X The Guslar of Ragusa
It is a long time since I first saw Dalmatia, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. Her hills were denuded of verdure, monotonously barren and ashen gray, with a bit of Paradise here and there along the edge of the sea. In silence, her ancient cities mourned a turbulent past of which they were reminded by walls and palaces which the Romans built, as only the Romans knew how to build.
Although these walls have felt the force of Venetian battering-rams, of French, Turkish, and Austrian cannon-balls, they still stand, silent witnesses of a civilization which carried culture in the path of its conquest, and brought a certain kind of liberty to its captives. The Venetians took away these liberties, and, in exchange, gave the Dalmatians churches, whose graceful campaniles tower over the gray and solid Roman walls.
The French came and went; but, far as the eye can see, left nothing behind them.
Austria brought soldiers who are still there; nesting in the forts, commanding the mule-paths and seaways and hated by the native population, which is Slavic with a sprinkling of Italian, both races being antagonistic to the ruling power.
That Dalmatia has been badly governed, no one denies. It has been purposely kept out of touch with the mainland, the old motherland behind it, Croatia. Only by the sea had it access to other peoples, to whom it rarely went and who seldom came to it.
Of all Dalmatian cities, Ragusa is the proudest, even as it is the poorest. Once the seat of a virile republic, she sent out armadas for conquest, watched from her sea-girt walls the struggles between Venice and the Ottomans, and, by force of arms, helped to decide the destinies of nations.
Ragusa’s glory was short, but memory is long; although her harbour is choked and useless, her sea-wall in ruins, and her pavements grass-grown; still under marble porticoes half-sunk into the ground, sit the grandees of the city, smoking the Turkish czibuk and musing over those golden days when Ragusa called herself the “Queen of the Adria,” and fought with Venice for its supremacy.
On the corner of the Stradona and the Piazza, there stood all day long an old minstrel, who strummed monotonous strains on the gusla, while he sang the epics inspired by centuries of conflict. As he sang, the grandees smoked and mused; while the lesser folk cobbled opankee, embroidered garments after Oriental fashion, and wove tiny strands of silver into crude filigree.
The old guslar was minstrel, poet, and historian. It was he who told me marvellous stories of the time when in each of those palaces on the Stradone there lived a statesman-soldier, at war politically with one half his world and in social rivalry with the other half. The city’s gentlefolk were divided into the Salamanchesi and the Sorbonnesi; those who sent their sons to the University of Salamanca and those who sent them to the Sorbonne.
These divergent cultural currents kept the nobility apart and gave ample cause for petty quarrels; many a Ragusan Romeo’s love for his Juliet has furnished material for a romance and for a beautiful funeral.
Against these old walls and old traditions the immigrant tide has been beating for the last ten years, carrying away the grandee’s sons, numbers of whom are now digging coal in Pennsylvania, or waiting on table in some cheap restaurant in New York. Yet, whether he lives in a wretched boarding-house in a Pittsburg “Patch,” or accepts the modest tip his patrons give him, the son of a Ragusan grandee never forgets his nobility.
These immigrants, too, have gone home again, and make their presence felt, economically and socially. They have repaired the old palaces and brought money into circulation; but the old guslar, who stood on the corner of the Stradona and the Piazza, and whom I sought out after these ten years, had his story to tell.
“Yes, Signor, many have gone to America and have come back, and will go again; but, Signor, that must be a bad country, a wild country. They come home and walk carelessly up and down the Stradona, the finest street in the world, every house a palace—and they talk of it with disrespect!
“Why, Signor, they say that in America there are finer streets than this, and bigger houses, and they laugh at the Dogana, Signor—at the Dogana, where our Principes and our Consiglios made treaties with the great powers, where we received the ambassadors of the Sultan and of the Doges of Venice!
“Signor, they walk up and down the street with their heavy-soled shoes, talking loudly, and making such a noise that the grandees cannot take their siestas undisturbed.
“Yes, Signor, there are some of them here now. They came back a fortnight ago, a man and his two daughters. A good-for-nothing he is, Signor. Think of it! Ah, listen!” He paused abruptly. I listened. The sweet, harmonious quiet was rudely broken; the air, full of the fragrance of oleander blossoms, seemed suddenly vitiated; the Monte Sergio and the swaying palms beneath it, which made so marvellous a picture, seemed to drop with a crash out of their frame of sky and sea.
“Signor, listen!” And the old guslar trembled from anger and pain. It was the grinding of a phonograph which struck our ears. “Listen, Signor! That they bring out of America! Out of your barbaric country!”
True enough; they were the painfully familiar notes of “canned ragtime” at its worst.
“Signor, that man has come back with his two daughters. They can’t speak a word of their mother tongue; and oh, Signor! they walk up and down the Stradona without a duenna, they look boldly at the men, and they keep their jaws moving constantly, even when they do not speak.
