Chapter 15

The tinker lived with his wife in a "tramps' lodging-house" in the town. To those Americans who know such places by the abominable dens which are occasionally reported by American grand juries, the term will suggest something much worse than it is. In England the average tramp's lodging is cleaner, better regulated, and more orderly than many Western "hotels." The police look closely after it, and do not allow more than a certain number in a room. They see that it is frequently cleaned, and that clean sheets are frequently put on the beds. One or two hand-organs in the hall, with a tinker's barrow or wheel, proclaimed the character of the lodgers, and in the sitting-room there were to be found, of an evening, gypsies, laborers with their families seeking work or itinerant musicians. I can recall a powerful and tall young man, with a badly expressive face, one-legged, and well dressed as a sailor. He was a beggar, who measured the good or evil of all mankind by what they gave him. He was very bitter as to the bad. Yet this house was in its way upper class. It was not a den of despair, dirt, and misery, and even the Italians who came there were obliged to be decent and clean. It would not have been appropriate to have written for them on the door, "_Voi che intrate lasciate ogni speranza_." (He who enters here leaves soap behind.) The most painful fact which struck me, in my many visits, was the intelligence and decency of some of the boarders. There was more than one who conversed in a manner which indicated an excellent early education; more than one who read the newspaper aloud and commented on it to the company, as any gentleman might have done. Indeed, the painful part of life as shown among these poor people was the manifest fact that so many of them had come down from a higher position, or were qualified for it. And this is characteristic of such places. In his "London Labour and the London Poor," vol. i. p. 217, Mahew tells of a low lodging-house "in which there were at one time five university men, three surgeons, and several sorts of broken-down clerks." The majority of these cases are the result of parents having risen from poverty and raised their families to "gentility." The sons are deprived by their bringing up of the vulgar pluck and coarse energy by which the father rose, and yet are expected to make their way in the world, with nothing but a so-called "education," which is too often less a help than a hindrance. In the race of life no man is so heavily handicapped as a young "gentleman." The humblest and raggedest of all the inmates of this house were two men who got their living by _shelkin gallopas_ (or selling ferns), as it is called in the Shelta, or tinker's and tramp's slang. One of these, whom I have described in another chapter as teaching me this dialect, could conjugate a French verb; we thought he had studied law. The other was a poor old fellow called Krooty, who could give the Latin names for all the plants which he gathered and sold, and who would repeat poetry very appropriately, proving sufficiently that he had read it. Both the fern-sellers spoke better English than divers Lord Mayors and Knights to whom I have listened, for they neither omitted _h_ like the lowly, nor _r_ like the lofty ones of London.

The tinker's wife was afflicted with a nervous disorder, which caused her great suffering, and made it almost impossible for her to sell goods, or contribute anything to the joint support. Her husband always treated her with the greatest kindness; I have seldom seen an instance in which a man was more indulgent and gentle. He made no display whatever of his feelings; it was only little by little that I found out what a heart this imperturbable rough of the road possessed. Now the Palmer, who was always engaged in some wild act of unconscious benevolence, bought for her some medicine, and gave her an order on the first physician in the town for proper advice; the result being a decided amelioration of her health. And I never knew any human being to be more sincerely grateful than the tinker was for this kindness. Ascertaining that I had tools for wood-carving, he insisted on presenting me with crocus powder, "to put an edge on." He had a remarkably fine whetstone, "the best in England; it was worth half a sovereign," and this he often and vainly begged me to accept. And he had a peculiar little trick of relieving his kindly feelings. Whenever we dropped in of an evening to the lodging-house, he would cunningly borrow my knife, and then disappear. Presently the _whiz-whiz_, _st'st_ of his wheel would be heard without, and then the artful dodger would reappear with a triumphant smile, and with the knife sharpened to a razor edge. Anent which gratitude I shall have more to say anon.

