Part 3

As readily as he had come to the rescue of the peasants, Jim, throwing the knife at a distance over his head, interposed his body in protection of the man he had beaten. And then Jim spoke to them in feverish language, calling them brothers and asking them to be men and understand. In his ardor he had forgotten they were people of another language.

But the men listened. The women seemed to understand.

“Get up, you coward!” Jim turned around to Petrianu, who had risen to his feet. “Get up, and on your horse!”

And when the men seemed appeased, Jim, with his bleeding arm and the blood dripping from his cheek, put his arms around the necks of the two men who had driven the oxen.

“Come. Come,” he urged them.

He looked around to see Ileana. She was gone. What mattered it? He was a demonstrator. And the men were in a mood to do what he asked. They turned around to the other peasants, who made a passage for the machines. Jim seated himself on the seat of one while the man was driving the oxen.

The machine started its grumbling movement. The cutters sheared the wheat blades low. The peasants ran after the machine to watch how it operated. See, there a sheaf was piled up, the cord was passed around it by the two steel fingers. The needle passed across and twisted the cord into a knot. Another sheaf and another sheaf. Five. And then they were all dropped softly to the ground.

They had finished the first row when Boyar Robu arrived, riding near his sister, who had gone to call him, afraid lest some mishap was to befall Jim Allison.

“He has killed him! He has killed him!” she cried.

They found Jim peacefully starting the second row. He had tied a handkerchief around the wound on his arm to stop its bleeding; and he was continually staunching the wound on his cheek with the sleeve he had torn off his shirt. It was his opportunity now. He had won the confidence of the men. They were willing. He had been sent as a demonstrator and he was demonstrating. He was demonstrating the harvesting machine.

Robu rode after him, and Ileana put her arms around him to get him off the seat of the machine. He would not leave. The wound did not matter.

But they did not understand. Ileana was deeply concerned about the wounds he had received. She put her hands on his arm and her fingers trembled as she touched him. His whole body trembled in response. But he drove on to finish the other row.

On returning to where the idle machine stood, with the oxen still yoked to the pole, he motioned to Robu to sit down on the seat and set it in movement. The two machines rode side by side, with the peasants jumping from one to the other, looking and giving soft cries of wonderment at the regularity with which the sheaves were bound and dropped steadily, steadily. At the end of the row stood Ileana with a pail of water. And this time she put her arms firmly around the stranger and almost lifted him off the seat. She washed his wounds.

Jim was happy. Not a muscle of his face moved as she cleaned the gaping flesh of the deep knife wound in the upper part of his arm. Jim was happy. For one of the younger peasants, who had watched the machine while it had been pulled twice the length of the field, had now jumped on the seat in his place and was driving forward, onward, with the peasants and their wives running after it as the golden sheaves fell and fell to the ground. They were all with their backs toward Jim and Ileana.

And then Jim in great joy jumped to his feet and, without knowing exactly what he was doing, he threw his arms about the girl’s neck and drew her to him and kissed her long upon the lips. She encircled his waist with her arms and pressed him to herself.

The following day Jim Allison wrote to the manager of his company:

We are cutting four hundred acres of wheat with two machines Boyar Robu bought last year. Please send immediately six pieces X-34 and 8 L-56.

I shall, however, remain a little longer here than I expected at first, as I am marrying Boyar Robu’s sister.

Yours, James Allison.

SAVA

There were twenty men in Sava’s band: twenty resolute, black-bearded, lean, hard men, each one capable of doing whatever was demanded of him under any circumstances. Each one could ride a horse until the animal fell down exhausted; each one could negotiate twenty miles of hills and mountains in torrential rain or heavy snowstorm, and swim across a river with a gun so fastened on the back of the head that the powder in the barrels remained dry. Twenty men who could stand their ground against forty, against fifty, against a hundred, and disappear in the batting of an eye at a given signal, in as many different directions, and know where and when to meet again in the crevice of a rock in the mountains, or in the abandoned dugout of a she bear!