“The father drinks, he drinks maraschino by the bottleful and he defiles the pavements of our ancient streets by his polluted spittle. You want to go to see him?” The guslar looked deeply hurt. He feared that the phonograph had lured me from him.
“No, I shan’t go until you play and sing for me.”
He took his gusla and moved his bow gently over its single string, while he sang of “Mustapha who came riding on a dapple gray stallion, with thirty Pashas as his escort. He struck a glass of wine from the hand of a Servian hero, who vowed that he would shed the black blood of the Turk,” which, after many monotonous verses, he did.
“Signor, I can’t sing very well—ah, there it is again!”
While he had been singing about Mustapha, who died so many years ago, the phonograph bawled lustily about “Tammany, Tammany,” which, unfortunately, is very much alive.
I made my peace with the guslar by putting into his hand a liberal fee; then I followed the sound of the phonograph which had been switched from “Tammany” to the song of “A nice young man, that lives in Kalamazoo.”
On the lower floor of a house in one of the small streets which divide the Stradona, I discovered the phonograph and its owner, a man neither of the nobility nor noble. His knowledge of America extended as far as Brooklyn and the Austro-Italian docks, near which he had established a boarding-house. Of course, he had come home rich, and only for a visit.
“Who could live in Ragusa after Brooklyn?”
He told me that he made a great deal of money selling liquor, and acknowledged that he sold it without a license. Besides that, the sailors brought over various articles for which he found a ready market. His case would not be worth recording were it not for the fact that he may be looked upon as a man who has been spoiled by his sojourn with us. I doubt, though, that there was anything to spoil; evidently, he was a man of poor breeding and low moral standards. In America, he had found an outlet for his evil tendencies, and a bad business which offered opportunities for lawlessness.
His daughters were more interesting than he; for they came back perfect strangers, into the environment which they had left as children. They had quite forgotten Italian and spoke Serbo-Slavic very poorly; while their English was typical.
“Golly! But Ragusa is a bum town!”
The Adriatic shore could not be compared with the sea they knew, bordered as it was by Coney Island.
“No, sir-ree! Give me Coney Island, and you can have this two for a cent, Gravoosa.” And I suppose, the peninsula of Lapad also, circled by palms and olives and set in a sea of turquoise blue.
When I mentioned the guslar, one of the girls said that he “might make a hit at Coney Island as a side-show.”
“Were there many Dalmatians in America?” I asked the father.
“You bet! They have gone from along the whole —— coast, and there is one —— little town near Lucin Piccolo where there is not an able-bodied man left. They’ll all come over when they get the —— money. The more come the better for me.”
His place was the centre to which they came and from which they radiated.
“What do they do in America?” I asked.
“Oh! any old thing. It all depends. There is one back here now.”
“He’s a regular big head,” interrupted one of the girls; “thinks he’s the whole cheese. He’s a newspaper man. I suppose he’ll be on the Stradona to-night.”
Every evening after sunset, all Ragusa wakens out of its day-dreams and is on parade in the Stradona.
Demure maidens come out from behind latticed windows, reflecting in their garments the sombre hues borrowed from Venice, and a riot of Oriental colours. They are dark-eyed creatures, these maidens, and their faces, as well as their garb, show the mixture of Latin and Slav; for this is the battling-ground of the two races, the persistent Slav being in the ascendency.
The youths followed at a distance; for propriety is one of the assets of Ragusan society.
Noiselessly they walked up and down over the grass-grown pavement, and, when one heard the heavy-soled shoe striking it, one recognized the stranger; and by that sign I knew the Ragusan-American newspaper man. A graceful, swarthy young fellow he was, upon whose face his new environment had already written its story.
His eyes had lost their melancholy look, for he had escaped the thraldom of the past and seemed like a man fully awake to the present. When we met, he looked at my shoes, I looked at his, and the contact was made.
Interesting, indeed, his story was, beginning with his running away from home, one of those ancient palaces on the Stradona. His assets were: money enough to take him to Triest, third-class, a large stock of inherited pride, and nothing else.
At that time there was no passenger service from Triest, but there were freight steamers and a chance to serve as steward to the officer’s mess. Three weeks of life on the sea and then New York. There he served his apprenticeship in the art of “getting along” by walking up and down Broadway, hungry and cold, sleeping in “Sailor’s Boarding Houses,” and finally in the police station.
At last came a turn in his fortunes, through getting work as a strawberry-picker in New Jersey, then working in a restaurant in Pennsylvania as waiter and cook. After much chance and change, he had become the owner of an Italian newspaper, whose chief object was to chronicle the happenings in the Fatherland, for the edification of his countrymen.
