“And schools,” said Alex. “Don’t forget the schools.”
Perolli translated at length. When he had finished, Lulash rose, and he was very splendid in his six feet of height, a snowy turban with folds beneath the chin outlining his strong, sensitive, sun-browned face, silver chains clinking against the jewel-studded silver pistols in his orange-and-red sash, and he made a beautiful speech, graceful with a hundred flowery metaphors, thanking us and, beyond us, America, in the name of his village, his tribe, and all his people, for the school and the hope it brought.
“I,” he said, “am a great chief; I have a great house and large flocks and much silver, and all that I have I would give if I could read. I am a chief of Thethis, and my people look to me, and many things are happening outside our mountains that mean much to my people, and I cannot learn what they are and what they mean, because I cannot read. Every night I come to Padre Marjan and study the little black marks, and long afterward I lie awake in my house and am shamed before myself for the ignorance of my whole life. But you have brought learning into my village; our children will know more than we. Our hope is in the children; they will be little torches leading us out of the darkness. You have lighted these torches, and I say to you, for Thethis, for Shala, and for the Land of the Eagle, our hearts are yours to walk upon. Long may you live!”
“Go on a smooth trail,” said we, as he went out, all the other men following him. Then, released from their observant eyes, we looked at one another with all the panic we felt.
“What will they do? Did he mean what he said? Can we expect any protection from him for you, if we ask it?” said Frances.
“Qui sait?” said Perolli. “We Albanians use many words. They have gone to hold a council. All their immediate interests lie with the Serbs. If they hand me over—well, you know the Serbian armies hold their markets and their grazing lands, and a million Albanians are in Serbia’s power. We have nothing like that to offer these chiefs from Tirana, yet.”
“But we are guests! But we are women!” we exclaimed.
“Oh, they won’t act quickly. But the trails are long, in the mountains. Let me think,” said Perolli. And we were silent, watching Padre Marjan busy and anxious about the cooking.
The hours went by, with a steadily increasing tension on the nerves. It is so rarely that we are actually in the center of a situation involving murder that we do not easily adjust ourselves to it. With Perolli it was different; he did not disguise a very earnest desire to save his life, but he is Albanian. He laughed, quite as usual; he sat on the bench before the fire and told stories, and sang Albanian songs, and joked with Padre Marjan. Only occasionally the thoughts beneath the surface of his mind rose and engulfed him in a dark silence. At dinner he ate with good appetite. As for us, watching him, we could not avoid the horrid idea of the good breakfasts served before executions.
We ate in the bare, bleak living room. It was intensely cold; we wore sweaters and coats. Rain blew through the broken window upon us. We would infinitely have preferred to be squatting by the fire in a native house, but Padre Marjan’s hospitable pride would have been stabbed if we had suggested eating in the kitchen. So we sat on the bench, with the table before us, and both of them seemed very strange, and knives and forks and plates appeared to us the most absurd of hindrances to the simple and pleasant action of eating. Why, we said, did we ever invent them; they are not really beautiful or useful; they simply clutter up our lives; and we were aghast, thinking of all the factories and railroad cars and stores and dishpans and the millions of hours of washing up, all of it, one might say, an enormous river of human energy running into the waste of heaps of broken crockery, and nothing more.