Part 3
For the Lavender and Strawberry Girls she blew their own colours, telling the one that she now possessed enough lavender to sweeten all the laundries in London, and the other sufficient strawberries to feed the House of Commons at tea through a whole summer. The Crossing Sweeper asked for a green one, because grass needs no sweeping except by the wind, and he got one as green as the dome of Amberley on the South Downs. Jeremy chose copper, and the Balloon Woman assured him that all the slot-machines in England held less than he when he had it, like a fat brown purse, in his hands. Everybody had something blown from the Balloon Woman’s bowl. Gypsy had two, one as blue as night and one as blue as day, because he loved all the time there is, and blue beyond all the colours there are.
But when Mrs. Green turned at last to Ginger and asked her what one she’d have, Ginger, who was always as immoderate as a child, pointed up in the sky and said, “I’ll have that one, please.”
“What a nuisance you are,” said Mrs. Green. “But I suppose you must have it, or you’ll be crying for it. I expect it can be managed from Nelson’s shoulder. Just hand me your pick, Rags.”
And this surprising woman began to mount the steps of the Column, pick in hand. But she had got no further than the lions when a little voice cried through the night,
“Come out o’ that, will you? Just you leave the moon alone.”
The voice came from the roped-in enclosure in the Square where They had been doing something to London during the day. They are always doing something to London, either taking it away or putting it back, scraping it, painting it, or tarring and feathering it. It was one of Gypsy’s fears that one day They would take it all up at once and put it back in the wrong places; and it was one of Ginger’s hopes that They would.
“Think how ripping it would be,” said Ginger, “if one morning you found the Temple Gardens in the Camden Road.”
“But think how horrible it would be,” urged Gypsy, “if one morning you found the Camden Road in the Temple Gardens.”
“Don’t!” shuddered Ginger.
“Well, that’s the risk, you see. You couldn’t be sure.”
“Why does one sound all right and the other all wrong?” wondered Ginger.
She wondered about it often after this, and decided that the next time They took up the Camden Road They’d better lose it, and put apple-trees from Nowhere there instead.
But this is a digression.
“Just you leave the moon alone!” cried the wild little voice from the Night Watchman’s box in the Square.
Everybody turned to look. What they saw was a small fierce figure in an old top hat and a long-tailed coat dancing excitedly round and round the roped-in enclosure. In one hand he had a telescope, and in the other a pair of field-glasses, both of which he flourished in the direction of the Balloon Woman.
“You would, would you?” he shrilled. “Come out o’ that, you Mrs. Green.”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Ginger. “I’m afraid this is all my fault.” She hurried to the enclosure. “Please do be quiet and tell me why you don’t want me to have the moon.”
“The thoughtlessness of the young!” said the little man, mopping his brow with a blue handkerchief dotted with white stars. “It’s all on account of the likes o’ you that the likes o’ me has to watch the night. A nice mess she’d get into otherwise.”
“I’m so sorry. Come and have a sausage,” coaxed Ginger.
He shook his head. “Can’t,” he said shortly. “What d’you suppose the rope’s here for?”
“To keep us out,” suggested Ginger.
“To keep me in,” said the wild little man. “Set a thief to catch a thief, and one that never knew his place to keep the night in hers. Ah, many and many a time They’ve set me to watch her because They knew I’m up to all her tricks. But They have to coop me in, or I’d be off. On land They put a rope round me; on sea They put me up the mast.”
Ginger beckoned to the others, and they gathered round from the Weatherhouse. Gypsy brought the teapot with him, and the Night Watchman was given a cup across the barrier.
“What do you have to watch the night for?” asked Ginger, putting in five lumps.
“Enough o’ your sugar,” said the little man. “That’s _her_ dodge, too, sending out all her stars when a chap’s got to try to keep his senses steady. Too much stars and sugar goes to the heart. What do I have to watch her for, the jade? A pretty question! So as nothing gets stolen, for one thing.”
Ginger put her face in her hands.
“You may well!” said the Night Watchman. “Many and many a moon has you young folk tried to steal. Sometimes you’re too sharp even for me. But the moon’s not the worst of it. It’s keeping the constellations in order, especially in August when the shooting stars are about. It goes to the heads of the old ones when those young ones gets frisking, and it takes all my time to stop the Horse from kicking the Hunter in the belt, or the Twins from parting company. ‘Move on there!’ I tell them, till I’m hoarse. Comets are disorganizing too, in their way, but we’ve generally time to prepare for them, like the Lord Mayor’s Show. And then the fixed stars want watching; they’re liable to come un-fixed.”
