"not all the preaching since Adam Has made Death other than Death."
We buried him quietly in the churchyard at Arreton, the kind rector not asking for a baptismal certificate, for he knew that I was not a churchman, and Russie had never been baptized. In these things we follow prejudices. Mine were Baptist; his mother was an advanced Unitarian, and had been born in the Brook Farm community, of which her father was a member, so that we had no sympathy with paedobaptism, while the terrible effect of my own religious education forbade me to encumber the boy's mind with religious dogmas, and from the beginning I had forbidden any one in the house to teach him the name of God until he was old enough to understand what "God" meant; but one day during his illness I found him, when he should have been sleeping, weeping bitterly, and to my inquiry as to the cause of his trouble, he replied, "Do you think, Papa, that, if I went to sleep saying my prayers, God would be satisfied if I finished them after I woke?" That terrible hereditary conscience could not be laid, and perhaps the boy was fortunate in his early death.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE MONTENEGRINS AND THEIR PRINCE
To me Russie's death was a crushing disaster. The care and constant preoccupation of my life was taken away, and nothing moved me to activity. I missed him every moment that I was awake, and in my condition I could not rally from the depression caused by the mental void and grief. I do not think I should have recovered from it had not Mr. Spartali conceived the idea of my going off to Herzegovina, where the insurrection of 1875 was just beginning to stir, and, to cut short my hesitation at the venture as a volunteer correspondent, got me an introduction to the manager of the "Times," and offered to pay my expenses should the "Times" not accept my letters. I knew so well the condition in which the Turkish Empire had been left by the Cretan affair, and the apathy that had ruled ever since, that I was convinced that a disaster was pending, and the state to which Russia had brought matters in the Ottoman Empire in 1869 pointed to a Slavonic movement this time. The manager was not of my opinion; he thought the disturbances would blow over in a few weeks, and nothing serious would come of it. I went home, but watched the news, and a few days after went again to the office and offered to go out at my own expense, with the understanding that if they printed my letters they should pay me for them, but that they ran no risk and need not print them unless they wished. The review of my Cretan book in the "Times" now served me as credentials by showing my knowledge of Turkish ways. At the same time I arranged to send letters to the New York "Herald," also as a volunteer, for no one then attached any importance to the rising.
Arriving at Trieste in August, 1875, I found that a committee was at work sending arms and ammunition, and, following the coast down, I found other committees at work at Zara and elsewhere, under Austrian auspices, without any attention being paid to their action by the Imperial authorities. At Ragusa I found the headquarters of the agitation, there under the direction of the captain of the port, Kovachevich, a zealous Slavonic patriot. The movement was evidently regarded benevolently by the Kaiserlich-Koeniglich, and the insurgents came openly into the city, and returned again to their fighting with fresh supplies of ammunition and provisions. I pushed on to the Bocche di Cattaro, and at Castel Nuovo found the insurgents coming and going freely, and at Sutorina, in the corner of Herzegovina, which comes to the Gulf of Cattaro, their depot and manufactory of cartridges. The information to be obtained there was abundant, if not always absolutely trustworthy; but on the whole I found the only fault of that which I got from the insurgents was its exaggeration, while what I got from the Turkish consul-general at Ragusa was simple fabrication. Volunteers fully armed went by every steamer, and when they had enough of campaigning they went to Castel Nuovo and refreshed themselves, and returned, quite regardless of the Austrian regulations. I found that the insurrection was spreading through all the mountain section of Herzegovina and along the border of Montenegro, and it was said that strong detachments of Montenegrins were aiding in the operations. The Prince of Montenegro had opposed the insurrection in the early stages of it, and had even sent old Peko Pavlovich to arrest the Herzegovinian leader, Ljubibratich, and carry him to Ragusa, where he left him under Austrian authority, to return freely as soon as his band had reunited. But as, according to the general Slav opinion, there was nothing important to be done without Montenegro, I pushed on to Cettinje to see with my own eyes what there was to see.
