Chapter 10

Then the agent calls in one of the disguised Romanys to testify to the good qualities of the horse. They look at it, but the third _deguise_, who has it in charge, avers that it has just been sold to a gentleman. But they have another. By this time the farmer wishes he had bought the horse. When any coin slips from between our fingers, and rolls down through a grating into the sewer, we are always sure that it was a sovereign, and not a half-penny. Yes, and the fish which drops back from the line into the river is always the biggest take--or mistake--of the day. And this horse was a bargain, and the three in disguise say so, and wish they had a hundred like it. But there comes a Voice from the depths, a casual remark, offering to bet that 'ere gent won't close on that hoss. "Bet yer ten bob he will." "Done." "How do yer know he don't take the hoss?" "He carn't; he's too heavy loaded with Bill's mare. Says he'll sell it for a pound better." The farmer begins to see his way. He is shrewd; it may be that he sees through all this myth of "the gentleman." But his attention has been attracted to the horse. Perhaps he pays a little more, or "the pound better;" in greater probability he gets Sam's horse for the original price. There are many ways among gypsies of making such bargains, but the motive power of them all is _taderin_, or drawing the eye of the purchaser, a game not unknown to Gorgios. I have heard of a German _yahud_ in Philadelphia, whose little boy Moses would shoot from the door with a pop-gun or squirt at passers-by, or abuse them vilely, and then run into the shop for shelter. They of course pursued him and complained to the parent, who immediately whipped his son, to the great solace of the afflicted ones. And then the afflicted seldom failed to buy something in that shop, and the corrected son received ten per cent. of the profit. The attention of the public had been drawn.

As we went about looking at people and pastimes, a Romany, I think one of the Ayres, said to me,--

"See the two policemen? They're following you two gentlemen. They saw you pallin' with Bowers. That Bowers is the biggest blackguard on the roads between London and Windsor. I don't want to hurt his charackter, but it's no bad talkin' nor _dusherin_ of him to say that no decent Romanys care to go with him. Good at a mill? Yes, he's that. A reg'lar _wastimengro_, I call him. And that's why it is."

Now there was in the fair a vast institution which proclaimed by a monstrous sign and by an excessive eruption of advertisement that it was THE SENSATION OF THE AGE. This was a giant hand-organ in connection with a forty-bicycle merry-go-round, all propelled by steam. And as we walked about the fair, the two rural policemen, who had nothing better to do, shadowed or followed us, their bucolic features expressing the intensest suspicion allied to the extremest stupidity; when suddenly the Sensation of the Age struck up the Gendarme's chorus, "We'll run 'em in," from Genevieve de Brabant, and the arrangement was complete. Of all airs ever composed this was the most appropriate to the occasion, and therefore it played itself. The whole formed quite a little opera-bouffe, gypsies not being wanting. And as we came round, in our promenade, the pretty girl, with her rifle in hand, implored us to take a shot, and the walk wound up by her finally letting fly herself and ringing the bell.

That pretty girl might or might not have a touch of Romany blood in her veins, but it is worth noting that among all these show-men and show-women, acrobats, exhibitors of giants, purse-droppers, gingerbread-wheel gamblers, shilling knife-throwers, pitch-in-his-mouths, Punches, Cheap-Jacks, thimble-rigs, and patterers of every kind there is always a leaven and a suspicion of gypsiness. If there be not descent, there is affinity by marriage, familiarity, knowledge of words and ways, sweethearting and trafficking, so that they know the children of the Rom as the house-world does not know them, and they in some sort belong together. It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody quite understands it. No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet _clearly_ explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population, excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, composed of English people like ourselves. It is leavened with direct Indian blood; it has, more or less modified, a peculiar _morale_. It was old before the Saxon heptarchy.

