge of her petticoat 
till she was told she should not, she repeated a Serbian hymn 
and sang a French song all about les fleurs and la nature^ in the 
classic treble of the infant French voice, in the voice that Rene 
Clair gave to the morning glories in ” A Nous la Liberte ”. 
When she had finished she stood on the point of her sharp little 
nose in the immense slopes of the abbess’s bosom. 

By now the young nun had come back with the brandy and 
the sugar and water, and she stood with her arms a-kimbo and 
her chin forward, adoring the child. ” Who is that bishop with 
the very fine head ? ” said my husband as he drank, nodding 
at a photograph on the wall. I had asked the very same question 
when I was here for the first time the year before, and she had 
looked at the photograph and had said, ” He is the Metropolitan 
who received me into the Church, he was burned alive by the 
Bulgarians,” and her eyes had darkened. She had talked of the 
dead man for a long time. This time she said the same words, 
but her eyes did not darken, they went back to the child at 
once, and she said, ” We have been here twenty-six years, 
never have we had a child here before, it is such a joy as I 
could not have believed.” Perhaps the cock crowed, but it 
was in Paradise. 



BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


S2 


Bardovtsi 

One wet evening I saw a gentleman wearing a fez come out 
of one of the Minnie Mouse houses in the new town of Skoplje 
and with a deep sigh, as if to him the world seemed more 
obstinately rainy than it does to the rest of us, open his umbrella 
and set himself to picking his way among the puddles. ** That 
is the Pasha of Bardovtsi,” said my friend ; “ there are no 
pashas now, but that is what he would be if there were any, and 
he is not anything else, so that is what we call him. But you 
must go to Bardovtsi, it is quite close, and nobody lives there 
now, and you ought to see what a pasha*s palace was like.” 
So one afternoon we borrowed a car from the Governor and 
drove out to a point in the valley under the Skopska Tserna 
Gora, where there was a thickly wooded village, and many 
people walking through air throbbing with distant music 
towards a festival, in white clothes and tall fantastic head-dress, 
dappled by sunlight falling through the leaves. We came at 
last on a patch of grassland and a great wall, set with watch- 
towers at either end, in which there was a ramshackle door in 
a lordly gateway. But it was locked, and when our chauffeur 
beat on it there was no answer. He crossed the grassland to a 
farm and called up to the balcony, but there was silence. Every- 
body we had seen had been walking away from the village. 

Our chauffeur became very angry. He was a handsome and 
passionate young man who had never been denied anything in 
his life. He battered at the door till it appeared about to split 
and then it was slowly opened by an old man carrying a scythe, 
his hand cupping his ear. Behind him an acr<= of long grass 
shook its ears, and we saw beyond it the cool prudence, the 
lovely common sense, of a Turkish country house, as they built 
them a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago. The Turks 
and the Georgian English have known better than anyone how 
to build a place where civilised man can enjoy nature. The 
old man with the scythe said we could go where we liked, he 
had only bought the hay rights and was getting the grass in 
because the young people had to go to the kolo. ” Yes,” he 
said with a chuckle, ” they have to go to the kolo, but all the 
same they know no way of keeping off the rain.” 

This acre of grass was one of three paddocks which lay 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 53 

within the great wall, themselves divided by walls. We went 
to the door on the left, stamping our feet as we went, for fear 
there were snakes, and looked over more long grass to a solid 
profligacy of richly coloured bricks such as the Turks loved. 
There was stabling there for sixty horses, housing for an army 
of retainers. We went back to the house, a black stork scream- 
ing suddenly above our heads. But we could not go in. As 
we opened the door we saw that the staircase in the hall was 
barred, and for good reason. A host of ravens fled from the 
glassless windows, and when some lumps of masonry fell from 
a ceiling somewhere too many unseen living things scuttled and 
rustled on the floors where we must walk for real comfort of 
the mind. We were able only to look through the dimness and 
see that all the proportions were wise, that it must have been 
light without flimsiness, and firm without heaviness, and that 
in the heat the coolness must have been stored here as in a 
reservoir. Then we went to the wall on the right and through 
a gateway, and saw a house, only a little less large, that had 
been the harem. There also we startled many ravens, but it 
was still safe to enter it, and we went up the stairs to that 
delicious landing-room which is the special invention of Turkish 
architecture, where one sits in the freshness of the first storey 
and can look down the well of the staircase and see who is 
coming in and out of the rooms on the ground floor. It is the 
spirit of harem intrigue insisting that, to make the game more 
sporting, all the cards shall be laid on the table straight away. 
This room was decorated in the curious Turkish Regency 
style that is so inexplicable. It is hard to imagine why at the 
end of the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the 
nineteenth, when the Turks were still the fiercest of military 
peoples, they had the houses decorated with paintings which 
recall the Regency style, not as it was in its own age (which 
would not be surprising, for some of our eighteenth-century 
men were terrible as any Turks) but as it is rendered in 
pastiche by Mr. Rex Whistler. There were on these walls 
pictures of Constantinople and the Bosphorus, framed with the 
most affected of swags and segregated by comic mock pilasters, 
which were not even Strawberry Hill, which were painted by 
somebody who seemed to be saying ** How amusing it was 
when people thought it amusing to paint in this way We 
went through the other rooms delicately, and we found that 



54 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

there were bathrooms and water-closets, several of them, such 
as there cannot have been in a single house in England or France 
or America at that time. 

