The Luck of Thirteen | Page 3

plump hands till we
had rumbled round the corner of the landscape.
In the train to Nish it was intensely hot. We had sixteen or seventeen
fellow-passengers in our third-class wooden-seated carriage--all the
firsts had been removed, because they could not be disinfected--and the
windows, with the exception of two, had been screwed tightly down.
Every time we stood up to look at the landscape somebody slipped into
our seat, and we were continually sitting down into unexpected laps.
Expostulations, apologies, and so on. Somebody had gnawed a piece
from one of the wheels, and we lurched through the scenery with a
banging metallic clangour which made conversation difficult, in spite
of which Jo astonished the natives by her colloquial and fluent Serbian.
We had an enormous director of a sanitary department and a plump
wife, evidently risen, but fat people rise in Serbia automatically like
balloons. We had three meagre old gentlemen, one unshaven for a week,
one whiskered since twenty years with Piccadilly weepers like a stage

butler; some ultra fashionable girls and men; and a dear old dumb
woman wearing three belts, who had been a former outpatient; and
several sticky families of children.
The old gentlemen took a huge interest in Jo. They drew her out in
Serbian, and at every sentence turned each to the other and elevated
their hands, ejaculating "kako!" (how!) in varying terms of admiration
and flattery.
The American has not yet ousted the Turk from Serbia, and the bite
from our wheel banged off the revolutions of our sedate passing.
Trsternik's church--modern but good taste--gleamed like a jewel in the
sun against the dark hills. On either hand were maize fields with stalks
as tall as a man, their feathery tops veiling the intense green of the
herbage with a film, russet like cobwebs spun in the setting sun. There
were plum orchards--for the manufacture of plum brandy--so thick with
fruit that there was more purple than green in the branches, and
between the trunks showed square white ruddy-roofed hovels with
great squat tile-decked chimneys. Some of the houses were painted
with decorations of bright colours, vases of flowers or soldiers, and on
one was a detachment of crudely drawn horsemen, dark on the white
walls, meant to represent the heroes of old Serbian poetry.
To Krusevatz the valley broadened, and the sinking sun tinted the
widening maize-tops till the fields were great squares of gold. We had
no lights in the train, and presently dusk closed down, seeming to shut
each up within his or her own mind. The hills grew very dark and
distant, and on the faint rising mist the trees seemed to stand about with
their hands in their pockets like vegetable Charlie Chaplins.
A junction, and a rush for tables at the little out-of-door restaurant. In
the country from which we have just come all seemed peace, but here
in truth was war. Passing shadowy in the faint lights were soldiers;
soldiers crouched in heaps in the dark corners of the station; yet more
soldiers and soldiers again huddled in great square box trucks or open
waggons waiting patiently for the train which was four or five hours
late. There were women with them, wives or sisters or daughters, with
great heavy knapsacks and stolid unexpressive faces.

While we were dreaming of this romance of war, and of the coming
romance of our own tour, a little man dumped himself at our table,
explained that he had a pain in his kidneys, and started an interminable
story about his wife and a dog. He was Jan's devoted admirer, and
declared that Jan had performed a successful operation upon him,
though Jan is no surgeon, and had never set eyes upon the man before.
Georgevitch rescued us. Georgevitch was fat, tall, young and genial,
and was military storekeeper at Vrntze. He was an ideal storekeeper
and looked the part, but he had been a comitaj. He had roamed the
country with belts full of bombs and holsters full of pistols, he and 189
others, with two loaves of bread per man and then "Ever Forwards." Of
the 189 others only 22 were left, and one was a patient at our hospital
where we called him the "Velika Dete" or "big child," because of his
sensibility. With Georgevitch was a dark woman with keen sparkling
eyes. Alone, this woman had run the typhus barracks in Vrntze until the
arrival of the English missions. She was a Montenegrin; no Serbian
woman could be found courageous enough to undertake the task. After
struggling all the winter, she was taken ill about a fortnight after the
arrival of the English. The Red Cross Mission took care of her and she
recovered.
We left our bore still talking about his wife and the dog,