At Salonika we entered a Europe which was new to me, if an old story to Nikka, a Europe which was blended with the life and color and form of the Orient. Tall minarets like fingers of doom pointed skyward over bulbous domes, and driving to the railroad station through blocks of shabby houses that had replaced an area ravaged by fire, we heard the high-pitched, wail-call of the muezzin.
Jews in long, black gaberdines; Albanian Arnauts, Tosks, Ghegs and Malissori tribesmen, stately and savage; Greek mountaineers in the dirty, starched fustenella; tall Serb peasants, with the bearing of nobles and the faces of poets; Bulgars, stolid, imperturbable and level-eyed; hawk-nosed Ottoman Turks in tasseled fezzes; Armenians, fawning and humble; lank, hungry Syrians; treacherous-looking Greeks of the Peninsula; Greeks of the Islands, beautiful as statues by Phidias; Roumanians, with heavy black brows and the stocky build of Trajan's legionaries; Tziganes, lean and gaudily dressed; Kurds with cruel eyes and the bow-legs of a race of horsemen;—all the races of the Near East swarmed and crowded and cursed and pushed along the untidy sidewalks.
"This is No Man's Land," said Nikka as our dilapidated automobile forced a slow progress through the congested traffic. "All races here hate one another. We are two hundred years behind western Europe. Here treachery is the rule. Might is right. The strong hand takes all. Women are inferior beings—save amongst my own race."
His thin face lit with a smile.
"Many things can be said against my people, but we give our women freedom. Yet over us, as over all the other peoples, still hangs the shadow of Islam, shutting out the sun, denying culture, restricting thought."
At the railroad station we fought for places in a first-class compartment, which had room for six and must accommodate eight. The second and third-class cars were jammed to the doors. Women wept, children howled and men swore and struck each other and their women indiscriminately. In the midst of it all, with one warning whistle-blast, the train lunged out of the station, shaking off superfluous passengers as it jolted over the switch on to the main line.
That was a dreadful journey, not long as regards distance, but tediously protracted in time. The country grew steadily more mountainous as we left the coast. The engine panted and heaved; the cars rattled and shook. At frequent intervals we stopped by some station, and the scenes of our departure from Salonika were repeated according to scale. But the engine toiled on, and in the full tide of hours we crawled over a mountain-ridge and saw the sun rising in the east beyond the close-packed roofs of Seres.
It was a town that seemed to huddle together as though in fear, and there were great gashes and gaps in its lines of white-washed house-walls, relics of three wars, each of which had taken toll of its citizens. Here and there a church or a mosque, a school or a government building, rose above the level of two-story dwellings. But it had none of the teeming squalor and gorgeous conflict of colors that made Salonika so effective a gateway.
Nikka commandeered a fiacre in the station-square.
"Do you know the house of Kostabidjian the moneylender?" he asked the driver in Greek that sounded more than passable to me. "Very well, then, drive us there."
"Who is Kostabidjian?" I inquired as the driver whipped up his small horses.
A dour, secretive look had settled on Nikka's face in the last two days. His eyes had narrowed, and their gaze was fixed upon the far horizon when they were not shrewdly surveying the appearances of people around him.
"He is the agent of the tribe," he replied shortly. "It was through him I sent word to my uncle."
I held my peace after that. We drove for half an hour into the northeastern suburbs, where the houses became little villas, with courtyards and small gardens, and sometimes orchards behind. At last we stopped at a gateway overhung by olive-trees, and the driver got down to pull the bell-wire which protruded from an opening by the gate. The solemn clangor echoed faintly, and was succeeded by shuffling foot-steps. A wicket opened, and a dark, bewhiskered face was revealed. Nikka ejaculated a single sentence in the Gypsy dialect that Toutou's gang sometimes used, and the gate swung ajar. I gave the driver of the fiacre a couple of drachmas, and followed Nikka inside.
The individual with the whiskers, a dried-up, elderly man, quickly fastened the gate again, with a sidewise look at Nikka, half respect, half fear. The courtyard was empty, save for some ponies and mules under a shed at the rear, and the custodian motioned to us to follow him to the house.
At the door, he stood aside and ushered us into a parlor furnished in the French style. Off it opened a dining-room. A stout, smooth-faced, elderly man rose from a desk as we entered. He started to salaam, thought better of it, and offered his hand, which Nikka grasped perfunctorily. Then he commenced to speak in the Tzigane dialect, and Nikka cut him off.
"Speak French," said Nikka curtly. "I have no secrets from my friend, Mr. Nash." And to me: "This is Monsieur Kostabidjian."
Kostabidjian bowed to me.
"My poor home is honored, indeed, by two such distinguished guests," he protested. "Monsieur Zaranko, it is many years now since I had the pleasure of meeting you, but you will find that I have executed all your commissions faithfully."
Nikka smiled sarcastically.
"You would not be alive and whole if you had not," he commented.
"Surely, you do not mean that you think I would do anything else," cried Kostabidjian.
"I mean I am sure that you do as I command," returned Nikka impatiently. "Also, that I feel I do not have to rely upon your honesty in the matter. Now, what news have you for me?"
Kostabidjian—he was an Armenian of uncertain parentage, I afterwards discovered, with the ingrained servility pounded into that unfortunate race by centuries of oppression—drew up chairs for us.
"The telegram was forwarded at once to the Chief," he answered. "But Wasso Mikali sent back word yesterday that he would be delayed in waiting upon you in consequence of a caravan of cartridges which the band are running into Albania. It is an affair which has attracted his attention for the past month, and he dares not trust the work to another."
"Does he, himself, go to Albania?"
"No, Monsieur Zaranko. But the starting of the caravan, and the paying of the purchase-price—"
"In advance?"
"Of course."
"Good," said Nikka. "When will he be here?"
"He spoke of to-morrow—"
"Then serve us food, and lead us to a room where we may rest."
The Armenian clapped his hands, and the old man with the whiskers—who was dumb in consequence of having had his tongue cut out in one of the Turkish massacres of the red past—returned and carried word in his own fashion of our wants to the kitchen. Presently we sat down in the dining room to a hot meal of pilaf, with chicken, dough cakes and coffee, which Kostabidjian pressed upon us officiously.
"It has been a hard year for the tribe, Monsieur Zaranko," he purred, rubbing his hands together. "I don't know what they would have done without your aid."
"The subject is not for discussion," rapped Nikka.
"Oh, ah! Certainly!"
And he was quiet for a few minutes. Then his loquacity gained the better of him, and he burst forth:
"It's not as it used to be in the Balkans, gentlemen! The law doesn't run any stronger. I'll say that. And boundaries are still vague, for all that the great ones in Paris decided. But people are poor as Hajji Achmet after he'd been to Mecca. They earn nothing, and have nothing—and therefore there's nothing to take or to steal. Hee-hee-hee!"
"You talk nonsense," said Nikka savagely. "Am I to be annoyed by such as you?"
No prince could have been more arrogant; no lackey could have succumbed more completely.
"P-p-par-d-dd-don!" The Armenian's teeth rattled.
"You may go. I will summon you if I have need."
The man went like a whipped dog, and cowered over his mysterious accounts at the desk in the next room.
Nikka sat through the meal with a black frown on his face. He was plainly out of sorts, and while I could understand his aversion to Kostabidjian, I was secretly amazed by the constantly growing change in his manner, for he was normally of a uniformly pleasant disposition. But it was not until we had been shown to a bedroom on the upper floor that he unmasked his feelings. I began to undress, but he paced the fl............