It was a fine spring noon, and the corner of Fourth and Library
streets in Philadelphia was like a rock in the turn of a rapid river,
so great was the crowd of busy business men which flowed past. Just out
of the current a man paused, put down a parcel which he carried, turned
it into a table, placed on it several vials, produced a bundle of
hand-bills, and began, in the language of his tribe, to cant
—that is, cantare, to sing—the virtues of a medicine which was
certainly patent in being spread out by him to extremest
thinness. In an instant there were a hundred people round him. He
seemed to be well known and waited for. I saw at a glance what he was.
The dark eye and brown face indicated a touch of the diddikai,
or one with a little gypsy blood in his veins, while his fluent patter
and unabashed boldness showed a long familiarity with race-grounds and
the road, or with the Cheap-Jack and Dutch auction business, and other
pursuits requiring unlimited eloquence and impudence. How many a man of
learning, nay of genius, might have paused and envied that vagabond the
gifts which were worth so little to their possessor! But what was
remarkable about him was that instead of endeavoring to conceal any
gypsy indications, they were manifestly exaggerated. He wore a
broad-brimmed hat and ear-rings and a red embroidered waistcoat of the
most forcible old Romany pattern, which was soon explained by his
words.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “I am always sorry to detain a
select and genteel audience. But I was detained myself by a very
interesting incident. I was invited to lunch with a wealthy German
gentleman; a very wealthy German, I say, one of the pillars of your
city and front door-step of your council, and who would be the steeple
of your exchange, if it had one. And on arriving at his house he
remarked, 'Toctor, by tam you koom yust in goot dime, for mine frau und
die cook ish bote fall sick mit some-ding in a hoory, und I kess she'll
die pooty quick-sudden.' Unfortunately I had with me, gentlemen, but a
single dose of my world-famous Gypsy's Elixir and Romany
Pharmacopheionepenthe. (That is the name, gentlemen, but as I detest
quackery I term it simply the Gypsy's Elixir.) When the German
gentleman learned that in all probability but one life could be saved
he said, 'Veil, denn, doctor, subbose you gifes dat dose to de cook.
For mine frau ish so goot dat it's all right mit her. She's reaty to
tie. But de boor gook ish a sinner, ash I knows, und not reaty for de
next world. And dere ish no vomans in town dat can gook mine
sauer-kraut ash she do.' Fortunately, gentlemen, I found in an unknown
corner of a forgotten pocket an unsuspected bottle of the Gypsy's
Elixir, and both interesting lives were saved with such promptitude,
punctuality, neatness and dispatch that the cook proceeded immediately
to conclude the preparation of our meal—(thank you sir,—one dollar,
if you please, sir. You say I only charged half a dollar yesterday!
That was for a smaller bottle, sir. Same size, as this, was it? Ah,
yes, I gave you a large bottle by mistake,—so you owe me fifty cents.
Never mind, don't give it back. I'll take the half dollar.”)
All of this had been spoken with the utmost volubility. As I
listened I almost fancied myself again in England, and at a country
fair. Taking in his audience at a glance, I saw his eye rest on me ere
it flitted, and he resumed,—
“We gypsies are, as you know, a remarkable race, and possessed of
certain rare secrets, which have all been formulated, concentrated,
dictated, and plenipotentiarated into this idealized Elixir. If I were
a mountebank or a charlatan I would claim that it cures a hundred
diseases. Charlatan is a French word for a quack. I speak French,
gentlemen; I speak nine languages, and can tell you the Hebrew for an
old umbrella. The Gypsy's Elixir cures colds, gout, all nervous
affections, with such cutaneous disorders as are diseases of the skin,
debility, sterility, hostility, and all the illities that flesh is heir
to except what it can't, such as small-pox and cholera. It has cured
cholera, but it don't claim to do it. Others claim to cure, but can't.
I am not a charlatan, but an Ann-Eliza. That is the difference between
me and a lady, as the pig said when he astonished his missus by
blushing at her remarks to the postman. (Better have another bottle, sir. Haven't you the change? Never mind, you
can owe me fifty cents. I know a gentleman when I see one.)
I was recently Down East in Maine, where they are so patriotic, they
all put the stars and stripes into their beds for sheets, have the
Fourth of July three hundred and sixty-five times in the year, and eat
the Declaration of Independence for breakfast. And they wouldn't buy a
bottle of my Gypsy's Elixir till they heard it was good for the
Constitution, whereupon they immediately purchased my entire stock.