For years Sava and his men had been peacefully smuggling silks from the Hungarian side of the Carpathians over into Roumania, and tobacco and linens from Roumania into Hungary. They carried the contraband on their backs or strapped the packs on the saddles of the small Moldavian ponies they rode. Customs guards and gendarmes on both sides had watched them closely for years without ever catching them.

Big Sava, the leader, was only thirty. And although his gait was as young as that of a man of twenty, the steadiness of his eye and the slowness of his speech gave his lean, dark, smooth face a much older stamp. He could outdo his men at anything, although they were the pick of the gypsy manhood of Roumania.

Sava was the only unmarried man of his band. He danced with all the maidens on Sunday at the inn when he was at home. He laughed and danced and joked and sang with all of them. Many a time when the older men had gone to sleep and the younger ones were yet too full of the joy of life to go home or to leave the circle of dancers, Sava would remain with two of the most beautiful girls of his tribe, one at his right and the other at his left, and amuse himself watching the two women trying to outdo each other in the game of husband catching.

When the game had lasted long enough, he would tap his open palms and tell them to run to their homes ere misfortune overtook them. For it would be misfortune to marry a man who did not love them. The women gone, Sava would sit alone somewhere under a tree and wonder when he would feel what love really was like. He would pass in review all the girls of his tribe. They were all beautiful, but there was not one he preferred to another one--not one he longed to see when he was away, not one whose nearness made him want to stay....

His own men watched and hoped every spring. They loved him and desired to see him happy with a woman of their tribe.

That winter Sava and his men had been detained on the Hungarian side of the Carpathians by a terrific snowstorm that lasted two weeks. During those two weeks they stayed at “Marga’s,” the inn of a young widow who kept the only place of its kind in fifty miles around.

When the storm had abated, the gendarmes learned that Sava and his men were at Marga’s. They drew a cordon around them, firmly decided to catch the gypsies red-handed in the act of smuggling. Sava resolved to outpatience the gendarmes. He did not explain anything to his men. He just remained there and slept and drank and danced and sang as he had never done before.

Somehow Marga, and even Sava’s own men, interpreted his actions according to their own lights. Marga was convinced he remained there because of her. As she was very much in love with the young gypsy she began to cover him with little attentions and whisper in his willing ears all the little gossip she could find out about the gendarmes. At first there were twenty. Then she reported a hundred. In a few days she reported the forest was full of them, two behind every tree. Sava listened quietly and smiled at her.

Besides Sava and his men, there were twenty other men staying at the inn. There were heavy-bearded shepherds with sheepskin coats reaching to their soles, itinerant peddlers with feet wrapped in red rags, and two gypsy fiddlers who had stumbled into the inn early one morning, stiff and frozen, as if they had ridden on top of the storm to Marga’s door.

After the storm abated, the guests began to depart one by one. Ultimately only Sava and his men remained with the two gypsy musicians, the gendarmes still watching.

Daily Sava’s men awaited orders from their chief. But Sava seemed to have forgotten their existence and forgotten everything about the gendarmes watching him. With the two musicians at his side, with the buxom blue-eyed widow looking into his eyes as she filled his cup of wine, he was oblivious of everything. Never before had he felt so warm inside and out. He had no love for Marga, and he knew that. But he knew that she felt for him what he had once felt for another woman, whom he had been compelled to forget. He gloated in that bitter-sweet of being loved without loving, as if he were avenging his soul for what had happened once, many years before. He could order Marga around as he wished without fear of losing her. He was master of her soul because he was master of his own.

His men came in and watched the spectacle. The glowing, full-bosomed, round-armed young widow was holding a foaming pitcher to his empty glass, while leaning her cheek against his.

The younger gypsies proposed that they overcome the gendarmes and bind them and tie up the widow or take her along with them, if Sava must have her near him. They were long overdue at home. Their wives and their children were weeping for them. Who knew but that Mara and Pania and Fanutza had already married former lovers or other men!

