I was bewildered. The crowd was dense, but as the procession passed me at a second turn I saw they were indeed gypsies, and I was grasped by the hand by more than one. They were my old friends from Moscow. This explained the immense multitude. There was during the Exhibition a great furor as regarded les zigains. The gypsy orchestra which performed in the Hungarian café was so beset by visitors that a comic paper represented them as covering the roofs of the adjacent houses so as to hear something. This evening the Russian gypsies were to make their début in the Orangerie, and they were frightened at their own success. They sang, but their voices were inaudible to two thirds of the audience, and those who could not hear roared, “Louder!” Then they adjourned to the open air, where the voices were lost altogether on a crowd calling, “Garçon—vite—une tasse café!” or applauding. In the intervals scores of young Russian gentlemen, golden swells, who had known the girls of old, gathered round the fair ones like moths around tapers. The singing was not the same as it had been; the voices were the same, but the sweet wild charm of the Romany caroling, bird-like, for pleasure was gone.
But I found by themselves and unnoticed two of the troupe, whom I shall not soon forget. They were two very handsome youths,—one of sixteen years, the other twenty. And with the first words in Romany they fairly jumped for joy; and the artist who could have caught their picture then would have made a brave one. They were clad in blouses of colored silk, which, with their fine dark complexions
and great black eyes, gave them a very picturesque air. These had not seen me in Russia, nor had they heard of me; they were probably from Novogorod. Like the girls they were children, but in a greater degree, for they had not been flattered, and kind words delighted them so that they clapped their hands. They began to hum gypsy songs, and had I not prevented it they would have run at once and brought a guitar, and improvised a small concert for me al fresco. I objected to this, not wishing to take part any longer in such a very public exhibition. For the gobe-mouches and starers, noticing a stranger talking with ces zigains, had begun to gather in a dense crowd around us, and the two ladies and the gentleman who were with us were seriously inconvenienced. We endeavored to step aside, but the multitude stepped aside also, and would not let us alone. They were French, but they might have been polite. As it was, they broke our merry conference up effectively, and put us to flight.
“Do let us come and see you, rya,” said the younger boy. “We will sing, for I can really sing beautifully, and we like you so much. Where do you live?”
I could not invite them, for I was about to leave Paris, as I then supposed. I have never seen them since, and there was no adventure and no strange scenery beyond the thousands of lights and guests and trees and voices speaking French. Yet to this day the gay boyishness, the merry laughter, and the child-like naïveté of the promptly-formed liking of those gypsy youths remains impressed on my mind with all the color and warmth of an adventure or a living poem. Can you recall no child by any wayside
of life to whom you have given a chance smile or a kind word, and been repaid with artless sudden attraction? For to all of us,—yes, to the coldest and worst,—there are such memories of young people, of children, and I pity him who, remembering them, does not feel the touch of a vanished hand and hear a chord which is still. There are adventures which we can tell to others as stories, but the best have no story; they may be only the memory of a strange dog which followed us, and I have one such of a cat who, without any introduction, leaped wildly towards me, “and would not thence away.” It is a good life which has many such memories.
I was walking a day or two after with an English friend, who was also a delegate to the International Literary Congress, in the Exhibition, when we approached the side gate, or rear entrance of the Hungarian café. Six or seven dark and strange-looking men stood about, dressed in the uniform of a military band. I caught their glances, and saw that they were Romany.
“Now you shall see something queer,” I said to my friend.
So advancing to the first dark man I greeted him in gypsy.
“I do not understand you,” he promptly replied—or lied.