XI Where the Angel Dropped the Stones
Prince Nicolas of Montenegro does not remember me, and why should he? It was many years ago, and I was one of 20,000 guests who suddenly descended upon his little capital of 5,000 inhabitants, during its national festivities in honour of the Prince of Bulgaria.
Cetinje’s two modest hostelries, in which under normal conditions twenty strangers might have found crude comforts, were packed from cellar to garret with the entourage of the royal guest. The rest of us, mostly natives and a few strangers, roving about the odd corners of Europe, were sheltered in private homes, hospitably thrown open by Cetinje’s citizens, who still believe in hospitality as a virtue, which they practice on all occasions.
I did not know until the morning after my arrival that my host was the Minister to the Exterior. The Interior, being so small, needed no minister, I suppose. His house, a rude stone structure, was only a degree better than that of the peasant; the bed was softer than his, for it was not the stone floor. The food was practically the same; a monotonous diet of maize bread and mutton, the staple food of rich and poor alike, except that the peasant eats only the bread and sells the mutton.
To find that my boots were blacked by a relative of the Minister to the Exterior, and that by virtue of being his guest I was also to be a guest at the banquet given by Prince Nicolas in honour of his princely visitor, produced in me no little feverish excitement; revealing the fact that I was a mere mortal, and as much pleased by my aristocratic surroundings and the prospect of royal favour, as if I were not a student of social phenomena with a strong bias towards democracy.
It is of no consequence to chronicle these facts here, except that they led to a passing acquaintance with the Prince and his family. His youngest son was then a growing youth of exceedingly lovable character. At that time the Queen of Italy was a visitor in her father’s simple home. The Prince is a writer of some ability, and I was glad to be able to tell him that I was familiar with his contributions to Serbic literature.
The royal favour accorded me stood me in good stead; for not only could I watch the pageant and other festivities from a splendid vantage ground, but it proved very helpful in my journey through the principality, which I traversed from Nyegusi to Lake Skutari, and from the Albanian Alps to the Herzegovina.
The country seemed like a huge eagle’s nest, perched amid inhospitable mountains. Here all men were warriors, from the time they were weaned from their mother’s breast, until they sank into their rock-hewn graves.
The women reared the young, tilled the bit of precious soil found among a waste of boulders, and carried mutton carcases to the market at Podgoricza or Cattaro, the largest trading town in Dalmatia. On the return home, they brought coffee and spring water, the two luxuries of those arid mountain heights. These poor homes, although rarely better than stables, sheltered people full of heroism, hospitality, and primitive social virtues; as well as a passionate hatred for the “Schwab,” their Austrian neighbour, and the Turk, their ancient foe.
The men lived in anticipation of war, not much caring whom they fought; for peace meant a stagnant poverty, while war held glory and pillage.
It was the day of the farewell festivities for the Bulgarian Prince, that the peasant subjects of Prince Nicolas passed in review before their patriarch, who was the supreme judge and arbiter of their fate. The menials kissed the hem of his coat, while the heads of different tribes kissed his cheek. Each man in passing before his lord told his troubles openly, and waited for the word of cheer or of judgment.
With little variation they all told of utter poverty—the kind of poverty which meant that from the month of August until the next autumn, there would be no bread; for the crops had failed. There was no prospect of relief, the Prince himself being poor and in debt; and the country had no resources.
I proposed emigration as a remedy, and rather impatiently the Prince dismissed the suggestion, saying that every warrior was of value in this mountain fastness; soldiers were its one asset, and they might at any moment be needed by their godmother, Russia, if not by himself.
Soldiers we did not need, I told him; the war with Spain was over, and even during its progress, we had soldiers to spare; but if his men would learn to “turn their spears into” crowbars, and “their swords into” shovels (taking liberties with a prophetic utterance) they would find opportunity for work, if not for valour; for a good wage, but not for pillage.
I knew they would come and they did. An apostolic band of twelve men first; seventy and more, following; three hundred on the next steamer, after which a temporary check. The three hundred, having violated the contract labour law, were sent home.
Then, like a flood, too long held back, came thousands, scattering through the Alleghanies and the Middle Western plain, as far as the Missouri River, and into California, where a colony of many hundreds at Los Angeles is in Paradise; although first they went through many a purgatory.
Ten years, and ten times ten years, which in Montenegro’s past were more or less glorious, had left the country practically unchanged; except as the present ruler had tried to root out some of its latent barbarisms. Here Slavic traditions at their best were immovably intrenched, and here were the bulwarks against the best and the worst in our civilization.