One day I was walking on the Front, when I overtook a gypsy van, loaded with baskets and mats, lumbering along. The proprietor, who was a stranger to me, was also slightly or lightly lumbering in his gait, being cheerfully beery, while his berry brown wife, with a little three-year-old boy, peddled wares from door to door. Both were amazed and pleased at being accosted in Romany. In the course of conversation they showed great anxiety as to their child, who had long suffered from some disorder which caused them great alarm. The man's first name was Anselo, though it was painted Onslow on his vehicle. Mr. Anselo, though himself just come to town, was at once deeply impressed with the duty of hospitality to a Romany rye. I had called him _pal_, and this in gypsydom involves the shaking of hands, and with the better class an extra display of courtesy. He produced half a crown, and declared his willingness to devote it all to beer for my benefit. I declined, but he repeated his offer several times,--not with any annoying display, but with a courteous earnestness, intended to set forth a sweet sincerity. As I bade him good-by, he put the crown-piece into one eye, and as he danced backward, gypsy fashion up the street and vanished in the sunny purple twilight towards the sea I could see him winking with the other, and hear him cry, "Don't say no--now's the last chance--do I hear a bid?"

We found this family in due time at the lodging-house, where the little boy proved to be indeed seriously ill, and we at once discovered that the parents, in their ignorance, had quite misunderstood his malady and were aggravating it by mal-treatment. To these poor people the good Palmer also gave an order on the old physician, who declared that the boy must have died in a few days, had he not taken charge of him. As it was, the little fellow was speedily cured. There was, it appeared, some kind of consanguinity between the tinker or his wife and the Anselo family. These good people, anxious to do anything, yet able to do little, consulted together as to showing their gratitude, and noting that we were specially desirous of collecting old gypsy words gave us all they could think of, and without informing us of their intention, which indeed we only learned by accident a long time after, sent a messenger many miles to bring to Aberystwith a certain Bosville, who was famed as being deep in Romany lore, and in possession of many ancient words. Which was indeed true, he having been the first to teach us _pisali_, meaning a saddle, and in which Professor Cowell, of Cambridge, promptly detected the Sanskrit for sit-upon, the same double meaning also existing in _boshto_; or, as old Mrs. Buckland said to me at Oaklands Park, in Philadelphia, "a _pisali_ is the same thing with a _boshto_."

"What will gain thy faith?" said Quentin Durward to Hayradden Maugrabhin. "Kindness," answered the gypsy.

The joint families, solely with intent to please us, although they never said a word about it, next sent for a young Romany, one of the Lees, and his wife whom they supposed we would like to meet. Walking along the Front, I met the tinker's wife with the handsomest Romany girl I ever beheld. In a London ball-room or on the stage she would have been a really startling beauty. This was young Mrs. Lee. Her husband was a clever violinist, and it was very remarkable that when he gave himself up to playing, with _abandon_ or self-forgetfulness, there came into his melodies the same wild gypsy expression, the same chords and tones, which abound in the music of the Austrian Tsigane. It was not my imagination which prompted the recognition; the Palmer also observed it, without thinking it remarkable. From the playing of both Mat Woods and young Lee, I am sure that there has survived among the Welsh gypsies some of the spirit of their old Eastern music, just as in the solo dancing of Mat's sister there was precisely the same kind of step which I had seen in Moscow. Among the hundreds of the race whom I have met in Great Britain, I have never known any young people who were so purely Romany as these. The tinker and Anselo with his wife had judged wisely that we would be pleased with this picturesque couple. They always seemed to me in the house like two wild birds, and tropical ones at that, in a cage. There was a tawny-gold, black and scarlet tone about them and their garb, an Indian Spanish duskiness and glow which I loved to look at.

Every proceeding of the tinker and Anselo was veiled in mystery and hidden in the obscurity so dear to such grown-up children, but as I observed after a few days that Lee did nothing beyond acting as assistant to the tinker at the wheel, I surmised that the visit was solely for our benefit. As the tinker was devoted to his poor wife, so was Anselo and his dame devoted to their child. He was, indeed, a brave little fellow, and frequently manifested the precocious pluck and sturdiness so greatly admired by the Romanys of the road; and when he would take a whip and lead the horse, or in other ways show his courage, the delight of his parents was in its turn delightful. They would look at the child as if charmed, and then at one another with feelings too deep for words, and then at me for sympathetic admiration.