We were wandering entranced in a world of delicate, clean 
people, surrounded by refined fragilities, when the chauffeur 
followed us upstairs. He had not joined us before because he 
had been catching a pigeon, which now fluttered between his 
two hands. There is a veil between the animal world and those 
of us who dwell in towns, but there was none to him. Wherever 
we were, he saw the animals as quickly as he saw the human 
beings who were present, the stoat or the lizard or the swallow 
fledgling ; and to the animals he must have seemed a god, so 
swiftly did he stretch out his hand to caress those he favoured 
and kill those in his disfavour. He looked round him and said, 
“ Ah, the old pig ! The old pig of a Turk ! Twenty-five 
women he had here, the old woman says.” He tried to say no 
more but his rage was too great. He whirled his joined hands 
round in a circle, the pigeon rattling its startled wings inside 
them, and began to shout. He was a Serbian from Nish, where 
they drove out the Turks only a little over sixty years ago. ** And 
there were many of our Christian women that were brought 
here 1 And they would not have children by our women ! Our 
women they made to have abortions ! They cut our women to 
pieces ! ” Ravens of specially lethargic disposition fled croak- 
ing to the light. ** Atde^ aide, out of it! ” he cried, clattering 
down the stairs. 

The old man stood resting on his scythe. He was proud 
that we had come to see the palace. It had belonged to Avzi 
Pasha, he said, and he watched for our faces to lighten. Avzi 
Pasha, he repeated. But nobody knows anything of him to-day 
for there are fewer archives here than there were in Bosnia. 
To a generation’s conflict with a government, to a personality 
whose virtues and vices made half a dozen countrysides smile 
or weep, there is often no clue except some crumpled pieces of 
paper, mostly referring to religious properties. Avzi Pasha, the 
old man told us, had been a very rich man, a very great man, 
he had been so great — he waved his feeble arm — that he had 
even sent his own army against the Sultan in Tsarigrad. But 
that did not serve, of course. Till the Sultan fell before the 
armies of the world he did not fall. Avzi Pasha was driven out, 
but there was another pasha here, and yet another, and they 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 55 

were all grand, but then the land was made free, and there 
were no more pashas, and the palace was as we saw it. 

His voice grumbled as he said it, and I thought he might 
perhaps be regretting that the palace was not as it had been. 
I said, ** Will you ask him if it is better now with him than it was 
then ? It had been only age and a dpy's mowing, that had made 
his voice drag. He threw down his scythe at our feet, he joined 
his hands and shook his head, and laughed at the simplicity of 
the question. In those days,*' he said, ** we did not know the 
harvest as a time of joy, half thjt cp >ps went straight away to the 
Pasha, but then the tax-collectors came back, and they came 
back, and they came back, and they said, ‘ This is for him also. 
It is another tax.* We never knew how little we had.** I thought 
of the Germans on the train from Salzburg. “ If only we could 
tell what we had to pay . . .** It is that, apparently, and not 
the single great injustices, the rape of the beloved to the harem 
or the concentration camp, but the steady drain on what one 
earns, on what should be one's own if there is justice in earth, 
or heaven, that cannot be borne. 

Again the chauffeur began to shout. ** And the stables ! 
The beautiful stables ! The people had to fetch all the stones 
from a quarry five miles away for nothing ! ** ** The harvest 

was not a time of joy,’* repeated the old man. ** Never did I 
think," said my husband, ** that I should hear a man speak of 
the Revolt of the Pashas as a thing his people remembered, I 
will give him fifty dinars." When the old man saw the coin he 
gaped at it, and bent down and kissed my husband's hand. 
" Would anybody on the Skopska Tserna Gora kiss my 
husband’s hand if he gave them money ? " I asked the chauffeur. 
" No," he said, " but they were in the mountains and these 
people were on the flat lands. They were defenceless against 
the Turks." 


Neresi 

In a cab drawn by two horses named " Balkan " and 
** Gangster ", we trotted out of Skoplje through market gardens 
where tomatoes and paprikas glowed their different reds, and 
climbed a road up the hill behind Skoplje that is called the 
Watery One because of its many springs. The cab was hardly a 
cab, the road was hardly a road, and the cabman was a man of 



56 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

irrational pride, which we wounded afresh each time we got 
out of the cab because it was about to fall over the edge of a 
ravine. There is a lot of emotion loose about the Balkans which 
has lost its legitimate employment now that the Turks have been 
expelled. But it was pleasant to walk along the hedges and 
sometimes pick the flowers, and sometimes look back and see 
the snow mountains framed between the apple blossom and the 
green-gold poplar trees, and watch the Moslem girls who, with 
an air of panic working in their faces, whisked their veils over 
the face when they saw Constantine and my husband, who, 
on the contrary, were talking about Bernard Berenson. Also 
there was good conversation with strangers, as there always is 
when Constantine is there. An old Moslem was sitting on a 
rock beside a field of corn under a hawthorn tree, and as he 
was breathing very heavily, Constantine stopped and asked, 
“ Are you ill, friend ? “ No,” said the Moslem, ” but I am 

old and I cannot walk as far as I used to do.” Constantine 
said, Well, this is a very pleasant place to rest.” That is 
why I chose it,” said the Moslem. ” I pressed on though I 
was breathless, till I came to this rock. For since I am so old 
that my soul must soon leave my body, I look at nature as much 
as I can.” 

