“No, I shan’t go until you play and sing for me.”
He took his gusla and moved his bow gently over its single string, while he sang of “Mustapha who came riding on a dapple gray stallion, with thirty Pashas as his escort. He struck a glass of wine from the hand of a Servian hero, who vowed that he would shed the black blood of the Turk,” which, after many monotonous verses, he did.
“Signor, I can’t sing very well—ah, there it is again!”
While he had been singing about Mustapha, who died so many years ago, the phonograph bawled lustily about “Tammany, Tammany,” which, unfortunately, is very much alive.
I made my peace with the guslar by putting into his hand a liberal fee; then I followed the sound of the phonograph which had been switched from “Tammany” to the song of “A nice young man, that lives in Kalamazoo.”
On the lower floor of a house in one of the small streets which divide the Stradona, I discovered the phonograph and its owner, a man neither of the nobility nor noble. His knowledge of America extended as far as Brooklyn and the Austro-Italian docks, near which he had established a boarding-house. Of course, he had come home rich, and only for a visit.
“Who could live in Ragusa after Brooklyn?”
He told me that he made a great deal of money selling liquor, and acknowledged that he sold it without a license. Besides that, the sailors brought over various articles for which he found a ready market. His case would not be worth recording were it not for the fact that he may be looked upon as a man who has been spoiled by his sojourn with us. I doubt, though, that there was anything to spoil; evidently, he was a man of poor breeding and low moral standards. In America, he had found an outlet for his evil tendencies, and a bad business which offered opportunities for lawlessness.
His daughters were more interesting than he; for they came back perfect strangers, into the environment which they had left as children. They had quite forgotten Italian and spoke Serbo-Slavic very poorly; while their English was typical.
“Golly! But Ragusa is a bum town!”