There was a little silence after the woman had gone, and then one of the youths, compressing his ears with his thumbs, began to sing. He sang softly, for an Albanian mountaineer, but the high, clear notes filled the house like those of a bugle. He uttered a phrase and paused; Cheremi repeated it and paused; and, so singing alternately, repeating always the same musical phrase with changing words, they chanted long songs of war and adventure, old legends of men whose lives had been worn into myths by the erosion of centuries.
The music, strange and nostalgic, seemed to follow a scale quite different from ours, a simple scale of five notes, thin and vibrating like a violin string.
“Sing one of the songs of your land, Flower,” said Cheremi to me, politely. All the Albanians addressed us by our first names, as is the custom, for among them the last name is merely the possessive form of the father’s, and it is dropped in conversation. Long since my name had been translated into their tongue, becoming Drana Rugi-gnusht, Flower of the Narrow Road.
And we gave them our best. We sang “Juanita,” and “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Marching Through Georgia” and “Dixie” and “Columbia.” We stood up and filled our lungs and sang with all our might, but the result was thin and faint; even to our own ears our songs were difficult to hear, after the ringing voices of the Albanians. “Glory to your lips,” they said, courteously, trying to cover their disappointment and lack of interest. Then we tried “A Hot Time in the Old Town To-night,” and that fell flat. But from depths of her memory Frances resurrected an old American popular song; its name I never knew, I had never heard it before; it had something to do with an obviously improper conversation over a telephone, ending, “Are you wise, honey eyes? Good-by!”
That got them! They sat up, very much interested. “We know that song, too!” said they, and, putting their thumbs to their ears, they sang it in voices that compared with ours as a factory whistle to a penny one. Except that in their mouths it became a beautiful thing, vibrant with innumerable grace notes, and striking truly where our version became banal. Changed, but it was our melody as unmistakably as a beautiful woman is the mother of her ugly daughter. “But that is not a true mountain song, it is a song of the cities,” they said, and we wondered whether it had come to us through Vienna or gone from us to them through Paris.
“Try them on the ‘Merry Widow,’” I said, knowing that that music had come to us from the Balkans, and they laughed aloud at the strains of that famous waltz. “Albanian gypsy music,” said they, and from somewhere in the shadows they produced a sort of musical instrument, cunningly carved from pine, in shape like a long, thin mandolin, strung with horse hair, and on this with a hair-strung bow they played us the real “Merry Widow” waltz. “You have gypsies in your country, too,” said they, and we thought how the centuries have transformed the wandering bands of ragged entertainers into our press-agented musical-comedy companies; how the commercial age had divided fortune telling, thieving, and music into complex and separate activities.
At eleven o’clock Cheremi broke reluctantly from the merry group and, approaching us stealthily, whispered his request to be permitted to go home for the night. His house lay only four hours away, perhaps forty miles by our measurements; he had not seen his family for two years, and he wished to visit them. He would be back before dawn. We gave him permission, and one of the villagers went with him, to guard him from the village dogs.
Then we learned that when darkness came the dogs were let loose, and after their loosening only the boldest ventured outside stone walls. And the long wolf howl that rose and quavered and sank and rose again along the trail that Cheremi followed made the dangers of the night vocal for us. We had seen the dogs, tied by the houses, curled into sullen gray-white balls; they are wolves, they are the first dogs, torn from the forests and made half-tame savage companions of these primitive men. Here in the Albanian mountains the long process of molding life, by which men have created the breeds of dogs we know, the great Dane, the collie, the monstrous, fantastic bulldog, and the wispy Pekingese is still in its beginning.
For us, safe in the shelter of solid walls, the night wore away as the previous one had done. Talk and music and the desperate struggle with weariness; the leisurely dinner in the small hours of the morning; the brief lapse into unconsciousness, lying on the floor, which we shared with twenty others—our host and his wife and their smallest child, the last quite naked, had ascended the notched log to the nest of woven willow branches that hung above us on the wall—and the awakening at dawn to the smell of new-made coffee.
“Perolli,” said Frances, desperately, “I simply can’t walk another twenty miles on one little cup of coffee. Isn’t there something left over from dinner? Can’t I have just one little bite of corn bread? Oh, Perolli, please!”