The Weather had put on his very worst clothes, and was never so hard
at work for the agricultural interests, or so little inclined to see
visitors, as on the Sunday afternoon when I started gypsying. The rain
and the wind were fighting one with another, and both with the mud,
even as the Jews in Jerusalem fought with themselves, and both with the
Romans,—which was the time when the Shaket, or butcher, killed
the ox who drank the water which quenched the fire which the reader has
often heard all about, yet not knowing, perhaps, that the house which
Jack built was the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. It was with such
reflections that I beguiled time on a long walk, for which I was not
unfitly equipped in corduroy trousers, with a long Ulster and a most
disreputable cap befitting a stable-boy. The rig, however, kept out the
wet, and I was too recently from England to care much that it was
raining. I had seen the sun on color about thirty times altogether
during the past year, and so had not as yet learned to miss him. It is
on record that when the Shah was in England a lady said to him, “Can it
be possible, your highness, that there are in your dominions people who
worship the sun?” “Yes,” replied the monarch, musingly; “and so would
you, if you could only see him.”
The houses became fewer as I went on, till at last I reached the
place near which I knew the gypsies must be camped. As is their custom
in England, they had so established themselves as not to be seen from
the road. The instinct which they display in thus getting near people,
and yet keeping out of their sight, even as rats do, is remarkable. I
thought I knew the town of Brighton, in England, thoroughly, and had
explored all its nooks, and wondered that I had never found any gypsies
there. One day I went out with a Romany acquaintance, who, in a short
time, took me to half a dozen tenting-places, round corners in
mysterious by-ways. It often happens that the spots which they select
to hatch the tan, or pitch the tent, are picturesque bits, such
as artists love, and all gypsies are fully appreciative of beauty in
this respect. It is not a week, as I write, since I heard an old
horse-dealing veteran of the roads apologize to me with real feeling
for the want of a view near his tent, just as any other man might have
excused the absence of pictures from his walls. The most beautiful spot
for miles around Williamsport, in Pennsylvania, a river dell, which any
artist would give a day to visit, is the favorite camping-ground of the
Romany. Woods and water, rocks and loneliness, make it lovely by day,
and when, at eventide, the fire of the wanderers lights up the scene,
it also lights up in the soul many a memory of tents in the wilderness,
of pictures in the Louvre, of Arabs and of Wouvermanns and belated
walks by the Thames, and of Salvator Rosa. Ask me why I haunt gypsydom.
It has put me into a thousand sympathies with nature and art, which I
had never known without it. The Romany, like the red Indian, and all
who dwell by wood and wold as outlawes wont to do, are the best human
links to bind us to their home-scenery, and lead us into its inner
life. What constitutes the antithetic charm of those wonderful lines,
“Afar in the desert, I love to ride,
With the silent bush-boy alone by my side,”
but the presence of the savage who belongs to the scene, and whose
being binds the poet to it, and blends him with it as the flux
causes the fire to melt the gold?
I left the road, turned the corner, and saw before me the low, round
tents, with smoke rising from the tops, dark at first and spreading
into light gray, like scalp-locks and feathers upon Indian heads. Near
them were the gayly-painted vans, in which I at once observed a
difference from the more substantial-looking old-country vardo.
The whole scene was so English that I felt a flutter at the heart: it
was a bit from over the sea; it seemed as if hedge-rows should have
been round, and an old Gothic steeple looking over the trees. I thought
of the last gypsy camp I had seen near Henley-on-Thames, and wished
Plato Buckland were with me to share the fun which one was always sure
to have on such an occasion in his eccentric company. But now Plato
was, like his father in the song,
“Duro pardel the boro pani,”
Far away over the broad-rolling sea,
and I must introduce myself. There was not a sign of life about,
save in a sorrowful hen, who looked as if she felt bitterly what it was
to be a Pariah among poultry and a down-pin, and who cluttered as if
she might have had a history of being borne from her bower in the dark
midnight by desperate African reivers, of a wild moonlit flitting and
crossing black roaring torrents, drawn all the while by the neck, as a
Turcoman pulls a Persian prisoner on an “alaman,” with a rope, into
captivity, and finally of being sold unto the Egyptians. I drew near a
tent: all was silent, as it always is in a tan when the
foot-fall of the stranger is heard; but I knew that it was packed with
inhabitants.
I called in Romany my greeting, and bade somebody come out. And
there appeared a powerfully built, dark-browed, good-looking man of
thirty, who was as gypsy as Plato himself. He greeted me very civilly,
but with some surprise, and asked me what he could do for me.
“Ask me in out of the rain, pal,” I replied. “You don't suppose I've
come four miles to see you and stop out here, do you?”
This was, indeed, reasonable, and I was invited to enter, which I
did, and found myself in a scene which would have charmed Callot or
Goya. There was no door or window to the black tent; what light there
was came through a few rifts and rents and mingled with the dull gleam
of a smoldering fire, producing a perfect Rembrandt blending of
rosy-red with dreamy half-darkness. It was a real witch-aura, and the
denizens were worthy of it. As my eyes gradually grew to the gloom, I
saw that on one side four brown old Romany sorceresses were “beshing
apre ye pus” (sitting on the straw), as the song has it, with
deeper masses of darkness behind them, in which other forms were barely
visible. Their black eyes all flashed up together at me, like those of
a row of eagles in a cage; and I saw in a second that, with men and all
I was in a party who were anything but milksops; in fact, with as
regularly determined a lot of hard old Romanys as ever battered a
policeman. I confess that a feeling like a thrill of joy came over
me—a memory of old days and by-gone scenes over the sea—when I saw
this, and knew they were not diddikais, or half-breed mumpers.
