"Do you know this place?"
"As well as—how shall I put it?—As well as Hugh knows Castle Chesby. No, I was not born here. My mother lay on the floor-boards of a caravan-cart in the Bukowina. My father was looking for likely ponies to trade with Bulgarian officers. But they brought me back here, and here I grew to boyhood. Do you see that first hovel on this bank? That was where I was taught to fiddle. And there—"
Wasso Mikali, striding in front of us, raised his voice in a great shout, and the men by the houses jumped to their feet and crowded toward us. The old Gypsy added something in which Nikka's name was repeated two or three times, and they cried out in astonishment. In the next moment they were swarming around us, and sinewy hands were clasping ours, rows of white teeth were gleaming in welcoming smiles, and Nikka was being greeted with a heart-warming mixture of affection and respect.
Once they discovered I could not talk their language they let me alone, but Nikka they plied with questions until the women summoned us to the fires for the evening meal. Their attitude toward him was extraordinary. He was one of themselves—several were his cousins, most of them were related to him in some remote degree of consanguinity; he had lived amongst them for years. Yet to them, as to the rest of the world, he was also the great master, the violinist who could charm multitudes, upon whose bounty, too, they and others like them had been sustained in periods of want.
While the women served us with stew and bread, Nikka introduced me to them, and they promptly manifested a naïve interest in my person and career. They all called me Jakka. They were amazed to learn that I made my living by drawing plans of houses for people. Who, they inquired with frank disbelief, needed to have somebody draw for him the plan of his house? It was absurd. You simply took logs and boards or bricks and stone, if you were in a city, and you put them together. They even insisted upon dragging me away from the fire to the nearest house to illustrate what they meant. They were determined to convince me how superfluous was my profession.
I, in my turn, was surprised by the idyllic security of this retired valley, and I asked them, through Nikka, if it had never been penetrated even in wartime. No, they replied, only once a party of Franks in pot-hats—by which, it seemed, they meant Germans—had come upon it by accident, and of the Franks not one had escaped. Of course, occasional attempts had been made to drive them out by other outlaw bands; but none had ever succeeded, in consequence of the vigilance of their watch and the tortuous approach through a network of defiles.
Their community persisted in defiance of civilization, an anomalous relic of the stone age, of nomad barbarism; and they assured me that here and there all over the Balkans other similar Gypsy communities still held out, in spite of the havoc of destruction wrought by the War.
We remained in the valley for one day, just long enough for Wasso Mikali to pick the six men he intended to take with him, select horseflesh for ostensible trading purposes, and made the necessary arrangements for leaving the tribe so long without his guidance. It interested me that he appointed as sub-chief his wife, a wrinkled old beldame, who boasted a complete mouthful of yellowed teeth and rolled cigarettes with one hand. And it was significant of the conditions under which they lived that we stole away by twilight, so that our exit might not be observed by chance spies of rival bands, who would thus learn of the reduction of their garrison.
Two days' journey to the east carried us into the colorful stream of traffic on a main-traveled highway. Caravans of pack-ponies jingled along. Bands of itinerant Gypsies like ourselves; camel trains, endless processions of ox-carts, and very rarely, an automobile or a fiacre, moved in both direction. Monks from the mountain monasteries looked askance at Pomak and Tzigane. The Balkan races in their varied garb jangled and wrangled by. But not too close to the Greek frontier we swerved into a byway, and gave the custom houses a safe margin.
After that it was the same story for more than a week. True, when we abandoned the mountains and dipped into the rolling plains of Thrace, we left behind us the trappings of barbarism. But the air we breathed and the scenes that unrolled before us belonged to the Orient. We had occasional minor adventures, fights with keepers of roadside khans, disputes with other parties and attempts to steal our horses. But Wasso Mikali was a prince of the road. He met stealth with guile, force with nerve. He was never defeated.