The Gypsies Part 18

"_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, p.r.o.nounce 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 _c.o.c.ks_, 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 b.u.t.ter. _How do you do it_? I asked him one day. 'Well, you wouldn't believe it,' said he; 'but they're mostly c.o.c.ks. 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 n.o.body 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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.

III. GYPSIES IN CAMP. (NEW JERSEY.)

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 const.i.tutes the ant.i.thetic 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 ma.s.ses 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 gra.s.s. 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 n.o.bility 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_!