The common hall contained little but a long table and two long benches, recalling, except for its honeycombed stove, the furniture of an Oxford College hall. It is here that the whole family take their meals; and in the winter time, when the stoveless summer dwellings are uninhabitable, it is here that the men take shelter from the blast to make or mend their rude implements of husbandry, and the women ply their homely looms. They told us further that this was the room in which the family met to choose their house-father or house-mother, and to transact all common business; and, since dinner is the natural time for all the family to be assembled together, it is after dinner that these matters of household economy are mooted, and the house-father, who represents the family in dealings with the authorities, and the house-mother, who shares with her consort[161] his patriarchal sway over the rest of the house-community, are elected. It is here, too, that the domestic government is thrown out if it does not continue to give satisfaction to its constituents. In short, this is their little Parliament-House, and these the earliest germs of Constitutional Government.
But we must leave Slavonia for the present, and transport ourselves back in some aërial fashion to Karlovac, from which town we are about to make our way to Siszek by the last strip of railway we were to see for many a long day. It may be that it was lucky that such a means of transit was still at our disposal, since, if we had been obliged to foot it, we must have run the gauntlet of a band of robbers then infesting the country near Petrinia. As a rule our Croatian friends were never tired of assuring us that it was beyond the frontier that these gentry flourished; and the hilly country that rose to the south-west—the Kraina, as the promontory of Turkish territory is known, which acts as a thorn in the side of Austria—was pointed out as a regular asylum for wild characters, and in fact was long the only part of the frontier where the watch-service was still needed. At the present moment, however, even the Croats were fain to admit that Bosnia was free from robbers, while their own country was insecure; and, indeed, I am afraid that this was not such an exceptional state of things as they would have had us believe, for when we arrived two days later in the Slavonian lands of the lower Save we found the whole country under martial law, owing to the murderous infestations of brigands in the Syrmian highlands; and though several had been hanged, the reign of terror was such that the military government was still continued. Indeed, just after the Austro-Prussian war, the state of Croatia had become so deplorable by reason of the increasing brigandage, that ‘Standrecht’ had to be proclaimed there, and no less than forty robbers were hung. For some time a gibbet with its ghastly appendages was to be seen from the train on nearing Agram.
On the whole, then, it was more comfortable to indulge in such reflections as we shot through the mighty oak-forest in a railway-carriage bound for Siszek, than to sneak through these mysterious shadows on foot with the feelings of one of our great-grandfathers, when doomed to traverse Hampstead Heath on a dark night. These Croatian highwaymen, however, immediately under notice, had hitherto conducted the business of the road on the most gentlemanly principles; and though a kind of ‘commercial’ with whom we travelled seemed a bit scared, even he could report no thrilling tales of bloodshed. There were sixteen of these Hajduks,[162] as the Croats called them, who had taken to outlawry to avoid the military conscription, which has just superseded the older organisation of the Granitza. Soldiers have been in pursuit, but fruitlessly, since not only are the hills about covered with unfathomable forest and hollowed—so we were told—with caverns, but the peasants, like those of Greece and Southern Italy, are in league with the brigands, supplying them with food, and refusing to reveal their hiding-places. The gendarmes, indeed, express hopes of seizing their quarry when the leaves have fallen and the snow is on the ground. Meantime they are at large. Nor let us judge too harshly of their profession, for in this old world East of Europe the Hajduk is often a gentleman in his way. ’Tis Robin Hood and his merry men who still live on, roughly redressing their wrongs in a vicarious fashion against that society which refuses them legal requital, but capable none the less of much tenderness to women and children, and discriminating their friends from the class that oppresses them. Across the Turkish frontier the cause of national freedom, hopelessly lost centuries ago on the battlefield, has been championed from generation to generation by the Hajduks of the forest mountain, in achievements not unsung by Sclavonic bards; and, likely enough, these Croatian brothers are striving too for ancient liberties, as they understand them.
It was late at night by the time we arrived at Siszek, so we were glad enough to avail ourselves of a car bound for the ‘White Ship’ inn on the Kulpa Quay, in company with a Serbian lady and her child—she disdaining not either for herself or boy the national costume of Free Serbia. And verily she had her reward. For what could be more appropriate than the rich silver embroidery flowered on the purple-velvet field of her mantle—efflorescent with the poetic yearning of the race for that gorgeous Orient, a yearning as lively as the abhorrence from its yoke—an echo from the Serbian lyre—a protest against your cold foggy West—but subdued withal by a Roman-matronly coiffure wondrously becoming to the tranquil grace of Serbian motherhood?
