This had been entirely unexpected, Mr. Eyres said. However, Ahmet did not turn a hair. He and Elez made the besa of peace, and then Elez added another thing. “I have heard,” he said to Ahmet, “that you intend to disarm the men of Dibra. You have not expected to do that without fighting. Now I, Elez Jusuf, chief of the Dibra, say this: The Serbs hold our city of Dibra. The Serbs are on the lands of my people. Twice in this year the Serbs have come to kill our men and burn our villages. Only our rifles stand between us and the Serbs. But you are the chief of Albania and you are a wise chief. When you think it is time to come to the Dibra to take away the rifles of the Dibra, I will give you every rifle. There will be no trouble. I say this, on the honor of Dibra.”
Even this, to Mr. Eyres’s deeper astonishment, did not cause Ahmet to turn that hair. He said merely, “That is well.” The interview was ended. On the way back to his men, Elez suggested to Mr. Eyres that he leave his son as hostage to insure that he had spoken the truth. If he broke the besa, he said, in a matter-of-fact manner, Mr. Eyres might kill his son. Misunderstanding Mr. Eyres’s reaction to this offer, he added that his son would be glad to make his life a forfeit for the honor of Dibra. “But what on earth would I do with the chap?” said Mr. Eyres to us. “Bless my soul, I know old Elez will keep his word! Well, rather! I told the old man to jolly well take his son along with him. By the way, the young Elez has two lads of his own here in this school. Asked me to give them greeting from him, said he was sorry he couldn’t stop to see them. Elez’s riding out on the Dibra trail by this time, I expect.”
The young secretary of the absent Prime Minister came at that moment to confirm this conjecture. The crisis was over. Albania, we said, was saved once more. If the uprising had been—who could say?—an Italian plot, Italy was checkmated again. There would be no new outbreak in the Balkans this time, and that precarious balance in all European politics, the Balkan equilibrium, was unchanged. We were saying this, and I was thinking of the two Austrian engineers riding behind the retreating Dibra men on their quest for electric lights for Tirana, when the second blow fell upon us.
The Red Cross mail car, gone that morning to meet the Italian steamer at Durazzo, returned with the news that Hamid Bey Toptani, brother of Essad Pasha, had taken Durazzo. He was an hour from Tirana, coming on the Durazzo road, with at least six hundred armed men. How many more were hidden in the hills when the automobile passed, no one could guess. Under the American flag, the car had gone and come through the lines, and no secret had been made of the fact that Tirana would be attacked that night.
There is a point at which human nerves cease to report emotion. For three days and nights we had felt all that we are capable of feeling. We heard this news blankly, understanding it, thinking about it, and hardly caring. There was no resilience left in us with which to care. It was like beginning again a story we had once read.
“Where did Hamid Bey Toptani get his arms?” I asked. For the Toptani family are not mountaineers, nor chiefs of mountaineers. The peasants on the great estates of the plains do not carry rifles.
“There is an Italian gunboat in the harbor of Durazzo, and another at San Giovanni,” said the American who had gone with the mail.
“It does look like a well-organized plan,” we said. Scutari attacked, Elbassan attacked, Durazzo taken, Tirana attacked from the west and from the east. A plot, in which only one small thing had gone wrong. Had old Elez Jusuf, tricked by his two friends into involving the Dibra, come too early to Tirana? Had Mustapha Kruja and Zija Dibra intended to bring the Dibra men from the east when Hamid Bey Toptani came from the west? Was it because the plan miscarried that they had urged Elez Jusuf to sit intrenched in Tirana, while they hoped that Toptani would come in time to help them take Government House? Or had the Dibra men come on time, and Toptani purposely delayed, to leave the hard fighting in Tirana to the Dibra men?
Futile questions, for we could not know the answers. And our thoughts settled upon Ahmet, three days and nights without sleep or rest, the one man who was the government, sitting alone in Government House with the checkerboard of this situation before him. How well he had moved the pieces! Bringing in the British minister, to give him time to bring in his fighting men. Settled, in his mind, that to-day must remove Elez Jusuf, though he burned half Tirana to do it. And sending out, ten minutes behind Elez, those two engineers to plan electric lights for the capital! To plan electric lights for the city that—surely he knew it—Hamid Bey Toptani would attack that night. Ahmet, the Hawk, chief of the Mati, come from the court of Abdul Hamid when sixteen years old, to fight the Serbs in the mountains. The chiefs of the Mati must lace his opangi before every battle, because he did not know how to lace opangi. But the chiefs of the Mati loved him.
Two horses went cantering past the windows of the Red Cross dining room, and because the clatter of horse’s hoofs is rare in Tirana they must be bringing news. From the gateway of the courtyard we watched them—a rider in the Mati costume, leading a lean, eager bay horse. They went through the gate to Government House. In a moment they reappeared, Ahmet Bey Mati riding the bay. He still wore the clothes in which I had seen him; rumpled a little, they spoke of the sleepless nights, and his face was white with fatigue. On his head an astrakan fez; over his shoulder the strap that held a rifle; around his waist the cartridge belt, and a belt holding silver-hilted revolver and knives. A strange figure, in tailored business suit, riding the lean bay through the streets of Tirana. Behind him, coming with the long swinging walk of the mountaineers, perhaps sixty Mati men.