Theodore Watts-Dunton Part 8

Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with every dappled coat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true 'Child of the Open Air.'

'Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?' I murmured to Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said in a dreamy way, 'Old England! Old England!'

It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham's arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the trees, 'Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?' And then, calling to mind the books he had written, I said: 'He went into the Dingle, and lived alone-went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as Th.o.r.eau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the 'horrors' to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never disturbed by pa.s.sion as was the Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as Emily Bronte would certainly have been had she been placed in such circ.u.mstances as Charlotte Bronte placed Shirley.'

'But the most d.a.m.ning thing of all,' said Gordon, 'is that umbrella, gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.'

'Pa.s.sion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,' said I.

'So devoid of pa.s.sion is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never.

No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story finds himself able to realize from Dereham's description the misery of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with starvation staring him in the face. It is not pa.s.sion,' I said to Gordon, 'that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the Nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition.

To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander Smith's poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.'

'Ambition and the green gamp,' said Gordon. 'But look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries; and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light.'

But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind which the 'Child of the Open Air' must needs lack.

Knowing Dereham's extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why Dereham should at once take to me-reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.

By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon Dereham's character than by any kind of a.n.a.lytical disquisition.

Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably had their nests. By the expression on Dereham's face as he stood and gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a pa.s.sion for herons.

'Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was drained?' I said.

'I should think so,' said he dreamily, 'and every kind of water bird.'

Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, 'But how do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?'

'You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.'

'I don't mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,' he said.

'No,' said I, 'but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.'

'Then you know Whittlesea Mere?' said Dereham, much interested.

'I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,' I said, 'and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized. He was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.'

I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him Marcia.n.u.s's story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper's bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper-as he, Dereham, when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.

'The gypsies,' said Dereham, 'always believed me to be a Romany. But surely you are not a Romany Rye?'

'No,' I said, 'but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?'

'I should think not,' said Dereham indignantly.

'But I hope you don't know the literary cla.s.s among the rest.'

'Gordon is my only link to that dark world,' I said, 'and even you don't object to Gordon. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of printers' ink.'

He laughed. 'Who are you?'

'The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in short frocks,' I said, 'and have never yet found an answer. But Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarra.s.s itself with any such troublesome query.'

This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man's personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.

'You are an Englishman?' said Dereham.

'Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,' I said, using a phrase of his own in one of his books-'if not a thorough East Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.'

'Nearly,' said Dereham.

And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine 'Shales mare,' a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a dogcart-an East Anglian dogcart; when I praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was 'the gla.s.sy Ouse' of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment we became friends.

Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity between the kind of m.u.f.fled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.

'It is on sand alone,' said Dereham, 'that the sea strikes its true music-Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.'

'The best of the sea's lutes,' I said, 'is made by the sands of Cromer.'"

These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above quotation) in Richmond Park and the neighbourhood, have been thus described by the 'Gordon' of the story in one of the sonnets in 'The New Day':-

And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!

How often 'mid the deer that grazed the park, Or in the fields and heath and windy moor, Made musical with many a soaring lark, Have we not held brisk commune with him there, While Lavengro, there towering by your side, With rose complexion and bright silvery hair, Would stop amid his swift and lounging stride To tell the legends of the fading race- As at the summons of his piercing glance, Its story peopling his brown eyes and face, While you called up that pendant of romance To Petulengro with his boxing glory, Your Amazonian Sinfi's n.o.ble story!

In the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and in Chambers' 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' and scattered through scores of articles in the 'Athenaeum,'

I find descriptions of Borrow and allusions to him without number. They afford absolutely the only portrait of that wonderful man that exists or is ever likely to exist. But, of course, it is quite impossible for me to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many more important figures waiting to be introduced. Still, I must find room for the most brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for it will flush these pages with a colour which I feel they need. Mr. Watts-Dunton has been described as the most picturesque of all living writers, whether in verse or in prose, and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but never, I think, is he so picturesque as when he is writing about Borrow.

I am not quite clear as to where the following picture of gypsy life is to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part of England where East Anglia and the Midlands join. It adds interest to the incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl was the prototype of Rhona Boswell, and that Dereham is George Borrow. This also is a chapter from the unpublished story before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to be used in an introductory essay to another of Borrow's books:-

"It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with what Dereham called 'gypsy gold,' and the bright green of the foliage showed scarcely a touch of bronze-at that very moment, indeed, when the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy, and pimpernel. Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man could give. He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days. In conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume of Matthew Arnold in which appears 'The Scholar-Gypsy.' Dereham said he well remembered my directing his attention to 'The Scholar-Gypsy.'

After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever the merits of Matthew Arnold's poem might be, from any supposed artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or even understand its motive in the least degree. I challenged this, contending that howsoever Arnold's cla.s.sic language might soar above a gypsy's intelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the most illiterate person could grasp it.

'I wish,' said Dereham, 'you would come with me to the camp and try the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp.

As to gypsy men,' said he, 'they are too prosaic to furnish a fair test.'

We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense, and many other pet subjects of his. I already knew that he was no lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the 'trumpery great,' although in other regards he was such a John Bull.

By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition.

As we were walking along, Dereham's eyes, which were as longsighted as a gypsy's, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush some distance off. He stopped and said: 'At first I thought that white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it's a magpie,'-next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies' most famous bird.

On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the leaves. As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: 'It is wounded-or else dying-or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?'

'Hawk!' said Dereham laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into the sky. 'The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his quarry and made his meal. I fancied he has himself been 'chivvied'

by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.'

And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that speckled the dazzling blue, a hawk-one of the kind which takes its prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands-was wheeling up and up, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to swoop at and devour it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident, for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk.

Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as a protecting friend.

As we were gazing at the bird a woman's voice at our elbows said,-