that he is the Romany Rye and tells him there is scarcely a part of England where he has not heard the name of the Romany Rye mentioned by the Gypsies. Here he makes another praise him. Now let him mount the fine horse he has bought with £50 borrowed from a Gypsy, and is about to sell for £150 at Horncastle Fair.
“After a slight breakfast I mounted the horse, which, decked out in his borrowed finery, really looked better by a large sum of money than on any former occasion. Making my way out of the yard of the inn, I was instantly in the principal street of the town, up and down which an immense number of horses were being exhibited, some led, and others with riders. ‘A wonderful small quantity of good horses in the fair this time!’ I heard a stout jockey-looking individual say, who was staring up the street with his side towards me. ‘Halloo, young fellow!’ said he, a few moments after I had passed, ‘whose horse is that? Stop! I want to look at him!’ Though confident that he was addressing himself to me, I took no notice, remembering the advice of the ostler, and proceeded up the street. My horse possessed a good walking step; but walking, as the reader knows, was not his best pace, which was the long trot, at which I could not well exercise him in the street, on account of the crowd of men and animals; however, as he walked along, I could easily perceive that he attracted no slight attention amongst those who, by their jockey dress and general appearance, I imagined to be connoisseurs; I heard various calls to stop, to none of which I paid the slightest attention. In a few minutes I found myself out of the town, when, turning round for the purpose of returning, I found I had been followed by several of the connoisseur-looking individuals, whom I had observed in the fair. ‘Now would be the time for a display,’ thought I; and looking around me I observed two five-barred gates, one on each side of the road, and
fronting each other. Turning my horse’s head to one, I pressed my heels to his sides, loosened the reins, and gave an encouraging cry, whereupon the animal cleared the gate in a twinkling. Before he had advanced ten yards in the field to which the gate opened, I had turned him round, and again giving him cry and rein, I caused him to leap back again into the road, and still allowing him head, I made him leap the other gate; and forthwith turning him round, I caused him to leap once more into the road, where he stood proudly tossing his head, as much as to say, ‘What more?’ ‘A fine horse! a capital horse!’ said several of the connoisseurs. ‘What do you ask for him?’ ‘Too much for any of you to pay,’ said I. ‘A horse like this is intended for other kind of customers than any of you.’ ‘How do you know that?’ said one; the very same person whom I had heard complaining in the street of the paucity of good horses in the fair. ‘Come, let us know what you ask for him?’ ‘A hundred and fifty pounds!’ said I; ‘neither more nor less.’ ‘Do you call that a great price?’ said the man. ‘Why, I thought you would have asked double that amount! You do yourself injustice, young man.’ ‘Perhaps I do,’ said I, ‘but that’s my affair; I do not choose to take more.’ ‘I wish you would let me get into the saddle,’ said the man; ‘the horse knows you, and therefore shows to more advantage; but I should like to see how he would move under me, who am a stranger. Will you let me get into the saddle, young man?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘I will not let you get into the saddle.’ ‘Why not?’ said the man. ‘Lest you should be a Yorkshireman,’ said I, ‘and should run away with the horse.’ ‘Yorkshire?’ said the man; ‘I am from Suffolk; silly Suffolk—so you need not be afraid of my running away with the horse.’ ‘Oh! if that’s the case,’ said I, ‘I should be afraid that the horse would run away with you; so I will by no means let you mount.’ ‘Will you let me look in his mouth?’ said
the man. ‘If you please,’ said I; ‘but I tell you, he’s apt to bite.’ ‘He can scarcely be a worse bite than his master,’ said the man, looking into the horse’s mouth; ‘he’s four off. I say, young man, will you warrant this horse?’ ‘No,’ said I; ‘I never warrant horses; the horses that I ride can always warrant themselves.’ ‘I wish you would let me speak a word to you,’ said he. ‘Just come aside. It’s a nice horse,’ said he, in a half whisper, after I had ridden a few paces aside with him. ‘It’s a nice horse,’ said he, placing his hand upon the pommel of the saddle and looking up in my face, ‘and I think I can find you a customer. If you would take a hundred, I think my lord would purchase it, for he has sent me about the fair to look him up a horse, by which he could hope to make an honest penny.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘and could he not make an honest penny, and yet give me the price I ask?’ ‘Why,’ said the go-between, ‘a hundred and fifty pounds is as much as the animal is worth, or nearly so; and my lord, do you see . . .’ ‘I see no reason at all,’ said I, ‘why I should sell the animal for less than he is worth, in order that his lordship may be benefited by him; so that if his lordship wants to make an honest penny, he must find some person who would consider the disadvantage of selling him a horse for less than it is worth, as counterbalanced by the honour of dealing with a lord, which I should never do; but I can’t be wasting my time here. I am going back to the . . ., where if you, or any person, are desirous of purchasing the horse, you must come within the next half-hour, or I shall probably not feel disposed to sell him at all.’ ‘Another word, young man,’ said the jockey; but without staying to hear what he had to say, I put the horse to his best trot, and re-entering the town, and threading my way as well as I could through the press, I returned to the yard of the inn, where, dismounting, I stood still, holding the horse by the bridle.”
As no one else troubled to paint Borrow either at Horncastle or any other place, and as he took advantage of the fact to such purpose, I must leave this portrait as it is, only I shall remind the reader that it is not a photograph but a portrait of the painter. A little time ago this painter was a consumptive-looking literary hack, and is still a philologist, with eyes a bit dim from too much reading, and subject to frantic melancholy;—a liker of solitude and of men and women who do not disturb it, but a man accustomed to men and very well able to deal with them.
CHAPTER XVI—THE VEILED PERIOD
The last words of “The Romany Rye” narrative are: “I shouldn’t wonder if Mr. Petulengro and Tawno Chikno came originally from India. I think I’ll go there.” This is his way of giving impressiveness to the “veiled period” of the following seven or eight years, for the benefit of those who had read “The Zincali” and “The Bible in Spain,” and had been allured by the hints of earlier travel. In “The Zincali” he has spoken of seeing “Gypsies of various lands, Russian, Hungarian and Turkish; and also the legitimate children of most countries of the world”: of being “in the shop of an Armenian at Constantinople,” and “lately at Janina in Albania.” In “The Bible in Spain” he had spoken of “an acquaintance of mine, a Tartar Khan.” He had described strange things, and said: “This is not the first instance in which it has been my lot to verify the wisdom of the saying, that truth is sometimes wilder than fiction;” he had met Baron Taylor and reminded the reader of other meetings “in the street or the desert, the brilliant hall or amongst Bedouin haimas, at Novgorod or Stambul.” Before 1833 he had been in Paris and Madrid. “I have been everywhere,” he said to the simple company at a Welsh inn. Speaking to Colonel Napier in 1839 at Seville, he said that he had picked up the Gypsy tongue “some years ago in Moultan,” and he gave the impression that he had visited most parts of the East.
A little too much has been made of this “veiled period,” not by Borrow, but by others. It would have been fair to surmise that if he chose not to write about this period of
his life, either there was very little in it, or there was something in it which he was unwilling—perhaps ashamed—to disclose; and what has been discovered suggests that he was in an unsettled state—writing to please himself and perhaps also the booksellers, travelling a little and perhaps meeting some of the adventures which he crammed into those few months of 1825, suffering from “the horrors” either in solitude or with no confidant but his mother.
Borrow himself took no great pains to preserve the veil. For instance, in the preface to his translation of “Y Bardd Cwsg” in 1860, he says that it was made “in the year 1830 at the request of a little Welsh bookseller of his acquaintance” in Smithfield.