Neither steam nor electricity, those destroyers of archaic simplicity, had yet entered the country, nor had our vulgarities of French dress and morals driven out the simple virtues or the picturesque national garb, worn by the Prince and by the peasant.
On all sides, Montenegro’s neighbours, the Albanians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, and even her brother, Servia, in the lowlands of the old cradle home—had all yielded, in a greater or lesser degree, to Mohammedan influences. Montenegro alone remained an unsealed fortress, in which the crescent never supplanted the cross; nor did the horse’s tail wave from its flag-staff, on which once and forever had been unfurled the victorious colours—red, black, and white.
The dawn of the twentieth century found the principality still Homeric and patriarchal, but the brief years since its opening have been significant ones. During those years her sons for the first time left “their crags and unsealed passes” to go out upon so base an errand as seeking work across the Atlantic, later to return with the booty of a bloodless conquest.
About ten years after my last visit to Montenegro, I was again journeying towards it upon that serpentine road from whose every winding the truly matchless bay can be seen, receding with every turn, hemmed in more and more by the chalk cliffs which look like petrified clouds. Almost barren of verdure they are, but full of an awful majesty; until they blend with the bay, when one can see beyond them the blue Adriatic. The ships upon her bosom are moved by a gentle sirocco, while the islands on the Dalmatian coast, hidden in the shining green of the olive and the yellower tints of fig leaves, make patches of colour which seem to be floating away in the mist rising at noontime from the sea.
Suddenly one turns northward and faces gray stones, walls of stone, fields of stone—nothing but stone—and that is Montenegro. My peasant driver told me that when God made the earth, He saw that He had made it good, with the exception of the stones, of which there were too many. He called His angel Gabriel and told him to take a bag as large as the ends of the four winds and go down to earth, pick up the surplus stones and cast them into the sea.
The devil, who delighted in the stones and the trouble they would give humanity, flew after the busy angel.
When Gabriel had picked up all the superfluous stones on earth, and was about to drop them into the Adriatic, his Satanic Majesty took his pocket knife, cut a hole in the angel’s bag, and all the stones dropped on to that part of the earth where Montenegro is situated.
The peasant’s story accounts for the topsy-turvy position of the stones; now piled high as mountains, then solid walls of stone, and, again, huge boulders scattered about, with plenty of smaller ones between. There are some fertile spots, especially the famous Brda, where flocks find pasture; and there is an occasional field large enough for a horse to turn with its plough. Most of the country, however, is barren, and it is from this bleakest mountain region that the exodus to America has taken place.
At Nyegusi, as usual, there was an hour’s wait, and a chance to refresh the inner man with cheese and coffee. In this primitive hostelry one noticed the first evidences of the changes wrought. Nyegusi, the birthplace of the Prince, under the shadow of the historic Lovczin, has been more drained of its men in these times of peace than ever it was in time of war.
When last I passed through it, there stood before every one of the wretched stone huts a giant-like figure, attired in his native costume, which, according to Montenegrin standards, was worth a fortune, and did indeed represent its wearer’s wealth. Ancient and costly weapons protruded from his belt, generously wound around his portly body. Thus armed, he paraded up and down the rocky streets of Nyegusi, or lounged in the village inn, smoking cigarettes and drinking his raki, if he had the wherewithal.
At the time of which I write, the streets were deserted, save for the women, who bent beneath their heavy burdens of wood which they bring down from the ravines in the Lovczin mountain.
Old men sat wearily on the stone walls which surrounded their small fields, and every one told of a son who had gone “to Amerikee.”
One toothless woman could tell her age only approximately, by the number of sons she had borne; and there were eighteen. Ten of them were in America; the others had been killed in border warfare.
In this same town I met a mother of twenty-two sons, twenty of whom had lost their lives in battle. The two survivors were the innkeepers of Nyegusi. The inn itself was the same as when first I saw it, with its beaten earth floor, and walls bare, except for the icon, a splendid bit of Byzantine workmanship; but since I drank the excellent coffee there, ten years ago, more than 5,000 braves have been under its roof, bound for my own country or returning from it. Now the room is full of them, all homeward bound, spending money far too freely in drinking and gambling; two vices which, although taken with them from their mountains, they bring back in exaggerated form.
I must confess to a sense of disappointment when I saw them beside the Montenegrin who had remained at home. The sombre dress of our civilization was a poor exchange for the brilliant, native costume. The hard labour the men performed in America had robbed them of their erect and elastic forms, and they looked like the menials of their brothers who had been keeping watch against the “Schwab,” in the shadow of the Lovczin.