When we came to Neresi it was as I had remembered it, a 
rustic monastery, as homely as a Byzantine church can possibly 
be, a thing that might be a farmhouse, as it stands in a paddock, 
had it not been that there appear in it domes that are plainly 
bubbles blown by the breath of God. From the fountain at the 
corner of the paddock children drew water, dressed in their 
best for a kolo ; the plum tree that nuzzles a corner of the 
church was in full flower ; a small dog was chasing its fleas 
and in its infant folly transferred itself constantly from spot to 
spot as if hoping to find one specially suited to the pursuit. 
All was well in this world, and there came out of the priest’s 
house the little priest whom I find one of the most sympathetic 
characters in Yugoslavia. 

He is a tiny creature without sin. His eyes, which shine 
out of a tangle of eyebrows and wrinkles and beard, are more 
than bright, they are unstained light. He is an exile, for a 
tenuous and exquisite cause. He is a Russian monk, but he 
was not one of those who fled from the Bolsheviks ; he belonged 
to the great monastery on the island on Lake Ladoga, which 



NERESI 



OUTSKIRTS OF SKOPLJE 




Macedonia (south Serbia) 57 

is on the borders of Finland and Russia and exists to this day. 
He left this beloved place, where he had been since his early 
boyhood, to live in a lonely village, where there are more 
Moslems than Christians, in a climate that to his northern blood 
is abominable, because he would not consent to the adoption 
of the modern calendar. There had been a great many disputes 
in the monastery itself as to whether they should adhere to the 
old Church calendar, which is a fortnight after the ordinary 
world calendar, as the Orthodox Church in some respects still 
does in Yugoslavia, or should keep the modern world calendar. 
These disputes became so violent that the Finnish Government, 
a cool body mainly Lutheran in its origins, lost patience and bade 
the monks adopt the modern calendar or leave the monastery. 
So, for that and no other reason, did the little creature leave all 
that was dear to him. 

Nothing, indeed, is more reasonable in the terms of his 
type of mysticism. On a certain day you will look up to heaven 
and think of the Mother of God as she was at the moment of the 
annunciation and she will bend down and accept your thoughts 
and lift them up in her heavenly sphere. What is the good of 
it all if you start looking up and sending her your thoughts on 
quite another day from that on which she has bent down to 
accept them ? He felt as if he was being condemned to a life- 
time of imbecile and heartrending activity, just as one would 
if every day one were forced to go to a railway terminus and 
wait for some beloved person who had in fact arrived at that 
station a fortnight before, I like such literal mysticism. It 
shows a desire to embrace the adored spiritual object and hug 
it till it passes into enjoyment of the boon of material existence, 
which is proof of a nature that would be kind and warm, and 
that would prefer the agreeable to the disagreeable. I think 
of the little man as of the old anthropomorphist heretic hermit, 
who was told that he must cease to believe that God was a 
person with a human body, having arms and legs and eyes and 
ears and must worship him as a spirit, and who went away 
with tears, repeating the text, “ They have taken away my Lord 
and I know not where they have laid him As it is easier to 
love an abstraction than a material person, since an abstraction 
demands no daily sacrifices, has no slippers to warm and needs 
no hot supper, this was to his credit as a human being, though 
not as a theologian. 

VOL. u 


E 



58 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

We talked to the little man, and asked him how time went, 
and he said it went well, but he grieved, as he had when I saw 
him before, at the lack of fish. At Lake Ladoga he had eaten 
fish nearly every day, wonderful fish straight out of the water, 
and there was none in this village. Also he was used to tea, 
and here they drank coffee and the tea was not good. We 
asked him if he were not lonely, and he said, “ On the whole, 
no, for there is God.” Then we were joined by the owner of the 
flea-bitten dog, an elderly woman who had come here from near 
Belgrade because all her family, all her five sons and daughters, 
had chosen to give their lives to their country here. She was 
quite elderly ; most and perhaps all of her children must have 
made this decision before the war, when it meant self-condemna- 
tion to an indefinite sojourn in an insanitary hell with consider- 
able chances of sudden death. My husband and I wondered if 
we would perhaps find ourselves moved by some extraordinary 
reason to go to die where we were not born ; but as both these 
people were sitting smiling so happily into the sunshine, to 
find an answer seemed not so vital as one might suppose. 

Presently we went into the church and saw the frescoes, 
which are being uncovered very slowly, to wean the peasants 
from the late eighteenth-century peasant frescoes which had 
been painted over them, for the peasants like these much better 
than the old ones, and indeed they are extremely attractive. 
They show tight, round, pink little people chubbily doing 
quite entertaining things, as you see them represented in the 
paintings on the merry-go-rounds and advertising boards of 
French fairs, and exploited in the pictures of Marc Chagalle 
and his kind ; and it would be a pity to destroy them if they 
were not covering fine medieval frescoes. When my husband 
saw the older frescoes I could see that he was a little dis- 
appointed, and at last he said, ” But these are not like the 
Byzantine frescoes I have seen, they are not so stylised, they are 
almost representational, indeed they are very representational.” 