Don't lose time in securing this invaluable blessing to those who feel
occasional pains in the lungs. This is not taradiddle. I am engaged to
lecture this afternoon before the Medical Association of Germantown, as
on Wednesday before the University of Baltimore; for though I sell
medicine here in the streets, it is only, upon my word of honor, that
the poor may benefit, and the lowly as well as the learned know how to
prize the philanthropic and eccentric gypsy.”
He run on with his patter for some time in this vein, and sold
several vials of his panacea, and then in due time ceased, and went
into a bar-room, which I also entered. I found him in what looked like
prospective trouble, for a policeman was insisting on purchasing his
medicine, and on having one of his hand-bills. He was remonstrating,
when I quietly said to him in Romany, “Don't trouble yourself; you were
not making any disturbance.” He took no apparent notice of what I said
beyond an almost imperceptible wink, but soon left the room, and when I
had followed him into the street, and we were out of ear-shot, he
suddenly turned on me and said,—
“Well, you are a swell, for a Romany. How do you do it up to
such a high peg?”
“Do what?”
“Do the whole lay,—look so gorgeous?”
“Why, I'm no better dressed than you are,—not so well, if you come
to that vongree” (waistcoat).
“'T isn't that,—'t isn't the clothes. It's the air and the
style. Anybody'd believe you'd had no end of an education. I could make
ten dollars a patter if I could do it as natural as you do. Perhaps
you'd like to come in on halves with me as a bonnet. No? Well, I
suppose you have a better line. You've been lucky. I tell you, you
astonished me when you rakkered, though I spotted you in the
crowd for one who was off the color of the common Gorgios,—or, as the
Yahudi say, the Goyim. No, I carn't rakker, or none to
speak of, and noways as deep as you, though I was born in a tent on
Battersea Common and grew up a fly fakir. What's the drab made of that
I sell in these bottles? Why, the old fake, of course,—you needn't say
you don't know that. Italic good English. Yes, I know I do.
A fakir is bothered out of his life and chaffed out of half his
business when he drops his h's. A man can do anything when he
must, and I must talk fluently and correctly to succeed in such a
business. Would I like a drop of something? You paid for the
last, now you must take a drop with me. Do I know of any Romany's in
town? Lots of them. There is a ken in Lombard Street with a regular
fly mort,—but on second thoughts we won't go there,—and—oh, I
say—a very nice place in —-Street. The landlord is a Yahud; his wife
can rakker you, I'm sure. She's a good lot, too.”
And while on the way I will explain that my acquaintance was not to
be regarded as a real gypsy. He was one of that large nomadic class
with a tinge of gypsy blood who have grown up as waifs and strays, and
who, having some innate cleverness, do the best they can to live
without breaking the law—much. They deserve pity, for they have never
been cared for; they owe nothing to society for kindness, and yet they
are held even more strictly to account by the law than if they had been
regularly Sunday-schooled from babyhood. This man when he spoke of
Romanys did not mean real gypsies; he used the word as it occurs in
Ainsworth's song of
“Nix my dolly, pals fake away.
And here I am both tight and free,
A regular rollicking Romany.”
For he meant Bohemian in its widest and wildest sense, and to
him all that was apart from the world was his world, whether it
was Rom or Yahudi, and whether it conversed in Romany or Schmussen, or
any other tongue unknown to the Gentiles. He had indeed no home, and
had never known one.
It was not difficult to perceive that the place to which he led me
was devoted in the off hours to some other business besides the selling
of liquor. It was neat and quiet, in fact rather sleepy; but its card,
which was handed to me, stated in a large capital head-line that it was
OPEN ALL NIGHT, and that there was pool at all hours. I conjectured
that a little game might also be performed there at all hours, and
that, like the fountain of Jupiter Ammon, it became livelier as it grew
later, and that it certainly would not be on the full boil before
midnight.
“Scheiker fur mich, der Isch will jain soreff shaskenen
“ (Beer for me and brandy for him), I said to the landlord, who at once
shook my hand and saluted me with Sholem! Even so did Ben Daoud
of Jerusalem, not long ago. Ben knew me not, and I was buying a
pocket-book of him at his open-air stand in Market Street, and talking
German, while he was endeavoring to convince me that I ought to give
five cents more for it than I had given for a similar case the day
before, on the ground that it was of a different color, or under color
that the leather had a different ground, I forget which. In talking I
let fall the word kesef (silver). In an instant Ben had taken my
hand, and said Sholem aleichum, and “Can you talk
Spanish?”—which was to show that he was superfine Sephardi, and not
common Ashkenaz.