On the other side, several young people, among them three or four
good-looking girls, were eating their four-o'clock meal from a canvas
spread on the ground. There were perhaps twenty persons in the place,
including the children who swarmed about.
Even in a gypsy tent something depends on the style of a
self-introduction by a perfect stranger. Stepping forward, I divested
myself of my Ulster, and handed it to a nice damsel, giving her special
injunction to fold it up and lay it by. My mise en scene
appeared to meet with approbation, and I stood forth and remarked,—
“Here I am, glad to see you; and if you want to see a regular
Romany rye [gypsy gentleman], just over from England, now's your
chance. Sarishan!”
And I received, as I expected, a cordial welcome. I was invited to
sit down and eat, but excused myself as having just come from habben, or food, and settled myself to a cigar. But while everybody was
polite, I felt that under it all there was a reserve, a chill. I was
altogether too heavy a mystery. I knew my friends, and they did not
know me. Something, however, now took place which went far to promote
conviviality. The tent-flap was lifted, and there entered an elderly
woman, who, as a gypsy, might have been the other four in one, she was
so quadruply dark, so fourfold uncanny, so too-too witch-like in her
eyes. The others had so far been reserved as to speaking Romany; she,
glancing at me keenly, began at once to talk it very fluently, without
a word of English, with the intention of testing me; but as I
understood her perfectly, and replied with a burning gush of the same
language, being, indeed, glad to have at last “got into my plate,” we
were friends in a minute. I did not know then that I was talking with a
celebrity whose name has even been groomily recorded in an English
book; but I found at once that she was truly “a character.” She had
manifestly been sent for to test the stranger, and I knew this, and
made myself agreeable, and was evidently found tacho, or all
right. It being a rule, in fact, with few exceptions, that when you
really like people, in a friendly way, and are glad to be among them,
they never fail to find it out, and the jury always comes to a
favorable verdict.
And so we sat and talked on in the monotone in which Romany is
generally spoken, like an Indian song, while, like an Indian drum, the
rain pattered an accompaniment on the tightly drawn tent. Those who
live in cities, and who are always realizing self, and thinking how
they think, and are while awake given up to introverting vanity, never
live in song. To do this one must be a child, an Indian, a dweller
in fields and green forests, a brother of the rain and road-puddles and
rolling streams, and a friend of the rustling leaves and the summer
orchestra of frogs and crickets and rippling grass. Those who hear this
music and think to it never think about it; those who live only in
books never sing to it in soul. As there are dreams which will not
be remembered or known to reason, so this music shrinks from it.
It is wonderful how beauty perishes like a shade-grown flower before
the sunlight of analysis. It is dying out all the world over in women,
under the influence of cleverness and “style;” it is perishing in
poetry and art before criticism; it is wearing away from manliness,
through priggishness; it is being crushed out of true gentleness of
heart and nobility of soul by the pessimist puppyism of miching
Mallockos. But nature is eternal and will return. When man has run one
of his phases of culture fairly to the end, and when the fruit is
followed by a rattling rococo husk, then comes a winter sleep, from
which he awakens to grow again as a child-flower. We are at the very
worst of such a time; but there is a morning redness far away, which
shows that the darkness is ending, the winter past, the rain is over
and gone. Arise, and come away!
“Sossi kair'd tute to av'akai pardel o boro pani?” (And what made
you come here across the broad water?) said the good old dame
confidentially and kindly, in the same low monotone. “Si lesti chorin a
gry?” (Was it stealing a horse?)
Dum, dum, dum, patter, patter,
dum! played the rain.
“Avali I dikked your romus kaliko” (I saw your husband yesterday),
remarked some one aside to a girl.
Dum, dum, dum, patter, patter,
dum!
“No, mother deari, it was not a horse, for I am on a better, higher
lay.”
Dum, dum, dum, patter, patter,
dum!
“He is a first-rate dog, but mine's as good.”
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
“Tacho! There's money to be made by a gentleman like you by telling
fortunes.”
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
“Yes, a five-hundred-dollar hit sometimes. But dye, I work
upon a better lay.”
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
“Perhaps you are a boro drabengro” (a great physician).
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
“It was away among the rocks that he fell into the reeds, half in
the water, and kept still till they went by.”
“If any one is ill among you, I may be of use.”
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
“And what a wind! It blows as if the good Lord were singing! Kushti
chirus se atch a-kerri.” (This is a pleasant day to be at home.)
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
“I thought you were a doctor, for you were going about in the town
with the one who sells medicine. I heard of it.”
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
“Do not hurry away! Come again and see us. I think the Coopers are
all out in Ohio.”
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!
The cold wind and slight rain seemed refreshing and even welcome, as
I went out into the cold air. The captain showed me his stock of
fourteen horses and mules, and we interchanged views as to the best
method of managing certain maladies in such stock. I had been most
kindly entertained; indeed, with the home kindliness which good people
in the country show to some hitherto unseen and unknown relative who
descends to them from the great world of the city. Not but that my
friends did not know cities and men as well as Ulysses, but even
Ulysses sometimes met with a marvel. In after days I became quite
familiar with the several families who made the camp, and visited them
in sunshine. But they always occur to me in memory as in a deep
Rembrandt picture, a wonderful picture, and their voices as in vocal
chiaroscuro; singing to the wind without and the rain on the tent,—
Dum, dum, dum, patter, dum!