The change was not unlike that which has taken place in the American Indian who left the war-path to repair the steel path of the railroad.
The men in the inn, nearly thirty of them, belonged to all parts of the little realm, from Niksic in the North and Grahova on the Herzegovinian border, to Cetinje and Podgoricza, its centre. They had gone out in neighbourhood groups, members of one tribe; but, returning, had become badly mixed. Some in the original group had failed, while others had succeeded; some decided to remain in America, others were glad to come home.
Most of those in the inn had been West, and knew only the rigorous side of our industrial life, and to no European people could the experience have been so trying; while none could have adjusted itself less easily to it.
The complaints as registered in Cetinje were many, and on the whole justified. They may be classified as follows:
| Cheated by Employment Agencies | 80% |
| Cheated by Austrian boarding-house keepers | 60% |
| Money lost by giving bribes to Irish-American bosses who promised jobs which were never given | 36% |
| Rough treatment by bosses | 72% |
| Robbed by railroad crews in Montana | 80% |
| “Shanghaied”—made drunk and railroaded from St. Louis to Southern Kansas | 15% |
| Robbed of money and tickets before departure for home | 40% |
This represented the dark side of the experience of the Montenegrin immigrant. The brighter side cannot so easily be classified. As with other groups, so with those; America meant an enlargement of their horizon. Most of them had earned money and meant to buy land; some of them had an eye to the undeveloped mineral wealth of their country, and two carried home enriched lives through having attended an evening school, where they had learned to read and write some English.
All were still loyal sons of their mountain home, and only three of the thirty in the inn meant to try their luck again.
The innkeeper thought emigration a great boon, and it was, to him; for the emigrants all passed through Nyegusi whether they came or went, and that meant revenue.
Externally, Cetinje, the capital, is still the same; although there the greatest change has taken place since my last visit. Cetinje now has a parliament, and its post-office officials have something more to do than smoke cigarettes. Its storekeepers are enriched by the inflow of money; the women respond to the new spirit; for a comparatively large number is going to America, and a few have already gone. The men, especially the old peasants, find this new spirit most trying. One of them, in a little stone hut at Kolasin, said: “The women come home after three years’ absence and the devil has got into them. They sit in my presence and demand to eat when I do!
“What kind of country is that anyway which encourages such things? Is it a woman’s country?”
I met one woman whose son I knew in the “States.” He is one of the few that have prospered, and he means to stay. His mother’s little cottage on the outskirts of Cetinje shows plainly the influence of America.
On the walls hang many gaudy calendars, and a crayon portrait of her son, in an elaborate frame.
“Tell me,” she said, as she pointed to a bulky newspaper printed in Scranton, Pa., and sent by her son, as a curiosity, “how many weeks does it take them to read it?”
Her son sends her ten dollars every month, which means fifty kronen. “Only the good Princess has so much money of her own!” the proud mother said; and I am not so sure that even the Princess has it.
There must be many such huts; for the postmaster told me that $30,000 came into this little rocky nest in one year; more money than passed through the hands of that postmaster in twenty preceding years. In a country so impoverished, this money cannot help being a blessing.
It is true, that after a brief glimpse of Montenegro I left it with feelings decidedly mixed as to the benefits it has derived from emigration. The Prince is less a patriarch than he was and not so accessible to his subjects; for he has felt the force of a revolution, small but significant.
The grand opera setting of the villages and towns is being destroyed; men no more strut about like stage heroes, waiting for their cues. The picturesque is going, is almost gone, and will go entirely; poverty, extreme poverty, pinching, grinding poverty is going too, and will soon disappear. Men drink more fiery raki and gamble more; women are beginning to lift up their heads and walk beside the men, not behind them. I am convinced that the relative of the Minister to the Exterior would not now black my boots; for which I rejoice, although the old braves complain and say: “America is a woman’s country.”
Montenegro, hemmed in on three sides by Austria and on the other side by Turkey, and all around by poverty, has found an outlet and relief by way of the sea. Progress has come slowly and from far away and she must pay the price; yet when all is considered, she ought to be glad to pay it.
In talking to the postmaster of Cetinje, I referred to my driver’s story, about the angel’s dropping the stones upon Montenegro, and said: “It must have been a poor sort of angel; for he didn’t pick them up again.”
“Ah, well! He is trying to make up for it. Look here;” and he showed me advices from New York for 1,500 kronen.
“If that angel keeps up the good work, we will have a krone for every stone that he dropped on our soil. Don’t you say anything against our angel!”