The little world about Cettinje has changed so much since this my first visit there, and was so little known then by the outer world, that my experiences there will be to the present day like those which one might have in a perished social organization. The only access to the capital of the principality was by a zigzag bridle-path up from Cattaro to a height of 4500 feet above the sea,—a hard, rough road, more easily traveled on foot than in the saddle, and so I traveled it, in the company of a Scotch cavalry officer intending to volunteer. Passing the rocky ridge along which ran the boundary between freedom and Austria, one descended by another precipitous path into the valley of Njegush, the birthplace of the family of the Prince, a circular amphitheatre of rocks, a narrow ridge here and there holding still a little earth on which the people raised a few stalks of maize or a few potatoes, a few square yards of wheat, or a strip of poor grass for the sheep or goats. Every tiny field was terraced against the wash of the rains so that the soil should not be carried away, for the geological formation of this part of the principality, Montenegro proper, is a porous rock, which allows water to filter through it, and which is even so fissured that no stream will form, and the drainage is through the rocks or in katavothra which gush out in mysterious fountains in the Gulf of Cattaro or into the Lake of Scutari.
Njegush, the village in which the Prince was born, was a collection of a score or more of stone cottages of two rooms on the ground floor, with two or three—of which one was the house of the Petrovich family—of two stories, simple as the people we saw moving about, the women carrying heavy loads on their backs, and a few ragged children peeping round the corners of the houses at the foreigners passing through. Suspicion was on every face, for the foreigner was still an enemy. We had taken the trouble to send word to Cettinje that we were coming up on that day, and the coming of a correspondent of the "Times" apparently had some importance to Montenegro, for we had found and made friends with, in the market-place where our baggage horses were to be hired, a senator of the principality who had accidentally come down from Cettinje, and we did not suspect that he had been sent down to see if there was danger in our visit or not; and so suspicious was the little community that every Montenegrin set himself, without orders and by the instinct of danger, to watch every stranger within the gates.
The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one to ride; but from the crown of the pass over which we had to go, there is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus in the extreme distance. The bad roads were part of the Montenegrin system, which, as the Prince later explained to me, was not to make roads for Austrian artillery.
Cettinje was a poor village of one-story houses, with two or three exceptions of two-storied ones, of which the principal was the "palace," a residence which in another country would have been a poor gentleman's country house. Our senatorial herald had gone ahead and announced our coming and our friendliness, and the hotel, the second largest building in the village, had rooms ready for us, and the little world of the Montenegrin capital had put on the air of nonchalance, as if such things as the arrival of a "Times" correspondent and a foreign cavalry officer were things of everyday occurrence. No one would condescend to show curiosity; all were as impassive as Red Indians; and though we were the only strangers there, no one seemed at all curious about our business. This was the manner of the entire population, and it was a trait which I soon realized in everybody, from highest to lowest, that they kept the habitual garb of an incurious reticence, neither asking nor giving information. We found, as if carelessly loitering around the hotel, or playing billiards in it, several young men who spoke excellent French, and we laid cautious traps for conversation, but no one could tell us any news or give us any information about the fighting, or answer any questions other than evasively. And it was only after a long acquaintance, and when I had become in a way naturalized, that I was able to provoke confidence in any Montenegrin. The generations of isolation, surrounded only by enemies whom it was a duty to mislead,—four hundred years of a national existence of combat and ruse, always at war, with no friend except far-off Russia,—had developed the natural Slav indifference to the truth into a fine and singularly subtle habit of communicating nothings to any inquiring outsider, which never failed even the most humble clansman. I was, however, pushed on from hand to hand by casual suggestions until I reached the Prince, who gave us audience under the famous tree where he heard appeals of all kinds, from petitions for help to the last recourse from the judgments of the tribunals, a final appeal to which every Montenegrin was entitled, and without which none submitted to an unfavorable judgment.