“I can’t say. He’s gone to the fair.”
Under their mother’s shawl three tiny children huddled like little brown partridges beneath an outspread wing, a sight which caused me some pricking of heart. The biggest child kept saying, “What does the gawjo want, mammy?” Just then I looked up the lane and saw a man coming down, who by his jaunty air I guessed was the woman’s husband.
“Kushti sawla (Good morning), Mr. Trickett; take a little tuvalo.” I handed him my tobacco pouch. “I’ve come a long way to see you. Ask me to sit down a bit, now I’ve got here.”
Mrs. Trickett’s face was a study in wonderment, as I sat down for a friendly chat. “Dawdi,” said she, “you did trasher mandi (frighten me). I thought there was tshumani oprê” (something up).
When Hamalên Smith, from the top of the lane, saw that the episode had arrived at a happy termination, he strolled down the lane and joined us.
A far-travelled Gypsy is Hamalên, and many a tale can he unfold.
“One morning,” said he, “a policeman came up to my wagon and told me as how twenty-four fowls was missing from the next field to where we was stopping. Somebody had stole ’em in the night. ‘Of course you suspects us,’ says I to the policeman, ‘but you’re wrong. We’ve never touched a feather of ’em.’ However, nothing would do but the man must search my wagon from top to bottom, and for all his trouble he found nothing. I know’d very well I hadn’t touched ’em, and I was telling him the truth.
“‘Wait a bit,’ says he. ‘Didn’t I see three vans in this field last night as I was going along the high road?’
“‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘My boys have gone on in front with the other wagons.’
“Says he, ‘That looks suspicious. I must make haste and find them. Where have they gone?’
“‘I can’t say, for I don’t know myself.’
“‘Well, I shall have to come with you, and you must show me where to find them.’ The policeman jumped up and sat on the seat along with me and my wife, and off we went to find the boys. Of course it was plain to see by the wheel-marks just outside the gate which way they had turned, but when we got to the cross-roads about three miles furder on, the road was that hard and dry that no wheel-marks could be seen. Now I could easily have misled the policeman, but I thought it best to try to find the boys as quick as I could, for I didn’t believe for a minute they had done it. Looking down the road, I saw the boys’ patrin (guiding sign). The policeman didn’t know what I was looking at, and it wasn’t likely as I should show him our signs, so I says we’ll take this road, and we turned off to the left.
“‘How did you know which way the boys had gone?’ asked the policeman. ‘Was it some thing tied on that tree bough hanging over the road?’
“‘I never sees nothing on the tree bough,’ says I.
“I thought to myself the policeman must have been reading some tale about the Gypsies. Anyway, he had heard something about patrins and such-like, but I wasn’t going to be the one to larn him our signs, so I changed the subject.
“‘Yon’s my boys on in front,’ says I. The policeman began rubbing his hands and smiling. At last we caught up with the boys, and the policeman searched inside the two wagons and found nothing. Then he says—
“‘I might as well look on the top,’ and he climbed on to the roofs of the wagons.
“‘Hello, what have we here?’ says he, in a way that made me turn warm. He lifted up a dead pigeon.
“‘Where did you get that from?’ I asked the boys.
“‘Picked it up a bit o’ way down the road. It had just killed itself on the telegraph wires by the wood side.’
“After that, the disappointed policeman went away, and the thieves were never found out.
“Another time we draw’d into a rutted lane lying off the high road. We had our three wagons, and at night we always covered the big one up, because we didn’t sleep in it. It was a nice quiet lane, and we thought there would be nobody to trouble us as there was no willage near. But about midnight a man knocked on the wagon and woke us up.
“‘What are you doing here?’
“‘No harm, I hope. We’ll clear out first thing in the morning.’ He said he’d been knocking at the big wagon what was covered up, and he couldn’t make anybody hear.
“‘Well,’ says I, ‘whatever you do, don’t you touch that big wagon agen.’
“‘Why, what’s in it?’
“‘Wild beasts, for sure—a lion and a tiger.’
“You’d ha’ laughed at the way that man made hisself scarce. Next morning, as we draw’d out of the lane, we met a policeman.
“‘I hear you have some wild beasts in that big wagon of yours. Wasn’t it a bit dangerous stopping so near the highway?’
“‘Well, we’re clearing out in good time.’
“‘Get along with you then.’
“A few miles furder on the road we come to a little town, and as it was market day we pulled up in the big square, and I took the cover off the big wagon. Just as I was doing this, who should come up but the policeman we’d met in the early morning.
“‘Where’s those wild beasts of yours?’ says he.
“‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I’ll soon show you.’ And I went inside my brush and carpet wagon and brought out two big rugs, and I showed him a tiger skin and a lion skin, both lined with red. ‘There’s my wild beasts,’ said I.
“Talk about laughing, I thought that policeman would never ha’ stopped.”
CHAPTER IX
TAKEN FOR TRAMPS—AN EAST ANGLIAN FAMILY
Day after day, in the woods around our village, the autumnal gales roared and ravened with unabated fury, snapping brittle boughs, cracking decrepit boles, and piling up drifts of brown leaves around grey roots protruding like half-buried bones through the mossy woodland floor. Then right in the midst of it all came a spell of calm weather, as if summer had stolen back to her former haunts in sylvan glade and ferny lane. Call it by what name you please, this brief season of sunny repose following upon the heels of the tempestuous equinoctials is a time when some of us are impelled, as by a primal instinct, to shake off the collar of routine and take the road leading over the hill into what realm of adventure beyond.