ithout a nose, we have met a dozen. And
stunted people. All these people are like evil schoolboys; they do
nothing but malicious mischief; there is nothing adult about them but
their voices; they are like the heroic dreams of young ruffians in a
penitentiary. You saw that man at Scutari in the corner of the bazaar,
the gorgeous brute, you admired him--."

"The man with the gold inlaid pistols and the diamonds on his yataghan.
He wanted to show them to us."

"Yes. You let him see you admired him."

"I liked the things on his stall."

"Well, he has killed nearly thirty people."

"In duels?"

"Good Lord! NO! Assassinations. His shoemaker annoyed him by sending in
a bill. He went to the man's stall, found him standing with his child
in his arms and blew out his brains. He blundered against a passer-by in
the road and shot him. Those are his feats. Sometimes his pistols go off
in the bazaar just by accident."

"Does nobody kill him?"

"I wanted to," said Benham and became thoughtful for a time. "I think I
ought to have made some sort of quarrel. But then as I am an Englishman
he might have hesitated. He would have funked a strange beast like me.
And I couldn't have shot him if he had hesitated. And if he hadn't--"

"But doesn't a blood feud come down on him?"

"It only comes down on his family. The shoemaker's son thought the
matter over and squared accounts by putting the muzzle of a gun into the
small of the back of our bully's uncle. It was easier that way.... You
see you're dealing with men of thirteen years old or thereabouts, the
boy who doesn't grow up."

"But doesn't the law--?"

"There's no law. Only custom and the Turkish tax collector.

"You see this is what men are where there is no power, no discipline,
no ruler, no responsibility. This is a masterless world. This is pure
democracy. This is the natural state of men. This is the world of the
bully and the brigand and assassin, the world of the mud-pelter and
brawler, the world of the bent woman, the world of the flea and the
fly, the open drain and the baying dog. This is what the British
sentimentalist thinks a noble state for men."

"They fight for freedom."

"They fight among each other. There are their private feuds and their
village feuds and above all that great feud religion. In Albania there
is only one religion and that is hate. But there are three churches for
the better cultivation of hate and cruelty, the Latin, the Greek and the
M