By early evening we had reached Cautley, where, as before, we drew on to the strip of wayside turf, and in quick time a couple of plump fowls were roasting in the black pot over a wood fire. To watch Oli prepare and cook those fowls was an object-lesson to be remembered. Bravo, Oli, our Romany chef!
Realizing that this was our last evening in the wilds, we were in no hurry to get between the blankets. So we stretched out the tales, and meandered leisurely through the fields of reminiscence, while the cloud of tobacco smoke grew denser around us, and the stars o’ night shone more and more brightly over Cautley’s black crag.
October 2.—Up at seven to find the sky almost free from clouds and holding out the promise of a brilliant wind-up. After breakfast we set off for Lancaster, near whose castle we parted; and now, over fireside pipes, my notebook and its jottings possess the power to make every sight and sound of the journey live again.
CHAPTER XXII
FURZEMOOR
Are you seeking a recipe for youth? Go a-Gypsying. Forth to the winding road under the open sky, the Gypsies are calling you. Scorning our hurrying mode of life, these folk are content to loiter beneath the green beeches, or in the shadow of some old inn on the fringe of a windy common. Like Nature herself, these wildlings of hers overflow with the play-spirit and therefore remain ever youthful. To rub shoulders with them, I have found, is to acquire a laughing indifference to dull care and all its melancholy train. Whoever then would grow light-hearted and become just a happy child of sun and star and stream, let him respond to the call of the road: let him go a-Gypsying.
Long ago I observed that during the pleasanter months of the year a few families of wanderers were generally to be found encamped upon a secluded waste—which I will call Furzemoor—where, by the courtesy of the owner, they were allowed to remain as long as they pleased. They resorted thither, so it seemed to me, to recuperate from the effects of their winter’s sojourn upon the city ash-patches hemmed in by unsavoury gas-lit streets.
One April afternoon, following close upon a lengthy stay in London, I remember how blithely I tramped along the grassy cart-track, which, after winding between hedgerows full of green sprays, sweet odours and tinkling bird-notes, emerged upon rugged Furzemoor—one of those few places which in after years become for you backgrounds of dream-like delight by reason of the memories associated with them. Is it not to such spots that the fancy turns when the mood of the commonplace hangs heavily upon you, and any shred of adventure would be more stirring to the heart than “the cackle of our burg,” which is too often mistaken for “the murmur of the world”?
No matter how often I came, the moor had ever the power to stir one’s imagination anew by its suggestive atmosphere of the remote, the aloof, the wild; and having paused at the end of the lane to renew old recollections, I went forward and peered over the edge of a declivity fringed with bushes of furze in golden flower. Ah! there below the slope, kissed by the warm sun and fanned by the breath of spring from off the heath, lay the brown tents, tilt-carts, and smouldering fires of a Romany camp, looking strangely deserted save for a girlish figure reclining near one of the fires over which a kettle was slung. Pushing between the bushes, my blundering feet loosened some large stones which rolled down the bank with a rattle, causing the girl to look sharply over her shoulder, and simultaneously from her red lips came a warning whistle, a shrill penetrating note first ascending then dropping again. I had heard that whistle of old and knew well its significance. In response thereto a Gypsy man appeared from behind the tents, his keen eyes gleaming with recognition. “Hey, rashai, we’s been a-talking about you lately. Only last night I was saying, p’raps our pass’n will be coming to see us one of these days, and here you are!”
Such was the greeting I got from Gypsy Sam, who now wheeled about and walked me off to a sandy hollow where his wife Lottie and her bairns sat by the fire. On catching sight of me, the children—a black-eyed troop—raised a shout of welcome, and, like little savages, soon began tugging at my coat tails. After an absence of several months from the camping-place this was a joyful meeting, and I guessed that my friends had much news to tell.