I was very much impressed at this fair with the extensive and unsuspected amount of Romany existent in our rural population. We had to be satisfied, as we came late into the tavern for lunch, with cold boiled beef and carrots, of which I did not complain, as cold carrots are much nicer than warm, a fact too little understood in cookery. There were many men in the common room, mostly well dressed, and decent even if doubtful looking. I observed that several used Romany words in casual conversation. I came to the conclusion at last that all who were present knew something of it. The greatly reprobated Bowers was not himself a gypsy, but he had a gypsy wife. He lived in a cottage not far from Walton, and made baskets, while his wife roamed far and near, selling them; and I have more than once stopped and sent for a pot of ale, and shared it with Bill, listening meantime to his memories of the road as he caned chairs or "basketed." I think his reputation came rather from a certain Bohemian disregard of _convenances_ and of appearances than from any deeply-seated sinfulness. For there are Bohemians even among gypsies; everything in this life being relative and socially-contractive. When I came to know the disreputable William well, I found in him the principles of Panurge, deeply identified with the _morale_ of Falstaff; a wondrous fund of unbundled humor, which expressed itself more by tones than words; a wisdom based on the practices of the prize-ring; and a perfectly sympathetic admiration of my researches into Romany. One day, at Kingston Fair, as I wished to depart, I asked Bill the way to the station. "I will go with you and show you," he said. But knowing that he had business in the fair I declined his escort. He looked at me as if hurt.

"_Does tute pen mandy'd chore tute_?" (Do you think I would rob _you_ or pick your pockets?) For he believed I was afraid of it. I knew Bill better. I knew that he was perfectly aware that I was about the only man in England who had a good opinion of him in any way, or knew what good there was in him. When a _femme incomprise_, a woman not as yet found out, discovers at last the man who is so much a master of the art of flattery as to satisfy somewhat her inordinate vanity, she is generally grateful enough to him who has thus gratified her desires to refrain from speaking ill of him, and abuse those who do, especially the latter. In like manner, Bill Bowers, who was every whit as interesting as any _femme incomprise_ in Belgravia, or even Russell Square, believing that I had a little better opinion of him than anybody else, would not only have refrained from robbing me, but have proceeded to lam with his fists anybody else who would have done so,--the latter proceeding being, from his point of view, only a light, cheerful, healthy, and invigorating exercise, so that, as he said, and as I believe truthfully, "I'd rather be walloped than not fight." Even as my friend H. had rather lose than not play "farrer."

This was a very pretty little country fair at Cobham; pleasant and purely English. It was very picturesque, with its flags, banners, gayly bedecked booths, and mammoth placards, there being, as usual, no lack of color or objects. I wonder that Mr. Frith, who has given with such idiomatic genius the humors of the Derby, has never painted an old-fashioned rural fair like this. In a few years the last of them will have been closed, and the last gypsy will be there to look on.

There was a pleasant sight in the afternoon, when all at once, as it seemed to me, there came hundreds of pretty, rosy-cheeked children into the fair. There were twice as many of them as of grown people. I think that, the schools being over for the day, they had been sent a-fairing for a treat. They swarmed in like small bee-angels, just escaped from some upset celestial hive; they crowded around the booths, buying little toys, chattering, bargaining, and laughing, when my eye caught theirs, as though to be noticed was the very best joke in the whole world. They soon found out the Sensation of the Age, and the mammoth steam bicycle was forthwith crowded with the happy little creatures, raptured in all the glory of a ride. The cars looked like baskets full of roses. It was delightful to see them: at first like grave and stolid little Anglo-Saxons, occupied seriously with the new Sensation; then here and there beaming with thawing jollity; then smiling like sudden sun-gleams; and then laughing, until all were in one grand chorus, as the speed became greater, and the organ roared out its notes as rapidly as a runaway musical locomotive, and the steam-engine puffed in time, until a high-pressure scream told that the penn'orth of fun was up.