“Why shouldn’t they?” demanded Gypsy. “About time they did.”
“Futurist!” said the Night Watchman. “But of course it isn’t only the stars. There’s plenty else to watch the night for.”
“What?” asked Gypsy.
“Ghosts,” said the Night Watchman. “And fairies.” He checked himself, and handed back his cup abruptly. “There’s all the sounds, too, that can’t be heard by day--such as the dust settling, and the pavement cracking, and the tide turning in the Thames. Ah, the pavement takes a lot of watching, and _still_ you can’t help the cracks coming. Sometimes one big square will split into half-a-dozen little ones before you can say Knife!”
“Would that stop it?” asked Ginger.
“It would stop anything if you said it quick enough,” said the Night Watchman, “but you never do. You may try again and again, and in the end be no better off than the fools who try to say Jack Robinson. And again, the night must be watched for the thoughts that won’t come out in the light. Some of them are too shy. But the boldness of them after dark! They take a lot of managing, for they’re a disorderly crew, bad _or_ good. Then on land you watch the night for its moths and bats, and on sea for its wrecks and its sails. But perhaps the best thing to watch the night for, on sea or land, is morning.”
“Why?” said Gypsy.
“Because then They come and take the rope away,” said the Night Watchman.
Then he went into his box and sat on his stool and put his telescope to his eye and glared at the Pole Star. If the Pole Star had had any idea of side-slipping it abandoned it instantly, and kept as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar.
“Who do you think he is?” asked Ginger.
“Nobody knows,” said the P.A.
“I expect he’s Mr. Maeterlinck,” said Gypsy, “or Mr. Devant. But I don’t care who he is, darling, and one of these days I’ll steal the moon for you under his very nose. Meanwhile have half my balloons.”
He gave her the bluest balloon, and she hung it over her door of the Weatherhouse, and he hung the other over his. And Jeremy and the rest went back home, if they had one, and hung up theirs over their beds, if they had any.
But nearly all the balloons had disappeared by the morning.
Gypsy and Ginger first saw the Groundsel Man in the early morning. It was very early morning indeed. The moon had just gone out, and a good deal of Mother-o’-pearl was left in the sky, and there was a faint glow over Fleet Street. Of course Gypsy and Ginger couldn’t see Fleet Street, but they looked that way for the glow. The streets were quite empty when the Groundsel Man came along, and for this reason alone you couldn’t have helped noticing him. But you would have noticed him even in a crowd. His basket was slung in front of him by a strap over his shoulders, and he limped a little, but his limp, instead of being a drag, only seemed to make his step livelier, so that he came down the pavement on the light jerky hop of a chaffinch hopping down a potato-row after the digger in hope of worms.
“He’s just like the little rabbits Jeremy sells,” said Ginger.
“If you could look under his trousers,” said Gypsy, “you’d find that instead of feet he has two spiral springs.”
“It’s quite easy to look under his trousers,” said Ginger, “and he prefers not to wear socks.”
“Another Simple Lifer,” said Gypsy. Most of their friends were.
“But he _has_ got a pretty hat,” said Ginger. “I wish I’d got one like it.”
His hat was the chief reason why you’d have to notice the Groundsel Man in a crowd. It was a straw hat of all sorts of shapes and colours, with no top to the crown and whiskers round the brim. And it was weighed down by a glorious wreath of buttercups. The Groundsel Man’s basket was also half buttercups, as well as groundsel and chickweed, and in one hand he had a short thick thorn-stick, as black and shiny as an old clay pipe, and in the other he carried a great branch of white wild roses like a banner. As he stepped by he said,
“Good morning, sir and ma’am. A fine night it’s been and a finer day _’twill_ be.”
“Are _you_ telling _us_ that?” said Gypsy doubtfully.
“I am, sir. You’re clever little people,” said the Groundsel Man cheerily, “but it’s not the likes o’ me you can tell about the weather. My kind needs no weatherhouses.”
“Not even in London?” said Ginger, bringing the teapot.
“I don’t live in Lunnon, ma’am. I only passes through. Lunnon’s a cage, she is. But her’ll never ketch _me_.”
