GYPSY AND GINGER GET MARRIED
When Gypsy and Ginger got married—
Oh, but before that I ought to say that those were not their names. Hers was the name of the most beautiful of women, and his the name of the most victorious of men. But they were not a bit like that really. Parents make these mistakes, and the false prophecies they invent for their infants at the font continue to be their delusions through life. But nobody else’s. As they grow up the children find their level, and are called according to their deserts. And so Gypsy was called Gypsy because his hair wasn’t really quite as black as a gypsy’s; and Ginger was called Ginger because her hair was the sort of hair that those who adore it love to insult. It was anything but ginger; or rather, it was everything besides. Such as mace, and cinnamon, and nutmeg, and cayenne, and ochre, and burnt sienna, and vandyke brown and a touch of chrome no. 3; and one hair, named Vivien, was pure vermilion. It was a ridiculous mixture really, and resembled the palette of an artist trying to paint beechwoods in Autumn. No, it didn’t; it resembled the beechwoods. In thinking of Ginger’s hair you must begin again, and wash out all the above colours, which are not really colours, but paints. Ginger’s hair, like all the colours of earth and sky, was made of fire and light. That is why colours can never be painted. I’m sorry to have gone on so long about Ginger’s hair, but I couldn’t help it; yet I should have been able to, for the hair itself was short. When she combed it over her head and face it hung as low as her upper lip, and so on all the way round, very smooth on the top, very thick at the bottom, and doing a lovely serpentine in and out just below the level of her eyebrows. When it got to her lip it did another one in, and never came out again.
When Gypsy and Ginger got married—
By the way, it was by the merest fluke that they did get married. A month before that Ginger chanced to be in Sussex (she never was anywhere by design), and she saw an empty cottage that took her fancy; it had a thatched roof with martins under the thatch, and two brick floors downstairs, and two whitewashed ceilings upstairs. Between the two ceilings was a green door three feet high, so you had to play at elephants to get from one ceiling to the other. When you were there you could stand upright; but if you wanted to look out of the window to talk to the martins you had to go down on your knees again. The cottage had got two chains of hills all to itself, one on each side, and a river at the bottom of the garden, running very full and level between green grass and gold kingcups.
Therefore Ginger knew that the cottage had got to be hers. She went to the Pub to ask about it, and the Pub gave her shandygaff and cheese and said it belonged to the Blacksmith.
“Why doesn’t the Blacksmith live in it?” asked Ginger.
“He’s keeping it for his son, till he gets married,” said the Pub.
“Is he going to get married?” asked Ginger.
“Not as we knows on,” said the Pub.
Ginger finished her shandygaff so hastily that she choked, and ran as fast as she could to the Blacksmith’s, with her mouth full of cheese. Between cheese and breathlessness she was unable to speak when she got there, so she merely leaned against the door waving her hands at the Blacksmith and his Son. They looked round at her. The Blacksmith said, “What d’ye want, missy?” and the Son didn’t say anything. Ginger gulped down the last of her cheese and said, “I want to marry your son.” The Blacksmith said, “He’s tokened to Lizzie Hooker,” and the Son didn’t say anything. Ginger stamped her foot and said, “When?” “Come dinner-time,” said the Blacksmith. The Son said nothing. “There!” said Ginger, “I knew I’d be too late.” And she turned and ran down the hill and took the next train to Sligo. The men went back to their work, and come supper-time the Blacksmith’s Son broke it off with Lizzie Hooker. But by then Ginger was nearly in Wales, which shows how fatal a thing is procrastination.
Gypsy knew this. He never procrastinated. But at that time he and Ginger were strangers, or this narrow squeak would never have happened. Ginger stayed a week in Sligo, went to Abbeyville for another, came back in a hurry because the Ballet was dancing Carnaval on Saturday afternoon, and then ran up to Ilkley for three days. She was next said to have been seen simultaneously in Northamptonshire and Petersfield, but the certain fact is that exactly a month after not marrying the Blacksmith’s Son in Sussex, she was in a boat on the Cam with Gypsy. He had come across her in the Backs five minutes previously, and asked her to go for a row. The next day Gypsy and Ginger got married.
