The landlord was all friendliness. He knew all about the English, and he told me about Someone-avich-who-married-an-English-wife. "She is so happy," he added rapturously, "and he is now just like an Englishman!"
"What does he do?" I asked.
"Do? He does not do anything. He sits in Idepark like an Englishman."
"She must be an American," I said firmly; "Englishwomen are not rich enough for that."
Radujevatz, on the Danube, the port for Negotin and the last station before reaching the Bulgarian frontier, is but a couple of kilometres away. I returned to Belgrade by boat. All the world and Cook go down the Danube, so it needs no description. My guardian angel was as kind as usual, and gave me two most courteous Servian artists as travelling companions. There is nothing like a "brother brush" for help in need, and as a general rule my sketch-book is a great passport and finds me more useful friends than does my Foreign Office one. These two gave me lessons in the language and told me of their fatherland. That I should have come so far to see it pleased them greatly, but they were both, especially the elder man, very sad about it, and told me mournfully that I could scarcely have come in a worse period of its history. "Our old patriarchal system is dead, and we have nothing to replace it. Our people have had thrust upon them too suddenly Western ideas which they do not understand; we are in the most critical period of a nation's history, the half-educated period. The nations that criticise us passed through this period so long ago that they have forgotten it." He talked of the Great Empire and of Kosovo and of the black years that followed. "Look at the few old churches that the Turks have left us. In those days we were not behind the whole of Europe. Our past was heroic; our future looks black. I am an old man, and I shall die with all my hopes disappointed. No one in the West knows how we have suffered. I, of course, remember when the Turks still occupied our forts." They sang me snatches of Servian ballads—all monotonous wails over the slaying of someone by the Turks, ending in a cry for vengeance. I commented on their unrelieved melancholy. "Ah, Fräulein," said the elder, "it is the suffering of five hundred years, and it is your nation that keeps the Turk in Europe. The Crimean War was a blow to us, and the Berlin Treaty was only a shade less bitter. They did not consider us as peoples. They marked out the Balkan peninsula into spheres of influence awaiting the pleasure of the great Powers, and we are in the Austrian sphere. England has never troubled about us. Russia is our only friend; Russia could save us, but she is too busy in the Far East. The only other land situated as we are, with no outlet to the sea, is Switzerland. All Europe takes care of Switzerland. We have no one to help us in the whole world."
We reached the Iron Gates. The stream was enormously swollen, and we steered up the middle, a huge wide swirl of water eddying and coiling with terrible rapidity. The boat began its upward climb, shuddering and trembling violently; it seemed to be straining every nerve, and the deck vibrated underfoot. Beyond and above gleamed the line of smooth water, and the panting vessel struggled into it and regained its breath. As I stood in the bows and watched the struggle and heard the tale of Servia's woes, Servia seemed to me like the struggling boat, with the melancholy difference that there was no strong hand at the helm to save her from shipwreck.
This was, however, the boat's supreme effort. We lay off Orsova all night, were more and more behind time next day, and did not lounge up to the quay at Belgrade till very nearly midnight. Belgrade was fast asleep when I walked through the silent streets that were entirely deserted save for the sentinels standing motionless at the street corners with rifle and revolver. Belgrade, I had been told in West Europe, was a gay, reckless, dissipated capital. In outward appearance it is about as wild as Little Peddlington. Appearances may be deceptive. I do not know.