GYPSY AND GINGER TAKE THINGS SERIOUSLY
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.”
“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.
“That!” said Gypsy, pointing upward.
She shifted her faggot and gazed at the roof, which bore this legend in luminous white paint:
THERE IS NO TRUTH IN THE RUMOUR THAT
THIS UGLY IF UTILITARIAN ROOF IS TO
BE REPLACED WITH A BEAUTIFUL THATCH
“Why did you do that?” asked Ginger.
“I didn’t,” said Gypsy.
“Who did, then?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Gypsy.
It was only the beginning. Soon his other roofs began to be adorned with similar statements. A shelter in Kensington inquired:
WHO HAS BEEN CIRCULATING THE FICTION
THAT OLD WEATHER-STAINED TILES ARE
THE LATEST FASHION FOR CABMEN?
THEY ARE NOT!
And a Canteen in Putney asserted:
THE REPORT IS ABSOLUTELY UNFOUNDED
THAT BEFORE LONG THIS UNPREPOSSESSING
HUT WILL RESEMBLE THE LOG-CABINS OF
THE EARLY SETTLERS
These suggestions, and others equally attractive, were gradually being negatived on iron roofs in every quarter of London.
If Gypsy and Ginger were mysteries to the Cricket-Clubs and Flower-sellers, the unknown Luminous Painter was a mystery to them. But at last they discovered him.
They had taken half an hour off one night to look at the pattern of the moon on the river, and they found him standing in the middle of Westminster Bridge. He was very tall and lean, and wore a tight frock-coat that was quite a good green. It had once been rather a poor black. His soft felt hat was also green, and even he did not know what its first colour was. When they caught sight of him he was engaged in removing the hat from his head with an exquisite gesture, and bowing right and left with an unexampled grace. But for themselves there was nobody else on the bridge, yet he performed his courtly salute again and again, north and south, east and west. His deportment was as expressive as it was beautiful; it expressed deference without humility, airiness without impudence, and it paid a compliment not only to the recipient, but to the executor, of the bow.
“What are you doing?” cried Ginger, advancing with an involuntary curtsey.
The individual almost swept the ground with his hat.
“Madam,” he said, sweetly, “I am Bowing to the Circumstances.”
“What Circumstances?” inquired Ginger.
“My own Circumstances, madam. They require it of me frequently. They require it, alas! of many people. But it is one of the Lost Accomplishments of the age. One of the many. These things were once done with a grace——!”
He dusted and replaced his hat. “They stand saluted!” he said.
“I don’t believe that Circumstances which require bowing to ought to be saluted,” objected Ginger. “Why do you bow to them?”
“In acknowledgment, dear madam,” said the shabby gentleman, “that I am not what I was.”
“What were you?” asked Ginger.
“A Professor, madam.”
“And what are you?” asked Gypsy.
“At the moment, sir, I am Contradictor of Rumours.”
“You contradict them on my roofs!” cried Gypsy.