It was the beginning of March. Soon the melting of the snows would not only make the underground passages impossible but even the paths in the woods. The wolves and the bears were traveling in enormous packs. And the gendarmes now entered the inn daily.

One day Sava ordered the gypsy fiddlers to play in the center of the room instead of playing right near him. The gendarmes, half intoxicated, mingled freely with his men, talking and laughing. The carbines of the men of the law were stacked in a corner.

Suddenly Sava snapped his fingers. In a leap, each of his men possessed himself of one of the weapons and at the same time directed it against one of the gendarmes. Sava’s hands were the only ones free of any weapons. While his men held the gendarmes at the points of the guns, Sava paid his bill to Marga, whispering a few love words to her. And then, turning around to the gendarmes, he said:

“If you stay here quietly for an hour, one hour by my watch, you will find all your guns stacked up at the foot of the mountain near the big white boulder. And no one will know anything about it. If you come after us, we’ll have to use the carbines, and you’ll lose them--and lose other things besides. Remember, there are wives and children waiting for you at home, but there are also wives and children waiting for my men.”

They placed the carbines near the white boulder as promised, then they disappeared from the surface into a secret tunnel a hundred feet away from the place where the gendarmes had camped without knowing that it led through the mountains to the other side.

There were loud huzzahs and hurrahs when Sava and his men returned early one morning to their village. They had been overdue two months. Pania was already allowing Yorga to come much nearer to her tent. Fanutza and Mara were being considered young widows.

And now Sava and his men were back, the men looking up at him with even greater love and devotion than they had ever done before. It had to be celebrated--with the best wine, the loudest shouting, the wildest dancing.

They were not ready to tell the story of how Sava had taken them away from among the gendarmes. They interrupted themselves in the middle of a tale with: “Oh, that can never be told!”

It was a trick of theirs they had for effect, to tell one-half of the tale. They let it be understood Sava was a supernatural being who could do things no one else could do, things they could not even tell about.

They feasted and celebrated for a whole month. There were many dances. And many were the women who turned about Sava, trying to captivate him. Whenever Sava would be near one of the girls who had forced her attentions upon him, he would be waiting for that pleasant glow which he experienced when in the nearness of Marga, the widow innkeeper. She was not as beautiful as many of the girls of his own tribe, but he did not feel in their presence what he felt in hers. She loved him for what he was, not what he did. He felt they were giving him counterfeit instead of the clink of real gold.

When the wind and the sun had dried the roads a Turkish merchant, coming from the other side of the Danube, brought them a load which he wished carried across into Hungary. Sava and half of his men, loaded with heavy packs, disappeared early one morning in different directions. And though the place where they had to deliver the merchandise was miles away from the inn of the widow, Sava found himself quite involuntarily stepping in the direction of Marga’s inn.

He told himself repeatedly he did not love her, that he went there only because he knew she was waiting for him--for him only....

His men thought it was useless audacity to go to Marga, with gendarmes watching about her place. At one point of the road a riding gendarme whizzed by. The gypsies looked at one another and looked at their chief. He answered with a broad smile and a nod of his head. He knew that gendarme was riding at top speed to warn the others of their coming. But the merchandise had already been delivered.

They were all in the inn when he opened the door. He greeted them with loud laughter. His running away had been a game. He and his men had won. Sava offered them wine.

“Let us drink like friends. What has been has been. Wine, Marga.”

The gendarmes refused. Yet they were unwilling to pick a fight with the gypsy, fearing that a far greater number than those who had come into the inn were outside ready to pounce upon them if they should attack Sava. They left the inn cursing and swearing.

When they had gone, Sava leaned over the counter and spoke to Marga:

“I have come to bid you good-morning. I had no time to bid you good-bye last time. Let’s drink a glass together if you have forgiven me.”

“Oh, Sava!” the widow answered, happy to touch his hand. “Let me drink from your glass. Sava! Sava!”

