“Come over to her tent, the old lady’s making chairs and I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you.”
Although I was well known to the old woman, had chatted with her a great many times and had seen her work, I had never before been fortunate enough to find her making her famous chairs, contrivances, by the way, which would probably provoke the mirth or arouse the pity of an expert workman, but which were nevertheless ingenious in a way, and were really wonderful productions for a woman who had passed the allotted span of life. Now I had her before me actually making these things,—the old lady with her strong and still handsome, kindly Romany face,—and I found my mind working quickly, presenting to me and unrolling before me, as it were in a dream, a panorama of her untainted record of years and years of toil,—such as “society” cannot even imagine,—carried on day, month and year, in and out, in order to earn, together with her husband, enough to enable them to keep a hold on life, and rear their children; later on, working by herself for years to support her invalid husband, afterwards giving him decent burial, living her life through with never more of the necessaries of life at hand than enough for the immediate future, and never more than a blanket between her and the sky, until the picture was disclosed that I now had before me in reality—the old woman, with one foot in the grave, one might say, her husband gone over to the majority, and all her children grown up and living apart; here she was, taking no anxious thought for the morrow, working as cheerily as ever, doing her best and leaving the rest to God,—one of Nature’s gentlewomen.
Regaining full consciousness of my surroundings, which for the moment had become hazy, I heard her reply to my greeting—
“Yes, pretty well, my Rye, thank you,—nothing to grumble about, anyway.”
We maintained a desultory conversation while she kept on with her occupation of making babies’ and dolls’ chairs, so that I had ample demonstration of the process of manufacture.
In the first place, a number of freshly cut sticks were peeled, and cut into manageable lengths upon her “work bench,” which consisted of a wooden post some three or four inches in diameter, driven into the ground so as to present a flattish top at a convenient height for cutting upon by a person seated on the ground near it. After having decided upon the size of chair she intended to make, she cut one piece of wood of the length desired for the back, and another for the front legs, to be used as gauges. After cutting several dozens by these, she took smaller sticks and cut the rails or pins in the same manner; these she then tapered at both ends and laid aside. Her next operation was the boring of back and front legs for the insertion of rails; this she accomplished with a large bradawl; subsequently she fitted the tapered pieces into the holes, and drove up the whole tight by means of a hammer. Afterwards, she plaited bast fibre across to form seats, thereby giving the finishing touch to small chairs, which, if not absolutely symmetrical, were sufficiently attractive to cause little folk to worry their elders into buying them to accommodate their own little persons or their dolls.
The knife used by most of the gypsies for their wood-working consists usually of a flat and nearly straight blade having a substantial handle, but I have occasionally seen them using knives having slightly curved blades of the kind favoured by leather cutters or by upholsterers for cutting floor coverings. These knives do not fold, and crude sheaths are often made for them; frequently, however, they are simply wrapped in two or three folds of paper for protection.
After photographing the old lady, I set out for home, intending to make a rather wide detour in order to pass through another Romany camping ground, fully expecting two families, or, at the least, one, to be at home. In this I was to be disappointed, for upon reaching the spot I found the locality quite deserted; nevertheless, I was fortunate in timing my visit, for it afforded one of the best of my opportunities to decipher the secret signs of the Romanies.
They are an acutely observant people, especially with regard to natural objects, reminding one of the Arab or Red man, by their quick apprehension of, and deductions from, circumstances having a bearing on the affair in hand, and, to some extent, of the aboriginal black trackers in their keen detection of minute quantities of matter that are foreign to the natural dispensation of things in different localities, and they are in consequence liable to be somewhat impatient or contemptuous in their attitude towards those who are otherwise; therefore, from their point of view, nothing more distinctly stamps a man as a gorgio than the fact that he is “dull o’ comprehension” in such matters.
I will now give my reading of the signs I discovered, and state how my deductions were arrived at, not with the idea of supplying a key to all such gypsy tokens, but by detailing the facts in this instance to illustrate one of their methods of communication.