It is, of course, quite true, though I have doubted whether 
we are right in considering Byzantine frescoes highly stylised 
since, on my first visit to Yugoslavia, I went through the Sandjak 
of Novi Pazar, which is the most medieval part of the country 
and saw peasants slowly move from pose to pose distorted 
by conscious dignity which made them exactly like certain 
personages over the altars of Ravenna and Rome. But the 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 59 

Serbo-Byzantine frescoes are unquestionably more naturalistic 
and far more literary. In looking at some of these at Neresi 
there came back to me the phrase of Bourget — “la vegetation 
touffue de King Lear **, they are so packed with ideas. One 
presents in another form the theme treated by the painter of the 
fresco in the little monastery in the gorge ; it shows the terribly 
explicit death of Christ’s body, Joseph of Arimathea is climbing 
a ladder to take Christ down from the cross, and his feet as they 
grip the rungs are the feet of a living man, while Christ’s feet 
are utterly dead. Another shows an elderly woman lifting a 
beautiful astonished face at the spectacle of the raising of 
Lazarus : it pays homage to the ungrudging heart, it declares 
that a miracle consists of more than a wonderful act, it requires 
people who are willing to admit that something wonderful 
has been done. Another shows an Apostle hastening to the 
Eucharist, with the speed of a wish. 

But there is another which is extraordinary beyond belief 
because not only does it look like a painting by Blake, it actually 
illustrates a poem by Blake. It shows the infant Christ being 
washed by a woman who is a fury. Of that same child, of that 
same woman, Blake wrote : 

And if the Babe is born a boy 
He’s given to a Woman Old 
Who nails him dowm upon a rock, 

Catches his shrieks in cups of gold. 

She binds iron thorns around his head, 

She pierces both his hands and feet, 

She cuts his heart out at his side, 

To make it feel both cold and heat. 

Her fingers number every nerve. 

Just as a miser counts his gold ; 

She lives upon his shrieks and cries, 

And she grows young as he grows old. 

It is all in the fresco at Neresi. The fingers number every 
nerve of the infant Christ, just as a miser counts his gold ; that 
is spoken of by the tense, tough muscles of her arms, the com- 
pulsive fingers, terrible, seen through the waters of the bath as 
marine tentacles. She is catching his shrieks in cups of gold ; 
that is to say she is looking down with awe on what she is so 



6o 


BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 


freely handling. She is binding iron around his head, she is 
piercing both his hands and feet, she is cutting his heart out 
at his side, because she is naming him in her mind the Christ, 
to whom these things are to happen. It is not possible that that 
verse and this fresco should not have been the work of the 
same mind. Yet the verse was written one hundred and fifty 
years ago by a home-keeping Cockney and the fresco was 
painted eight hundred years ago by an unknown Slav. Two 
things which should be together, which illumine each other, 
had strayed far apart, only to be joined for a minute or two at 
rare intervals in the attention of casual visitors. It was to 
counter this rangy quality in the universe that the little monk 
had desired to maintain contact between his devotions and their 
objects. His shining eyes showed a faith that, bidden, would 
have happily accepted more exacting tasks. 

Road 

We had had a number of bad evenings with Gerda. She 
was not easy in the daytime. A number of expeditions had been 
darkened, it seemed without cause, till I discovered that when 
we jumped out of the car, as we were sure to do quite often, to 
see a view or a flower or a kolo, I sometimes got in and sat on the 
right, which was where, she strongly felt, she ought to sit since 
she was the wife of a Government official. But over our evening 
meals she was at her worst, for it was then, after the business of 
sightseeing was over, that she was able to cultivate her ingenuity. 
Before Constantine came down she would try to correct any 
pleasant impressions of the country we might have received 
during the day. She would tell us, ** You do not understand 
how horrible this country is. You think it is grand when they 
talk of Serbian pioneers. You do not know what that means. 
Everybody who goes into the Civil Service and wants to get a 
good post must volunteer to work here in Macedonia for three 
years. That is abominable. I knew a woman doctor and she 
came down here, and they made her go to the smallest mountain 
villages and teach the people , about health and the care of 
children and it was terrible, the peasants were just like animals, 
so filthy and stupid. Do you call that right to make an educated 
woman of good family do that ? ” ** But if one acquires territory 
that is not fully developed one must do that sort of thing, said 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 6i 

my husband. “ One is bound to have trouble and loss until it 
is done. We have had to do exactly the same thing in India.** 
You have done exactly the same thing in India ? ** repeated 
Gerda. ** Yes, there are many English people in India who 
spend their lives doing such work among the natives, both 
missionaries and civil servants.** Then as Constantine took his 
place at the table, she said to him in Serbian, ** Here our friend 
is telling us that the English do all sorts of philanthropic work 
among the natives in India. It is wonderful what hypocrites 
they are.** ^ 

