“From what does their happiness come, then?” said I. (“For Heaven’s sake, what happened to make him do that?”)
“Happiness,” said Lulash, “comes from the skies. It comes from sunshine, and from light and shadow on the mountains, and from green things in the spring. It comes also from rest when one is tired, and from food when one is hungry, and from fire when one is cold. It comes from singing together, and from walking on hard trails and being harder than the rocks; and there is a kind of happiness that comes to a man in battle, but that is a different kind. For us, marriage has nothing to do with happiness.”
Perolli, translating, added, “He did it because the Albanian government has helped the American school here.”
Then for the first time I really looked at Lulash. He had been until then simply a marvelously beautiful animal; a man such as men must have been before cities and machines and office desks brought dull skins and eyes, joy rides, padded shoulders, and crippling collars. Now I perceived that he was also a real person.
He saw beyond immediate gain for himself or his people. He had refused any advantages to be gained by this unexpected dropping into his hands of this man that the Serbs wanted; he lived under the shadow of mountains alive with Serbian troops, his village was filled with Serbian influences, the Tirana government was two hundred miles away, and he knew nothing of it except that it had promised a hundred kronen a month to the mountain school that Alex and Frances had started. Yet he had come, voluntarily, without urging, to swear a besa of loyalty to that government because it had helped the school. And the besa, the word of honor, would hold him, I knew, as the strongest treaties never hold Western governments. I admired that man. I felt a tender sort of pity for him, too, because of his faith in the value of being able to read. After all, what has it done for us? Like most of civilization, it has done little more than create a useless desire that men become slaves to satisfy. It has made us very little kinder, very little less unsympathetic with alien points of view, and no farther from war, poverty, and misery than the Albanians are.
“Then what does marriage mean to the Albanians?” I said, grasping for the thread of the conversation.
Lulash was really puzzled by my idea that marriage and happiness were in some way connected. He was courteous, but there was a little surprise in his voice. “Marriage is a family question,” he said. “One marries because one is old enough to marry, and that is the way the family goes on from generation to generation. You marry in America, do you not? You keep the family alive? How are marriages arranged in America?”
“With us,” I said, “marriage does not have much to do with the family. Young people grow up thinking about themselves. Then, when they are old enough, if they have money enough to live on, and if they meet some one they like and want to marry, they marry. They marry to be happy, because they have found some one they want to live with always. They go away from their families, sometimes very far away, and live in a house by themselves.”
It came over me, while I watched the surprise growing in Lulash’s eyes, how haphazard and egotistic—how shallowly rooted, really—our whole system is. We marry because we want another human being, because—it really comes to that—we want to use that other human being to make happiness for ourselves. For even when one gets happiness by giving, instead of taking, it is still fundamentally a demand, a demand that the other take what is given, and that is sometimes the hardest of all demands to satisfy. Two persons, each demanding that the other be a source of personal happiness to him or her, each demanding, clutching, insisting on that gift from the other—that is the spectacle of American marriage. No wonder it so often ends in a heap of wreckage, out of which maimed human beings struggle through divorce.
“I do not understand what you mean by saying they must have money enough to marry,” said Lulash. “There is always money enough to marry, isn’t there? A man costs the tribe no more married than not married, and if new girls are brought into the tribe by marriage, others are given away in marriage. Even in the poorest tribes marriages never stop.”