The keeper of the house where they lodged was in his way a character and a linguist. Welsh was his native tongue and English his second best. He also knew others, such as Romany, of which he was proud, and the Shelta or Minklas of the tinkers, of which he was not. The only language which he knew of which he was really ashamed was Italian, and though he could maintain a common conversation in it he always denied that he remembered more than a few words. For it was not as the tongue of Dante, but as the lingo of organ-grinders and such "catenone" that he knew it, and I think that the Palmer and I lost dignity in his eyes by inadvertently admitting that it was familiar to us. "I shouldn't have thought it," was all his comment on the discovery, but I knew his thought, and it was that we had made ourselves unnecessarily familiar with vulgarity.

It is not every one who is aware of the extent to which Italian is known by the lower orders in London. It is not spoken as a language; but many of its words, sadly mangled, are mixed with English as a jargon. Thus the Italian _scappare_, to escape, or run away, has become _scarper_; and a dweller in the Seven Dials has been heard to say he would "_scarper_ with the _feele_ of the _donna_ of the _cassey_;" which means, run away with the daughter of the landlady of the house, and which, as the editor of the Slang Dictionary pens, is almost pure Italian,--_scappare colla figlia della donna_, _della casa_. Most costermongers call a penny a _saltee_, from _soldo_; a crown, a _caroon_; and one half, _madza_, from _mezza_. They count as follows:--

ITALIAN. Oney saltee, a penny Uno soldo. Dooey saltee, twopence Dui soldi. Tray saltee, threepence Tre soldi. Quarterer saltee, fourpence Quattro soldi. Chinker saltee, fivepence Cinque soldi. Say saltee, sixpence Sei soldi. Say oney saltee, or setter Sette soldi. saltee, sevenpence Say dooee saltee, or otter Otto soldi. saltee, eightpence Say tray saltee, or nobba saltee, Nove soldi. ninepence Say quarterer saltee, or dacha Dieci soldi. (datsha) saltee, tenpence Say chinker saltee, or dacha one Dieci uno soldi saltee, elevenpence Oney beong, one shilling Uno bianco. A beong say saltee, one shilling Uno bianco sei soldi. and sixpence Madza caroon, half a crown Mezza corona.

Mr. Hotten says that he could never discover the derivation of _beong_, or _beonk_. It is very plainly the Italian _bianco_, white, which, like _blanc_ in French and _blank_ in German, is often applied slangily to a silver coin. It is as if one had said, "a shiner." Apropos of which word there is something curious to be noted. It came forth in evidence, a few years ago in England, that burglars or other thieves always carried with them a piece of coal; and on this disclosure, a certain writer, in his printed collection of curiosities, comments as if it were a superstition, remarking that the coal is carried for an amulet. But the truth is that the thief has no such idea. The coal is simply a sign for money; and when the bearer meets with a man whom he thinks may be a "fence," or a purchaser of stolen goods, he shows the coal, which is as much as to say, Have you money? Money, in vulgar gypsy, is _wongur_, a corruption of the better word _angar_, which also means a hot coal; and _braise_, in French _argot_, has the same double meaning. I may be wrong, but I suspect that _rat_, a dollar in Hebrew, or at least in Schmussen, has its root in common with _ratzafim_, coals, and possibly _poschit_, a farthing, with _pecham_, coal. In the six kinds of fire mentioned in the Talmud, {222} there is no identification of coals with money; but in the German legends of Rubezahl, there is a tale of a charcoal-burner who found them changed to gold. Coins are called shiners because they shine like glowing coals, and I dare say that the simile exists in many more languages.

