Later, after we had concluded our visit to Nyby, we sought out the master-fiddler at home. You might think that a man so gifted, so recognised, betitled indeed, would be in fairly affluent circumstances. But the master-fiddler had not grown rich through his art. His revenues are spasmodic, and, as often as not, in order to widen his public, he has to turn vagrant, to fling out-o'doors accompanied by his son, and to wander into provinces where his reputation has not penetrated, where his proud title bears little meaning till he has proved it. Hard times they have suffered often enough, and stark stories he has of days when he and stolid Erik were adrift in unknown places, almost penniless, sleeping in the woods, earning a meal with their violins at some lonely farm, staking their last kroner on the hire of a village schoolroom, and the posting of a few all too modest announcements. He lives in a pine-wood near a sandpit, a wood thinly populated with new settlers, two miles from a village. His house is of the simplest and is yet incomplete, for he is building it himself, and in the manual labour finds an occupation which soothes his excitable, strange, southernish self. His building is a balance weight, and he is prouder of his newmade pig-sty than he is of his VI. exquisite polskas. His house, all of wood, has a porch and two rooms-kitchen and living room,-the bedroom upstairs being still incomplete. His raw garden grows potatoes, and for his fruit he can gather as many bilberries, whortleberries, and cloud berries as he will from the surrounding woods. Here he keeps his permanent ties, his mother peering with eightyyear-old face from her cowl of close-drawn kerchief, musician also, who taught him the guitar in his younger days. Here lives his pale Nordic wife and his silver-haired children-the family of a labourer, but of one who by chance gifts labours in music instead of labouring the earth. Art is not of necessity aristocratic, however fine its quality; the carvers of Chartres were no less labourers than is our fiddler. Yokel inertia composed of pride and of bashfulness was even more marked in this district than it had been at Nyby. The prophet has no honour in his own country; our masterfiddler was held in little respect in his own place. His eagerness, his enthusiasms, his liveliness of temper naturally estranged him from the stolid Lutherans who dictated village manners here. His semivagrant life, his apparent unproductiveness, even his title aroused their criticism and their envy. By the irony of fate they did not dance in the in that piece of wood is concealing a man, or a woman, or a child. The wood is crowded with folk who are hiding and listening to the music." master fiddler's village; the yet I tell you that every tree harmonium was their favourite instrument, and the public fiddle hanging in the village hostel was more often silent than played upon. Nevertheless they were inquisitive, and our visit fully aroused curiosity. We stayed two days with the master fiddler, learning Swedish tunes from him and teaching him melodies of Spain -a mutual musical barter. From early morning till late at night we played one to the other till our melodies were exhausted and our fingers had become sore at the tips. On the second evening of our stay the master-fiddler, who had gone outside, came in, laughing to himself. Rhetoric or rhetorical painting has gone out of fashion, yet we would conjure up a Rubens or a Guido Reni to paint us an apotheosis. Set us up the master-fiddler on rolling clouds of glory, his hair would make his own aureole; let him have the concentric rings of a polska contest, spinning Swedish youths and maidens, as adorati, with a few fat and chubby Swedish children for cherubim to fill up the corners of the frame, and you'll see as honest an apotheosis as any you will find in the Art Galleries. Good-bye, master-fiddler, Ave atque Vale. For how much of sweetness will be gone from the world at that time when the gramophone and the wireless, the accordion and prohibitions, shall have banished you and your jolly fellows off to potionless almshouses. FROM THE OUTPOSTS. SHERANI VIGNETTES. BY J. COATMAN. I. WITH THE FRONTIER CONSTABULARY. THE Frontier Constabulary pire, apart from the island posts lie along and across the itself. border of British India, from Oghi away at the foot of the Black Mountain in the north, to the Sherani posts in the far south, where the Frontier Province and Balochistan come together in a tangle of sunscorched and God-forsaken hills. Life is always hard in the Frontier Constabulary, but nowhere else is it so hard as in Draban, the headquarters for the Sherani country. For there, in addition to the rigours of a harsh unfriendly land, and the neighbourhood of savage tribes, the Constabulary officer is a lonely man. Forty miles lie between him and the nearest of his own kind in Dera Ismail Khan, forty miles of sparselypeopled wilderness through which runs a mere track, for ever dipping down into unbridged nullahs which a shower of rain in the hills may turn into treacherous and unfordable torrents. It is true that Oghi lies equally distant from the nearest settlement of British folk, but from there it is an easy ride to Khaki, whence a car will take one in an hour into Abbottabad, the most homelike place in all our Em There is nothing homely about Draban. In my time the Constabulary inhabited an antiquated mud fort, built originally by the Sikhs, quarter of a mile west of the squalid native village. Behind and on both sides stretched the bare repellent waste. In front lay the great stony slope which led up to the passes of Chaudwan Zam and Draban Zam, which are the gates of the Sherani country. In the cold weather it is not so bad, because then a man may shoot and fish and course with his Rampur hounds, and fever is not too heavy on him. Also, the British officers of the district, the Deputy Commissioner, the Superintendent of