“Tired, Rexh?”
“No, Mrs. Lane.”
“What is the matter?”
“I am thinking that you will go away to your own country and forget us. You say you will come back to Albania, but you never will. It is easy to forget when one is far away; the mind changes. A mind is like the water in a river. We will forget you, too. But I would like to keep this night, because it is a very beautiful night.”
“Yes, Rexh, so would I.”
The lights of Scutari were like scattered glow-worms among the trees. How strange it would be to come back into the twentieth century again! Scutari, Tirana, Salonica—Constantinople? No, not Constantinople. I would go back to Paris. It was not so much that I was tired of traveling as that I was filled with it. One must go across the centuries and back, across a great deal of the world and back, perhaps, to know all the strange things that are at home, all the romances and surprises in one’s own self.
The lights of Scutari were coming nearer. Scutari, Tirana, Durazzo, the Adriatic, Trieste, and Venice, and then Paris—perhaps ten days to Paris, the center of all Europe’s intrigues. For a weary instant I felt again the pressure of all those currents which bewilder, crush, and smother the struggling individual—movements of peoples, marching of armies, alliances of nations, the tides of poverty and disease, the tremendous impersonal economic conflicts. Silicia’s coal, Galicia’s oil, England’s unemployed millions, Ireland, Egypt, India—my mind slid away from them all. I was too pleasantly tired, too much under the spell of the Albanian moon—perhaps, now, a little too old—to care tremendously again for movements. They seemed at once too inevitable and too unpredictable to be concerned about.
The three of us were so small on that vast plain, the sweep of the moon-filled sky and the bulk of the blue-black mountains were too vast; simple as an Albanian, I thought of the world as made of little individuals like ourselves, each lonely, surrounded by the unknown, each a little world in himself. That little world was the real world. Externals did not matter. If each of us could only make our own little world clean and kind and peaceful——
“Tired, Mrs. Lane?” Rexh said, softly.
“No, Rexh. Just thinking.”