The occupations and customs of gypsies have not varied much all the world over. The men have been jockeys and horse-dealers and the women fortune-tellers. Borrow has given more than one account of hokano baro, “the great trick,” practised on credulous women, who hide money or valuables in the earth or elsewhere, deluded by the Romany chi’s (gypsy woman’s) promise that it shall magically increase—and, of course, never find it again. The three weeks generally prescribed as the term of its gestation are quite long enough to put a sufficient number of miles between the gypsy and her victim. The practice of hokano baro is becoming rarer, probably not because of any reluctance on the part of the gypsies to perform it, but because of the gradual decline of the kind of superstition which made it possible. There are relics of it in the West of England and elsewhere. The village “witch” occasionally makes an appearance in the police court, and not many years ago in Cornwall a chi received imprisonment for a false pretence not less ingenious than the hokano baro, and almost as elaborate as some recent conspiracies in which no gypsies have been involved. The bait in this case was money “in Chancery,” and three Cornish housewives were effectually swindled by a cleverly constructed story in which witchcraft, the planets, phantom lawyers, and hidden property all played their parts.
To hoax the gentile is a meritorious thing in a gypsy, and there is evidence that the Romany people themselves are not as a race superstitious. Their success depended in Borrow’s time upon cold calculation and rapid judgment of the characters of the people with whom they had to deal. Pepita’s interview with Cristina in the palace, and the trick of Aurora upon the wealthy widow lady [279] are evidence of that. Their modern attitude is precisely the same, though I have been told of one Welsh gypsy who believed she could work spells, had faith in her own fortune-telling, and was believed in by other gypsies. A well-known gryengro in the eastern counties, it is said, never concludes any important horse-dealing transaction till his mother has “read the stars” for him. Some gypsies credit the seventh daughter with the power of true divination. But in the main their art of dukkering, bewitching, or fortune-telling, is merely the art of gauging the personalities with which they are dealing, and, as Borrow says, adapting their promises “to the age and condition of the parties who seek for information”; the gypsy holds the hand of her client, but her eyes are fixed upon the client’s face. Readers of “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye,” a much more numerous company than those who have studied “The Zincali,” will recall references in those books to draving balos. This was the pleasant custom of administering to pigs and other comestible animals of the countryside a certain poison, which infallibly deprived them of life but did not render their flesh unfit for food. Having done this in secret, the gypsy would go up to the farmer openly and offer some small price for the carcass, and his offer would be accepted, since a porker supposed to have died of disease was marketable in no other quarter. The custom does not linger in England, but a recent traveller in Spain saw at Martos, in the province of Jaen, a whole gypsy tribe feeding on the roasted body of a poisoned pig.
Among the Romany habits quaintly discussed in “The Zincali” [280] which still survive in gypsydom is that of the patteran, or trail—the bunches of twigs or handfuls of grass scattered at a cross-road to indicate to stragglers the way which their companions have taken. It has been remarked that the ranks of the gryengroes, or horse-dealers, of the class described in Borrow’s books have been greatly depleted, particularly by emigration to the Western continent; but there are representatives of these, the gypsy aristocracy, still to be seen at the English horse-sales and fairs, and very formidable judges of a horse they are, though I know of none quite so expert as Jasper Petulengro. One of them not long ago bought a piece of land near Lowestoft, in order that he and his friends might camp undisturbed by the law and unvexed by the police.
No account of Borrow’s gypsyism can neglect the wonderful scene or series of scenes which, omitted from “The Zincali,” were included in “The Bible in Spain,” picturing his journey from Badajoz towards Madrid in company with Antonio Lopez. These passages, in the ninth and tenth chapters of the book, convey an extraordinary impression of the gypsy character and of gypsy habits. They contain sketches of persons and incidents vivid as lightning flashes; they are full of Borrow’s best matter and in his most characteristic manner. See the fierce gitano in his zamarra, or cloak of sheepskin, and his high-peaked Andalusian hat, coming to interview the London Caloro (gypsy) who has so strange a knowledge of their language that the gypsies for whom he has written a gospel call him “brother.” Antonio, bound on a journey on “the affairs of Egypt,” has bethought him that the strange Caloro is going to Madrid. The country is very disturbed; the gypsies are taking advantage of the uproar to plunder the gentiles; and the Caloro may fall a victim to them. Antonio proposes, therefore, to accompany him as far as the frontiers of Castile, so that he may not run the risk of a mistake; while, as for perils from any other quarter than the bands of gypsy brigands—does not Antonio carry in his bosom the magic bar lachi, the lodestone, a talisman which renders him immune from knife or bullet, and for him makes “the dark night the same as the fair day, and the wild carrascal [forest] as the market-place?” The bar lachi occupies a prominent place in “The Zincali,” where a strange story is told of the fascination exercised upon the gitanós by the large piece of lodestone in the museum at Madrid, and the recipe is given for a magic potion consisting of a little powder from the stone dropped in a glass of the potent spirit aguardiente. Antonio had fortified himself with such a draught before he came to make his proposal that they should ride forth together, Borrow on the fleet horse which had cost fifty dollars, and the gypsy on a mule.