Police, Garrison Engineers, come to Draban on tour. They, good fellows, have gone through the same thing themselves, and they know how eagerly their coming is awaited. It is different in the hot weather. Then the desert all round becomes one of the hottest parts of the earth's surface, and the hours during which one would willingly walk abroad are very few. Fever holds the land in its grip, and sometimes, for days together, the lonely Englishman can do nothing but lie on his bed and watch the shadows creeping round the high whitewashed walls. But, fever or no, winter and summer alike, he must be constantly on the move with his men about the business of keeping the King's peace within the Indian border. Marching and countermarching, whether the temperature is at 130° in the shade or below freezing point, lying out at nights, chilled to the marrow, or tormented by mosquitoes and parched by hot desert winds, in fierce little lone-hand skirmishes or in regular military operations, they must do their job as befits men who bear the honourable title of Constabulary. And yet if the four or five British officers who have served in Draban were asked what they thought of the place, they would all reply that the days they spent there were among the happiest of their lives. The reason for this apparent eccentricity is the Sherani country. The Sherani country is a little world in itself. The march of civilisation and political developments to the east, in India, affect it not at all. Tribal movements to the north and west produce no reflex here. Only a rare upheaval like the special circumstances of the last Afghan War can disturb the surface of that placid life. Noli me tangere is the Sherani motto, and because every Englishman is a crusted Tory at heart, he falls in love with the shy primitive folk. The King's writ stops at the foot of the stony ramp outside Draban. All we ask of the Sheranis is that they leave our border in peace, and refrain from shocking our sensibilities by murdering each other too freely. They are allowed to run their own show, but may appeal to our Political Officers in severe disputes. Hardly any dues are demanded of them, and these in any case amount to less than the subsidy which a paternal Government pays the tribe in consideration of its good behaviour. The Constabulary are the embodiment of the King Emperor's suzerainty, and the British officer's position is not unlike that of a Warden of the Marches of old England. He must be ceaselessly patrolling the highways and byways of his jurisdiction, collecting political information, keeping outlaws on the move, watching the passes and nullahs against the movements of raiding gangs, seeing that grazing and other disputes are not allowed to develop into bloodshed, pouring oil wherever the waters are troubled. When a Sherani's action has brought him into with the political authorities, it is the duty of the Constabulary to hale him to justice. And since in tribal country such a task is invariably a minor military operation, there is much surrounding of villages by night, house searches in the grey of early morning, and picketing through the hills back to the fort against a possible rescue by the culprit's clansmen. These little jobs are not always peaceful, and now and again a corpse or two lying on the hillside will mark the scene of a skirmish, or the Constabulary will carry back one of their own number dead or wounded. Once a month we take the convoy for Fort Sandeman in Zhob up through the Sherani country. It assembles in Draban, a motley collection of traders, sepoys, and recruits of the Zhob Militia and Balochistan Police, wives and families, and civilians going up on business or on visits to friends. Supplies for the Militia and Military Works and merchandise of all descriptions go up with the convcy. I have known as many as a thousand camels in one convoy, and only those who have had to deal with camels in the mass can know what that means. The first day we take the convoy to Domanda, the first of our posts along the Zhob road. This is the most anxious part of the march, since the road lies across favourite raiding routes of the Mahsuds and passes by the ill-omened Inzar Wam, always a favourite place for ambushes and onfalls. The through a narrow gut on to the broad raghza or plateau, at the far end of which is our most distant outpost, outpost, Moghalkot. The third day's march is a short one, only seven miles, to the great rock, Katao Dabra, where Balochistan begins, and the Zhob Militia wait to relieve us of our charge. At the very beginning of the march we plunge into the wonderful Chuhar Khel gorge, where the sun never shines, and where the camels are dwarfed into absolute insignificance against the mighty faces of rock. Up in the picket positions the days are long, and in the hot weather the limit of human endurance is quickly reached. But fortunately the convoys are small in the hot days. The sleek timorous traders, the brightly dressed women, silent for once in face of the grim possibilities of the frontier hills, the swaggering devil-may-care sepoys and sturdy camel-men, the noisy ill-conditioned beasts themselves, the shoutings, quarrels, sudden mishaps, and clamorous repairing of their damage, all blend into a scene entirely Asiatic and thoroughly fascinating. Then at Katao Dabra there is always an interesting exchange of news of battle, murder, and sudden death with the Zhob Militia. Inzar Wam is a line of low cliffs commanding the whole of the nullah bed, and it was It is impossible to be bored here that a Sub-Divisional Offi- in the Sherani country, for cer of the Military Works De- there is always something out partment was ambushed and of the common happening there. murdered in January 1916. Even to go from one post to The second day the convoy another is an adventure, and slowly climbs the slope of the we have been fired at within nullah bed, and winds up two hundred yards of Domanda |