Chapter 22

'You needn't see no fear about not marryin' Winifred Wynne. You _must_ marry her; your dukkeripen on Snowdon didn't show itself there for nothink. When you two was a-settin' by the pool, a-eatin' the breakfiss, I was a-lookin' at you round the corner of the rock. I seed a little kindlin' cloud break away and go floatin' over your heads, and then it shaped itself into what us Romanies calls the Golden Hand. You know what the Golden Hand means when it comes over two sweethearts? You don't believe it? Ask Rhona Boswell! Here she comes a-singin' to herself. She's trying to get away from that devil of a Scollard as says she's bound to marry him. I've a good mind to go and give him a left-hand body-blow in the ribs and settle him for good and all. He means mischief to the Tarno Rye, and Rhona too. Brother, I've noticed for a long while that the Romany blood is a good deal stronger in you than the Gorgio blood. And now mark my words, that cuss o' your feyther's'll work itself out. You'll go to his grave and you'll jist put that trúshul back in that tomb, and arter that, and not afore, you'll marry Winnie Wynne.'

Sinfi's creed did not surprise me: the mixture of guile and simplicity in the Romany race is only understood by the few who know it thoroughly: the race whose profession it is to cheat by fortune-telling, to read the false 'dukkeripen' as being 'good enough for the Gorgios,' believe profoundly in nature's symbols; but her bearing did surprise me.

'Your dukkeripen will come true,' said she; 'but mine won't, for I won't let it.'

'And what is yours?' I asked.

'That's nuther here nor there.'

Then she stood again as though listening to something, and again I thought, as her lips moved, that I heard her whisper, 'I will, I will.'

III

I had intended to go to London at once after leaving Gypsy Dell, but something that Sinfi told me during our interview impelled me to go on to Raxton Hall, which was so near. The fact that Sinfi was my kinswoman opened up new and exciting vistas of thought.

I understood now what was that haunting sense of recognition which came upon me when I first saw Sinfi at the wayside inn in Wales. Day by day had proofs been pouring in upon me that the strain of Romany blood in my veins was asserting itself with more and more force. Day by day I had come to realise how closely, though the main current of my blood was English, I was affined to the strange and mysterious people among whom I was now thrown--the only people in these islands, as it seemed to me, who would be able to understand a love-passion like mine. And there were many things in the great race of my forefathers which I had found not only unsympathetic to me, but deeply repugnant. In Great Britain it is the Gypsies alone who understand nature's supreme charm, and enjoy her largesse as it used to be enjoyed in those remote times described in Percy Aylwin's poems before the Children of the Roof invaded the Children of the Open Air, before the earth was parcelled out into domains and ownerships as it now is parcelled out. In the mind of the Gorgio, the most beautiful landscape or the most breezy heath or the loveliest meadow-land is cut up into allotments, whether of fifty thousand acres or of two roods, and owned by people. Of ownership of land the Romany is entirely unconscious. The landscape around him is part of Nature herself, and the Romany on his part acknowledges no owner. No doubt he yields to _force majeure_ in the shape of gamekeeper or constable, but that is because he has no power to resist it. Nature to him is as free and unowned by man as it was to the North American Indian in his wigwam before the invasion of the Children of the Roof.

During the time that I was staying in Flintshire and near Capel Curig, rambling through the dells or fishing in the brooks, it was surprising how soon the companionship of a Gorgio would begin to pall upon me. And here the Cymric race is just as bad as the Saxon. The same detestable habit of looking upon nature as a paying market-garden, the same detestable inquiry as to who was the owner of this or that glen or waterfall, was sure at last to make me sever from him. But as to Sinfi, her attitude towards nature, though it was only one of the charms that endeared her to me, was not the least of them. There was scarcely a point upon which she and I did not touch.