“Where do you live?” asked Ginger, filling a cup for him; and Gypsy offered him his tobacco pouch.
“Thank you, ma’am. Thank you, sir. I lives anywheres that a bird may, ma’am, and after all that’s anywheres there is. In sedges and tree-tops and the flat tops of hills and hedgerows and the faces of clifts.”
“And the sky?” asked Ginger so eagerly that Gypsy surreptitiously tied a string round her ankle to haul her in by if she flew up too suddenly.
“As oft as not,” said the Groundsel Man sipping his cup and crumbling his bread. More than half the crumbs fell to the ground, and he let them lie.
“Why do you come to London at all?” asked Gypsy.
“To open the bird-cages, sir.”
“What sport,” said Gypsy. “Do you ever get caught?”
“Very seldom, sir. I does it after dark. I takes note of my street by day, and by night I sets it free. Sometimes the cage is hung outside the house, and then it’s easy. But other times it stands inside the window, and then I has to force the catch. I’m doing Lunnon street by street. When her’s empty I’ll do Manchester. But so fast as I empty her, her fills up like Philemon’s pitcher.”
“What sort of birds do you let out?” asked Ginger.
“Every sort, ma’am. Canaries and parrots and redpoles and skylarks--yes, ma’am, I’ve known houses as even keeps skylarks in cages. Once I found a Red Cardinal in Bethnal Green. I hopes he flew back to South Ameriky, but if not there’s warm spots in Hampshire.”
“You’ll have a grand time,” said Gypsy, passing him the matches, “the night you do the Zoo.”
The Groundsel Man puffed hard, and disappeared entirely behind a cloud of smoke; out of which he piped shrilly, “Flamingoes!” The cry was like a thin streak of lightning passing through a thunder-cloud.
Ginger asked, “What happens when you _do_ get caught?”
“I sells them a bunch of groundsel for their dickies,” he said. “Oh, that’s all right, ma’am. The birds doesn’t suffer, neither way. And so soon as the basket’s empty, back I goes to fill it up.”
“Back where?” asked Ginger.
“Anywheres,” he said vaguely.
“Do you sell buttercups too?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. Buttercups is my pleasure. Well, so is the groundsel too, mine and the birds’. But this sort of gold can’t be sold for pence to the keepers of cages. They’ll sometimes cage robins, ma’am, robins that’ll come into your house for company like your brother. But what sort of company is one in a cage? Will they play pretty like the Robin of Cold-harbour?”
“Who’s he?” asked Gypsy.
“A little chap I knows. He goes to church on week-days. First time I seed him he was sitting in the pulpit singing fit to bust, so sweet as any parson.”
Gypsy said doubtfully, “Do parsons?”
“Don’t they, sir? I supposed they did, else why do the folk go? But I never heard one myself. It’s mostly some other bird I’m listening to o’ Sundays, the daws at their games round the chalk-pits, or the plovers swooping on the Downs, or the larks you can’t see for the air in between. But when my Robin’s done his Glory-Glory, down he hops to a pewback, and so hops all down the aisle like a stone on a pond, skipping one pew at each hop. And when he gets to the end he thinks, What can I do next? and he looks at the stained glass windows and Pooh! cries he. And he chooses a clear pane of glass under a Saint, and flies up and sits against it with the sun on his breast as red as a ruby. And there he sings Glory-Glory all over again, and out he flies. Would you cage that bird, ma’am?”
“I wouldn’t cage anything!” said Ginger angrily, “and I’m going to Manchester by the next train.”
Gypsy took another reef in his string.
“Well, it’s time somebody did,” said Ginger.
“Don’t you fret, ma’am,” said the Groundsel Man. “I’ll get there all in good season. Would you like some buttercups?”
“Yes, please,” said Ginger, running for a bowl, which she filled at the fountain.
The Groundsel Man put his buttercups into it carefully, and then with a sort of hop and flutter he was up on the roof of the weatherhouse, perched for a moment on the chimney, where he stuck his branch of wild-rose. The glow from Fleet Street was now so strong that the small white burnet blossoms looked like puffs of golden smoke. Then he gave another flutter and disappeared.
Ginger ran round the corner to catch him, but when she got there she could see nothing but the sparrows quarrelling round the Nelson Column, and the pigeons flying from the spire of St. Martin’s to the Dome of the National Gallery.
It was after the visit of the Groundsel Man that Gypsy realised that life is not all play.