Gypsy and Ginger spent their honeymoon on Hampstead Heath. It lasted from Saturday to Monday, and by great luck the Monday was Whit Monday. So they did the end of the honeymoon in Swings and Roundabouts, and slid several times down a little Spiral Tower, and had gingerbeer and oranges and hokey-pokey, and bought each other a great many beautifully-coloured wedding-presents, such as feathers and streamers and little balls of pink and blue and yellow and green and gold and silver, swinging from elastics, and tin trumpets, and striped cornucopias. And Gypsy came away with sixteen cocoanuts. He felt in great form, because, he said, the cocoanuts that hadn’t been to the barber’s looked exactly like Ginger’s head, and it was too good a chance to be missed. He did have nineteen cocoanuts, but he dropped one in the last Roundabout, very late at night when the flares were lit. It was a Motorcar Roundabout with an automatic Jazz Band in the middle of it that got jazzier and jazzier as the motors got faster and faster. But when Gypsy dropped his cocoanut he got even jazzier than the band, and stood up on the back of his seat and yelled for the thing to stop, and for several rounds had a fierce argument with an attendant, whom he accused, every time he whirled past, of conspiring to rob him of his nut. But all the attendant saw was an occasional lightning-streak of a young man with wild hair and glittering eyes and gesticulating hands, superbly balanced on one foot; and all the attendant heard was, “Nut! nut! nut!” And all the attendant said was, “’E’s fair gawn orf it.” As the motor-jazz simmered down so did Gypsy, and by the time they came to a standstill he realised that he had done the attendant an injustice, so he gave the man his eighteenth cocoanut as a keepsake.
And Ginger won a penknife. She threw a little ring right over it and won it. It was an awful surprise to her, because she never knew she had it in her, but it was an awfuller surprise to the Man with the Rings, because nobody ever did win a penknife. He simply hated losing it. So he offered Ginger anuvver frow, free of charge, if she would give him back the penknife. She was delighted and said, “How generous! oh, but are you sure?” she was so afraid of doing him. The Man with the Rings was quite sure. So they put back the penknife, and Ginger threw her free throw and won it again. Then the Man with the Rings said, “Blarst!” and burst into tears.
Ginger said, “Oh, dear, what is the matter?”
“Well may you arst!” sobbed the Man with the Rings, “an’ me wiv a wife an’ five little ’uns at ’ome.”
At least, Ginger thought he said this; in Gypsy’s opinion, when they discussed it later, he said, “Five wives and a little ’un.” Either way they felt very sorry for him. Ginger dried his eyes with a beautiful orange-coloured handkerchief which was Gypsy’s chief wedding-present to her, and Gypsy gave him his seventeenth cocoanut. But the Man With the Rings only looked miserably at the penknife; and at last he offered Ginger free free frows if she’d give it back. But Ginger clutched it. She wanted so much to keep the penknife as a proof, and she knew that luck doesn’t go on forever. The Man with the Rings looked frightfully unhappy, so Gypsy, who could not bear a cloud on his first honeymoon, gave him half-a-crown for the penknife; and everybody was cheerful.
“It’s for you,” said Ginger when they came away. “It’s a wedding-present. I won it for you with the sweat of my own brow.”
“We shan’t have to sweat again for a long time now,” said Gypsy. “Sixteen cocoanuts will be lots to live on for a bit, especially now we’ve got a penknife to eat them with. It’s ripping, darling.”
Gypsy was wrong, however. The penknife wouldn’t rip margarine, much less sixteen cocoanuts. So when they got back to a little room they’d found standing quite empty and longing for them in Well Road, they had supper by the aid of the poker. Then, because they’d no pennies left for the gas-slot, and no lamp, and no candles, Ginger put a match to some shavings in the fireplace so that they could see whether they were taking bites of cocoanut or of cocoanut matting; and as the poker was otherwise engaged, she poked the fire with the penknife, which flared up like a squib and disappeared for ever. And Gypsy and Ginger, who both adored fireworks, said, “Oo—oo—oo!” and clapped their hands, and rolled themselves up on the floor and went to sleep.
Because, as I said before, the room was quite empty.
The day after the honeymoon, Gypsy and Ginger decided that it was time to settle down. The five days since they had first met had been as unsettled as unsettling, but now that they were used to married life and to one another—“we must make up our minds,” said Gypsy, “to being humdrum for the rest of our days. There’s no escape. We must Keep House.” “Why?” said Ginger. “Before you’re married,” said Gypsy, “House keeps You. Afterwards You keep House. It’s a sort of moral obligation for past favours received.” “Bother,” said Ginger, “is it?” “’Fraid so,” said Gypsy; “and before we keep house we must discuss Ways and Means.” “Isn’t there a Ministry for that?” asked Ginger. “We might go to the Minister and discuss it with him.” “There isn’t one yet,” said Gypsy, “there won’t be one till the Householders’ Strike nearly comes off.” “Then let’s nearly strike,” said Ginger. “But we aren’t nearly Householders yet,” objected Gypsy; “which brings us back to the discussion of Ways and Means.”
