Upon the walls of the church were beautiful frescoes of the fifteenth century, and because they were in bad condition, they were about to be whitewashed. Equivalent to saying, if you are ill, don't send for the doctor, murder the patient. The only touch of soulful atmosphere was to be obliterated.
After the service, the monk invited us to his house, adjoining the church, and in the corridor we sat at a table, and talked, whilst cigarettes, rakiya, and coffee were handed round. Mr. Little, our clergyman chauffeur, who generally drove me, was with us. The priests thought it very strange that a clergyman should be a chauffeur; they asked if he was married? He was not. That again was strange to them, because in Serbia a priest must marry whether he wants to do so or not. A monk, on the other hand, must not, even if he wants to. A monk and a priest were both present, so I asked them which of the two had the worse fate--the one who must marry even if he wouldn't, or he who mustn't even if he would. They laughed much, but the question was too difficult; the answer was not contained in their theology.
The priest then wanted to know if English clergymen might marry two wives? No interpreter was present, and our hosts only spoke Serbian, and I thought at first that he meant bigamy, and I held up my hands shocked. But he explained that he meant one wife after the other. He, himself, if his present wife died, would, he explained, never be allowed to marry again. Would our priest-chauffeur, who was sure to marry some day, be allowed to marry again if his first wife died? "Oh, yes!" I answered, "he may drive tandem but not a pair." I added that this chauffeur priest was a very lucky man. He marries a wife; she dies, no matter; he marries a second; she dies, no matter; he marries a third, and so on to infinity. And when I further added that, indeed, the only condition set by law as a premise for a priest's marrying with a dozen successive wives, was the decease of, or divorce from, the previous wife, our priest said he would like to live in England. "And I should like to live in Serbia," I replied. "If I were not already married, I should certainly choose to marry a Serbian priest, for my husband could not fail to put a high value on me; he would know that, though I might not be perfect, he could never get a better wife."