As we went home in the twilight, and looked back at the trees and roofs of the village, in dark silhouette against the gold-bronze sky, and heard from afar and fitfully the music of the Great Sensation mingled with the beat of a drum and the shouts of the crowd, rising and falling with the wind, I felt a little sad, that the age, in its advancing refinement, is setting itself against these old-fashioned merry-makings, and shrinking like a weakling from all out-of-doors festivals, on the plea of their being disorderly, but in reality because they are believed to be vulgar. They come down to us from rough old days; but they are relics of a time when life, if rough, was at least kind and hearty. We admire that life on the stage, we ape it in novels, we affect admiration and appreciation of its rich picturesqueness and vigorous originality, and we lie in so doing; for there is not an aesthetic prig in London who could have lived an hour in it. Truly, I should like to know what Francois Villon and Chaucer would have thought of some of their modern adorers, or what the lioness Fair-sinners of the olden time would have had to say to the nervous weaklings who try to play the genial blackguard in their praise! It is to me the best joke of the age that those who now set themselves up for priests of the old faith are the men, of all others, whom the old gods would have kicked, _cum magna injuria_, out of the temple. When I sit by Bill Bowers, as he baskets, and hear the bees buzz about his marigolds, or in Plato Buckland's van, or with a few hearty and true men of London town of whom I wot, _then_ I know that the old spirit liveth in its ashes; but there is little of it, I trow, among its penny prig-trumpeters.

IV. THE MIXED FORTUNES.

"Thus spoke the king to the great Master: 'Thou didst bless and ban the people; thou didst give benison and curse, luck and sorrow, to the evil or the good.'

"And the Master said, 'It may be so.'

"And the king continued, 'There came two men, and one was good and the other bad. And one thou didst bless, thinking he was good; but he was wicked. And the other thou didst curse, and thought him bad; but he was good.'

"The Master said, 'And what came of it?'

"The king answered, 'All evil came upon the good man, and all happiness to the bad.'

"And the Master said, 'I write letters, but I am not the messenger; I hunt the deer, but I am not the cook; I plant the vine, but I do not pour the wine to the guests; I ordain war, yet do not fight; I send ships forth on the sea, but do not sail them. There is many a slip between cup and lip, as the chief of the rebel spirits said when he was thrown out of heaven, and I am not greater nor wiser than he was before he fell. Hast thou any more questions, O son?'

"And the king went his way."

One afternoon I was walking with three ladies. One was married, one was a young widow, and one, no longer very young, had not as yet husbanded her resources. And as we went by the Thames, conversation turned upon many things, and among them the mystery of the future and mediums; and the widow at last said she would like to have her fortune told.

"You need not go far to have it done," I said. "There is a gypsy camp not a mile away, and in it one of the cleverest fortune-tellers in England."

"I am almost afraid to go," said the maiden lady. "It seems to me to be really wrong to try to look into the awful secrets of futurity. One can never be certain as to what a gypsy may not know. It's all very well, I dare say, to declare it's all rubbish, but then you know you never can tell what may be in a rubbish-heap, and they may be predicting true things all the time while they think they're humbugging you. And they do often foretell the most wonderful things; I know they do. My aunt was told that she would marry a man who would cause her trouble, and, sure enough, she did; and it was such a shame, she was such a sweet-tempered, timid woman, and he spent half her immense fortune. Now wasn't that wonderful?"

It would be a curious matter for those who like studying statistics and chance to find out what proportion in England of sweet-tempered, timid women of the medium-middle class, in newly-sprouted families, with immense fortunes, do _not_ marry men who only want their money. Such heiresses are the natural food of the noble shark and the swell sucker, and even a gypsy knows it, and can read them at a glance. I explained this to the lady; but she knew what she knew, and would not know otherwise.

