“Not a soul.” (This very solemnly.)
“Then what if I can tell you?”
“Well, what was it, my gentleman?” eyeing me curiously.
“You are one of the Drapers—Old Israel’s daughter, if I’m not mistaken” (looking straight into her large eyes as though reading the information at the back of her brain), “and your two sisters were Rodi and Lani.”
If a stone figure had spoken, she could scarcely have looked more amazed, and, quite forgetting herself, she exclaimed—
“Av adrê, mi tshavo, and besh tălê” (Come inside, my son, and sit down).
Mrs. Boswell’s manner was now so amiable, and her voice so soft, that as she handed me cake and tea, I felt as if I had known her all my life. All who have ever met a pure-bred Gypsy will know what Romany politeness is, and how charming a sense of the fitness of things these wanderers possess. As one who has worked hard at Gypsy genealogy, I have myself often been surprised at one thing. A member of the kawlo rat (black blood) will betray no inquisitiveness in regard to his tiresome interlocutor who may be a perfect stranger to him. How many of us, I wonder, would care to be subjected to such an inquisition as we sometimes inflict upon a Gypsy by our interrogations as to his ancestry? Yet the Gypsy apparently takes it all with complacence and good humour.
When taking mine ease behind the scenes in a Gypsy camp, it has often amused me to observe how extremes meet. After all, the tastes of the high and the low are not so very far removed. If the duchess is proud of her blue blood and her ancestral tree, so is the Gypsy of her black blood and lengthy pedigree. I have known “swells” who liked their game so “high” that it almost ran into the fields again, a taste akin to the Gypsy’s liking for mulo-mas. The Gypsy mother’s love for her black cutty joins hands with the after-dinner cigarette in my lady’s boudoir. It goes without saying that politeness is a stamp of both extremes.
In the cool of the evening I wandered inland to a sequestered camp, where Isaac and Sinfai Heron, those aristocrats of their race, sat by their fire in an angle where two hedgerows met.
“We likes a bit o’ quiet, you see,” said the slender, gracious Sinfai, when I asked why they had pitched on a spot so far from Blackpool’s South Shore.