One twilight we found in the public sitting-room of the lodging-house a couple whom I can never forget. It was an elderly gypsy and his wife. The husband was himself characteristic; the wife was more than merely picturesque. I have never met such a superb old Romany as she was; indeed, I doubt if I ever saw any woman of her age, in any land or any range of life, with a more magnificently proud expression or such unaffected dignity. It was the whole poem of "Crescentius" living in modern time in other form.

When a scholar associates much with gypsies there is developed in him in due time a perception or intuition of certain kinds of men or minds, which it is as difficult to describe as it is wonderful. He who has read Matthew Arnold's "Gipsy Scholar" may, however, find therein many apt words for it. I mean very seriously what I say; I mean that through the Romany the demon of Socrates acquires distinctness; I mean that a faculty is developed which is as strange as divination, and which is greatly akin to it. The gypsies themselves apply it directly to palmistry; were they well educated they would feel it in higher forms. It may be reached among other races and in other modes, and Nature is always offering it to us freely; but it seems to live, or at least to be most developed, among the Romany. It comes upon the possessor far more powerfully when in contact with certain lives than with others, and with the sympathetic it takes in at a glance that which may employ it at intervals for years to think out.

And by this _duk_ I read in a few words in the Romany woman an eagle soul, caged between the bars of poverty, ignorance, and custom; but a great soul for all that. Both she and her husband were of the old type of their race, now so rare in England, though commoner in America. They spoke Romany with inflection and conjugation; they remembered the old rhymes and old words, which I quoted freely, with the Palmer. Little by little, the old man seemed to be deeply impressed, indeed awed, by our utterly inexplicable knowledge. I wore a velveteen coat, and had on a broad, soft felt hat.

"You talk as the old Romanys did," said the old man. "I hear you use words which I once heard from old men who died when I was a boy. I thought those words were lying in graves which have long been green. I hear songs and sayings which I never expected to hear again. You talk like gypsies, and such gypsies as I never meet now; and you look like Gorgios. But when I was still young, a few of the oldest Romany _chals_ still wore hats such as you have; and when I first looked at you, I thought of them. I don't understand you. It is strange, very strange."

"It is the Romany _soul_," said his wife. "People take to what is in them; if a bird were born a fox, it would love to fly."

I wondered what flights she would have taken if she had wings. But I understood why the old man had spoken as he did; for, knowing that we had intelligent listeners, the Palmer and I had brought forth all our best and quaintest Romany curios, and these rural Welsh wanderers were not, like their English pals, familiar with Romany ryes. And I was moved to like them, and nobody perceives this sooner than a gypsy. The old couple were the parents of young Lee, and said they had come to visit him; but I think that it was rather to see us that we owed their presence in Aberystwith. For the tinker and Anselo were at this time engaged, in their secret and owl-like manner, as befitted men who were up to all manner of ways that were dark, in collecting the most interesting specimens of Romanys, for our especial study; and whenever this could be managed so that it appeared entirely accidental and a surprise, then they retired into their shadowed souls and chuckled with fiendish glee at having managed things so charmingly. But it will be long ere I forget how the old man's eye looked into the past as he recalled,--

"The hat of antique shape and coat of gray, The same the gypsies wore,"

and went far away back through my words to words heard in the olden time, by fires long since burnt out, beneath the flame-gilt branches of forests which have sailed away as ships, farther than woods e'er went from Dunsinane, and been wrecked in Southern seas. But though I could not tell exactly what was in every room, I knew into what house his soul had gone; and it was for this that the scholar-gypsy went from Oxford halls "to learn strange arts and join a gypsy tribe." His friends had gone from earth long since, and were laid to sleep; some, perhaps, far in the wold and wild, amid the rocks, where fox and wild bird were their visitors; but for an instant they rose again from their graves, and I knew them.

