“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 Mahometan.”

“But no one has ever conquered these people.”

“Any one could, the Servians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Italians, the Austrians.  Why, they can’t even shoot!  It’s just the balance of power and all that foolery keeps this country a roadless wilderness.  Good God, how I tire of it!  These men who swagger and stink, their brawling dogs, their greasy priests and dervishes, the down-at-heel soldiers, the bribery and robbery, the cheating over the money. . . .”

He slipped off the parapet, too impatient to sit any longer, and began to pace up and down in the road.