So we came along the rippling river, watching the darting swallows and light water-gnats, as the sun sank afar into the tawny, golden west, and Night, in ever-nearing circles, wove her shades around us. We saw the little tents, like bee-hives,--one, indeed, not larger than the hive in which Tyll Eulenspiegel slept his famous nap, and in which he was carried away by the thieves who mistook him for honey and found him vinegar. And the outposts, or advanced pickets of small, brown, black-eyed elves, were tumbling about as usual, and shouted their glad greeting; for it was only the day before that I had come down with two dozen oranges, which by chance proved to be just one apiece for all to eat except for little Synfie Cooper, who saved hers up for her father when he should return.

I had just an instant in which to give the gypsy sorceress a "straight tip," and this I did, saying in Romany that one of the ladies was married and one a widow. I was indeed quite sure that she must know the married lady as such, since she had lived near at hand, within a mile, for months. And so, with all due solemnity, the sorceress went to her work.

"You will come first, my lady, if you please," she said to the married dame, and led her into a hedge-corner, so as to be remote from public view, while we waited by the camp.

The hand was inspected, and properly crossed with a shilling, and the seeress began her prediction.

"It's a beautiful hand, my lady, and there's luck in it. The line o' life runs lovely and clear, just like a smooth river from sea to sea, and that means you'll never be in danger before you die, nor troubled with much ill. And it's written that you'll have another husband very soon."

"But I don't want another," said the lady.

"Ah, my dear lady, so you'll say till you get him, but when he comes you'll be glad enough; so do you just get the first one out of your head as soon as you can, for the next will be the better one. And you'll cross the sea and travel in a foreign land, and remember what I told you to the end of your life days."

Then the widow had her turn.

"This is a lucky hand, and little need you had to have your fortune told. You've been well married once, and once is enough when it's all you need. There's others as is never satisfied and wants everything, but you've had the best, and more you needn't want, though there'll be many a man who'll be in love with you. Ay, indeed, there's fair and dark as will feel the favor of your beautiful eyes, but little good will it do them, and barons and lords as would kiss the ground you tread on; and no wonder, either, for you have the charm which nobody can tell what it is. But it will do 'em no good, nevermore."

"Then I'm never to have another husband," said the widow.

"No, my lady. He that you married was the best of all, and, after him, you'll never need another; and that was written in your hand when you were born, and it will be your fate, forever and ever: and that is the gypsy's production over the future, and what she has producted will come true. All the stars in the fermentation of heaven can't change it. But if you ar'n't satisfied, I can set a planet for you, and try the cards, which comes more expensive, for I never do that under ten shillings."

There was a comparing of notes among the ladies and much laughter, when it appeared that the priestess of the hidden spell, in her working, had mixed up the oracles. Jacob had manifestly got Esau's blessing. It was agreed that the _bonnes fortunes_ should be exchanged, that the shillings might not be regarded as lost, and all this was explained to the unmarried lady. She said nothing, but in due time was also _dukkered_ or fortune-told. With the same mystery she was conducted to the secluded corner of the hedge, and a very long, low-murmuring colloquy ensued. What it was we never knew, but the lady had evidently been greatly impressed and awed. All that she would tell was that she had heard things that were "very remarkable, which she was sure no person living could have known," and in fact that she believed in the gypsy, and even the blunder as to the married lady and the widow, and all my assurances that chiromancy as popularly practiced was all humbug, made no impression. There was once "a disciple in Yabneh" who gave a hundred and fifty reasons to prove that a reptile was no more unclean than any other animal. But in those days people had not been converted to the law of turtle soup and the gospel of Saint Terrapin, so the people said it was a vain thing. And had I given a hundred and fifty reasons to this lady, they would have all been vain to her, for she wished to believe; and when our own wishes are served up unto us on nice brown pieces of the well-buttered toast of flattery, it is not hard to induce us to devour them.