“The time has come,” said Gypsy, with his mouth full of tacks----
He was trying the effect of sausages in festoons round the walls of the Weatherhouse. Something had to be done with the sausages, which accumulated daily in increasing quantities as Gypsy and Ginger accumulated friends. There was no cupboard-room in the Weatherhouse, and Gypsy agreed with William Morris that the Useful is not incompatible with the Decorative.
“The time has come, Ginger,” said Gypsy, “for us to take things seriously.”
“I know it,” said Ginger, picking up an odd length of sausages and beginning to skip to the old tune of
“Andy Spandy, Sugardy Candy, French Almond Rock! Breadandbutterforyoursupper’sallyourMother’s GOT!”
“It’s all very well,” said Gypsy, between hammer-strokes, “for us to be light-hearted in our own lives, and even in the comparatively grave matter of earning our living; but as well as that we must remember that the world is full crying of evils----”
“You can’t really skip with sausages,” said Ginger, giving it up.
“Just hand that length over, if you’ve quite done with it,” said Gypsy. “The West Frieze wants completing.”
“I’ll dust them off a bit first,” said Ginger. “What do the evils cry for?”
“Reform,” said Gypsy.
“Then let’s reform them,” said Ginger. “But we needn’t cry along with them, need we?”
“That,” said Gypsy, “would merely be piling Peleus on Ossian.” (I think I mentioned that he had got his education in Cambridge; but his classics were good enough for Ginger, who had never got her education anywhere.) “No,” he said, festooning the final sausage, “it’s no use crying over spilt evils. It’s better to mop them up laughing. How do you like that, darling?”
“The _line_ is beautiful,” said Ginger, putting her head on one side and shutting her eye on the other. “But the colour-scheme is pasty.”
“It improves in the frying-pan,” said Gypsy. “But enough of Aesthetics. Let us return to Sociology. What evil are _you_ going to reform?”
“Twenty seconds,” pleaded Ginger.
He took out his watch.
“Time!” called Gypsy, as Ginger called, “Got mine!”
“Got mine too!” said Gypsy. “What’s yours?”
“Croquet!” cried Ginger.
“Bamboo furniture!” cried Gypsy.
“Why do you want to reform croquet? I rather like croquet, and I play it rather well.”
“The better the worse!” said Ginger fiercely.
“You feel this subject passionately,” said Gypsy thoughtfully.
“Yes, I do.”
“Perhaps you play it badly?”
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” said Ginger quickly. Then she contradicted herself still more quickly. “Yes, it has, though. However you play croquet has to do with it. The only thing is not to play it at all. Croquet is the root of all the ill-temper there is. If you could once kill the spirit of croquet throughout the world, there’d be no more wars.”
“How will you start?” asked Gypsy.
“With a forceps,” said Ginger promptly. “The strongest forceps owned by the most famous dentist in New York, because American dentists are the best. Then I shall go all over the world in the middle of the night, pulling up all the hoops on all the croquet-lawns I can find.”
“Like so many double-teeth,” said Gypsy.
“And I hope they’ll hurt,” said Ginger vindictively.
“I’m sorry you feel it so bitterly,” said Gypsy, “but I suppose things have to be felt like that before they can be reformed.”
“Don’t _you_ feel bamboo like that?”
Gypsy shuddered. “I had an aunt in Wisbech once,” he said. “She died of a tea-heart.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ginger gently.
“Oh, it didn’t matter,” said Gypsy. “After all she had to die of something, and it’s much better to die of what you like than of what you don’t. Men and women die of tobacco and tea with enthusiasm, where they would only resent death from German Measles or Mexican Gulps.”
“Do people die of Mexican Gulps?” asked Ginger.
“They would if they got it,” said Gypsy, “but they don’t.”
“It sounds like geography,” said Ginger, “and I very nearly died of that when I was a child. So I was inoculated against it, and I don’t even know where Wisbech is.”
