We thanked them and, refusing a coffee, walked slowly on in the summer evening. Nothing could have been more tranquil than the low white town, with its cobbled winding streets, its stream murmuring beneath a stone bridge, its minarets, its plane trees. The crowds went slowly up and down, sauntering past the mosque’s naïvely pictured walls, past the white-arcaded street of little shops whose owners sat crosslegged among their goods, past the cemetery of toppling turbaned gravestones, past the lighted windows of the cafés where men were singing the strange Albanian melodies. It is a town to be happy in, Tirana.
But the water rippling in the gutters stirred uneasiness in my mind, a vague uneasy effort, out of which came a name. “Ahmet Bey Mati! What have I heard about him, Rexh?”
“I don’t know all you can have heard about him, Mrs. Lane. But you remember the comitadj, in the cave above the Lumi Shala on the trail from Thethis? The one that sang us the songs? He told you first about Ahmet Bey and how they went to Valona.”
“Oh, Rexh, sure enough! Doesn’t it seem a long time ago? And how you have grown, and how much you have learned, since then!”
For the little boy who trudged beside the donkey through that moonlit night on the plains of Scutari was gone. The red fez, the flannelette pajamas, were memories. It was a youth with a quick smile and earnest eyes who walked beside me in Tirana, a student in the Vocational School, learned in baseball and college yells and geometry, modest still, and thinking more than he spoke, but no longer a child. It was Frances—now in France—who had got Rexh into the American school, handicapped though he was with lack of schooling and with his Gheg tongue, and he had worked hard to justify her commendation.
“I do my best, Mrs. Lane. At first I was very stupid, for I could not understand the Toshk boys, and I could not understand the teachers when they asked me questions, and I was two years behind with the books. But now they speak English, and I have learned Toshk. So I am happy, and my report card is very good. I would like to show you my next one. Now that you have come, I have some one to show it to. It is a joke on me, because, though you said you would come back, I did not think you ever would. And aren’t you happy to find the school really here?”
For we had talked a great deal about the school, a year before when it was only a plan and a hope. Of all the work done by American children in Europe, this school is most beautiful to me. It was not much the Junior Red Cross did in Albania—only a few months of Frances Hardy’s house for refugee children in Scutari, only a little medical work that stopped too soon—but it did build the Vocational School, and Albania will never forget it. Half of the country’s little income goes for the 1,100 schools started since 1912, but none of them can be equipped or staffed like the Vocational School. It opened in July, with sixty boys to learn English. For there are no technical books written in Albanian, and Albanian was the only language the boys knew. Three months later they were speaking, reading, and writing English, and the first school year began. In March, when we came to Tirana, they were the finest upstanding lot of youngsters that ever made a teacher proud, and our arrival was celebrated by an evening’s entertainment, for which the boys extemporised little plays in English, political parodies so witty that they brought tears of mirth to the eyes. I do not think the record of those boys is equaled anywhere, and to find Rexh among them was the happy ending to the story.
“And now Ahmet Bey is Minister of the Interior! Who is chief of the Mati, then?”
“His mother is chief when he is away, Mrs. Lane.”
“Is he a good Minister of the Interior?”