It is written that when Ashmedai, or Asmodeus, the chief of all the devils of mischief, was being led a captive to Solomon, he did several mysterious things while on the way, among others bursting into extravagant laughter, when he saw a magician conjuring and predicting. On being questioned by Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, why he had seemed so much amused, Ashmedai answered that it was because the seer was at the very time sitting on a princely treasure, and he did not, with all his magic and promising fortune to others, know this. Yet, if this had been told to all the world, the conjurer's business would not have suffered. Not a bit of it. _Entre Jean_, _passe Jeannot_: one comes and goes, another takes his place, and the poor will disappear from this world before the too credulous shall have departed.

It was on the afternoon of the following day that I, by chance, met the gypsy with a female friend, each with a basket, by the roadside, in a lonely, furzy place, beyond Walton.

"You are a nice fortune-teller, aren't you now?" I said to her. "After getting a tip, which made it all as clear as day, you walk straight into the dark. And here you promise a lady two husbands, and she married already; but you never promised me two wives, that I might make merry withal. And then to tell a widow that she would never be married again! You're a _bori chovihani_ [a great witch],--indeed, you aren't."

"_Rye_," said the gypsy, with a droll smile and a shrug,--I think I can see it now,--"the _dukkerin_ [prediction] was all right, but I pet the right _dukkerins_ on the wrong ladies."

And the Master said, "I write letters, but I am not the messenger." His orders, like the gypsy's, had been all right, but they had gone to the wrong shop. Thus, in all ages, those who affect superior wisdom and foreknowledge absolute have found that a great practical part of the real business consisted in the plausible explanation of failures. The great Canadian weather prophet is said to keep two clerks busy, one in recording his predictions, the other in explaining their failures; which is much the case with the rain-doctors in Africa, who are as ingenious and fortunate in explaining a miss as a hit, as, indeed, they need be, since they must, in case of error, submit to be devoured alive by ants,--insects which in Africa correspond in several respects to editors and critics, particularly the stinging kind. "_Und ist man bei der Prophezeiung angestellt_," as Heine says; "when a man has a situation in a prophecy-office," a great part of his business is to explain to the customers why it is that so many of them draw blanks, or why the trains of fate are never on time.

V. HAMPTON RACES.

On a summer day, when waking dreams softly wave before the fancy, it is pleasant to walk in the noon-stillness along the Thames, for then we pass a series of pictures forming a gallery which I would not exchange for that of the Louvre, could I impress them as indelibly upon the eye-memory as its works are fixed on canvas. There exists in all of us a spiritual photographic apparatus, by means of which we might retain accurately all we have ever seen, and bring out, at will, the pictures from the pigeon-holes of the memory, or make new ones as vivid as aught we see in dreams, but the faculty must be developed in childhood. So surely as I am now writing this will become, at some future day, a branch of education, to be developed into results of which the wildest imagination can form no conception, and I put the prediction on record. As it is, I am sorry that I was never trained to this half-thinking, half-painting art, since, if I had been, I should have left for distant days to come some charming views of Surrey as it appears in this decade.

The reedy eyots and the rising hills; the level meadows and the little villes, with their antique perpendicular Gothic churches, which form the points around which they have clustered for centuries, even as groups of boats in the river are tied around their mooring-posts; the bridges and trim cottages or elegant mansions with their flower-bordered grounds sweeping down to the water's edge, looking like rich carpets with new baize over the centre, make the pictures of which I speak, varying with every turn of the Thames; while the river itself is, at this season, like a continual regatta, with many kinds of boats, propelled by stalwart young Englishmen or healthy, handsome damsels, of every rank, the better class by far predominating. There is a disposition among the English to don quaint holiday attire, to put on the picturesque, and go to the very limits which custom permits, which would astonish an American. Of late years this is becoming the case, too, in Trans-Atlantis, but it has always been usual in England, to mark the fete day with a festive dress, to wear gay ribbons, and to indulge the very harmless instinct of youth to be gallant and gay.

I had started one morning on a walk by the Thames, when I met a friend, who asked,--

"Aren't you going to-day to the Hampton races?"

"How far is it?"

"Just six miles. On Molesy Hurst."