“The boshno an’ kāni
The rye an’ the rāni;
Welled acai ’pré the boro lun pani.
Rinkeni juva hav acai!
Del a choomer to the rye!”
“Duveleste!” said the old fortune-teller, “that ever I should live to see a rye like you! A boro rye rakkerin’ Rommanis! But you must have some tea now, my son—good tea.”
“I don’t pi muttermengri dye (‘drink tea,’ but an equivoque). It’s muttermengri with you and with us of the German jib.”
“Ha! ha! but you must have food. You won’t go away like a Gorgio without tasting anything?”
“I’ll eat bread with you, but tea I haven’t tasted this five-and-twenty years.”
“Bread you shall have, rya.” And saying this, the daughter spread out a clean white napkin, and placed on it excellent bread and butter, with plate and knife. I never tasted better, even in Philadelphia. Everything in the cottage was scrupulously neat—there was even an approach to style. The furniture and ornaments were superior to those found in common peasant houses. There was a large and beautifully-bound photograph album. I found that the family could read and write—the daughter received and read a note, and one of the sons knew who and what Mr Robert Browning was.
But behind it all, when the inner life came out, was the wild Rommany and the witch-aura—the fierce spirit of social exile from the world in which they lived (the true secret of all the witch-life of old), and the joyous consciousness of a secret tongue and hidden ways. To those who walk in the darkness of the dream, let them go as deep and as windingly as they will, and into the grimmest gloom of goblin-land, there will never be wanting flashes of light, though they be gleams diavoline, corpse-candlelights, elfin sparkles, and the unearthly blue lume of the eyes of silent night-hags wandering slow. In the forgotten grave of the sorcerer burns steadily through long centuries the Rosicrucian lamp, and even to him whose eyes are closed, sparkle, on pressure, phosphorescent rings. So there was Gipsy laughter; and the ancient wicca and Vala flashed out into that sky-rocketty joyousness and Catherine-wheel gaiety, which at eighty or ninety, in a woman, vividly reminds one of the Sabbat on the Brocken, of the ointment, and all things terrible and unearthly and forbidden.
I do not suppose that there are many people who can feel or understand that among the fearfully dirty dwellers in tents and caravans, cock-shysters and dealers in dogs of doubtful character, there can be anything strange, and quaint, and deeply tinged with the spirit of which I have spoken. As well might one attempt to persuade the twenty-stone half-illiterate and wholly old-fashioned rural magistrate of the last century that the poor devil of a hen-stealing Gipsy dragged before him knew that which would send thrills of joy through the most learned philologist in Europe, and cause the great band of scholars to sing for joy. Life, to most of us, is nothing without its humour; and to me a whilome German student illustrating his military marauding by phrases from Fichte, or my friend Pauno the Rommany urging me with words to be found in the Mahabahrata and Hāfiz to buy a terrier, is a charming experience.
I believe that my imagination has neither been led nor driven, when it has so invariably, in my conversing with Gipsy women, recalled Faust, and all I have ever read in Wierus, Bodinus, Bekker, Mather, or Glanvil, of the sorceress and sortilega. And certainly on this earth I never met with such a perfect replica of Old Mother Baubo, the mother of all the witches, as I once encountered at a certain race. Swarthy, black-eyed, stout, half-centuried, fiercely cunning, and immoderately sensual, her first salutation was expressed in a phrase such as a Corinthian soul might be greeted with on entering that portion of the after-world devoted to the fastest of the fair. With her came a tall, lithe, younger sorceress; and verily the giant fat sow for her majesty, and the broom for the attendant, were all that was wanting.
To return to the cottage. Our mirth and fun grew fast and furious; the family were delighted with my anecdotes of the Rommany in other lands—German, Bohemian, and Spanish,—not to mention the gili. And we were just in the gayest centre of it all, “whin,—och, what a pity!—this fine tay-party was suddenly broken up,” as Patrick O’Flanegan remarked when he was dancing with the chairs to the devil’s fiddling, and his wife entered. For in rushed a Gipsy boy announcing that Gorgios (or, as I may say, “wite trash”) were near at hand, and evidently bent on entering. That this irruption of the enemy gave a taci-turn to our riotry and revelling will be believed. I tossed the brandy in the cup into the fire; it flashed up, and with it a quick memory of the spilt and blazing witch-brew in “Faust.” I put the tourist-flask in my pocket, and in a trice had changed my seat and assumed the air of a chance intruder. In they came, two ladies—one decidedly pretty—and three gentlemen, all of the higher class, as they indicated by their manner and language. They were almost immediately followed by a Gipsy, the son of my hostess, who had sent for him that he might see me.