Peaks of Shala

by Rose Wilder Lane

“You mean I could do anything I liked with it? I wouldn’t have to have his consent?”

“Of course you could do anything you liked with it,” Perolli said, wearily. “This isn’t Europe.”

“Obviously,” said I. “Nor America.”

“Well, what do you say? Do you want to do it?”

Men ask women to marry them for many reasons and from many motives, even though they are all lumped under the word “love.” Sometimes the asking is an honor that should make any woman, either happily or regretfully, proud. And sometimes it isn’t. For myself, I shall always remember as one of my finest experiences this offer of a scalplocked Shala chief to pay twenty thousand kronen for me. There was no eager clutching in it, no selfish, grasping, personal asking for personal happiness; he could have had no idea whether or not this strange woman would bring happiness into his house; his motives in asking her to marry him had their roots quite outside himself. He believed that she would help him in his work for the tribe.

And I thought that a woman might have a much worse life than in this remote, stranded fragment of primitive times still left among the Albanian mountains, where respect for women is not taught like courteous manners, but is as natural as breathing, so natural that it is never discussed nor even thought about, and where marriage is not centered in small egotisms, but in the larger idea of the family and the future.

But I must admit that to live that life requires other training than any daughter of the twentieth century has received, for one’s ideas have little to do with one’s actions; my mind might admire this alien concept of life, but I fear that nothing will ever lead a Western woman to marry for the good of anyone but herself.

“Why, Perolli,” I said, “of course I can’t marry a Shala chief!”

We came back to the fireplace where Padre Marjan was stirring the tantalizing contents of the cooking pots, and were clutched by a radiant Frances. She had ventured to speak to Padre Marjan about the family of Kol Marku. And this was the news he had told her. The bitter old mother of Pjeter was relenting. Because the holy Easter-time was near—so Padre Marjan said, but we guessed that Padre Marjan himself had caused her change of heart—the family of Pjeter had told him the day before in upper Thethis that Koi Marku might come home, and the men of his family work in peace, for two weeks.

This was the law of the blood-feud truce; that the injured party might grant, when it desired to do so, on holy days or at a time of common danger from without, a reprieve of a stated length of time. During that time the families or tribes involved would meet and greet each other courteously, although on the day that the truce ended the law of the blood debt applied again, and they must kill each other at sight. The family of Pjeter had granted two weeks—fourteen days of burden lifted from the spirit of the family of Kol Marku. A great deal could be done in fourteen days, Padre Marjan said—fields cleared, ditches repaired, seed sown, family councils held. And he was hopeful that this was the beginning of complete forgiveness; perhaps in another year Kol Marku might come home to stay with his family. The news was being telephoned to the tribe in which he had taken refuge—a tribe in the valley of the Kiri, near Scutari—and in two days at most he would be in Thethis. Already the men of his family were working; we could see them from the windows of Padre Marjan’s dining room, working in the rain with iron bar and hammer, attacking a gigantic bowlder which lay in the middle of their poor little field. Laboriously they chipped at it, cutting it into pieces small enough to roll away, and they worked with trembling haste, for it seemed a task too long to be done in two weeks. We wished that we might be there when Kol Marku came home.