“It’s queer,” resumed my Gipsy, after a pause, “how they always tells these here stories by Sevens. Were you ever on Salisbury Plain?”
“No!”
“There are great stones there—bori bars—and many a night I’ve slept there in the moonlight, in the open air, when I was a boy, and listened to my father tellin’ me about the Baker. For there’s seven great stories, and they say that hundreds of years ago a baker used to come with loaves of bread, and waste it all a tryin’ to make seven loaves remain at the same place, one on each stone. But one all’us fell off, and to this here day he’s never yet been able to get all seven on the seven stones.”
I think that my Gipsy told this story in connection with that of the Whistlers, because he was under the impression that it also was of Scriptural origin. It is, however, really curious that the Gipsy term for an owlet is the Māromengro’s Chavi, or Baker’s Daughter, and that they are all familiar with the monkish legend which declares that Jesus, in a baker’s shop, once asked for bread. The mistress was about to give him a large cake, when her daughter declared it was too much, and diminished the gift by one half.
“He nothing said,
But by the fire laid down the bread,
When lo, as when a blossom blows—
To a vast loaf the manchet rose;
In angry wonder, standing by,
The girl sent forth a wild, rude cry,
And, feathering fast into a fowl,
Flew to the woods a wailing owl.”
According to Eilert Sundt, who devoted his life to studying the Fanten and Tataren, or vagabonds and Gipsies of Sweden and Norway, there is a horrible and ghastly semblance among them of something like a religion, current in Scandinavia. Once a year, by night, the Gipsies of that country assemble for the purpose of un-baptizing all of their children whom they have, during the year, suffered to be baptized for the sake of gifts, by the Gorgios. On this occasion, amid wild orgies, they worship a small idol, which is preserved until the next meeting with the greatest secresy and care by their captain. I must declare that this story seems very doubtful to me.
I have devoted this chapter to illustrating from different points the fact that there lives in England a race which has given its impress to a vast proportion of our vagabond population, and which is more curious and more radically distinct in all its characteristics, than our writers, with one or two exceptions, have ever understood. One extraordinary difference still remains to be pointed out—as it has, in fact, already been, with great acumen, by Mr George Borrow, in his “Gipsies in Spain,” and by Dr Alexander Paspati, in his “Études sur les Tchinghianés ou Bohémiens de l’Empire Ottoman” (Constantinople, 1870); also by Mr Bright, in his “Hungary,” and by Mr Simson. It is this, that in every part of the world it is extremely difficult to get Rommany words, even from intelligent gipsies, although they may be willing with all their heart to communicate them. It may seem simple enough to the reader to ask a man “How do you call ‘to carry’ in your language?” But can the reader understand that a man, who is possibly very much shrewder than himself in reading at a glance many phases of character, and in countless trickeries, should be literally unable to answer such a question? And yet I have met with many such. The truth is, that there are people in this world who never had such a thing as an abstract idea, let us say even of an apple, plumped suddenly at them—not once in all their lives—and, when it came, the unphilosophical mind could no more grasp it, than the gentleman mentioned by G. H. Lewes (History of Philosophy), could grasp the idea of substance without attribute as presented by Berkeley. The real Gipsy could talk about apples all day, but the sudden demand for the unconnected word, staggers him—at least, until he has had some practice in this, to him, new process. And it is so with other races. Professor Max Müller once told me in conversation, as nearly as I can recollect, that the Mohawk Indian language is extremely rich in declension, every noun having some sixteen or seventeen inflexions of case, but no nominative. One can express one’s relations to a father to a most extraordinary extent, among the dilapidated descendants of that once powerful tribe. But such a thing as the abstract idea of a father, or of ‘father’ pur et simple, never entered the Mohawk mind, and this is very like the Gipsies.
When a rather wild Gipsy once gives you a word, it must be promptly recorded, for a demand for its repetition at once confuses him. On doit saisir le mot échappê au Nomade, et ne pas l’obliger à le répéter, car il le changera selon so, façon, says Paspati. Unused to abstract efforts of memory, all that he can retain is the sense of his last remark, and very often this is changed with the fleeting second by some associated thought, which materially modifies it. It is always difficult, in consequence, to take down a story in the exact terms which a philologist desires. There are two words for “bad” in English Gipsy, wafro and vessavo; and I think it must have taken me ten minutes one day to learn, from a by no means dull gipsy, whether the latter word was known to him, or if it were used at all. He got himself into a hopeless tangle in trying to explain the difference between wafro and naflo, or ill, until his mind finally refused to act on vessavo at all, and spasmodically rejected it. With all the patience of Job, and the meekness of Moses, I awaited my time, and finally obtained my information.
The impatience of such minds in narrative is amusing. Let us suppose that I am asking some kushto Rommany chal for a version of Æsop’s fable of the youth and the cat. He is sitting comfortably by the fire, and good ale has put him into a story-telling humour. I begin—
“Now then, tell me this adrée Rommanis, in Gipsy—Once upon a time there was a young man who had a cat.”