Draga’s home was one of these houses. All its doors and windows opened on the inner court. On the ground floor were stalled the oxen, the hens, and the goats. Above the stables projected a wide veranda hung with gay Serbian rugs and strings of tobacco and beans. Below, in the open space of the court, was piled husked corn, which glowed like a heap of gold when the sun struck it.
Draga’s thoughts rushed back to the familiar scene the next day, as the ox-cart creaked through the sere and dusty country, over a road that had once been a great Roman thoroughfare. It was really a continuation of the famous Appian Way from Rome to Brindisi. There it disappeared in the Adriatic, to emerge on the other side at Durazzo, in Albania, where it took another name, of Via Egnatia, and continued across country to Salonica. Monastir, where Draga and Dushan were to go to school, was the halfway station. The old Roman road was still the great highway, but the merchant caravans and the trampling legions had disappeared. Military trucks, white with dust, sometimes lumbered by, carrying stores to some outlying garrison, and the mail car was sure to be met sooner or later jacking up its wheels for new tires. For the most part, people went by on foot or on donkey-back, all burden-laden.
There were brigands back in the hills. Sometimes they disguised themselves as Turkish women, with long, black veils over their faces, and flowing garments, which concealed weapons; but persons traveling in an ox-cart driven by a barefooted boy had nothing to fear. Nevertheless, they spent the nights near some small village that looked like an outcrop of stones on the hillside, and after coffee and sour milk at the inn, stretched themselves out on the floor of the wagon and pulled the blankets over them.
On the third day they came to Monastir—to Draga and Dushan a bewildering, beautiful place. The next day was market day, and their mother could go back in company with friends. So, on the threshold of the school, with many hurried embraces, she left Draga, who felt small and alone in spite of the crowd of new faces around her.
A month went by and the first examinations were over.
Draga’s parents were to come that day to learn whether or not she had passed. Draga did not know and was afraid to ask. One moment she trembled with hope that she had not passed, so that she might travel back in the ox-cart with her parents to the golden-lighted court, the shadowy kitchen, and the sweet, musty smell of grapes. Then she shriveled with shame at the thought of failure. Besides, she was beginning to love the school life; the fresh clean dormitory, where they slept with open windows; the team work of study and play; and the evening hour, when they all sat on the floor and told stories before going to bed. Also, she had learned with surprise that Bulgarian girls are as kindly as Serbians. There were several in the school, and one of them, Boiana, had been her friend from the start. This seemed strange, for she had always heard that Bulgars were evil and hostile people.
Fearing that her mother might find her strange because of her bobbed hair and straight gingham dress, Draga put on her Macedonian garments. The embroidery on her tunic was of an ancient pattern called ‘Marko, the King’s Son,’ so named in honor of the Serbian prince, Marko, the national hero of chivalry and romance, who had lost a crown rather than tell a lie. His home had been in Macedonia over five hundred years before Draga’s time, but ‘Marko’s pattern’ had been handed down from one generation of Serbian women to another, each proud to wear it, as Draga was to-day. The sleeveless jacket which she wore over her tunic was of a clear red, like the peppers strung against the white walls of her home; and wound around her waist was a rope of black wool to keep her brilliant girdle in place.
Behind the school playground there was a high brick wall with a small green door. It led into a quiet, neglected garden like a scene from a book. There was a well in the center; gourds and spiked flowers, purple and white, grew in the rank grass, and crooked plum trees traced blue shadows on the walls which shut the garden away from the clatter of the streets. This was the paradise of a large family of rabbits, and when Draga felt homesick she slipped away to feed them with scraps of red peppers, which she begged from the cook; for all Macedonians down to the rabbits love peppers.
Draga had begun to feel the charm of order and cleanliness, but she missed the animals which were a part of the family at home, and which she had fed and cared for all her life. She was torn between a longing to go back to her home and a real love for the life in school. Her examination marks would decide which it was to be. Of her Serbian studies she felt fairly sure. It was the strange English language that staggered her—its incomprehensible verbs, its spelling without a clue. Some of the Serbian girls spoke it well, and from them she learned more than from her books. The queer names for food and clothes and the objects in the schoolroom she was beginning to master.