"They could do wonders by the power of the imagination," says Glanvil of the gypsies; "their fancy binding that of others." Understand by imagination and fancy all that Glanvil really meant, and I agree with him. It is a matter of history that, since the Aryan morning of mankind, the Romanys have been chiromancing, and, following it, trying to read people's minds and bind them to belief. Thousands of years of transmitted hereditary influences always result in something; it has really resulted with the gypsies in an instinctive, though undeveloped, intuitive perception, which a sympathetic mind acquires from them,--nay, is compelled to acquire, out of mere self-defense; and when gained, it manifests itself in many forms,

"But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill."

AMERICAN GYPSIES.

I. GYPSIES IN PHILADELPHIA.

It is true that the American gypsy has grown more vigorous in this country, and, like many plants, has thriven better for being trans--I was about to write incautiously _ported_, but, on second thought, say _planted_. Strangely enough, he is more Romany than ever. I have had many opportunities of studying both the elders from England and the younger gypsies, born of English parents, and I have found that there is unquestionably a great improvement in the race here, even from a gypsy stand-point. The young sapling, under more favorable influences, has pushed out from the old root, and grown stronger. The causes for this are varied. Gypsies, like peacocks, thrive best when allowed to range afar. _Il faut leur donner le clef des champs_ (you must give them the key of the fields), as I once heard an old Frenchman, employed on Delmonico's Long Island farm, lang syne, say of that splendid poultry. And what a range they have, from the Atlantic to the Pacific! Marry, sir, 't is like roaming from sunrise to sunset, east and west, "and from the aurora borealis to a Southern blue-jay," and no man shall make them afraid. Wood! "Well, 't is a _kushto tem for kasht_" (a fair land for timber), as a very decent _Romani-chal_ said to me one afternoon. It was thinking of him which led me to these remarks.

I had gone with my niece--who speaks Romany--out to a gypsyry by Oaklands Park, and found there one of our good people, with his wife and children, in a tent. Hard by was the wagon and the horse, and, after the usual initiatory amazement at being accosted in the _kalo jib_, or black language, had been survived, we settled down into conversation. It was a fine autumnal day, Indian-summery,--the many in one of all that is fine in weather all the world over, put into a single glorious sense,--a sense of bracing air and sunshine not over-bold or bright, and purple, tawny hues in western skies, and dim, sweet feelings of the olden time. And as we sat lounging in lowly seats, and talked about the people and their ways, it seemed to me as if I were again in Devonshire or Surrey. Our host--for every gypsy who is visited treats you as a guest, thus much Oriental politeness being deeply set in him--had been in America from boyhood, but he seemed to be perfectly acquainted with all whom I had known over the sea. Only one thing he had not heard, the death of old Gentilla Cooper, of the Devil's Dyke, near Brighton, for I had just received a letter from England announcing the sad news.

"Yes, this America is a good country for travelers. _We can go South in winter_. Aye, the land is big enough to go to a warm side in winter, and a cool one in summer. But I don't go South, because I don't like the people; I don't get along with them. _Some Romanys do_. Yes, but I'm not on that horse, I hear that the old country's getting to be a hard place for our people. Yes, just as you say, there's no _tan to hatch_, no place to stay in there, unless you pay as much as if you went to a hotel. 'T isn't so here. Some places they're uncivil, but mostly we can get wood and water, and a place for a tent, and a bite for the old _gry_ [horse]. The country people like to see us come, in many places. They're more high-minded and hon'rable here than they are in England. If we can cheat them in horse-dealin' they stand it as gentlemen always ought to do among themselves in such games. Horse-dealin' is horse-stealin', in a way, among real gentlemen. If I can Jew you or you do me, it's all square in gamblin', and nobody has any call to complain. Therefore, I allow that Americans are higher up as gentlemen than what they are in England. It is not all of one side, like a jug-handle, either. Many of these American farmers can cheat me, and have done it, and are proud of it. Oh, yes; they're much higher toned here. In England, if you put off a _bavolengro_ [broken-winded horse] on a fellow he comes after you with a _chinamangri_ [writ]. Here he goes like a man and swindles somebody else with the _gry_, instead of sneaking off to a magistrate.