“I should think not,” said Borrow, indignantly. “But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.”
“Hake is my only link to that dark world,” I said; “and even you don’t object to Hake. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of printers’ ink.”
He laughed. “Who are you?”
“The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in short frocks,” I said, “and have never yet found an answer. But Hake agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such troublesome query.” This gave a chance to Hake, who in such local reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man’s personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed Borrow,
who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.
“You are an Englishman?” said Borrow.
“Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,” I said, using a phrase of his own in “Lavengro”—“if not a thorough East Anglian an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.”
“Nearly,” said Borrow.
And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine “Shales mare,” a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair, and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a dogcart—an East Anglian dogcart—when I praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of all sea water to swim in—when I told him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was “the glassy Ouse” of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast, and when I told him a good many things showing that I was in very truth not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, my conquest of the “Walking Lord of Gypsy Lore” was complete, and from that moment we became friends.
Hake meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned and asked Borrow whether he had never noticed a similarity between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea-waves upon a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.