“So I waited,” he said, “until one man was coming down with his snore, diminuendo, while the other was rising, crescendo, and at the exact point of intersection, moderato, I blew my car-whistle, and so got both birds at one shot. I stopped them both.” Even as Mayor Stewart had winged his two birds with one ball had I hit my two peregrines.
“We are now going to perform,” said the gypsy captain. “Will you not take seats on the platform, and hear us play?”
I did not know it at the time, but I heard afterwards that this was a great compliment, and one rarely bestowed. The platform was small, and we were very near our new friends. Scarcely had the performance begun ere I perceived that, just as the gypsies in Russia had sung their best in my honor, these artists were exerting themselves to the utmost, and, all unheeding the audience, playing directly at me and into me. When any tour was deftly made the dark master nodded to me with gleaming eyes, as if saying, “What do you think of that, now?” The Viennese laughed for joy every time his glance met mine, and as I looked at the various Lajoshes and Joshkas of the band, they blew, beat, or scraped with redoubled fury, or sank into thrilling tenderness. Hurrah! here was somebody to play to who knew gypsy and all the games thereof; for a very little, even a word, reveals a great deal, and I must be a virtuoso, at least by Romany, if not by art. It was with all the joy of success that the first piece ended amid thunders of applause.
“That was not the racoczy,” I said. “Yet it sounded like it.”
“No,” said the captain. “But now you shall hear
the racoczy and the czardas as you never heard them before. For we can play that better than any orchestra in Vienna. Truly, you will never forget us after hearing it.”
And then they played the racoczy, the national Hungarian favorite, of gypsy composition, with heart and soul. As these men played for me, inspired with their own music, feeling and enjoying it far more than the audience, and all because they had got a gypsy gentleman to play to, I appreciated what a life that was to them, and what it should be; not cold-blooded skill, aiming only at excellence or preëxcellence and at setting up the artist, but a fire and a joy, a self-forgetfulness which whirls the soul away as the soul of the Mœnad went with the stream adown the mountains,—Evoë Bacchus! This feeling is deep in the heart of the Hungarian gypsy; he plays it, he feels it in every air, he knows the rush of the stream as it bounds onwards,—knows that it expresses his deepest desire; and so he has given it words in a song which, to him who has the key, is one of the most touching ever written:—
“Dyal o pañi repedishis,
M’ro pirano hegedishis;“Dyal o pañi tale vatra,
M’ro pirano klanetaha.“Dyal o pañi pe kishai
M’ro pirano tsino rai.”“The stream runs on with rushing din
As I hear my true love’s violin;“And the river rolls o’er rock and stone
As he plays the flute so sweet alone.“Runs o’er the sand as it began,
Then my true love lives a gentleman.”
Yes, music whirling the soul away as on a rushing river, the violin notes falling like ripples, the flute tones all aflow among the rocks; and when it sweeps adagio on the sandy bed, then the gypsy player is at heart equal to a lord, then he feels a gentleman. The only true republic is art. There all earthly distinctions pass away; there he is best who lives and feels best, and makes others feel, not that he is cleverer than they, but that he can awaken sympathy and joy.
The intense reality of musical art as a comforter to these gypsies of Eastern Europe is wonderful. Among certain inedited songs of the Transylvanian gypsies, in the Kolosvárer dialect, I find the following:—