Mostly they are bronze-coloured old vagrants with melancholy eyes and bent backs, who are accustomed to cringe, and whose lean brown hands are accustomed to beg. Discarding their picturesque rags, these wandering minstrels have adopted hideous old clothes that others have cast off. Infinitely more mean-looking are they in this accoutrement; they have lost that indefinite charm that generally surrounds them; they are naught but sad old men clothed in ugly tatters, and are no more a delight to the eyes. Welcome they are, nevertheless, for their music is both sweet and melancholy, strident and weird; there is a strange longing in every note, and the gayer the tunes become the more is one inclined to weep!
An inexplicable cry of yearning lies in their every melody—is it a remembrance of far-off lands that once were theirs, and that they have never seen? Or is it only an expression of the eternal nostalgia that drives them restlessly from place to place?
One summer's evening I met a gipsy youth, coming towards me from out of the dust of the road. Seated with bare, dangling legs on the back of a donkey, his violin under his chin, regardless of all else, he was playing ... playing to the sky above, to the stars that were coming out one by one, peeping down with pale wonder upon this lonely vagabond to whom all the road belonged.... Playing because it was his nature to play ... playing to his heart that had not yet awakened ... playing to his soul that he could not fathom.
*
*—*
In towns the gipsies are used as masons. One finds them in groups wherever a house is being built, men, women, and children bringing with them their nameless disorder and their picturesque filth.
Of an evening, the work being done, they will prepare their supper, when, seated round the steaming pot, their many-coloured rags become radiant beneath the rays of the setting sun.
Often a mangy donkey is attached not far off, and in a basket, amidst a medley of metal pots of all sizes and shapes, lies a sleeping infant wrapped in a torn cloth.
The donkey patiently bears his burden, flicking away the flies with his meagre tail.
In the month of lilies handsome gipsy-girls will wander through the streets, carrying wooden vessels filled with snow-white flowers, the purity of the lilies strangely in contrast with their sun-tanned faces. In long, fragrant bunches they sell these flowers to the passers-by. At every corner one meets them, either crouching in picturesque attitudes on the pavement or standing upright beneath the shadowy angle of a roof, beautiful creatures with dark faces readily breaking into smiles that make their black eyes glisten and their white teeth flash.
Figures full of unconscious pride, visages at which one must look and always look again ... for they contain all the mystery of the many roads their feet have left behind!