But in all these literary excursions into gypsydom, the effervescence had gone. It was left for other pens to transmute the gorgio’s impressions of the Romany into real poetry. And even Borrow’s own adventures in these later times are better described by another than by himself.
Mr. Watts-Dunton relates one of the best gypsy stories ever told about Borrow. It arose out of a discussion between them as to the probable nature of the appeal, if any, which Matthew Arnold’s poem of “The Scholar Gypsy” would make to a real Romany chi. Borrow had ventured the opinion that whatever might be the poetical merits of Arnold’s work, it was clear that he had no conception of the Romany temper, and that gypsies would be unable either to understand its motive or to sympathise with it. Mr. Watts-Dunton thought, on the contrary, that, however blind a gypsy might be to the beauties of Arnold’s style, “the motive was so clearly developed that the most illiterate person could understand it.” They went off together to a gypsy camp to test the question, agreeing to read the poem to the first intelligent gypsy woman they should find—for gypsy men, said Borrow, were “too prosaic to furnish a fair test.” The encounter with the Romanies came about through the discovery of a magpie crouching in a hawthorn bush. The bird did not attempt to fly away as they approached. Mr. Watts-Dunton exclaimed, “It is wounded, or else dying—or is it a tame bird escaped from a cage?”
“Hawk!” said Borrow laconically, and turned up his face and gazed into the sky. “The magpie is waiting till the hawk has caught his quarry and made his meal. I fancy he has himself been ‘chivvied’ by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.”
And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that specked the dazzling blue, a hawk—one of the kind which takes its prey in the open rather than in the thick woodlands—was wheeling up and up, and trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to stoop at and devour it. . . .
As Borrow and his friend were gazing at the bird, a woman’s voice at their elbows said:
“It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk that chivvies a magpie. I shall stop here till the hawk’s flew away.”
They turned round, and there stood a magnificent gypsy woman, carrying, gypsy fashion, a weakly child that, in spite of its sallow and wasted cheek, proclaimed itself to be hers. By her side stood a young gipsy girl of about seventeen years of age. She was beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not of the typical Romany kind. It was, perhaps, more like the beauty of a Capri girl.
She was bareheaded—there was not even a gypsy handkerchief on her head—her hair was not plaited, and was not smooth and glossy like a gypsy girl’s hair, but flowed thick and heavy and rippling down the back of her neck and upon her shoulders. In the tumbled tresses glittered certain objects, which at first sight seemed to be jewels. They were small dead dragon-flies of the crimson kind called “sylphs.”
The woman was a well-known gypsy, Perpinia Boswell, with whom both students were acquainted. Borrow expressed surprise at the condition of the infant, and remarked that the “chavo” (baby) ought not to look like that with such a mother. Perpinia agreed. It was a misery to her, especially as her husband, Mike, was “such a daddy, too,” stronger for a man than she was for a woman. A great black cutty protruded between the woman’s teeth.
“How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?” asked Mr. Watts-Dunton. She could not say, but the girl ventured the calculation that it was as many as she could afford to buy. Her husband did not like her to smoke, and said it made her look “like an old Londra woman in Common Garding Market.”
“You must not smoke another pipe,” said Borrow’s friend to the mother—“not another pipe till the child leaves the breast.”
“What?” said Perpinia defiantly. “As if I could live without my pipe!”
“Fancy Pep a-livin’ without her baccy,” laughed the girl of the dragon-flies.
“Your child can’t live with it,” said Borrow’s friend to Perpinia. “That pipe of yours is full of a poison called nicotine.”
“Nick what?” said the girl, laughing. “That’s a new kind o’ Nick. Why, you smoke yourself!”
“Nicotine,” said Borrow’s friend; “and the first part of Pep’s body that the poison gets into is her breast, and—”
“Gets into my burk?” said Perpinia; “get along wi’ ye.”
“Yes.”
“Do it poison Pep’s milk?” said the girl.
“Yes.”
“That ain’t true,” said Perpinia; “can’t be true.”
“It is true,” said Borrow’s friend. “If you don’t give up that pipe for a time the child will die, or else be a rickety thing all his life. If you do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a Romany chal as Mike himself.”
“Chavo agin pipe, Pep,” said the girl.
“Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,” said Borrow, in that hail-fellow-well-met tone of his which he reserved for the Romanies—a tone which no Romany could ever resist. And he took it gently from the woman’s lips. “Don’t smoke any more till I come to the camp and see the chavo again.”
The woman looked very angry at first.
“He be’s a good-friend to the Romanies,” said the girl in an appeasing tone.
“That’s true,” said the woman, “but he’s no business to take my pipe out o’ my mouth for all that.”
She made no further protest, but remained to keep guard over the magpie which was to bring luck to her chavo, while Borrow walked away with the pipe in his pocket, accompanied by his friend and the young girl. The three sat down on a fallen tree to put Arnold’s poem through the crucible of the gypsy mind. The girl was a beauty of the most entrancing type to be found among her race, and her loveliness made a strong appeal even to Borrow, whose taste—the subject of frequent remark—was not so much for tawny women, however seductive, as for tall and stately fair girls, such as Isopel Berners and the queens of the North. The gypsy’s complexion, says Mr. Watts-Dunton,
“though darker than an English girl’s, was rather lighter than any ordinary gypsy’s. Her eyes were of an indescribable hue, but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for Borrow’s friend described it as a mingling of pansy-purple and dark tawny. The pupils were so large that, being set in the somewhat almond-shaped and long-eyelashed lids of her race, they were partly curtained both above and below, and this had the effect of making the eyes seem always a little contracted and just about to smile. The great size and deep richness of the eyes made the straight little nose seem smaller than it really was, they also lessened the apparent size of the mouth, which, red as a rosebud, looked quite small until she laughed, when the white teeth made quite a wide glitter.”
The poem was interrupted, before three lines had been read, by a swarm of dragon-flies which swam in the sunshine around the girl’s head, causing her to exclaim that the “Devil’s needles” were come to sew up her eyes for killing their brothers. “I dussn’t set here,” said she. “Us Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly brook.’ And that’s the king of the dragon-flies; he lives here.” The insects presently disappeared, and she sat down again to hear the lil (book). She was interested in the prose story of Glanville, on which Arnold’s poem was founded, but the poem itself bewildered her, except that “her eyes flashed now and then at the lovely bits of description.” It was read a second time. “Can’t make out what the lil’s all about—seems all about nothink! Seems to me that the pretty sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o’ her skin for joy makes this ’ere gorgio want to cry. What a rum lot gorgios is surely!”
And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp with the agility of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and laughing aloud.
“The beauty of that girl,” Borrow again murmured, “is quite—quite—”
Again he did not finish his sentence, but after a while said:
“That was all true about the nicotine?”
“Partly, I think,” said his friend, “but not being a medical man I must not be too emphatic. If it is true it ought to be a criminal offence for any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a child.”
“Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,” growled Borrow. “Fancy kissing a woman’s mouth that smelt of stale tobacco—pheugh!”