Padre Marjan began the mass, his high Albanian voice chanting the Latin, and the congregation made the responses in the same tongue. A ragged, barefooted man came to swing the censer for the padre, and Perolli, in his neat English tweeds, revolver and knife swinging at the belt, also assisted, going behind the altar with the padre to help him put a brocaded robe over the brown one, and reverently handing the cup and the wine. Rexh, in his red Mohammedan fez, watched it all with serious eyes, his head around the edge of the doorway.
After mass the padre dashed upstairs to look at our cooking dinner, and hastened down again for a christening. I am not familiar with Catholic ceremonial, but nothing could have been more touching than Padre Marjan, thin, worn by fasting and work, barefooted, the edge of his brown robe showing below the front hem of a white cotton garment, bringing into the arms of the Church the tiny, wrinkled infant strapped in its painted cradle. The woman who held it looked at him with a sort of apprehensive anxiety; the crowd pressed informally around them. Every time the padre turned to fetch the little glass bottle of oil, or the tin can of holy water, or the square of crocheted cotton lace that he laid over the cradle, the packed bodies gave way for him, and one child or another picked up the end of his trailing robe to keep it from beneath muddy, bare feet.
At the end, “Is it a boy or a girl?” he asked.
“A girl,” the woman whispered. And the padre ended his solemn words with the name, “Regina.”
The woman sighed and her tenseness relaxed. It must have been a great moment for the mother, I thought; some one said that she had carried the cradle forty miles over the mountains for this christening. We did want to give the baby something; for the hundredth time we regretted not having brought presents, and a hurried ransacking of all our possessions produced only a little colored sport handkerchief. But when we gave it to the baby it was as though we had presented a golden bowl; the excitement, the passing from hand to hand, the reverent marveling over such weaving, such color!
We found Perolli upstairs in the kitchen, grinning to himself, and when we asked him why, he said the christening was a joke on the padre. The woman was not the child’s mother; the real mother, married by Albanian custom, had not yet got around to having the church ceremony, and the priest in the village forty miles away had refused to christen the child until the parents were married by the Church. But the devout neighbor, knowing that the infant was in danger of hell fire, had brought it over the mountains and had it christened as her own, and Padre Marjan, all unsuspecting, had performed the ceremony.
Not half an hour later an almost naked man, streaming with rain as though he had swum the forty miles, appeared, breathless, with a water-soaked note from the other priest, and Padre Marjan read it aghast. “Merely parochial business,” he said, tucking it in his belt and bending over the bubbling pots in the fireplace to taste and season. But his brown face remained wrinkled with worry.
A matter far more serious distracted attention from this complication in Church affairs, for Perolli, taking me aside, said to me: “You say you love the Albanians and the Albanian mountains. Do you want to stay here?”
“I’d love to stay here for years,” I said. “It’s the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen, and the most interesting people. But I can’t, of course. Why?”
“Because you can, if you really do want to,” said he. “I have a proposal of marriage for you.”