He looked deeply into her eyes as he held the glass to her lips, and asked:

“And if I had told you to come along with me, would you have come?”

She raised her eyes to his and he read the answer: “To the end of the world!”

He remained leaning over the counter, looking at her. The warmth emanating from her was so pleasant! Why did he not love her? What was it that prevented him from loving her as she loved him? She was young. She was beautiful! He did not love her. Yet he liked to be near her. Why?

Suddenly Marga awoke from her reverie. She bent Sava’s head to her lips and whispered in his ear:

“They have found out the underground passage. They have hidden a number of gendarmes within the tunnel.”

Sava looked at her gratefully, and called his men to him for a short conversation. One by one they went out. Sava was the last one to leave. He kissed the widow’s lips before going.

The gypsy smugglers disappeared in different directions. But they met a few minutes later near the narrow opening of the underground tunnel in which the gendarmes were hidden. One by one, they crawled in, under the eyes of Sava, who remained the last. Then he, too, crawled in and disappeared in the black hole.

Sava had hardly crawled in when gendarmes who had been hiding behind trees followed the gypsies, crawling cautiously after them.

The gypsies did not remain underground very long. They climbed out from a side entrance to the tunnel a hundred paces from the first. Then they blocked it up. And while half of Sava’s men were running at top speed over the forest to close up the other end of the subterranean passage, Sava and the others were hastily rolling huge boulders and stones to close up the entrance into which the gendarmes had just disappeared.

Leisurely, carrying the bags of contraband which had lain hidden in the forest, the gypsies, headed by loud-singing Sava, marched single file over the broad road across the border. The gendarmes were all safely bottled up.

When they reached their village, Sava’s men were prouder of their leader than they had ever been, and told how he had tricked the gendarmes and extricated them from their clutches. There were dances on the fresh green grass, while the fiddlers, sitting on empty barrels, were playing until their strings snapped and were singing at the top of their voices.

When the gaiety was at its height a tribe of horse-dealing gypsies joined the merriment. They were from the Dobrudja, from the other side of the Danube, where they had earned much gold in trading horses.

The welcome to the guest tribe knew no bounds. The men threw their arms about one another and patted one another’s shoulders. The women climbed down from the tent wagons, helped by the women of Sava’s tribe, while the young men watched them, and made comments as each one went down.

“Hey, you black-tressed, long-faced beauty! Where did you get your earrings?”

“Hey, you! Did you steal your eyes from the night?”

“Oh, there another one climbs down backward from the wagon, as if she were an old woman. Are your feet of glass or are your kneecaps of porcelain?”

The young women of Sava’s tribe received their blood sisters with much noise, fingered their dresses, looked at their jewels and inspected their bracelets and anklets, their bejeweled fingers and necklaces. They tugged at one another’s handkerchiefs and waved the fringes of the shawls. The children of one tribe began to get acquainted with the children of the other, vying with each other as to who could turn more somersaults at a stretch. The dogs barked and nosed at the newcomers’ dogs, then went out side by side to inspect the camp, for the odor of broiled meats was rising in the air, mingling with the odor of fried oil and garlic in which the tenderer morsels were already being stewed.

Sava was standing near his men, occasionally smiling at a clever sally, but never saying anything himself. When Tira, Chief Mincu’s daughter, jumped down from the rear end of her father’s wagon there was a cry of wonder from the throats of many men. She was no longer very young, as gypsies go, perhaps twenty-five. Her face was round and full and quiet. Her body, without being supple, was sinuous. Her movements were slow and stately. Her big eyes looked the men over quietly and appraisingly without any haste. Many a man lowered his head as she looked at him. Her glance rested a little longer on Sava than it did upon the other men. But it was only a fraction of a second that their eyes met.

The other young men looked at Sava to see the effect of the woman upon him, and realizing he had singled her out of all the women, they went about to take part in the general gaiety that was being staged. A little later, while the smoke was rising from the fire, and the savour of steam from the pots, the two tribes mingled freely, the young men from Chief Mincu’s tribe were already on terms of friendship with the girls from Sava’s tribe, while Sava’s young men were joking and laughing with the women of Mincu’s tribe.