She robbed Constantine’s talk of all its quality. It is his 
habit, a harmless one, to begin a reminiscence, which is probably 
true and interesting, with a generalisation based on it which is 
unsound but arresting. It is his way of saying Walk up ! 
Walk up ! ” and nobody minds. Once at dinner he put down 
his wineglass and announced, “ I do not think, but I know, I 
absolutely know, that most men do not die a natural death but 
are poisoned by their wives.** Now my husband knew, and I 
knew, and Constantine knew that such a statement was stark 
nonsense, but we also knew that it was the prelude to a good 
story. But my husband said, “ Indeed ? ** And I said, “ Do you 
really think so ? ’* and Constantine began to tell us how after 
he had worked for some time in Russia as an official under the 
Bolsheviks, to save his life, he could bear it no longer and he 
decided to escape. First he had to lose his identity and this he 
did by picking up a gipsy girl and travelling with her for two 
months from fair to fair as a palmist, till he got down to the 
Roumanian border. Again and again while he was reading 
women*s hands they asked him if he could supply them with 
poison for the purpose of murdering their husbands. Nature, 
it is well known, always supplies its own antidote, and if it is 
natural for men to feel superior to women it is also natural for 
women to feed them with henbane when this superiority is 
carried past a joke. This story is borne out by the number of 
people who have been tried in Hungary during recent years for 
supplying poison to peasant women. Whatever Constantine 
wished to tell us in this connection we did not hear, for Gerda 
said crisply, Dear me, I am glad that I am in the company 
of clever people who can believe such things as that most women 
poison their husbands.** “But it is true,** began poor Con- 
stantine. “ Is it ? ** said Gerda. “ I am only a simple woman, 



6a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

and I do not write books, but such things seem to me too 
foolish.” There was then a wrangle in Serbian which left 
Constantine red and silent. 

On all the occasions when Gerda had thus tied a tourniquet 
round the conversation, she would sit and watch me thoughtfully, 
making remarks in Serbian of which I could usually catch the 
meaning, which had always the same subject matter and style. 
“ They must be very rich. Those two rings of hers must be 
worth a lot. But of course he is a typical English business man. 
Good God, how rich the English are.” ” But how stupid she 
is, how stupid ! She cannot possibly be a good writer. But of 
course there is no culture in England.” These remarks I did not 
translate to my husband, but sometimes she could not bear 
him not to know that she was being rude to me, and she would 
say something uncivil in German, and sometimes her rage 
against us would flood her face with crimson. 

After we had been to the theatre to see Yovanovna, an actress 
who was an old friend of Constantine’s, play the leading part 
in a classic Serbian play, she was so melancholy, with her hatred 
of us and England, so flushed and heavy with it, as one might be 
with the advent of a cold or influenza, that I went to bed early 
rather than have supper. Presently my husband came in and sat 
on my bed, and faced me with the air of one making a confession. 
” My dear,” he said, ” I am in the position of one who has gone 
into voluntary bankruptcy and still finds himself liable to im- 
prisonment for debt. To-night I thought Gerda so intolerable 
that I made up my mind to get rid of her. Good God, why should 
we not have this holiday ? All this last year, when we were going 
through that terrible time with your aunt and my uncle dying, 
we promised ourselves we would have this short time together, 
doing nothing but seeing new things and being quiet. Why 
should we have this woman who hates us tying herself round 
our necks ? Besides, how do we know when she will not mortally 
offend some of the people that we meet ? So I suddenly made 
up my mind at supper that I would stand it no longer. After 
all, we can go to Ochrid alqne, and we can see what is to be 
seen, without Constantine. It will be less delightful, for he is 
the most entertaining companion in the world, but it can be 
done. I said therefore over the supper-table, * There will be 
too many of us in the car to-morrow.’ I disliked the sound of 
my own voice intensely as I said it, but I set my teeth, and 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 63 

went on, determined to behave just as badly as she does. * Three 
and all our luggage will be just as much as the car will carry. 
Your wife, Constantine, must travel by the motor bus to Ochrid, 
since you certainly must accompany us if we are to visit the 
monastery of Yovan Bigorski.* I believed that they would be 
silent for a moment and that Constaritine would say, ‘ I am sorry, 
this arrangement will not suit me. My wife and I will be obliged 
to go to Belgrade to-morrow morning.* But there was a 
moment’s silence and then they agreed. Now, I have behaved 
just as badly as she does, but I have gained absolutely nothing 
by it.” I cared less than he did for the depressing moral aspect 
of the situation. I simply said, ** I believe we shall have to go 
about with Gerda for the whole of the rest of our lives.” 

So the next morning we had an uneasy breakfast, and Gerda 
left by the eight o’clock bus, telling us bravely that she did not 
mind. We sat at a table in the street, drinking coffee and 
sheep’s milk until the Ban’s car came. A French journalist 
who was staying in the town delayed a moment to ask me 
whether I knew the works of Millet on the Serbo-Byzantine 
frescoes, bought some lilac from a passing boy and laid it on 
my table. Constantine, away for the moment to buy stamps, 
and my husband, away for the moment to buy tooth-paste, 
each met the same boy and had the same idea. An old Turk 
stood by and watched the increase of the purple heap on my 
table and over his face spread the thought, ” These people are 
fond of lilac. They buy lilac. Since they have bought so much 
they might buy more.” So we saw him go down a side street 
and look up at a small wall over which some lilac was bobbing 
from someone else’s garden. There was a little negotiation 
with a barrel drawn from a neighbouring yard, and then the 
ragged old legs shinned up the wall, a ragged turban and a 
lean old forearm worked among the branches. He brought 
back a very respectable armful considering his age and the 
circumstances. It seemed hardly possible not to buy it. 

