Lamentable to record, the day was a Wednesday and the place a public fountain in the street of Travnik. A Mahometan girl, very slightly veiled, was drawing water, when up comes a young fellow with the ostensible purpose of doing the same. He was a gay deceiver!—she might have told it from his roguish look,—but for the honour of Islâm my pen refuses to chronicle the rest. Of course the artless maiden gave vent to a ‘Haiti!’ but in a tone so soft, so insinuating, as abundantly to prove that that word of dismissal is capable of as many interpretations as ‘get along, do!’ among certain she-Giaours, and to be the natural prelude to more mutual oglings, and squeezes, and gigglings, cut short by the appearance of an unwelcome third party in the distance—retributive Propriety herself, advancing like a walking sack.
Not many years ago a tragic love romance had Travnik for its scene. In the days of the last struggle of feudal Bosnia for her provincial liberties, a young Osmanlì sergeant of Omer Pashà’s army, who was stationed here, fell in love with the pretty daughter of a Bosniac Mussulman, and was betrothed to her. Before they could be married, however, the sergeant fell in battle, and the maiden, when she heard of the death of her beloved, rather than survive him and be forced to marry another, blew out her brains with a pistol. The moral drawn by Omer Pashà, in relating this tragic story, was admirable. ‘It all comes of not wearing the veil, and letting affianced couples see each other. If she had always kept her yashmak on her face she might have married another man, for there would have been no great love in the matter.’[206]
This approach towards natural relations between the two sexes is doubtless, as much else among the Bosniac Mussulmans, a survival of the old Sclavonic family life. The Mahometan house in Bosnia more nearly approaches our idea of home than in any other part of Turkey. We learnt that polygamy was almost non-existent throughout the province. It has been dying out, it is true, in other parts of Turkey, but here it appears never to have taken. What is still perhaps exceptional among the wealthier Turks, the richest Bosniacs have only one wife. Some of them are said to have concubines, but public opinion here denounces the Moslem who concludes more than one marriage. A few years ago a representative of the old feudal nobility, Ali-Beg Dzinić, one of the richest landholders in the country, set all Bosnia in an uproar by taking a second wife in the lifetime of the first.[207] Another peculiarity of these Mussulman Sclaves, illustrating the vitality of the family tie, is to be found in their names. Mahometans elsewhere, with the exception of Persians and Arabs, have no family name; but here, after the orthodox personal appellation, as in the instance above, to the Ali, or Méhchmet, or Selim, these descendants of the old Bosnian nobles add their ancestral patronymic. This, however, is confined to the grandees, and is rather an instance of the tenacity with which the Bosnian aristocracy has clung to its old feudal attributes.
After all, one ought rather perhaps to wonder that these Sclavonic renegades have received so much of the impress of Islâm. Considering the difference of race—how strange it is to see a bevy of blue-eyed light-haired Mahometans!—it is curious what thorough Turks these Travnik burghers make. Towards evening many of these grave merchants seated themselves in the gardens of a café just outside the town, and, while alternately purring their narghilés and sipping their coffee, contemplated, without uttering a syllable, the beautiful scene before them—the mountains, the green valley, the foaming mill-stream murmuring at their feet.
We were assured by ‘Europeans’ in Bosnia that the Turks do not care a rap for nature—that they are utterly callous as to scenery; that if anything charmed, it was the peace, the silence—not the beauties of the landscape. It is this, they say, which allures the Turk to seek as his greatest luxury the gardens of his country house. Yet old Edward Brown,[208] in his ‘Travels in the Levant,’ in the seventeenth century, records how the Grand Signior passed two months on Mount Olympus, not only for the coolness of the air in summer, but also for the sake of enjoying the prospect of the fair champaign of Thessaly on one side and the blue expanse of the Ægean on the other. For flowers at least, all Bosniacs, Mussulman as well as Christian, display an extraordinary love; not only do they adorn their persons with them on every possible occasion, but so great is their craving for them, that at Serajevo it is not unfrequent for mendicants to station themselves at the doors of our Consulate to beg not for bread, but for a single flower from the pretty little garden.