They discussed Ways and Means. “I’ve often thought,” said Ginger, pulling reflectively at her single scarlet hair, “that I might be a Designer.”
“What of? Of what? Let Vivien alone, darling, she might come out, and it would be a lot of trouble putting her back in the same hole. Transplanting hairs isn’t as simple as it sounds. And there’s no money in it either, or we might go in for that. Of what?”
“What of what?” asked Ginger.
“Do you mean ‘what of—what’ or ‘what—of what?’” asked Gypsy.
“I don’t remember,” said Ginger.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s go back to our first subject. What would you design?”
“The dresses you see in Dry-Cleaners’ shop-windows,” said Ginger. “I often wonder who designs them, or how they think of them, or when they were in fashion. There’s the one in cherry-coloured plush, and the one with a bodice draped canary satin with a bright blue moiré sash and a deep lace flounce round the skirt; and there are the white ingenue ones, all specially designed for ingenues over thirty-five. But it must be an awfully difficult profession—I expect you have to be born with a natural gift for the wrong colours.”
“Then you’d better chuck it and think of something else,” said Gypsy, looking at her hair which had been born with a natural gift for the right colours. “But while you’ve been talking I’ve decided on my profession.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Invert gas-mantles.”
“Why?”
“Well, somebody has to. All the best gas-mantles are inverted nowadays. And it sounds a simple, even an artless job; I’m sure it lies within my scope.”
“What is a scope?” asked Ginger.
“Don’t be silly,” said Gypsy. “You must know what a scope is. You’ve got one of your own.”
“Sure?” said Ginger.
“Everybody has.”
“What for?”
“For things to lie within, of course.”
“Like a sea-chest? What sort of things—the things you so often see in the offing?”
“Oh, not nearly as many or as varied as those,” said Gypsy. “They’re simply legion. The things within one’s scope are frequently quite limited. But if you take another peep into yours, you might find something else.”
Ginger took another peep, and emerged triumphant.
“Well?” said Gypsy.
“I’ve found what I’m going to do. I’m going to trim coal.”
“How?”
“I shall have to find out. But coal is trimmed—there’s been a lot about Coal-Trimmers in the papers lately, and I should love it. There’s such a lot of effects to be done with black—you ask Mr. Heal. Think of little white frills, and scarlet ribbons, and bright green pom-poms—”
“I never saw my Mother’s coal come into the drawing-room looking like an African Beauty Chorus,” said Gypsy, getting jealous. “I don’t believe that’s how you trim coal at all. I believe what coal-trimmers do is to put all those little goldy bits in the lumps, and that must be frightfully hard.”
“The first time I saw the goldy bits,” said Ginger, “I was nine years old. And I thought all we’d got to do was to get them out with a nutpick, and our fortune would be made. And I got the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue and turned up the Oriental Section, and decided I’d have a Moorish lamp and a Benares tray, and a sandalwood box, and an octagonal coffee-stool inlaid mother-of-pearl, and some joss-sticks, and wear a pink veil with gold spangles, and lie on three striped cushions all day long, and eat Turkish Delight, and be like the Arabian Nights.”
“Then you’d got a jolly thin idea of the Arabian Nights,” said Gypsy. “What a lot you talk.”
“I choose nice things to talk about anyhow,” said Ginger, “not dull ones like upside-down gas-mantles.”
“I’m not going to turn gas-mantles upside-down any more,” said Gypsy. “It’s cruel, because they’re subject to apoplexy. I’ve been getting a better idea lately. I’m going to paint Still Life.”
“What sort of still life?”
“Quite a new line. I shall paint Wax-Fruit-Pieces, and Artificial-Flower-Pieces. It’s never been done.”
“Yes it has been,” said Ginger. “The Pavement Artists all do it. The profession’s absolutely overcrowded, and it’s the rottenest Way and Mean we’ve discussed yet. I’m tired of Ways and Means, because while I go one way you mean another, and if we can’t find some sort of tandem profession we might as well stop being married at once. Let’s go for a walk to Golder’s Green and give cocoanuts to the emus. I wonder what the weather’s like.”
“Go and look for yourself,” said Gypsy.
“I looked first thing this morning,” said Ginger. “Don’t be sulky. It’s your turn.”
Gypsy went outside and came in again, and said rather excitedly, “Squally and showery. What was it this morning when you looked?”
“Set fair,” said Ginger.
“Eureka!” said Gypsy.
“What does that mean?”
“Come and play marbles with the cocoanuts,” said Gypsy, “and I’ll tell you.”