A woman with a handsome face worn with suffering but not 
ascetic, showing a mouthful of gold teeth, stopped and greeted 
Constantine with pleasure, and I remembered it was one of the 
chambermaids where Constantine and I had stayed last year. 
She was glad to see us and showed it in a curiously fantastic 
and highfaluting w^y ; and I remembered what Constantine 
had told me about her and the little blonde Slovene who was 



64 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

the other chambermaid. He had said, “ To-day my blind 
would not go up so I called them in to see it. But it was not 
serious, it was only that some plaster had fallen between it and 
the wall, nothing was broken. So I said to the chambermaid, 

* Nothing is bad so long as it is unbroken,* and she said, looking 
a little wicked at me, * Nothing is unbroken in these sinful 
days.* And then they both laughed a great deal, and they 
looked at my pyjamas, and said how gay they are, and if I 
wear such gay pyjamas when I am alone, how very gay they 
must be when I have a companion, and I say, ‘ It is not the 
pyjamas that make the gaiety when one has a companion ! * 
and at that they were so delighted that they ran out of the room, 
and then they ran back again and laughed some more, and then 
they ran out again. And now they like me very much, for that 
conversation represents something wonderful to them, it was a 
high-water mark of delicacy that they will perhaps never touch 
again. For they never talk to anybody about anything else 
than these matters, because they have nothing else to talk about 
to people who are strangers, who cannot talk about local things. 
But usually they have to talk about them to people who make 
jokes that are too bad, who are rude to them, who cannot be 
counted on not suddenly to show their teeth and become brutal. 
But I did not say a rude word, I was elegant with them. I am 
kind. So months after, years after, they will say to each other, 

‘ Do you remember the gentleman who came from Belgrade 
with the English lady, and who talked to us in that wonderful, 
witty, drawing-room way ? * And it will be just that which I 
said to them.*’ And here was proof that Constantine was right. 

The handsome young chauffeur, whose name was Dragutin, 
said farewell to his wife, a slender dark child who looked like 
one of the Russian ballet, by chance heel-bound. We rushed 
through the broad valley, past the ruined mosque, past poppies 
and poplars and the last fruit blossom to the town of Tetovo, 
which stands among many apple orchards. It is famous for 
those apples ; there are songs about them ; you may know 
that the hem of the hyperbolic East has touched here when you 
are told that some of them are so fine that they are transparent 
and that when you peel them you can see the pips at the core. 
We went out and drank black coffee at a coffee-house in a 
dusty market-place, and the bald-headed man who kept it came 
up with a tray of cakes and said, ** Did you expect to see 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 65 

Dobosch Torte here ? Did you expect to see Pozony here ? 
Did you expect to see Nusstorte here ? ” and we said that we had 
not, and he said, ** I will explain to you how this has happened. 
Once upon a time I had a very large bakery in Skoplje. I had 
many men working for me, and I backed the bill of a friend of 
mine for two hundred thousand dinars, and he ran away. So I 
had to sell all I had and start here afresh, and in a place that my 
wife hates, for she is a very cultivated lady, she comes from the 
north of the Danube. I have had to labour for five years like a 
convict, to face life with a clean forehead, and it is not even that 
I was foolish, for I was bound to back his bill, since in my 
beginning he had backed mine.** He made us take some cakes 
for our journey, and a piece of sucking-pig. For nowhere,** 
he said, “ will you find cakes as good as mine and there are few 
sucking-pigs like this. The whole of it weighed only eight 
pounds, and it is like butter.** He mentioned food only 
objectively, but nothing is more certain than that he was a very 
greedy man. It was good to think that he had this consolation, 
living in such a remote place, in undeserved ruin, with a very 
cultivated lady. 

On the outskirts of Tetovo we passed a mosque on the edge 
of a river which had a strange and dissolute air, for it was covered 
with paintings in the same Moslem Regency style as the harem 
in the Pasha*s palace at Bardovtsi. Not an inch but had its 
diamond centred with a lozenge or a star, all in the most 
coquettish, interior decorators* polychrome. It languished in 
the midst of a sturdy Oriental wall, with square openings in it 
barred by wooden grills, very fierce and very rustic. Rain had 
begun to fall but this mosque was so curious a thing, so in- 
appropriate in its contrast to its builders, that we sent a boy 
for the key and waited for it, though he was long in coming. 
On the other side of the river were ruins of a Turkish bath ; 
about us faultlessly proportioned Turkish houses slightly pro- 
jected their upper storeys ; a little way off the house of a Turkish 
merchant, painted periwinkle blue, stood in a garden great 
enough to be called a park, lovely enough to be called by the 
Midi name for a garden, un paradou. Not a dog barked. The 
quarter was tongue-tied with decay. 

When the key came we entered into an astonishing scene, 
for every inch of the mosque inside was painted with fripperies 
in this amusing and self-consciously amused style. There was a 



66 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

frieze of tiny little views, of palaces on the Bosphorus with ships 
neatly placed in the middle of the sound, of walled gardens 
with playing fountains and trees mingling their branches as in 
agreement, and on the ceiling were circles containing posies or 
views of buildings, Persian in origin but as remote from their 
origin as is London of to-day, though they were all that nearer. 
The vaulting under the galleries was painted with roses which 
proved that there must be a Turkish expression meaning 
** too divine It was like being inside a building made of a 
lot of enormous tea-trays put together, the very most whimsical 
tea-trays that the gift department of Messrs. Fortnum & Mason 
would wish to provide. In this erection a fierce people had met 
to worship their militant prophet. I understand nothing, nothing 
at all. 