Sava approached the chief and, greeting, sat down near him, saying, “I am Sava.”

“Oh, you are Sava?” Mincu answered, shaking his hand vigorously again. “They have just told me how you bottled the gendarmes up.”

And the shrewd old gypsy trader shook with laughter as he thumped Sava’s shoulder vigorously. Defeating the men of the law was great fun for all gypsies.

“And your daughter, what is her name?” Sava asked.

“Tira,” Mincu answered. “And though there have been five hundred and fifty men who have offered me wealth and riches that I should marry her to them, she has so far chosen to remain alone.”

He waxed enthusiastic. “In the Dobrudja a Tatar chief wanted to buy her from me, offering all his sheep, a thousand in number, for her. A Cherkess in Russia offered me, not very long ago, two of his best blood horses, for which I had offered him a thousand pieces of gold, that I should give her to him in marriage. She refused.”

“A thousand pieces of gold!” Sava repeated incredulously.

“A thousand pieces of gold,” Mincu asserted without flinching.

“And are you her father or her slave?” Sava questioned, looking the older man in the eyes.

“Her father,” Mincu answered. “But a woman like Tira should have her word in the choice of a husband.”

Sava looked at him, shrugged his shoulders, and rose to his feet. The dance had already begun. He walked slowly up to Tira and extended his right arm for her left one, to join with her in the circle that was already turning around to slow music, gathering speed for the whirl in which it should end.

With all her plumpness, she was as light as a feather. And her feet executed quick movements in the air before they were brought down again to the earth, as they turned around and around while the men were yelling “Hi! Hey!” from the fullness of their throats. At the completion of the circle one of the women was called upon to step out into the center of the circle to do a solo dance while the others turned around and around and clapped their hands:

“Mara! Mara! Mara! Mara!”

And Mara stepped out and danced. When Mara had returned to join arms with her partner another one was called. The young men and women of the other tribe were given first call, so that they might show the mettle of which they were made.

After the fourth round, the youth of Sava’s tribe began to call on Tira to step out and dance:

“Tira! Tira! Tira! Tira!”

Like a tiger Tira leaped into the center of the circle. Spinning like a top with her arms extended in front of her, she came to a dead stop, only to begin the same spin in the opposite direction. Her feet hardly touched the ground, while her head turned this side and that, looking at all of them provokingly, tantalizingly. When the music slowed up, she clasped her hands at her back, bringing her shoulders forward, and glided snakewise along the inner rim of the circle, measuring and weighing with her eyes the men of the other tribe.

When she reached Sava, she looked at him longer than at the others, and spinning around once more, she leaped as vigorously back to her place as she had broken out of it. There was no fatigue in her eyes. They were more luminous than before. Only the bosom rose and fell a little faster and the veins of her throat thickened.

There was a loud cry of admiration. Even the older men and women, forming an outer ring about the young people, were clapping their hands and calling loudly her name: “Tira! Tira! Tira!”

When the dance was over Sava tugged at Tira’s father’s coat.

“That we drink a glass of wine together, _cumetru_, father-in-law. Come where the wine is served.”

Mincu looked into Sava’s eyes as he rose to follow him.

“It is about Tira that I want to speak,” Sava said, after clinking glasses.

“What can you tell me of her that I do not already know?” the girl’s father laughed.

“You spoke of a thousand gold pieces, Mincu. But you meant silver pieces, did you not?”

“I spoke of a thousand gold pieces, which I have refused,” Mincu answered, putting down the empty glass.

“Maybe another glass of wine will teach you the difference between gold and silver,” Sava replied, winking at his men as he poured more wine for Mincu.

“The difference, my son, is the difference between you and me,” Mincu rejoined, while the people called out with admiration:

“Hey, Mincu! That’s Mincu!”