From the moment when Borrow’s love of adventure and desire to get insight into Spanish gypsydom led him to accept this strange proposal instead of going to Madrid in prosaic British fashion by the stage-coach, his pages are lit by variegated lights—the blaze of straw fires roasting pig, the eye of the sun in dusty village streets, or its rays percolating through the maze of forest trees, or the brasero’s glow in the vast ruined house in Merida, where the gypsy crone tells him her story of torrid adventure in Morocco among the Corahai, her fortune-telling and her hokkawaring (deceiving) among the desert tribes. They are overhung by the mystery of the object of Antonio’s journey, which remains unsolved. They echo with the weird converse of Antonio himself, with his guitar-strings vibrating in the shadows of the great room lit by an earthen lamp on the floor, with the patter of the gypsy girls’ feet as they dance. Nobody has ever mixed ingredients like these into such a dish as Borrow served up—the ancient gitana who knew “more crabbed things and crabbed words than all the Erraté [gypsy folk] betwixt here and Catalonia,” the venal alguazils, or excise officers, looking for contraband who were bribed by the present of a cigar and frightened out of the house by the maledictions of the old woman and her girls, the bivouac among the trees, the dialogues on solemn questions with Pepindorio the pagan.
The most interesting gypsy-hunt in which Borrow indulged in the later part of his life was the search in the Cheviot Hills for relics of old Will Faa, the gypsy “king,” smuggler, and innkeeper of Kirk Yetholm. Faa, the bearer of a celebrated name in Scottish gypsydom, flourished in the eighteenth century during those years when the nomads had recovered from the effects of the early persecutions, and had not yet been assailed by an organised rural police. This monarch in the Augustan age of the Romanies had been a person of great consequence in Borderland, and it was at the house he occupied in Kirk Yetholm—an inn which in ’64 had much of the appearance of a ruined Spanish posada—that Borrow was gazing when a woman accosted him on gypsy subjects, and told him that a granddaughter of Will Faa was residing in the town. The incident, with his visit to this celebrity, Esther Blyth, “the Queen of the Nokkums,” [284] provides the material for the last and the best chapter of “The Romano Lavo-Lil.” He describes his “deep discourse” with her “about matters Nokkum, about the words they used and the famous ones among them in the older time.”
There is a curious forecast here of Leland’s discovery of Shelta, and its identification with the language of the ancient Gaelic bards, though Borrow remained quite innocent of its significance. The Queen of the Nokkums had not much Romany, but used a “poggado jib” (a broken jargon) consisting partly of gypsy words, partly of Lowland Scots, and partly of cant, “the allegorical jargon of thieves.” He remarks: “Then she called a donkey asal, and a stone cloch, which words are neither cant nor gypsy, but Irish or Gaelic. I incurred her vehement indignation by saying they were Gaelic. She contradicted me flatly, and said that whatever I might know” (and he had been astonishing her with his Romany jib, as usual), “I was quite wrong there, for that neither she nor any one of her people would condescend to speak anything so low as Gaelic, or, indeed, if they possibly could avoid it, have anything to do with the poverty-stricken creatures who used it.” Borrow goes on to moralise in his own way on the effect built up in the minds of the public at large on the subject of the Highlanders and their Gaelic by “the magic writings of Walter Scott,” and to contrast it with the contempt in which both people and language were held in Scott’s own land.
The faltering hand of age is all too plainly seen in this Kirk Yetholm sketch. It has a certain interest, but it lacks the wondrous witchery of his earlier dialogues with gypsies in “Lavengro” and “The Romany Rye.” Perhaps there was every bit as much of the picturesque and romantic in his later intercourse with the swarthy people; but he was not the same Borrow. He had not the old spirit, the vim, the elasticity, and he could not invest his gypsy friends and their surroundings with the charm that pervaded his former writing on the subject. He had lost zest. He knew and mentioned that the Romany chals and chis whom he saw in dingy metropolitan suburbs or slums were out for a great part of the year in the green lanes and pleasant ways of Kent; but he gives us no pictures of the patch of grass, so vividly described by Dickens about the same time, “between the road-dust and the trees,” the place whose sweet temptations “all the tramps with carts or caravans, the gypsy-tramp, the show-tramp, the cheap-jack, find it impossible to resist,” where “all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. Bless the place! I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have scorched its grass!” Yet that was just the picture that would have appealed to the younger Borrow.
During his residence in London he paid many visits to the gypsy haunts in the neighbourhood, such as the no-man’s-land at Wandsworth, where was to be found a very Babel of gypsies, mumpers, and Irish vagrants, as unlike a true gypsy encampment as anything on earth—a medley of caravans and carts, horses and donkeys, basket-makers and clothes-peg carvers, broken-down pugilists and the scum of the nether world. There were sketches to be made of such characters as Mrs. Cooper, the deserted wife of Jack Cooper, a famous gypsy prize-fighter. With her he would sit “in her little tent after she had taken her cup of tea . . . and hear her talk of old times and things: how Jack courted her ’neath the trees of Loughton Forest, and how, when tired of courting, they would get up and box.” There were suggestions to be offered of such personalities as the “dark, mysterious, beautiful, terrible creature,” with a lovely gypsy face, but an expression “evil—evil to a degree,” who was a puzzle to all the inhabitants of the gypsery, now dukkering for servant girls or bandying slang with butcher-boys, and anon “in a beautiful half riding-dress, her hair fantastically plaited and adorned with pearls, standing beside the carriage of a countess telling the fortune of her ladyship with the voice and look of a pythoness.” There were stories to be told of the encampment at Latimer’s Green in the north of London, and of the rookery at “The Mount,” in the East End, and there was a biography to be related of that tremendous fellow, Ryley Bosvil, the tinker who wore gold pieces for coat-buttons, who had two wives, gave himself grand airs, and composed Romany verses, of which the following ode to one of his better halves is a spirited specimen—the translation is Borrow’s:
“Beneath the bright sun there is none, there is none,
I love like my Yocky Shuri;
With the greatest delight in blood I would fight
To the knees for my Yocky Shuri!”