Out of Tetovo we drove along a road between wide marshes 
trenched with yellow irises, lying between high hills where 
green terraces climbed to a blue barrenness, streaked by snow. 
Presently we came on the motor bus, which had broken down. 
We uncomfortably felt it our duty to stand by till it recovered. 
Gerda was standing with a Turkish woman in her late thirties, 
in widow’s weeds, who was fat in the curious way of beautiful 
middle-aged Turkish women. She did not look like one fat 
woman, she looked like a cluster of beautiful women loosely 
attached to a common centre, and she was multiplied again by 
her excess of widow’s weeds, which were enough for the bereaved 
of a small town. Her smile advertised sweetness under a thick 
layer of powder, like Turkish delight. She was, she said, the 
widow of a Belgrade actor, going home to see his parents at 
Debar. The bus started and we went ahead of it to Gostivar, 
which is another town shaped by the Turkish luxury that has 
departed. About the market square, which was edged with rickety 
shops and characterless cafes and one Regency Moslem house 
that might have been a summer-house designed in our day for a 
lady of title by some international epicene, men walked about 
holding squealing lambs in their arms. We left the town and 
climbed up the mountainside to the pass, and saw how the 
comitadji were able to carry oa their warfare, for we saw for 
the first time the Macedonian beechwoods and limewoods, leafy 
and stunted and dense. Under their green mantle an army 
could have its being and be invisible a quarter of a mile away. 
We stopped on the heights to look down at Gostivar, now a pool 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 67 

of russet roofs dripping across the river to a lower shelf, with 
minarets and poplars planted by it cunningly, and at the valley 
that drives broadly back to Tetovo between snow- brindled 
mountains to the ultimate pure white peaks. Dragutin left his 
car and at once cried out, as if hailing a fellow-soldier, and 
pointed his hand straight above him. An eagle soared above us 
with a chicken in its claws. We went on and came to the pass, 
a marshy stretch where there was still winter, and the trees and 
bushes were bare. Cattle and horses grazed, and they were 
ornery ; it is an American W'^rd but it was made for Balkan 
beasts. On the wetter patches storks stood on one leg, all facing 
one way. 

At an inn on which a stork sat immensely and superbly, as if 
not knowing that it was an inn, but thinking of it simply as 
what it sat on, we had a meal of excellent fish. Then the bus 
drove up, and Gerda came in. My husband, who was transfixed 
with horror at this turn his device had taken, plied her with 
fish and bread and wine, and asked her if she had had a comfort- 
able journey. ** Yes,” she said, ” several people have asked 
me why I am travelling by bus when my husband and friends 
are travelling in a car, but I have explained that these are 
English guests and they had to have the most comfortable 
seats.” My husband ceased to offer her anything at all, he 
retired into himself and suffered. 

Gerda ate in silence for a time and then she addressed herself 
to Constantine. ” The Turkish widow,” she said, ” asked me 
if I had been to see Yovanovna, and I said that I had. She 
asked me if I considered her attractive, and I said yes, quite 
attractive. And then she said, but Yovanovna is more than 
quite attractive, she is very attractive. She must be, for she 
has had so many lovers. Then the woman asked me if I had 
ever heard of the famous poet called Constantine, and I said 
I had, and she said that all the world knew that he had been 
Yovanovna's lover for many years.” After a moment Con- 
stantine said sadly, ” Ach, what a wicked woman to say that 
to somebody she has just met in a bus ! ” 

Just then the conductor put his head in at the door and said 
that he had lost time on the road, and he must start again at 
once. Gerda rose and went, and Constantine followed her. 
” But the Turkish widow must have recognised Constantine ! ” 
I exclaimed. ” Her husband was an actor and for years 



68 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

Constantine was a dramatic critic, and anyway everybody knows 
him from the caricatures.** “ Of course the Turkish widow 
knew him,** said my husband, ** but what on earth can Gerda 
have been saying to the Turkish widow to make her land such 
a good one as that ? ** At this moment Constantine returned. 
He sat down and ate sucking-pig very pensively. “ I have a 
very strong impression,” he said, ” that my wife would have 
liked to say something very disagreeable to me, but could not 
find what to say.** 

The road fell from the pass through a rocky gorge, sordid 
at first with rockfalls, which widened out into the valley that I 
had remembered as one of the loveliest things I had ever seen, 
where steep hillsides, far apart enough to be seen, fell again and 
again into the shapes that Earth would take if she found pleasure 
in herself and what she grows. Voluptuously the beech woods 
stretch up to the snow, the grasslands down to the streams, the 
crags with their poplars and ashes come forward like the elbows 
of a yawning woman. There is a village on these hillsides which 
I think the most beautiful I have ever seen, anywhere in the 
world. It is called the Sorrowing Women, a name which in a 
countryside where tragedy has till now been the common lot, 
must mark some ghastly happening. White houses, bluish 
white, all built tall, like towers, and yet like houses, with grey- 
brown roofs, stand on a ledge below the snow and beechwoods, 
and around them grow ashes and poplars and below a lawn 
falls to the river. There is one minaret. A path winds down 
through the lawn. The village has a unity like a person, one 
is disappointed that it cannot speak, that one cannot enter into 
any relation with it, that one must go away and leave it. 