“Yes,” resumed the crocus-fakir; “a man must be able to talk English
very fluently, pronounce it correctly, and, above all things, keep his
temper, if he would do anything that requires chanting or pattering.
How did I learn it? A man can learn to do anything when it's
business and his living depends on it. The people who crowd around me
in the streets cannot pronounce English decently; not one in a thousand
here can say laugh, except as a sheep says it. Suppose that you
are a Cheap Jack selling things from a van. About once in an hour some
tipsy fellow tries to chaff you. He hears your tongue going, and that
sets his off. He hears the people laugh at your jokes, and he wants
them to laugh at his. When you say you're selling to raise money for a
burned-out widow, he asks if she isn't your wife. Then you answer him,
'No, but the kind-hearted old woman who found you on the door-step and
brought you up to the begging business.' If you say you are selling
goods under cost, it's very likely some yokel will cry out, 'Stolen,
hey?' And you patter as quick as lightning, 'Very likely; I thought
your wife sold 'em to me too cheap for the good of somebody's
clothes-line.' If you show yourself his superior in language awd wit,
the people will buy better; they always prefer a gentleman to a cad.
Bless me! why, a swell in a dress-coat and kid gloves, with good patter
and hatter, can sell a hundred rat-traps while a dusty cad in a flash
kingsman would sell one. As for the replies, most of them are old ones.
As the men who interrupt you are nearly all of the same kind, and have
heads of very much the same make, with an equal number of corners, it
follows that they all say nearly the same things. Why, I've heard two
duffers cry out the same thing at once to me. So you soon have answers
cut and dried for them. We call 'em cocks, because they're just
like half-penny ballads, all ready printed, while the pitcher always
has the one you want ready at his finger-ends. It is the same in all
canting. I knew a man once who got his living by singing of evenings in
the gaffs to the piano, and making up verses on the gentlemen and
ladies as they came in; and very nice verses he made, too,—always as
smooth as butter. How do you do it? I asked him one day. 'Well,
you wouldn't believe it,' said he; 'but they're mostly cocks. The best
ones I buy for a tanner [sixpence] apiece. If a tall gentleman with a
big beard comes in, I strike a deep chord and sing,—
“'This tall and handsome party,
With such a lot of hair,
Who seems so grand and hearty,
Must be a militaire;
We like to see a swell come
Who looks so distingue,
So let us bid him welcome,
And hope he'll find us gay.'
“The last half can be used for anybody. That's the way the
improvisatory business is managed for visitors. Why, it's the same with
fortune-telling. You have noticed that. Well, if the Gorgios
had, it would have been all up with the fake long ago. The old woman
has the same sort of girls come to her with the same old stories, over
and over again, and she has a hundred dodges and gets a hundred
straight tips where nobody else would see anything; and of course she
has the same replies all ready. There is nothing like being glib. And
there's really a great deal of the same in the regular doctor business,
as I know, coming close on to it and calling myself one. Why, I've been
called into a regular consultation in Chicago, where I had an
office,—'pon my honor I was, and no great honor neither. It was all
patter, and I pattered 'em dumb.”
I began to think that the fakir could talk forever and ever faster.
If he excelled in his business, he evidently practiced at all times to
do so. I intimated as much, and he at once proceeded fluently to
illustrate this point also.
“You hear men say every day that if they only had an education they
would do great things. What it would all come to with most of them is
that they would talk so as to shut other men up and astonish
'em. They have not an idea above that. I never had any schooling but
the roads and race-grounds, but I can talk the hat off a lawyer, and
that's all I can do. Any man of them could talk well if he tried; but
none of them will try, and as they go through life, telling you how
clever they'd have been if somebody else had only done something for
them, instead of doing something for themselves. So you must be going.
Well, I hope I shall see you again. Just come up when you're going by
and say that your wife was raised from the dead by my Elixir, and that
it's the best medicine you ever had. And if you want to see some
regular tent gypsies, there's a camp of them now just four miles from
here; real old style Romanys. Go out on the road four miles, and you'll
find them just off the side,—anybody will show you the place.
Sarishan!”
I was sorry to read in the newspaper, a few days after, that the
fakir had been really arrested and imprisoned for selling a quack
medicine. For in this land of liberty it makes an enormous difference
whether you sell by advertisement in the newspapers or on the sidewalk,
which shows that there is one law for the rich and another for the
poor, even in a republic.