Through the Land of the Serb

But in spite of his wild-beast appearance and his many obvious faults, the Albanian is by no means all bad. I will almost say that he possesses the instincts of a gentleman. At any rate, he "plays fair," according to his own very peculiar creed. He boasts that he has never betrayed a friend nor spared a foe. It is true that "not sparing" includes torture and various and most horrible atrocities, but it is a great mistake in considering any of the Balkan peoples to make too much capital out of "atrocities." A century ago every race, including our own, considered the infliction of hideous suffering the legitimate way of punishing comparatively small crimes. At the risk of being laughed at, I will say that I do not believe the Albanian is by nature cruel. The life of the poor up-country peasant is hard and rough beyond what anyone who has only lived in a civilised country can realise, and the life of such a man's beasts is of necessity a hard one also. But though I have met him with his flocks on the hillsides and have watched him carefully in street and market, I have never seen the Albanian torturing an animal for the fun of the thing, as does the Neapolitan, the Provençal, and the Spaniard. The revolting "jokes" with lame and helpless animals which can be seen any day in the streets of Naples are not to be met with in the capital of the bloodthirsty Albanian.

I have trusted the Albanian somewhat recklessly, I have been told; I have given him plenty of chances of robbing me, and several of making away with me altogether; but he has always treated me with a fine courtesy, and has never taken a mean advantage. He is a brave man, and he is an intelligent man. When he gets the chance, he learns quickly and picks up foreign languages speedily. And when he succeeds in leaving his native land and escaping the awful blight of the Ottoman, he often shows great business capacity, and a surprising power of adapting himself to circumstances.

The ordinary Christian Albanian of the town is very different from the up-country savage, and is a pathetically childish person. He tries very hard to be civilised, but his ideas on the subject are vague. How far he is from understanding the prejudices of the twentieth century the following conversation will show. It is one of many similar. I was walking up the steep, cobble-stony bazaar-street of Antivari late one afternoon in the summer of 1902. The shop owners stood at their doors to see me pass. Presently a man came forward, a tall, fair, grey-eyed fellow. He spoke very politely in a mishmash of Servian and Italian. "I have never seen a foreign woman before," he said, "will you come into my shop and talk to me?" I followed him into his shop. As I was unmistakably from the West, he gave me a tiny box to sit on, and then squatted neatly on the ground himself, called for coffee, and started conversation. He was amazed at my nationality, and showed me some cotton labelled "Best hard yarn" among his goods. Otherwise "England" conveyed no idea to him. England, having no designs on Albania, does not count much as a Power with the ordinary Albanian, but is merely something distant and harmless that does not matter, whereas an eye is kept on Austria and on Italy, and Russia is regarded with extreme suspicion.

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