The very fact that they hide as much as they can of their Gipsy life and nature from the Gorgios would of itself indicate the depths of singularity concealed beneath their apparent life—and this reminds me of incidents in a Sunday which I once passed beneath a Gipsy roof. I was, en voyage, at a little cathedral town, when learning that some Gipsies lived in a village eight miles distant, I hired a carriage and rode over to see them. I found my way to a neat cottage, and on entering it discovered that I was truly enough among the Rommany. By the fire sat a well-dressed young man; near him was a handsome, very dark young woman, and there presently entered a very old woman,—all gifted with the unmistakable and peculiar expression of real Gipsies.
The old woman overwhelmed me with compliments and greetings. She is a local celebrity, and is constantly visited by the most respectable ladies and gentlemen. This much I had learned from my coachman. But I kept a steady silence, and sat as serious as Odin when he visited the Vala, until the address ceased. Then I said in Rommany—
“Mother, you don’t know me. I did not come here to listen to fortune-telling.”
To which came the prompt reply, “I don’t know what the gentleman is saying.” I answered always in Rommany.
“You know well enough what I am saying. You needn’t be afraid of me—I’m the nicest gentleman you ever saw in all your life, and I can talk Rommany as fast as ever you ran away from a policeman.”
“What language is the gentleman talking?” cried the old dame, but laughing heartily as she spoke.
“Oh dye—miri dye,
Don’t tute jin a Rommany rye?
Can’t tu rakker Rommany jib,
Tachipen and kek fib?”
“Āvo, my rye; I can understand you well enough, but I never saw a Gipsy gentleman before.”
[Since I wrote that last line I went out for a walk, and on the other side of Walton Bridge, which legend says marks the spot where Julius Cæsar crossed, I saw a tent and a waggon by the hedge, and knew by the curling blue smoke that a Gipsy was near. So I went over the bridge, and sure enough there on the ground lay a full-grown Petulamengro, while his brown juva tended the pot. And when I spoke to her in Rommany she could only burst out into amazed laughter as each new sentence struck her ear, and exclaim, “Well! well! that ever I should live to hear this! Why, the gentleman talks just like one of us! ‘Bien apropos,’ sayde ye ladye.”]
“Dye,” quoth I to the old Gipsy dame, “don’t be afraid. I’m tácho. And shut that door if there are any Gorgios about, for I don’t want them to hear our rakkerben. Let us take a drop of brandy—life is short, and here’s my bottle. I’m not English—I’m a waver temmeny mush (a foreigner). But I’m all right, and you can leave your spoons out. Tácho.”