Arrived at our inn, we found ourselves plunged at once into Turkish society, for many Bosnian corn-merchants from Bihac, Serajevo, and other towns, betake themselves in the way of trade to Siszek. Among the group of Turks who, in various awkward and frog-like postures, were endeavouring to accommodate themselves to chairs, was an Effendi, a title which implies not only a certain grade of Turkish gentility, but an education for Bosnia most polite, namely, the ability to read and write; and, what is by no means ordinary among the Mussulman Sclaves of Bosnia, an acquaintance with Osmanlì. Thus it was with a conscious sense of superiority that our Effendi, learning our intentions in Bosnia, expressed a desire to see the pass which the Vali Pashà had been good enough to supply us with. He seemed extremely surprised to see that it was in the Vali’s own handwriting; but having convinced himself of the fact, he first read it aloud with pleasing gusto in the original Turkish, and then translated it into Bosniac for the benefit of the Sclavonic Mahometans and our Croatian landlord, with many assurances that with such an ‘open sesamé’ we should have no difficulty in unlocking the innermost fastnesses of Bosnia or even the Herzegovina, where the revolt had now broken out.
There was also a venerable Turk of singularly dignified mien, with patriarchal beard and capacious turban, who sat in mild contemplation, lulled by the measured purring of his narghilé, lost to all mundane concerns, sagely superior to the curiosity which our pass and travelling gear were exciting in less exalted bosoms, and benignantly indifferent even to the indignity of a chair. Our host told us that he was a Hadji, or pilgrim, then on his way from Buda, where he resided as a merchant, to Mecca.
Aug. 8.—Next morning we sallied forth to explore what might remain of ancient Siscia. For we are now on classic ground. Siszek is but the corruption of a name great in all ages of imperial Rome, and greatest in the twilight of her empire. There was a time when Siscia was one of the sovereign cities of the world. She was a bulwark against barbarians, an emporium of commerce, a seat of emperors, a mother of martyrs, a gathering point for Roman-Christian Saga. And her older name, Segestica, takes us back to times prior to the Roman conquest itself, when she formed part of that Celtic empire of race, dim, commercial, reaching from Gades to the swamps of Nether Rhine; from glacial Ierné to the mouths of Ister. Segestica! we have no record of her dealings with the Adriatic votaries of Belenus,[163] nor what Taurisk gold passed current in her streets; and yet her peasant citizens of to-day plough up an abundance of bronze-age sickles as if to bear witness of her old Celtic industry and her very name calls up golden harvests of antiquity ready garnered into her warehouses from rich Pannonian plains, with a side suggestion perchance of her
Seges clypeata virorum,
that twice withstood the arms of Rome successfully, till Augustus reduced her, and made of her a stationary camp for his cohorts.
She is now Siscia, a convenient point d’appui for Dacian campaigns; the winter quarters for Tiberius in his Pannonian war; by Septimius Severus made the seat of military government for his world, and so benefited by him that she took the name of Septimia Siscia. Probably under Vespasian,[164] a Roman colony had been already planted here, and Siscia became a Republic with municipal liberties modelled on those of the parent city. An inscription still recalls her Duumviri, who, in Rome’s provincial mirrors, reflected the two Consuls. Later on, Siscia becomes the chief city of Upper Pannonia; then, when Savia was made a province, the residence of its Corrector. She was the seat of an imperial treasury, and it was here that the ‘most splendid Provost of the Ironworkers’ received the revenue from Noric mines. Here, too, was established the Premier Mint of the Roman Empire; and Siscia shares with Rome herself the distinguished honour of first imprinting her name in full on the imperial currency. What numismatist does not know and covet that coin of Gallienus? or that choice piece of the Emperor who sprang from her Savian rival Sirmium (though from this legend one would think he was really of Siscia), with the proud inscription, ‘Siscia Probi Aug.’—the Siscia of Probus? On it is to be seen the personification of the queenly city, holding in her hands the laurel-wreath of empire, while at her feet her two subject rivers pour bounteously from their tributary urns.