GYPSY AND GINGER KEEP HOUSE
When Gypsy said “Eureka!” he meant that he had found a Way and a Mean in which he and Ginger could work tandem and keep house together. It was really the ideal profession for newly-married couples, for it couldn’t be worked single, or by two men, or two women; it literally involved a house to be kept turn and turn about; and the balance between the Way and the Mean was so exquisitely adjusted, that while Gypsy went one Way, Ginger Meant something else entirely, and vice versa. This was the idea, which before long will probably be adopted by young brides and bridegrooms all over England.
“We will begin,” said Gypsy, “by building a little house, the size of Wendy and Peter’s, in a crowded thoroughfare. The house will have only one room, but two doors, both looking the same way. One door is yours and one is mine. When the weather is fine you will come out of your door while I stay inside and cook the sausages, and when it’s bad I will come out of my door while you go in and make the tea. And all the people will give us pennies for telling them what the weather is. That’s all.”
“Oh Gypsy!” exclaimed Ginger. She had always loved him, and often admired him; but now she almost respected him.
“We’d work on the swing system, you see,” said Gypsy. “I think there’d be a pivot in the middle of the floor and a little plank on it, with me on one end and you on the other.”
“We shouldn’t often meet,” said Ginger pensively.
“But think how jolly it would be to wave to each other,” said Gypsy.
“I’d wave my orange handkerchief,” said Ginger.
“I’d wave a blue one,” said Gypsy. “And I’d have a little blue top hat and coat, and bottle-green waistcoat and trousers, all varnished.”
“I’d have a round red bodice, very tight,” said Ginger, “and a little round yellow sailor hat, and I’d be varnished too. I’m afraid your varnish will wear off in the rain.”
“Well, you’ll fade a bit in the sun yourself,” said Gypsy.
“I’m sorry you’re to have all the bad weather,” said Ginger.
“It’s the man’s part, darling. And I shall have a purple umbrella stuck tight to my side.”
“I shall have a pink parasol,” said Ginger, “that never opens. I shall be very busy in June and July, but then I love an open-air life in summer. You’ll spend all August cooking sausages.”
“And you’ll be making tea most of January and February,” said Gypsy. “Home won’t see much of me at that time of year. But I shall hear you singing about the little house, and the kettle doing second, and I shall know it’s worth it.”
“What will happen in April?”
“Life will be a bit jerky in April,” said Gypsy. “There’ll be any amount of popping in and out, and I shall have to turn the sausages between the showers.”
“And what about when the weather’s not quite one thing and not quite another, and the barometer keeps on changing its mind about going up and down?”
“Then we’ll have to do a sort of Hesitation Waltz at our respective doors, and the tea and sausages must be suspended till May. Come on, darling, let’s go and do it.”
It was quickly done. Gypsy, who was handy with his hands, ran up a house with weather-boarding, and Ginger painted it green with a red chimney, and cottonwool smoke, because the chimney didn’t lead anywhere, and the cooking was all done on a brazier. They chose Trafalgar Square for their site because it was central and populous, and collared a lot of ’bus-routes. And they could see the fountains playing, and hear St. Martin ringing Oranges and Lemons, and throw crumbs to the sparrows and the lions. They had customers from the very beginning. Their most regular ones were the men from the Meteorological Office and the weather-reporters from the newspapers. The reporters came twice a day, at noon, to find out what the weather had been in the morning, and at evening to find out what it had been in the afternoon. But the theatre crowds kept them busiest. After the shows on soaking nights the people would flock with their dripping umbrellas and splashing galoshes to the little house to ask the weather, and Gypsy would stand outside the door and tell them it was raining and they’d he wise to go home by the Tube. And the grateful throng paid their pennies and rushed for the Bakerloo. But on fine nights Ginger would be there, and she would tell them that the moon was shining and the stars were out, and that nothing is lovelier than the top of a ’bus on a summer night. She told it so nicely that quite often she got two-pence instead of a penny. But she posted it all in the red pillar-box where they kept their money. When it got to a pound it would burst open, but it takes a long time to get to a pound because of the price of Souchong and Best Pork. And quite often a taximan or so would look in at twelve o’clock and ask for a sossidge and a cup of anything ’ot, just as a matter of course, and they always got it, and Gypsy and Ginger were really hurt when they offered to pay for this hospitality. So after that a great many taxi-men turned up regularly, and chestnut-men, and night-watchmen, and tramps, and in this way Gypsy and Ginger made many midnight friends, who are different from all the other sorts of friends there are. For at midnight we are quite ourselves.
Most of the people who would gather in Gypsy and Ginger’s Weatherhouse at midnight had lovely professions—so lovely that they often wondered they had not thought of them themselves when they were discussing Ways and Means. There were, for instance, a Rag-and-Bone Man, and a Punch-and-Judy Man, and a Balloon Woman, and a Lavender Girl. Gypsy would gladly have been either of the two first, and Ginger both of the two last. There were other people too, singers of ballads, and merchants of muffins and groundsel. But the only one whose profession they had considered even for a moment was the Pavement Artist. He was a very good artist and had once thought of being an R.A., but in the end had decided to be a P.A. instead.