And what about her lack of education? Was that a drawback? Not in the least. The fact that she knew nothing of that traditional ignorance which for ages has taken the name of knowledge--that record of the foolish cosmogonies upon which have been built the philosophies and the social systems of the blundering creature Man--the fact that she knew nothing of these gave an especial piquancy to everything she said. I had been trying to educate myself in the new and wonderful cosmogony of growth which was first enunciated in the sixties, and was going to be, as I firmly believed, the basis of a new philosophy, a new system of ethics, a new poetry, a new everything. But in knowledge of nature as a sublime consciousness, in knowledge of the human heart, Sinfi was far more learned than I. And believing as I did that education will in the twentieth century consist of unlearning, of unlading the mind of the trash previously called knowledge, I could not help feeling that Sinfi was far more advanced, far more in harmony than I could hope to be With the new morning of Life of which we are just beginning to see the streaks of dawn.

'I must go and see Fenella's portrait,' I said, as I Walked briskly towards Raxton.

When I reached Raxton Hall I seemed to startle the butler and the servants, as though I had come from the other world.

I told the butler that I should sleep there that night, and then went at once to the picture gallery and stood before Reynolds' famous picture of Fenella Stanley as the Sibyl. The likeness to Sinfi was striking. How was it that it had not previously struck me more forcibly? The painter had evidently seized the moment when Fenella's eyes expressed that look of the seeress which Sinfi's eyes, on occasion, so powerfully expressed. I stood motionless before it while the rich, warm light of evening bathed it in a rosy radiance. And when the twilight shadows fell upon it, and when the moon again lit it up, I stood there still. The face seemed to pass into my very being, and Sinfi's voice kept singing in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'

I left the picture and went into the library: for I bethought me of that sheaf of Fenella's letters to my great-grandfather which he had kept so sacredly, and which had come to me as representative of the family. My previous slight inspection of them had shown me what a wonderful woman she was, how full of ideas the most original and the most wild. The moment a Gypsy-woman has been taught to write there comes upon her a passion for letter-writing.

Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the illiterate locutions and the eccentric orthography of Fenella's letters and the subtle remarks and speculations upon the symbols of nature.--the dukkeripen of the woods, the streams, the stars, and the winds. But when I came to analyse the theories of man's place in nature expressed in the ignorant language of this Romany heathen, they seemed to me only another mode of expressing the mysticism of the religious enthusiast Wilderspin, the more learned and philosophic mysticism of my father, and the views of D'Arcy, the dreamy painter.

As I rode back to London, I said to myself, 'What change has come over me? What power has been gradually sapping my manhood? Why do I, who was so self-reliant, long now so passionately for a friend to whom to unburthen my soul--one who could give me a sympathy as deep and true as that I got from Sinfi Lovell, and yet the sympathy of a mind unclouded by ignorant superstitions?'

With the exception of D'Arcy, whose advice as to the disposal of the cross had proclaimed him to be as superstitious as Sinfi herself, not a single friend had I in all London. Indeed, besides Lord Sleaford (a tall, burly man with the springy movement of a prize-tighter, with blue-grey eyes, thick, close-cropped hair, and a flaxen moustache, who had lately struck up a friendship with my mother) I had not even an acquaintance. Cyril Aylwin, whom I had not seen since we parted in Wales, was now on the Continent with Wilderspin. Strange as it may seem, I looked forward with eagerness to the return of this light-hearted jester. Cyril's sagacity and knowledge of the world had impressed me in Wales; but his cynical attitude, whether genuine or assumed, towards subjects connected with deep passion, had prevented my confiding in him. He must, I knew, have gathered from Sinfi, and from other sources, that I was mourning the loss of a Welsh girl in humble life; but during our very brief intercourse in Wales neither of us had mentioned the matter to the other. Now, however, in my present dire strait I longed to call in the aid of his penetrative mind.