Meanwhile there sit our Turks, to all outward appearance rapt in the enjoyment of the picturesque. What sapient big-wigs, too, they look!—how profoundly versed in all the Law and the Prophets!—of what superfluity of braininess are those capacious turbans suggestive! It is hard to realise that these gentlemanly beings have been engaged all day in peddling trades. And indeed it is true that they forego with lordly disdain the petty chicaneries of their calling; it is notorious, among foreigners in Bosnia most hostile to the Mahometans, that wares are, as a rule, to be bought cheaper and of better quality with them, than at stores kept by Christians. The true believer will not wilfully cheat, and disdains to bargain. This is always put down to their fatalism; but I doubt if it be not more due to a certain personal dignity which the plastic Sclave of Bosnia has borrowed from the Osmanlì.
One would expect the brows of a pure fatalist to be smooth as marble. There could be, one would think, no trace of emotions to which he is superior. But the features of these Bosniac Mahometans are fretted with a positive network of wrinkles—far more than those of an average Englishman. The truth is that, superior as they are to many of the ‘changes and chances of this mortal world,’ they, too, have their weak points, and vanities of their own, about which they are touchy as other people. It is their wish on all occasions to seem oracular, to be lawgivers, to impress you with the profundity of their learning, to give the idea that they know a great deal more than they choose to say—to make up for the paucity of their observations by accentuating their value. Thus on the slightest occasion they will elevate or depress their brow, and otherwise contort the features with a kind of measured emphasis. The wrinkling process resembles that of the dogmatic and self-important type of German; it is the very opposite to that theatrical adaptiveness which leaves the footprints of every emotion on the Zingar’s face. Not indeed that the expression arrived at smacks by any means of Teutonic cantankerousness; it is rather a Spanish Grandezza—a stately condescending politeness—which converts every shopkeeper you converse with into a Grand Signior!
Of course in their manner of life and their way of conducting business there are traces enough of the numbing influences of fatalism. Though these Mahometan tradesmen are distinguished by their honesty, which, as everybody knows, is also the best policy, though they are favoured by belonging to the ruling caste, there is a want of enterprise among them which precludes them from favourably competing with the Christians. Almost all the larger businesses in the country are in Christian hands; the Mahometans are shopkeepers at most, not merchants—they are too stationary by temperament. Perhaps they indulge more than the rayahs in narcotics; it was woful to see the ghastly pallor of so many Turkish faces. Here and there in the course of our journey amusing features in Mahometan interiors bore witness of the laisser-aller spirit of the inmates. In the Konak at Tešanj was a writing-table made for no less a personage than the Kaïmakàm, and it was put together with bits of wood of uneven sizes, just as they came handy; and here, in the telegraph office at Travnik, was another—quite an elegant escritoir—but the whole spoilt and rendered ridiculous by a piece of wood of insufficient length being stuck in the middle, Providence having been pleased to place it in the way of the upholsterer. If a button comes off an official’s coat, he never thinks of replacing it; and if a beast dies before a Bosniac’s house, instead of removing it, or even burying it, he leaves it there to stink!
To-day we noticed a certain amount of positive manifestations, and those directed against ourselves. Many of the believers scowled as we passed, and one old fellow did me the distinguished honour of coming up and cursing me in the middle of the street. Once a Mahometan store-keeper positively refused to sell any of his wares to the Giaour—the Kaur, as the Bosniacs call him—and I should have been unable to procure the ‘lumps of delight’ which I affected, had not a Serb merchant, whose acquaintance I had made, come up and explained that I was neither a Russian, nor an Austrian, but an Englishman, on which the Turk relented at once. We were, however, more seriously annoyed by being followed wheresoever we went by a Zaptieh; and at last, unable to stand such persecution any longer, betook ourselves to the telegraph office to demand an explanation from our French-speaking friend.
‘You see,’ said he, ‘he has orders from the prefect of police to follow you.’