“Burlington House, pah!” he would say, half-shutting one eye as he held up in the middle distance a glistening sausage, crackling from the pan. “It is the Mausoleum of Art, my dear.”
“Mausoleum?” inquired Ginger, biting off her thread, because she was neatening a loose end of braid on the Pavement Artist’s shabby brown cotton velveteen jacket. She often did such jobs for her friends at midnight.
“I think it’s the name of a music-hall,” whispered Gypsy.
“Of a dancing-hall,” corrected the Pavement Artist, “where they do the Dance of Death to the skeleton rattle of easels and mahlsticks. Vampires sit at the door waiting to suck the red blood from the veins of any living artist who ventures in. Once in he seldom, if ever, gets out again. I thought it wasn’t worth it, and I took to the art of the populace on the pavements.”
“Do the populace like art?” asked Gypsy.
“They like mine,” said the P.A. “I paint their dreams for them.”
“What are their dreams?” asked Ginger.
“Salmon and Switzerland,” said the P.A. His eyes grew hazy. “They are also mine. Have you ever eaten salmon?” He attacked Gypsy abruptly.
“Twice,” said Gypsy, suppressing a hundredth part of the truth out of kindness of heart.
“Ah. So have I—tinned. And have you ever seen Switzerland?”
Ginger nodded. “She’s seen everywhere,” explained Gypsy apologetically.
“So have I—in Oxford Street. It was years and years ago. You sat in a pretend railway carriage for twopence, and the floor rocked, and a man turned a handle to make the sound of wheels, and another one yodelled while a panorama of mountains and waterfalls whirled past the carriage window.” The Pavement Artist’s chin sank on his breast. “But I know,” he whispered, “that it’s not like that really, neither the salmon nor the mountains. They are not even like my pictures of them.”
“What are they like?” asked Ginger, filling his teacup.
“They are like my dreams of them,” said the P.A., “they are like what I feel when I do the pictures. And I only do the best parts. I do middle cuts of Scotch. I know the loch my salmon was caught in, I know the thrill of the angler as he hooks, plays, and lands it, yes, and the thrill of the fish. I have seen it come down in spate——”
“What’s spate?” said Ginger. There were lots of words she didn’t know.
“Sh!” said Gypsy putting his finger on her mouth, for the P.A. was wandering in a world apart.
“Sometimes,” he murmured, “I do it raw, sometimes cooked. When it is raw the blue and silver scales of the skin are more exquisite; but when it is cooked there are thin slices of cucumber with seeds visible in their cool transparent centres. Have you ever felt the beauty of design in the heart of a cucumber?—Once I surrounded the king of fish with a thick layer of mayonnaise.” His nostrils inflated slightly. “And Switzerland!”
“Yes, Switzerland?” repeated Ginger softly. His way of saying it diffused glamour over a country which on the whole had bored her.
“Switzerland! the awful mountains piercing the sapphire with their silver pinnacles—earth’s knives thrust into heaven’s bosom! The cows with their tinkling bells leaping from crag to crag! The crimson sunsets, the purple nights! The still lagoons with their gondolas, the Northern lights, the white palaces——”
“But,” said Ginger.
“Hush!” said Gypsy, taking her on his knee.
“Music over the water ... the siesta at noon ... the click of castanets, the serenata ... the rugged firs be-diamonded with frost, the orange groves in flower ... the Aurora Borealis....” The P.A.’s voice trailed off and his eyes closed.
That night when their friends had gone, Ginger got down the little red pillar-box and looked defiantly at Gypsy. But Gypsy only said, “If you can’t shake it out we’ll prise it open with the fork.”
However, with a good deal of shaking they got out three-and-elevenpence, and that was practically all it contained.
“I’m afraid it won’t quite run to Switzerland,” said Gypsy.
“No,” said Ginger, “but it will to Salmon—Scotch. And I don’t want it to run to Switzerland. It would be simply brutal to send him to Switzerland.”
“Yes, we mustn’t be iconoclasts,” said Gypsy.
“Iconoclasts?” inquired Ginger.
“The antitheses of Cook and Lunn, darling. But salmon—”
“Antitheses?” interpolated Ginger.
“There really isn’t time, darling. Salmon—”
“Then talk in words of one syllable,” said Ginger. “Now what about salmon?”
“Salmon,” said Gypsy, “is safe. It’s only the Canadians who put it in tins that are iconoclasts about salmon. I don’t see how any pavement picture of the very middlest cut could be better than the real thing, do you?”
Ginger agreed that salmon was safe.
But the P.A. didn’t.
When the following night he asked for a sausage, and Ginger shyly offered him a pink slice of Scotch with a coronet of cucumber all the way round, his eyes dilated. But he shook his head.
“My dear,” he said, “do you know what are the two worst things in life?”
“Not salmon and cucumber, surely?” pleaded Ginger.
“No,” said he. “But not having what you want, and having it.” He put the plate from him. “‘Rather endure those evils’—I can’t argue about it,” he said abruptly, “I only know that if your salmon were one whit more or less delicious than mine, I should never chalk salmon on pavement again. And what would then be left me to do for a living?”
“S’rimps,” said the Rag-and-Bone Man.
“Potboiling!” said the P. A. “Can one dream of shrimps? A sausage, please.”