VIII

ISIS AS HUMOURIST

I

On reaching London I resumed my wanderings through the London streets. Bitter as these wanderings were, my real misery now did not begin until I got to bed. Then began the terrible struggle of the soul that wrestles with its ancestral fleshly prison--that prison whose warders are the superstitions of bygone ages. 'Have you not seen the curse literally fulfilled?' ancestral voices of the blood--voices Romany and Gorgio--seemed whispering in my ears. 'Have you not heard the voice of his daughter upon whose head the curse of your dead father has fallen a beggar in the street, while not all your love can succour her or reach her?'

And then my soul would cry out in its agony, 'Most true, Fenella Stanley--most true, Philip Aylwin; but before I will succumb to such a theory of the universe as yours, a theory which reason laughs at and which laughs at reason, I will die--die by this hand of mine: this flesh that imprisons me in a world of mocking delusion shall be destroyed, but first the symbol itself of your wicked, cruel old folly shall go.'

I would then leap from my bed, light a candle, unlock my cabinet, take out the cross, and holding it aloft prepare to dash it against the wall, when my hand would be arrested by the same ancestral voices, Romany and Gorgio, whispering in my ears and at my heart,

'If you break that amulet, how shall you ever be able to see what would be the effect upon Winnie's fate of its restoration to your father's tomb?'

And then I would laugh aloud and mock the voices of Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin and millions of other voices that echoed or murmured or bellowed through half a million years, echoed or murmured or bellowed from European halls and castles, from Gypsy tents, from caves of palæolithic man.

'How shall you stay the curse from working in the blood of the accursed one?' the voices would say. And then I would laugh again till I feared the people in the hotel would hear me and take me for a maniac.

But then my aunt's picture of a beggar-girl standing in the rain would fill my eyes and the whispers would grow louder than the voice of the North Sea in the March wind: 'Look at _that_. How dare you leave undone anything, howsoever wild, which might seem to any one--even to an illiterate Gypsy, even to a crazy mystic--a means of finding Winifred? What is the meaning of the great instinct which has always conquered the soul in its direst need--which has always driven man when in the grip of unbearable calamity to believe in powers that are unseen? What though that scientific reason of yours tells you that Winifred's misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds? The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways. With an inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal theory of the power of the spirit-world to execute a curse from the grave. Look at that beggar in the street! How dare you ignore the theory of the sorrowing soul, the logic of the lacerated heart, even though your reason laughs it to scorn?'

And then at last my laughter would turn to moans, and, replacing the cross in the cabinet, I would creep hack to my bed ashamed, like a guilty thing--ashamed before myself.

But the more I felt at my throat the claws of the ancestral ogre Superstition, the more enraged I became with myself for feeling them there. And the auger against my ancestors' mysticism grew with the growing consciousness that I was rapidly yielding to the very same mysticism myself. And then I would get up again and take from my escritoire the sheaf of Fenella Stanley's letters which I had brought from Raxton, and read again those stories about curses, such as that about the withering of a Romany family under a dead man's curse which Winnie had described to me that night on the sands.

II

I was delighted to be told by Sleaford, whom I met one afternoon in Piccadilly, that Cyril had returned to London within the last few days. 'He is appointed artist-in-chief of the new comic paper, _The Caricaturist,_ said Sleaford, 'and is in great feather. I have just been calling upon him.'

'The very man I want to see,' I replied. Sleaford thereupon directed me to Cyril's studio 'You'll find him at work,' said he, 'doin' a caricature of Wilderspin's great picture, "Faith and Love." Mother Gudgeon is sittin' as his model. He does everything from models, you know.'

'Mother Gudgeon?'

'A female costermonger that he picked up some where in the slums, the funniest woman in London: haw! haw! I promise you she'll make you laugh when Cyril draws her out.'

He then began to talk upon the subject which interested him above all others, the smartness and swiftness of his yacht. 'I am trying to persuade your mother and aunt to go for a cruise with me, and I think I shall succeed.'

He directed me to the studio, and we parted.

