It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and I was walking down Chestnut
Street, Philadelphia, when I met with three very dark men.
Dark men are not rarities in my native city. There is, for instance,
Eugene, who has the invaluable faculty of being able to turn his hand
to an infinite helpfulness in the small arts. These men were darker
than Eugene, but they differed from him in this, that while he is a man
of color, they were not. For in America the man of Aryan blood, however
dark he may be, is always “off” color, while the lightest-hued quadroon
is always on it. Which is not the only paradox connected with the
descendants of Africans of which I have heard.
I saw at a glance that these dark men were much nearer to the old
Aryan stock than are even my purely white readers. For they were more
recently from India, and they could speak a language abounding in
Hindi, in pure old Sanskrit, and in Persian. Yet they would make no
display of it; on the contrary, I knew that they would be very likely
at first to deny all knowledge thereof, as well as their race and
blood. For they were gypsies; it was very apparent in their eyes, which
had the Gitano gleam as one seldom sees it in England. I confess that I
experienced a thrill as I exchanged glances with them. It was a long
time since I had seen a Romany, and, as usual, I knew that I was going
to astonish them. They were singularly attired, having very good
clothes of a quite theatrical foreign fashion, bearing silver buttons
as large as and of the shape of hen's eggs. Their hair hung in black
ringlets down their shoulders, and I saw that they had come from the
Austrian Slavonian land.
I addressed the eldest in Italian. He answered fluently and
politely. I changed to Ilirski or Illyrian and to Serb, of which I have
a few phrases in stock. They spoke all these languages fluently, for
one was a born Illyrian and one a Serb. They also spoke Nemetz, or
German; in fact, everything except English.
“Have you got through all your languages?” I at last inquired.
“Tutte, signore,—all of them.”
“Isn't there one left behind, which you have forgotten? Think
a minute.”
“No, signore. None.”
“What, not one! You know so many that perhaps a language more
or less makes no difference to you.”
“By the Lord, signore, you have seen every egg in the basket.”
I looked him fixedly in the eyes, and said, in a low tone,—
“Ne rakesa tu Romanes miro prala?”
There was a startled glance from one to the other, and a silence. I
had asked him if he could not talk Romany. And I added,—
“Won't you talk a word with a gypsy brother?”
That moved them. They all shook my hands with great feeling,
expressing intense joy and amazement at meeting with one who knew them.
“Mishto hom me dikava tute.” (I am glad to see you.) So they
told me how they were getting on, and where they were camped, and how
they sold horses, and so on, and we might have got on much farther had
it not been for a very annoying interruption. As I was talking to the
gypsies, a great number of men, attracted by the sound of a foreign
language, stopped, and fairly pushed themselves up to us, endeavoring
to make it all out. When there were at least fifty, they crowded in
between me and the foreigners, so that I could hardly talk to them. The
crowd did not consist of ordinary people, or snobs. They were well
dressed,—young clerks, at least,—who would have fiercely resented
being told that they were impertinent.
“Eye-talians, ain't they?” inquired one man, who was evidently
zealous in pursuit of knowledge.
“Why don't you tell us what they are sayin'?”
“What kind of fellers air they, any way?”
I was desirous of going with the Hungarian Roms. But to walk along
Chestnut Street with an augmenting procession of fifty curious Sunday
promenaders was not on my card. In fact, I had some difficulty in
tearing myself from the inquisitive, questioning, well-dressed people.
The gypsies bore the pressure with the serene equanimity of cosmopolite
superiority, smiling at provincial rawness. Even so in China and Africa
the traveler is mobbed by the many, who, there as here, think that “I
want to know” is full excuse for all intrusiveness. Q'est tout comme
chez nous. I confess that I was vexed, and, considering that it was
in my native city, mortified.
A few days after I went out to the tan where these Roms had
camped. But the birds had flown, and a little pile of ashes and the
usual debris of a gypsy camp were all that remained. The police told me
that they had some very fine horses, and had gone to the Northwest; and
that is all I ever saw of them.
I have heard of a philanthropist who was turned into a misanthrope
by attempting to sketch in public and in galleries. Respectable
strangers, even clergymen, would stop and coolly look over his
shoulder, and ask questions, and give him advice, until he could work
no longer. Why is it that people who would not speak to you for life
without an introduction should think that their small curiosity to see
your sketches authorizes them to act as aquaintances? Or why is the
pursuit of knowledge assumed among the half-bred to be an excuse for so
much intrusion? “I want to know.” Well, and what if you do? The man who
thinks that his desire for knowledge is an excuse for impertinence—and
there are too many who act on this in all sincerity—is of the kind who
knocks the fingers off statues, because “he wants them” for his
collection; who chips away tombstones, and hews down historic trees,
and not infrequently steals outright, and thinks that his pretense of
culture is full excuse for all his mean deeds. Of this tribe is the man
who cuts his name on all walls and smears it on the pyramids, to
proclaim himself a fool to the world; the difference being that,
instead of wanting to know anything, he wants everybody to know that
His Littleness was once in a great place.
I knew a distinguished artist, who, while in the East, only secured
his best sketch of a landscape by employing fifty men to keep off the
multitude. I have seen a strange fellow take a lady's sketch out of her
hand, excusing himself with the remark that he was so fond of pictures.
Of course my readers do not act thus. When they are passing through the
Louvre or British Museum they never pause and overlook artists, despite
the notices requesting them not to do so. Of course not. Yet I once
knew a charming young American lady, who scouted the idea as nonsense
that she should not watch artists at work. “Why, we used to make up
parties for the purpose of looking at them!” she said. “It was half the
fun of going there. I'm sure the artists were delighted to get a chance
to talk to us.” Doubtless. And yet there are really very few artists
who do not work more at their ease when not watched, and I have known
some to whom such watching was misery. They are not, O intruder,
painting for your amusement!
This is not such a far cry from my Romanys as it may seem. When I
think of what I have lost in this life by impertinence coming between
me and gypsies, I feel that it could not be avoided. The proportion of
men, even of gentlemen, or of those who dress decently, who cannot see
another well-dressed man talking with a very poor one in public,
without at once surmising a mystery, and endeavoring to solve it, is
amazing. And they do not stop at a trifle, either.
It is a marked characteristic of all gypsies that they are quite
free from any such mean intrusiveness. Whether it is because they
themselves are continually treated as curiosities, or because great
knowledge of life in a small way has made them philosophers, I will not
say, but it is a fact that in this respect they are invariably the
politest people in the world. Perhaps their calm contempt of the
galerly, or green Gorgios, is founded on a consciousness of their
superiority in this matter.
The Hungarian gypsy differs from all his brethren of Europe in being
more intensely gypsy. He has deeper, wilder, and more original feeling
in music, and he is more inspired with a love of travel. Numbers of
Hungarian Romany chals—in which I include all Austrian gypsies—travel
annually all over Europe, but return as regularly to their own country.
I have met with them exhibiting bears in Baden-Baden. These Ricinari,
or bear-leaders, form, however, a set within a set, and are in fact
more nearly allied to the gypsy bear-leaders of Turkey and Syria than
to any other of their own people. They are wild and rude to a proverb,
and generally speak a peculiar dialect of Romany, which is called the
Bear-leaders' by philologists. I have also seen Syrian-gypsy Ricinari
in Cairo. Many of the better caste make a great deal of money, and some
are rich. Like all really pure-blooded gypsies, they have deep
feelings, which are easily awakened by kindness, but especially by
sympathy and interest.