The shock was such that my mind blinked. Then I said that I wished to visit Mati and the Merdite, and had come to the Ministry of the Interior to arrange for the trip. Ahmet offered me a cigarette, and lighted it, and my mind waked to alertness, for I saw that he was making time in which to choose his reply. There was something wrong; our feeling was right! I would trip him into giving me a clew.
Our eyes met as I thanked him for the cigarette, and I saw that he saw that I knew he had been hesitating. Idiot that I was, to betray it, I thought. And he said, “This is a difficult time in Albania, madame. I cannot tell you whether you can go to the mountains or not. I cannot discuss our difficulties with you to-day. In ten days’ time they will be ended. I must ask you to wait ten days, perhaps less, certainly no more. Then if you can come to see me again, I will tell you anything you want to know. If it is possible for you to go into the mountains, of course you will go as guest of the Albanian government.”
Everything had been said. He accompanied me to the door, said: “Long may you live! Go on a smooth trail!” and held the door open, simultaneously for me to go out and for the next caller to come in. The door shut. And I said, “That is one of the few great men I have met.”
All that day, at intervals, I recalled that interview and marveled. How had that man come from his background? From the leisurely, evasive, allusive talks of the mountains, from the intricate subtleties of Abdul Hamid’s court, where had he got that incisiveness, that direct, driving force? It was genius, I said; nothing less. I went about asking, “Is Ahmet Bey a patriot?” For if he were not, certainly he was one of the most dangerous men in Albania.
I was told that he was a nephew of Essad Pasha, who sold Albania to Serbia for the title of its king, and was assassinated by Albanians in Paris. I was told that Ahmet had sold timber rights in the Mati to Italians, but had later revoked the sale. I was told that he was a very rich man, and that he held the forty thousand fighting men of the Mati in his hand. I was told that the Serbs, in one of their 1921 raids, had burned the Great House in the Mati, the house in which his family had lived for five centuries. Nothing else, apparently, was known about him.
Walking that night at sunset time with all Tirana, we were surprised to observe that the soldiers lounging around the fires in the courtyard of their barracks were not the same soldiers who had been there the night before. These were new men, recruits, and—by the pattern of their trousers—men from the plains of the south. Raw peasant youths, they looked. None of them carried rifles on their backs, and the few rifles we saw were held awkwardly, as by unpracticed hands. Of course there is a constant flow of recruits through Tirana, for as the government disarms the mountaineers it endeavors to build up a trained citizen army, on the Swiss plan. But we guessed, by the absence of the seasoned soldiers, that there was battle, or danger of battle, somewhere else in Albania.
Incredible, as we walked homeward under the white moon, that on this spring night men could be killing one another. Incredible, in this magic of moon and rippling water and a little owl calling love notes from the dark cypress, that anywhere there was anything but peace. The tall carved wooden gate of our courtyard was romantic in the shadow of Government House; our little house was picturesque with black shadows on white plaster; there was glamour everywhere.
“What’s that? Is that a mouse?” said Annette, through the darkness in which we lay awake, watching the moonlight on the walls and breathing the sweet spring air. We listened. Nothing. “I thought I heard something—a sort of little crackling sound.”
“Listen,” I said, half an hour later. “What is that throbbing?”
Curiosity’s nagging at last got us from our beds. Kimono clad and in slippers we went out into our courtyard. The throbbing came from an engine; the engine that feeds the dynamo of Government House. Every window blazed electric light. We looked at them in amazement; we looked at our wrist watches under the moon. Ten o’clock. And we started when the shadow of the wall beside us moved and spoke. “Long may you live, zonyas! It will be very good if you go into your house.”