I found Cyril in a large and lofty studio in Chelsea, filled with the curiously carved black furniture of Bombay, mixed, for contrast, with a few Indian cabinets of carved and fretted ivory exquisitely wrought. He greeted me cordially. The walls were covered with Japanese drawings. I began by asking him about The Caricaturist.

'Well,' said he, 'now that the House of Commons has become a bear-garden, and t'other House a waxwork show, and the intellect and culture of the country are leaving politics to dummies and cads, how can the artistic mind condescend to caricature the political world--a world that has not only ceased to be intelligent, but has even ceased to be funny? The quarry of _The Caricaturist_ will be literature, science, and art. Instead of wasting artistic genius upon such small fry as premiers, diplomatists, and cabinet ministers, our cartoons will be caricatures of the pictures of Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Watts, Sandys, Whistler, Wilderspin: our letterpress will be Aristophanic parodies of Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne; game worth flying at, my boy! The art-world is in a dire funk, I can tell you, for the artistic epidermis has latterly grown genteel and thin.'

Already I was beginning to ask myself whether it was possible to make a confidant of this inscrutable cynic. 'You are fond of Oriental things?' I said, wishing to turn the subject. I looked round at the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese monstrosities scattered about the room.

'That,' said he, pointing to a picture of a woman (apparently drunk) who was amusing herself by chasing butterflies, while a number of broad-faced, mischievous-looking children were teasing her--'that is the masterpiece of Hokusai. The legend in the corner is "Kiyó-jo chó ni tawamureru," which, according to the lying Japanese scholars, means nothing more than "A cracked woman chasing butterflies." It was left for me to discover that it represents Yoka, the goddess of Fun, sportively chasing the butterfly souls of men, while the urchins, the little Yokas, are crying, "Ma! you're screwed."'

'But what are these quaint figures?' I asked, pointing to certain drawings of an obese Japanese figure, grinning with lazy good-humour above several of the cabinets.

'Hoteï, the fat god of enjoyment.'

'A Japanese god?' I asked.

'Yes, nothing artistic is quite right now unless it has a savour of blue mould or Japan. Wonderful people, the Japanese, to have discovered the Jolly Hoteï. And here is Hoteï's wife, the goddess-queen Yoka herself--the real masquerader behind that mystic veil which has so enveloped and bemuddled the mind of poor Wilderspin. She is to figure in the first number of _The Caricaturist_.'

He pointed to an object I had only partially observed: a broad-faced burly woman, of about forty-five years of age, in an eccentric dress of Japanese silks, standing on the model-throne between two lay figures. 'Good heavens!' I exclaimed, 'why, she's alive.'

'An' kickin', sir,' said a voice that was at once strident and unctuous. Owing to the almond shape of her sparkling black eyes and the flatness of her nose, the bridge of which had been broken (most likely in childhood), she looked absurdly like a Japanese woman, save that upon her quaintly-cut mouth, curving slightly upwards horse-shoe fashion, there was that twitter of humorous alertness which is perhaps rarely seen in perfection except among the lower orders, Celtic or Saxon, of London. Her build was that of a Dutch fisher-woman. The set of her head on her muscular neck showed her to be a woman of immense strength. But still more was her great physical power indicated by her hands, the fingers of which seemed to have a grip like that of an eagle's claws.

I then perceived upon an easel a large drawing. 'I have not seen Wilderspin's "Faith and Love,"' I said; 'but this, I see, must be a caricature of it.'

In it the woman figured as Isis, grinning beneath a veil held over her head by two fantastically-dressed figures--one having the face of Darwin, the other the face of Wilderspin.

'Allow me,' said Cyril, 'to introduce you to the Goddess Yoka, the true Isis or goddess of bohemianism and universal joke, who, when she had the chance of I making a rational and common-sense universe, preferred amusing herself with flamingoes, dromedaries, ring-taile monkeys, and men.'

'Pardon me,' I said; 'I merely called to see you. Good afternoon.'

