“Do the whole lay,—look so gorgeous?”
“Why, I’m no better dressed than you are,—not so well, if you come to that vongree” (waistcoat).
“’T isn’t that,—’t isn’t the clothes. It’s the air
and the style. Anybody’d believe you’d had no end of an education. I could make ten dollars a patter if I could do it as natural as you do. Perhaps you’d like to come in on halves with me as a bonnet. No? Well, I suppose you have a better line. You’ve been lucky. I tell you, you astonished me when you rakkered, though I spotted you in the crowd for one who was off the color of the common Gorgios,—or, as the Yahudi say, the Goyim. No, I carn’t rakker, or none to speak of, and noways as deep as you, though I was born in a tent on Battersea Common and grew up a fly fakir. What’s the drab made of that I sell in these bottles? Why, the old fake, of course,—you needn’t say you don’t know that. Italic good English. Yes, I know I do. A fakir is bothered out of his life and chaffed out of half his business when he drops his h’s. A man can do anything when he must, and I must talk fluently and correctly to succeed in such a business. Would I like a drop of something? You paid for the last, now you must take a drop with me. Do I know of any Romany’s in town? Lots of them. There is a ken in Lombard Street with a regular fly mort,—but on second thoughts we won’t go there,—and—oh, I say—a very nice place in --- Street. The landlord is a Yahud; his wife can rakker you, I’m sure. She’s a good lot, too.”
And while on the way I will explain that my acquaintance was not to be regarded as a real gypsy. He was one of that large nomadic class with a tinge of gypsy blood who have grown up as waifs and strays, and who, having some innate cleverness, do the best they can to live without breaking the law—much. They deserve pity, for they have never been cared for; they owe nothing to society for kindness, and
yet they are held even more strictly to account by the law than if they had been regularly Sunday-schooled from babyhood. This man when he spoke of Romanys did not mean real gypsies; he used the word as it occurs in Ainsworth’s song of
“Nix my dolly, pals fake away.
And here I am both tight and free,
A regular rollicking Romany.”
For he meant Bohemian in its widest and wildest sense, and to him all that was apart from the world was his world, whether it was Rom or Yahudi, and whether it conversed in Romany or Schmussen, or any other tongue unknown to the Gentiles. He had indeed no home, and had never known one.
It was not difficult to perceive that the place to which he led me was devoted in the off hours to some other business besides the selling of liquor. It was neat and quiet, in fact rather sleepy; but its card, which was handed to me, stated in a large capital head-line that it was OPEN ALL NIGHT, and that there was pool at all hours. I conjectured that a little game might also be performed there at all hours, and that, like the fountain of Jupiter Ammon, it became livelier as it grew later, and that it certainly would not be on the full boil before midnight.
“Scheiker fur mich, der Isch will jain soreff shaskenen” (Beer for me and brandy for him), I said to the landlord, who at once shook my hand and saluted me with Sholem! Even so did Ben Daoud of Jerusalem, not long ago. Ben knew me not, and I was buying a pocket-book of him at his open-air stand in Market Street, and talking German, while he was endeavoring to convince me that I ought to give five cents more for it than I had given for a similar case the