However, she became the mother of a daughter, and the Shala man became the father of a son. The girl was eleven years old, and in a few more years would have been duly married in Shala, when the Serbs and Montenegrins, pouring down over the mountains in the retreat before the Austrians, suddenly invaded Albania, and in fighting those ancestral enemies the girl’s father was killed. The mother immediately took her children and fled to Scutari.
Four years later, the girl now being of marriageable age, Shala sent to Scutari for her, and what was their outrage to discover that the mother not only would not give her up, but had actually betrothed her to a Scutari man! The gendarmes of Scutari make simple and direct justice difficult; mountain law does not apply there. Two Shala men made an attempt to carry off the girl, and were captured by superior forces and thrown into jail. Not killed, you perceive, but trapped, and talked over at length, and kept in a cage for some time, and at length freed, all most absurdly and unreasonably. They returned at once to their task, but they found it impossible to seize the girl again. She was closely guarded, not only by her mother, but by the family of the Scutari man to whom she was unjustly betrothed. So, finding that way to justice blocked, the Shala men caught her little sister, eight years old, and triumphantly escaped with her into the mountains.
She was not yet of marriageable age, and the Shala bridegroom must wait another six years, but justice had been done, though imperfectly. Pultit owed him a bride, and a Pultit bride he would have, with patience. The girl was brought to his house, and was even now being kept there, much against her will, while the family waited for her to grow old enough to be married.
“Those are things that we must change as soon as the government is strong enough,” Perolli said, decisively, and we hoped that the government would be strong enough in time to rescue the girl, though the poor Shala lad, through no fault of his own, seemed doomed to live an unhappy bachelor.
In Padre Marjan’s kitchen we found at least twenty visitors from the village; the men were there again, among them all the chiefs but Lulash. The fireplace was full of bubbling pots and sizzling pans; the padre, helped informally by whoever happened to be nearest, was preparing our luncheon. My dilemma was announced; I stood before them shoeless. A boy ran at once across the village and returned streaming, as though he had been in a river, bringing two pieces of goatskin, tanned with the soft brown hair on it.
To the eager interest of everyone, I set my feet on the pieces, and there were many exclamations of wonder at their smallness and at the curious shape of them, the toes so close together and making a point, instead of arching, each one separately, as the toes of their people do, and they would have been glad to examine them more closely—asking one another, as Rexh explained, if I would or would not take off the strangely woven stockings later. Meanwhile the boy with a nail drew the outlines of my feet on the leather and went away with it to his house, where the opangi would be made.
While this was happening the older men of the tribe went back to the cold bedroom with Perolli, each one adding his own besa of loyalty to the one Lulash had sworn, and asking many questions about the aims and strength of the Tirana government. They would not yet call it the Albanian government; they could not comprehend the idea of the state, so familiar to us that we never examine it. “Government” meant to them not only the consent of the governed, but the active participation of everyone in governing; they had, indeed, no conception of what we mean by “government.” When they say “government” they mean what we mean when we say, in a group, “Well, now we’re all agreed, let’s go on and do it.”
Perolli spent that morning—and indeed most of his time in the few succeeding days that we were together—trying to explain the idea of a representative government to these simple communist people. And he told us that within six weeks the Albanian government would really come up into the mountains. The plan was to begin by sending into the tribes men from Tirana who could read and write; they would be connecting links between Tirana and the tribes, sitting in all the tribal councils, making reports to Tirana and explaining the wishes of the Tirana parliament to the mountaineers.
These men would bring in with them, of course, the private-property ideas of southern Albania (which is just changing from the feudal system to modern capitalism), and I felt a regret, purely romantic, perhaps, at the inevitable disappearance of this last surviving remnant of the Aryan primitive communism in which our own fore-fathers lived, and at the replacing of Lulash by men like our politicians. I am a conservative, even a reactionary; I should like to keep the Albanian mountains what they are. But no one can stop the changes in human affairs; the eternal swing of the pendulum goes on; we have shop stewards in England and a Plumb plan in America, and in Thethis, on the headwaters of the Lumi Shala, we shall have agitators for private ownership of land and houses, and—no doubt, in time—for private property in mines and railroads and electric-power plants.