'Allow me,' said he, turning to the woman, 'to introduce to your celestial majesty Mr. Henry Aylwin, a kinsman of mine, whose possessions in Little Egypt are as brilliant (judging from the colours of his royal waggon) as are his possessions in Philistia.'

The woman made me a curtsey of much gravity. 'And allow me to introduce _you_,' he said, turning to me, 'to the real original Natura Mystica,--she who for ages upon ages has been trying by her funny goings-on to teach us that "the _Principium hylarchicum_ of the cosmos" (to use the simple phraseology of a great spiritualistic painter) is the benign principle of joke.'

The woman made me another curtsey. 'You forget your exalted position, Mrs. Gudgeon,' said Cyril; 'when a mystic goddess-queen is so condescending as to curtsey she should be careful not to bend too low. Man is a creature who can never with safety be treated with too much respect.'

'We's all so modest in Primrose Court, that's the wust on us,' replied the woman. 'But, Muster Cyril, sir, I don't think you've noticed that the queen's _t'other_ eye's got dry now.'

Cyril gravely poured her out a glass of foaming ale from a bottle that stood upon a little Indian bamboo-table, and handed it to her carefully over the silks, saying to me,

'Her majesty's elegant way of hinting that she likes to wet both eyes!'

Such foolery as this and at such a time irritated me sorely; but there was no help for it now. Whether I should or should not open to him the subject that had taken me thither, I must, I saw, let him have his humour till the woman was dismissed.

'And now, goddess,' said he, 'while I am doing justice to the design of your nose--'

'You can't do that, sir,' interjected the creature, 'it's sich a beauty, ha! ha! I allus say that when I do die, I shall die a-larfin'. They calls me "Jokin' Meg" in Primrose Court. I shall die a-larfin', they say in Primrose Court, and so I shall--unless I die a-cryin',' she added in an utterly different and tragic voice which greatly struck me.

'While I am trying to do justice to that beautiful bridge you must tell my friend about yourself and your daughter, and how you and she first became two shining lights in the art world of London.'

'You makes me blush,' said the woman, 'an' blow me if blushin' ain't bin an' made _t'other_ eye dry.'

She then took another glass of ale, grinned, shook herself, as though preparing for an effort, and said,

'Well you must know, sir, as my name's Meg Gudgeon, leaseways that was my name till my darter chrissened me Mrs. Knocker, and I lives in Primrose Court, Great Queen Street, and my reg'lar perfession is a-sellin' coffee "so airly in the mornin'," and I've got a darter as ain't quite so 'ansom as me, bein' the moral of her father as is over the water a-livin' in the fine 'Straley. And you must know, sir, that one of summer's day there comes a knock at our door as sends my 'eart into my mouth and makes me cry out, "The coppers, by jabbers!" and when I goes down and opens the door, lo! and behold, there stan's a chap wi' great goggle eyes, dressed all in shiny black, jest like a Quaker.' (Here she made a noise between a laugh and a cough.) 'I allus say that when I do die I shall die a-larfin'--unless I die a-cryin',' she added, in the same altered voice that had struck me before.

'Well, mother,' said Cyril, 'and what did the shiny Quaker say?'

'They calls me "Jokin' Meg" in Primrose Court. The shiny Quaker, 'e axes if my name is Gudgeon. "Well," sez I, "supposin' as my name _is_ Gudgeon,--I don't say it is," says I, "but supposin' as it is,--what then?" sez I. "But _is_ that your name?" sez 'e. "Supposin' as it was," sez I, "what then?" "Will you answer my simple kervestion?" sez 'e. "Is your name Mrs. Gudgeon, or ain't it not?" sez 'e. "An' will _you_ answer _my_ simple kervestion, Mr. Shiny Quaker?" sez I. "Supposin' my name was Mrs. Gudgeon,--I don't say it _is_, but supposin' it was,--what's that to you?" sez I, for I thought my poor bor Bob what lives in the country had got into trouble agin and had sent for me.'

'Go on, mother,' said Cyril, 'what did the shiny Quaker say then?'