“It’s not important,” said Gypsy. “But if you live in Wisbech, and buy enough tea at a certain shop, you can in time furnish your house from attic to basement with gratis bamboo. Why, you couldn’t buy two ounces without a bamboo bonus in the shape of a walking-stick or a curtain-pole; and for a whole pound, of course, you got hatstands and overmantels. After a while there were bamboo hatstands on every landing, and bamboo overmantels under as well as over all the mantelpieces. We were presently obliged to take all our meals at separate little bamboo tables, like the best boarding-houses and the worst tea-shops. Of course, the little tables wore out very quickly, quite often giving way in the joints in the middle of meals, but more and more came along, and we never succeeded in living them down. We sat on bamboo stools while we ate, and there were bamboo waste paper baskets and bookcases, and a bamboo side-board, and I _think_ a bamboo piano. I know there were bamboo beds. Mine broke down every other night, but my aunt was such a confirmed tea-drinker that a new one always appeared next day.” Here Gypsy suddenly stood on his head, kicking his feet in the air, and letting out prolonged wails like a dog made miserable by the moon. Then he got down and sat up again, and Ginger who, as he spoke, had turned paler and paler, held his hands very tight, and they remained silent until they both felt better.
Then Gypsy groaned, “Yet cities could be such beautiful places.”
“Yes,” sighed Ginger, “if it weren’t for the people in the red brick houses having all the almond trees. People who live in the grey stone houses ought to have them. But the first almond trees in London _always_ bloom against red brick.”
“I know,” growled Gypsy, growing wild-eyed again. “And then, the corrugated iron! Oh, _galvanize_ the man who first thought of corrugating iron.”
“There’s a worse evil than corrugated iron,” whispered Ginger. “There are wired flowers. Wired flowers are as dreadful as caged birds. We won’t interfere with the Groundsel Man’s job, but oh, Gypsy! to-night I’m going out to un-wire all the flowers in Piccadilly!” Her eyes shone like the Gemini as she said it.
“Brave child!” said Gypsy. “But before you go, put the flat-irons on the brazier, please.”
“What for?” said Ginger.
“Because,” said Gypsy, “_I_ shall go out and uncorrugate the iron.”
You may remember the Season, not so very long ago, when Londoners used to wake up every morning wondering Well Really What Next. A good many surprising and beautiful things happened during those brief weeks, and they were all due to the nocturnal efforts of Gypsy, Ginger, and their friends.
At first Ginger stuck to her pet reform of Unwiring Flowers, and Gypsy to his of Uncorrugating Iron. Not a night passed without some suburb having all its roses unmuzzled. Not a night passed without the roof of some Army Hut or Tennis-Club Pavilion being straightened out by Gypsy’s flat-iron. The process, of course, exactly doubled the length of the roof, so that yards used to jut out at either end. The Tennis-Players were considerably annoyed; and in the Army, Fatigue Duty resolved itself into sitting on the roof with a pair of curling-tongs, and crinkling the roofs back to their normal proportions. The soldiers who had been hair-dressers were the best at it, and some really beautiful work in Marcel Waving was put in by the experts for the Y.M.C.A. The Army minded it less than the Sportsmen, for they might just as well corrugate the iron on the roof as pick up the Woodbine stumps on the floor. But Gypsy was practically the death of local sport that summer, all the club-time being occupied in doing up what he had undone overnight. He gave some trouble, too, to Noncomformists and Sheltered Cabmen.
But Gypsy didn’t really want to stop sport. He liked sport. He himself could put such a twist on a serve that it would come back and hit his partner of its own accord; and in the cricket-field he never hit anything under Boundaries and Catches at Cover. His Innings consisted of exactly one of each. At the beginning of his Club Season the Scorer always made out his analysis in advance to save trouble:
Average GYPSY 4
it would run. If everyone had played Gypsy’s sort of cricket there would have been no need to talk of brightening the game. His cricket was as bright and as brief as a lucifer. It favoured the two-hour match. So he was really sorry to make the Houndsditch Hatters’ Second Eleven spend all their practice time in crinkling the pavilion roof. Also it vexed him to work on the system of Penelope’s Web. Presently he took to clipping the ends off the roofs after they were straightened. This checkmated the Cricketers and Tennis-Players, because when they attempted to re-corrugate the roof there wasn’t enough of it left over to keep out the weather. So they had to send for some more.
During the days of waiting Gypsy turned the time to account, and ironed out all the Cabmen’s Shelters on the No. 11 Bus route. But somebody else was now beginning to make good use of his efforts. An Unknown Quantity was also mysteriously at work under the moon.
One night, as Ginger was going home bent nearly double under a great load of rusty wires after a busy hour among the lilies of Sloane Square, she met Gypsy, flat-iron in hand, staring at one of his flattened rooms like a man in a trance.
“What are you looking at?” asked Ginger.