It had been a rough road, but it was worth the struggle; for it led to usefulness and into life. He thought that his countrymen always experienced unusual difficulties in America.
“The masses of them are illiterate to an alarming degree; bound by traditions, tribal in their social outlook, and serve as so much carrion for those birds of prey, the steamship companies’ agents, the padrone, the boarding-house keeper, the saloon, and the venal justice of the peace.”
Our national moral character he interpreted in the light or the experiences of his countrymen, and his judgment was not a flattering one. Yet he admitted that America is a blessing to Dalmatia. It has relieved bitter poverty, mentally awakened the people, and has broken down worthless traditions.
In Dalmatia, as elsewhere, the returned immigrant has sharpened the hunger for political liberties, and has intensified the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor.
Wherever the government was aided by the reactionary church, the people left the church. This is especially true of the northern towns of the peninsula, between Zara and Triest.
“Yes, indeed! The returned immigrant causes much trouble, and I am no exception. I wound my parents by my democratic ways, and I have forgotten many of the niceties of their social life.
“Yes, it was I who hurt the guslar’s feelings by telling him that there are streets in New York finer than the Stradona, and houses bigger than the Dogana. Ah, yes; the returned immigrant causes both sorrow and annoyance. Just watch that man and his two daughters.”
There they were; the man from Brooklyn, garishly attired. His daughters walked proudly beside him, heedless of the fact that over those pavements generations of Ragusa’s great men had walked to victory or to death.
The Brooklyn man seemed quite oblivious of the fact that these people whom he passed so carelessly were the sons and daughters of nobles and heroes. He did not lift his hat to them or step aside to let them pass; his daughters occupied more than their share of space, with their gorgeous and exaggerated hats, and smiled encouragingly on the young men whom they met, although strangers to them.
Later, there was much discussion of these “Americans,” among those who spend the evening at the “Café Arciduca Federigo”; smoking, singing, sipping granite, and talking about the good old days, those quiet, dreamy days which they had spent on this matchless spot, watching the sea as it encircled with its phosphorescent splendour the Island of Lacroma, or when, beaten by the Bora, it lashed itself into fury against the ancient walls.
The young newspaper man told me much about the pride and poverty of his countrymen, of their love for this fair spot, of their moral standards, and their unbroken word.
The guslar, standing in front of the café, began tuning his Jeremaic instrument, looking wistfully, as he did so, at the stranger who had given him so liberal a fee. He needed but slight encouragement to begin his plaintive recitative. A few lines clung to my memory; for they fitted so well into my conversation with the young Ragusan:
“Go out and sing of right and truth,
Of valour and of manly strife;
Better far, thy tongue grow mute
Than that thou sing of baser life
For common gain.”
In the middle of a verse, he dropped his instrument hopelessly.
“Oh, Signor! These terrible Americans! Listen!”
The quiet of that matchless night was being assailed by the awful refrain of: “There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night.”
“Ah, me, Signor! This will be my ruin! All the young men are at that man’s house drinking like beasts; they no more care for me, or for the heroic songs of their ancestors, and while they used to give me kreutzer, they now give me heller, if they give me anything.”
The old minstrel sighed profoundly and disappeared into the darkness, his gusla under his arm; while from the tin horn poured a medley of songs, the climax of which was: “A nice young man that lives in Kalamazoo.”
The sorrowful old man and his grief made me feel guilty, as if I were responsible for that terrible, torturing, unmusical outburst which disturbed the peace of the wonderful night.
After the guslar had left us, the newspaper man rowed me in his father’s barquetta across the shallow harbour, as far as the shadow cast by the gigantic palm trees on the shore. Every time his oars dipped into the water they brought to the surface a flame of fire; yet amid all the splendour of that night, I could think of nothing but the sad old musician.
Many months passed and I had quite forgotten the guslar of Ragusa. Again I was at the seashore; but it was the turbulent Atlantic—not the sunny Adriatic; Coney Island—not Lacroma.
Many confusing strains of music were in deadly conflict with one another; myriads of glowing lights encircled grotesque buildings of all descriptions; through streets given over to pleasure, crowded in one day nearly as many people as there are inhabitants in all Dalmatia.
I certainly did not think of Dalmatia, until I stood before an “Oriental Palace of Pleasure,” in front of which I saw the man from Brooklyn, resplendent in a gorgeous Oriental costume, “barking” to the multitude the sensuous pleasures which could be enjoyed within “for the small sum of one dime, only ten cents.”
When he paused for breath, I heard peculiar, strange, and yet familiar music. Following the sounds, I found on a balcony, in a blaze of electric lights, the guslar of Ragusa. When he finished playing, he too cried: “Tenee cenee, onlee tenee cenee! C-o-m-e een! Only tenee cenee!”