THE PLATEAU OF THETHIS
In the foreground the church, etc. The hills in the background are held by the Serbs.
But he was behind us on the trail, doubtless still engaged in trying to get breakfast for Frances in the house we had left, and we went forward with easy minds to meet Padre Marjan. He came barefooted and bareheaded across the fields to welcome us, a thin, ascetic-looking man in the brown robes of the Franciscan friar. Large brown eyes burned in his face that seemed made of bones and stretched skin, the grasp of his thin hand was hot and nervous. He spoke to us in Albanian, Italian, and German, ushering us with apologies into the bleak rooms above the church.
The Serbians and Montenegrins, in their drive down toward Scutari, had looted the church, he said. He had come into Thethis two months ago, and found not even a wooden stool left. He was doing his best, but it took time——
The rickety broken stairway led upward to a long hall; from this, a door let us into the living room. It was bare; rain-stained wooden walls and a floor that clattered beneath our feet. The one window was shattered; fragments of glass held together by pasted paper. There were a long wooden table and a bench, nothing more. No fire. Our soaked garments were suddenly cold on us, and a chill entered our very bones.
The only fire in the house, he said, was in the kitchen. We begged him to take us to it, and in a moment we were sitting on a bench before a crackling fire in a big stone fireplace. The tiny room was crowded with villagers, the floor was muddy with their trampling, and more arrived every moment. Padre Marjan had no servant, but all were eager to help him. Some took off our shoes, others heated water over the fire, a handsome youth who looked Serbian and talked German anxiously beat eggs and sugar together while Padre Marjan made coffee. The warmth and the genuine welcome they all gave thawed us and made us happy, and we sat drinking the heartening mixture of eggs and coffee, while clouds of steam rose from us all and a babble of talk went on.
One tall, handsome chief—Lulash, his name was, and beyond doubt he was the handsomest man we had yet seen—brought us a lamb as a gift. Dripping beside him stood a ragged boy, barefooted and blue with chill, who had come down the valley to bring us three eggs, which he carried tied around his waist in a pouch of goat’s skin. He put them carefully into our hands, and we tried to return the gift with some pieces of hoarded candy. But he gazed in dismay at the strange things, and nothing would persuade him to taste them. A colored handkerchief, however, was accepted in an ecstasy that made him dumb; he could only lay it upon his heart and touch our hands to his forehead. Another chief came with a fat hen, others with eggs; all were eager to roll cigarettes for us, all were smiling, and in a hundred beautiful phrases they overwhelmed us with thanks for our coming, for our presence, for the school that Alex and Frances had promised Thethis. For this was to be the first of the mountain schools, and Alex, who had come into the mountains to decide where to put the other two, was delighted to learn that already, before the school building was begun, Padre Marjan had started the school, and Lulash had promised a hundred trees to be burned to make lime for the building.
We sat talking of these things while Padre Marjan set pots of soup to boiling in the fireplace, broke eggs, unlocked his box of precious flour, busied himself with all preparations for dinner, climbing over and around the tangle of lounging bodies, until another outbreak of echoing noises announced the arrival of Frances and Perolli and Rexh and our men with the packs. We felt a little tension with Perolli’s arrival, seeing the keen eyes of the men fixed on his English clothes and swarthy, intelligent face. He is as tall as most Europeans, but he was small among those giants, and the neat leather-holstered revolver and dagger that hung from his belt looked inadequate among all those long, bristling rifles.
But Padre Marjan, unaware of our apprehensions, was altogether the happy welcoming host. He greeted the dripping Frances warmly, anxious only to make her comfortable—she who was also responsible for the hope of a school in Thethis. He welcomed Perolli also, calling him by his first name. “How does he know that Perolli’s name is Rrok?” we girls asked one another with startled eyes—and then, turning to the chiefs with a radiant smile, “This guest,” said Padre Marjan, with pleasure, “is Rrok Perolli, the secretary of the Minister of the Interior in Tirana.”
You read of such things calmly. Nothing that one reads is real to him. Therefore you can never know what Padre Marjan’s innocent words meant to us as he spoke them in his crowded kitchen in Thethis, at the headwaters of the Lumi Shala, a hundred miles and twenty centuries from anything you know.