However, the Gypsies were never reported to be otherwise than polite towards the outsider who ventured into the alley. Diplomats rather than hooligans were they. “Let’s ’eave ’alf a brick at ’im,” is not the Gypsy’s way with a stranger who happens to stroll into the camp. At the same time I would not have it imagined that the inhabitants of the squalid court were of the best black Romany breed; far from it, they were mostly of diluted blood, else how came they to turn sedentary at all? For pure Gypsies (or Romanitshelaw, as they call themselves), the aristocrats of their race, abhor settled life, preferring to die on the road rather than wither inside four walls.
On the occasion of a horse fair in the city, our lane would resound with the clanging of hoofs beyond the ordinary, and in front of the taverns there was much rattling of whipstocks on the insides of hard hats, in order to enliven some weedy “screw,” and so reward its owner for hours of patient “doctoring” in a corner well screened from prying eyes. Then when the autumnal rains set in, and the leaves began to flutter down in showers, there would come from afar the rumbling of Romany “homes on wheels,” driven townwards by the oncoming of winter. To me it was always a saddening sight to watch the travel-stained wanderers hying to their winter quarters through miry streets heavy with mist and gloom. Staruben sî gav (town is a prison), an ancient vagabond was heard to remark on a like occasion.
A spectacle far more inspiriting was the departure of a Gypsy cavalcade from the city on a gay spring morning. For into the dingy purlieus where the travellers had wintered more or less cheerlessly, stray sunbeams and soft airs had begun to penetrate. Tidings had reached them that away in the open something had stirred, or called, or breathed along the furzy lanes and among the tree boughs, and forthwith every Romany sojourner within the ash-strewn yards of the city became eager to resume the free, roving life of the roads. How often have I longed for the brush of an artist to depict the company of merry Gypsies—men, women, and bairns, horses, dogs, and donkeys, jingling pot-carts and living-wagons bedizened with new paint, starting from the top of our lane for the open country, just when the wind-rocked woods were burgeoning and every green hedge-bottom had a sprinkling of purple violets.
Now until my eleventh year I had seen no more than the mere outside of Romany life, and I might never have had any Gypsy experiences to relate but for a trivial blood-spilling, which, as I look back upon it, may well be called my initiation into Gypsydom. Indeed, the small incident I am about to mention had for me a most important result, insomuch as it made me akin to Gypsies for the rest of my life.
My earliest schools were dames’ academies—there were two of these old-time institutions in our lane. Approached by a dark passage, the second of these had for its lecture-hall a large brick-floored room, whose presiding spirit was a dwarfish lady of sixty-five or more, before whom we sat in rows at long desks. The school consisted of about a score of children who were awed into subjection by a threatening rod of supple ash, half as long again as the tapering stick around which the scarlet-runners in your kitchen garden love to entwine themselves. This dread implement of discipline, reared in a recess near our mistress’s desk, would oft descend upon the head of a chattering boy or girl, and to the tip of that rod my own pate was no stranger.
Among my acquaintances at this school was a Gypsy girl whose parents dwelt at the sunny end of the aforementioned court. A year or two my senior, Sibby Smith was a shapely lass, having soft hazel eyes and a wealth of dark hair crowning an olive-tinted face. Lissom as whalebone, she had a pretty way of capering along the lanes with hedgerow berries or leaves of autumn’s painting in her hair, and I, a silent, retiring boy, would watch her movements with admiring eyes. Fittingly upon that lithe form sat a garb of tawny-brown, with here a wisp of red and there a tag of yellow, mingled as on the wings of a butterfly. The girl had a harum-scarum brother, Snakey by name and slippery by nature, a little older than herself, with whom out of school hours she would be off and away searching the bushes for birds’ nests, or ransacking the thickets for nuts; and one day in school I remember how she pulled out inadvertently with her handkerchief a catapult—a Gypsy can bring down a pheasant with the like—and falling with a clatter at our teacher’s feet, the unholy weapon was straightway confiscated, whereat Sibby’s face grew darker by a shade, as with her pen-nib she savagely stabbed the desk on which our copybooks were outspread. A roamer in all the copses and lanes around our city, and enjoying the freedom of the camps which tarried for little or for long in the old brickyards fringing the common, this schoolmate of mine expressed the out-of-door spirit in her very gait, and as she pirouetted along the causeway, you caught from her flying figure the smell of wood smoke and the mossy odour of deep dingles.
In all the world it is hard to find the elusive Gypsy’s compeer. Whimsical as the wind, and brimful of mischief as an elf of the wilds, Sibby was to me the embodiment of bewitching mystery. From a hillock by the hedge I have watched her seize a skittish pony by the mane and, leaping astride its back, gallop madly along a lane, to return a few moments later, breathless and dishevelled. This was her frolicsome mood.
Never very far below the surface of the Gypsy nature lurks a feeling of disdain, waxing fierce at times towards everything and everybody outside the Romany world. To this mood the Gypsy life appears to be the only life worth living, and the Gypsy is the only real man in the world. All other ways and all alien folk are suspect. There were times therefore when Sibby’s eyes would pierce me through with arrows of detestation as though one had hailed from beneath the eaves of a constabulary. Yet the next day, every shred of this dark feeling would be flung to the winds, as under a scented may-bush the girl was romancing merrily or instructing me in the peculiar whistle giving warning of the approach of Velveteens or a policeman.
Is there in the whole bag of humanity, I wonder, a nut harder to crack than the Gypsy?