The “Amazonian Sinfi,” alluded to in Dr. Hake’s sonnet, was a heroine of this noble strain, and yet perhaps she was but a type of a certain kind of Romany chi.
It was she of the bantam cock and “the left-hand body blow” alluded to above.
This same gypsy girl also illustrated another side of the variously endowed character of the Romany women, ignored, or almost ignored by Borrow—their passion for music. The daughter of an extremely well-to-do “gryengro,” or dealer in horses, this gypsy girl had travelled over nearly
all England, and was familiar with London, where, in the studio of a certain romantic artist, she was in great request as a face-model. But having been brought into close contact with a travelling band of Hungarian gypsy musicians who visited England some years ago, she developed a passion for music that showed her to be a musical genius. The gypsy musicians of Hungary, who are darker than the tented gypsies, are the most intelligent and most widely-travelled of even Hungarian gypsies—indeed, of all the Romany race, and with them Sinfi soon developed into the “Fiddling Sinfi,” who was famous in Wales and also in East Anglia, and the East Midlands. After a while she widened her reputation in a curious way as the only performer on the old Welsh stringed instrument called the “crwth,” or cruth. I told Borrow her story at Gypsy Ring. Having become, through the good nature of an eminent Welsh antiquary, the possessor of a crwth, and having discovered the unique capabilities of that rarely-seen instrument, she soon taught herself to play upon it with extraordinary effect, fascinating her Welsh patrons by the ravishing strains she could draw from it. This obsolete instrument is six-stringed, with two of the strings reaching beyond the key-board, and a bridge placed, not at right angles to the sides of the instrument, but in an oblique direction. Though in some respects inferior to the violin, it is in other respects superior to it. Sinfi’s performances on this remarkable instrument showed her to be a musical genius of a high order.
VII. My First Meeting with Borrow.
But I am not leaving myself much room for personal reminiscences of Borrow after all—though these are what I sat down to write.
Dr. Hake, in his memoirs of “Eighty Years,” records thus the first meeting between Borrow and myself at Roehampton, at the doctor’s own delightful house, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common.
“Later on, George Borrow turned up while Watts was there, and we went through a pleasant trio, in which Borrow, as was his wont, took the first fiddle. The reader must not here take metaphor for music. Borrow made himself very agreeable to Watts, recited a fairy tale in the best style to him, and liked him.”
There is, however, no doubt that Borrow would have run away from me had I been associated in his mind with the literary calling. But at
that time I had written nothing at all save poems, and a prose story or two of a romantic kind, and even these, though some of the poems have since appeared, were then known only through private circulation.