A few miles further on was a monastery that I had to visit 
for a special purpose. It was no hardship. The view from the 
monastery, which lies high, is one of the best in Europe, taking 
the eye the whole journey from the snowfields to the springing 
corn, over sculptured earth that it seems must have been com- 
posed with joy. Also the Abbot is one of the most completely 
created human beings I have ever met. When we went into 
the galleried courtyard he was coming down the staircase from 
the upper storey, having heard our automobile as it wound its 
way up the hairpin bends through the limes. We knew he was 
on his way, because a servant standing in the courtyard looked 
up at the staircase and made a gesture such as might be used 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 69 

by an actor in a Shakespearean historical drama to announce 
the entrance of a king ; and indeed the old man presented a 
royal though equivocal appearance, his face shining with a 
double light of majesty and cunning. lie knew Constantine 
well, and gave him a comradely greeting, because he was a 
Government official. He himself had been appointed to this 
important monastery because he had been an active pro-Serb 
propagandist in Macedonia before the war and could be trusted 
afterwards to persuade to conformity such Albanians and 
Bulgarians as were open to persuasion, and to assist the authori- 
ties in dealing with the others. He faintly remembered me 
from my previous visit, and it crossed his mind that my husband 
and I might be persons of consequence, since we were accom- 
panied on our travels by a Government official, and a child 
could have detected him resolving to impress us and charm us. 
But also the thought of the vastness of the earth, and the great 
affairs that link and divide its several parts, made his mind 
stretch like a tiger ardent for the hunt, because he knew his 
aptness for such business. 

We were taken up to the parlour, which was very clean 
and handsome, like the whole monastery. It had been a pil- 
grimage much beloved by various neighbouring towns which 
had been prosperous under the Turks because of their craftsmen, 
particularly in the eighteenth century, so the church and the 
monastery have been richly built and maintained. The servant 
brought us the usual coffee and some wine which the Abbot, 
though he was sparkling with good-will, poured out for us 
without any marked air of generosity, for which I respected 
him all the more. I had seen him roll his eye round us and 
come to the perfectly sound judgment that my husband and I 
were too Western to enjoy drinking wine in the afternoon, and 
he very sensibly regretted that he had to waste his good wine 
in this ceremonial libation. Then we settled down to a talk 
about international politics. He expressed confidence in Eng- 
land as the only country which had remained great after the 
war, partly because he wanted to please us, but partly because 
he had collected a certain amount of evidence, some of it true 
and some of it false, which seemed to him to prove our unique 
distinction. The part that Mussolini had played in financing 
and organising Macedonian disorder made him regard Italy 
as a debauched and debauching brawler ; and he had an insight 



70 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON 

into Hitler that came from his knowledge of the comitadji. He 
recognised that Hitler was one of those who preferred to send 
out others to fight rather than to fight himself, and that the 
Nazis were the kind of rebels who forget that the aim of any 
rebellion should be to establish order. “ They are unrulers, 
Hitler and Mussolini,” he said. A sudden thunder working 
in his eye, he said, ” I am sure that Hitler does not believe in 
God ” ; and he added, after a minute, as if someone had ob- 
jected that perhaps there was no God, ” Well, what will a man 
like that believe in if he does not believe in God ? Nothing 
good, it is certain.” I think that in a single second he had boxed 
the compass, and passed from religious passion to scepticism 
and back again to faith though now of a more prudential sort. 

I noticed all this through a haze of pleasure caused by the 
man’s immense animal vigour, and his twinkling charm, which 
was effective even when it was realised to be voluntary. His 
disingenuousness failed to repel for the same reason that made 
it transparently obvious. It was dictated by some active but 
superficial force in the foreground of his mind ; but a funda- 
mental sincerity, of the inflexible though not consciously moral 
sort found in true artists, watched what he was doing with 
absolute justice. All his intellectual processes were of a hard 
ability, beautiful to watch, but it was surprising to find that 
they were sometimes frustrated by his lack of knowledge. 
“ France,” he said, ” is utterly decadent. It must be so, for 
she is atheist and communist.” ” But indeed you are mis- 
taken ! ” I exclaimed. ” I know France well, and the country 
is full of life, a sound and sober and vigorous life.” ” If it 
interests you,” said my husband, ” French literature has not 
for long been so generally inspired by the religious spirit as it is 
to-day ; and France is not communist but democratic.” ” But 
democracy is an evil thing,” said the Abbot, assuming a sublime 
expression of prophetic wisdom, ” it is always the beginning of 
communism.” To hurry past this occasion for disagreement 
he began to talk about Mr. Gladstone and all that he had done 
for the South Slavs in their struggle with the Turks. This is a 
subject about which I never feel at ease, for I am not sure that 
Mr. Gladstone would have retained his enthusiasm for the 
Balkan Christians if he had really known them. Their eager- 
ness not to be more sinned against than sinning if they could 
possibly help it, which was actually a most healthy reaction to 



MACEDONIA (SOUTH SERBIA) 7t 

their lot, might have repelled his ethical austerity. But I forgot 
my embarrassment in wondering whether the Abbot knew 
that Mr. Gladstone had been a leader of a democratic party. 
The answer was, of course, that he did not. His life had been 
spent in a continuous struggle for power, which had given him 
no time to pursue knowledge that was not of immediate use to 
him ; and indeed such a pursuit would have been enormously 
difficult in his deprived and harried environment. But his 
poetic gift of intuitive apprehension, which was great, warned 
him how much there was to be known, and how intoxicating 
it would be to experience such