Whatevermay have been those experiences with the gryengroes which made Groome, when speaking of the gypsies of ‘Aylwin,’ say ‘the author writes only of what he knows,’ it seems to have been after his intercourse with the gypsies that he and a younger brother, Alfred Eugene Watts (elsewhere described), were articled as solicitors to their father. His bent, however, was always towards literature, especially poetry, of which he had now written a great deal—indeed, the major part of the volume which was destined to lie unpublished for so many years. But before I deal with the most important period of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life—his life in London—it seems necessary to say a word or two about his visits to East Anglia, and especially to the Norfolk coast. There are some admirable remarks upon the East Coast in Mr. William Sharp’s chapter on ‘Aylwinland’ in ‘Literary Geography,’ and he notes the way in which Rhona Boswell links it with Cowslip Land; but he does not give examples of the poems which thus link it, such as the double roundel called ‘The Golden Hand.’
THE GOLDEN HAND[73a]PercyDo you forget that day on Rington strandWhen, near the crumbling ruin’s parapet,I saw you stand beside the long-shore netThe gorgios spread to dry on sunlit sand?RhonaDo I forget?PercyYou wove the wood-flowers in a dewy bandAround your hair which shone as black as jet:No fairy’s crown of bloom was ever setRound brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:Love-lips (with one tattoo ‘for dukkerin’[73b]) tannedBy sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.RhonaDo I forget?The Golden Hand shone there: it’s you forget,Or p’raps us Romanies ondly understandThe way the Lover’s Dukkeripen is plannedWhich shone that second time when us two met.PercyBlest ‘Golden Hand’!RhonaThe wind, that mixed the smell o’ violetWi’ chirp o’ bird, a-blowin’ from the landWhere my dear Mammy lies, said as it fannedMy heart-like, ‘Them ’ere tears makes Mammy fret.’She loves to see her chavi[74]lookin’ grand,So I made what you call’d a coronet,And in the front I put her amulet:She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.PercyBlest ‘Golden Hand’!
THE GOLDEN HAND[73a]
Percy
Do you forget that day on Rington strandWhen, near the crumbling ruin’s parapet,I saw you stand beside the long-shore netThe gorgios spread to dry on sunlit sand?
Rhona
Do I forget?
Percy
You wove the wood-flowers in a dewy bandAround your hair which shone as black as jet:No fairy’s crown of bloom was ever setRound brows so sweet as those the wood-flowers spanned.
I see that picture now; hair dewy-wet:Dark eyes that pictures in the sky expand:Love-lips (with one tattoo ‘for dukkerin’[73b]) tannedBy sunny winds that kiss them as you stand.
Rhona
Do I forget?The Golden Hand shone there: it’s you forget,Or p’raps us Romanies ondly understandThe way the Lover’s Dukkeripen is plannedWhich shone that second time when us two met.
Percy
Blest ‘Golden Hand’!
Rhona
The wind, that mixed the smell o’ violetWi’ chirp o’ bird, a-blowin’ from the landWhere my dear Mammy lies, said as it fannedMy heart-like, ‘Them ’ere tears makes Mammy fret.’She loves to see her chavi[74]lookin’ grand,So I made what you call’d a coronet,And in the front I put her amulet:She sent the Hand to show she sees me yet.
Percy
Blest ‘Golden Hand’!
In the same way that the velvety green of Hunts is seen in the verses I have already quoted, so the softer side of the inland scenery of East Anglia is described in the following lines, where also we find an exquisite use of the East Anglian fancy about the fairies and the foxglove bells.
At a waltz during certain Venetian revels after the liberation from the Austrian yoke, a forsaken lover stands and watches a lady whose child-love he had won in England:—
Has she forgotten for such halls as theseThe domes the angels built in holy times,When wings were ours in childhood’s flowery climesTo dance with butterflies and golden bees?—Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breezeShook out those English harebells’ magic chimesOn that child-wedding morn, ’neath English limes,’Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?The love that childhood cradled—girlhood nursed—Has she forgotten it for this dull play,Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and swayLike dancers in a telescope reversed?Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,‘Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed’?But was it this that bought her—this poor splendourThat won her from her troth and wild-flower wreathWho ‘cracked the foxglove bells’ on Grayland Heath,Or played with playful winds that tried to bend her,Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and teeth,When Love grew grave—to hide her soul’s surrender?
Has she forgotten for such halls as theseThe domes the angels built in holy times,When wings were ours in childhood’s flowery climesTo dance with butterflies and golden bees?—Forgotten how the sunny-fingered breezeShook out those English harebells’ magic chimesOn that child-wedding morn, ’neath English limes,’Mid wild-flowers tall enough to kiss her knees?
The love that childhood cradled—girlhood nursed—Has she forgotten it for this dull play,Where far-off pigmies seem to waltz and swayLike dancers in a telescope reversed?Or does not pallid Conscience come and say,‘Who sells her glory of beauty stands accursed’?
But was it this that bought her—this poor splendourThat won her from her troth and wild-flower wreathWho ‘cracked the foxglove bells’ on Grayland Heath,Or played with playful winds that tried to bend her,Or, tripping through the deer-park, tall and slender,Answered the larks above, the crakes beneath,Or mocked, with glitter of laughing lips and teeth,When Love grew grave—to hide her soul’s surrender?
Mr. Sharp has dwelt upon the striking way in which the scenery and atmosphere are rendered in ‘Aylwin,’ but this, as I think, is even more clearly seen in the poems. And in none of these is it seen so vividly as in that exhilarating poem, ‘Gypsy Heather,’ published in the ‘Athenæum,’ and not yet garnered in a volume. This poem also shows his lyrical power, which never seems to be at its very best unless he is depicting Romany life and Romany passion. The metre of this poem is as original as that of ‘The Gypsy Haymaking Song,’ quoted in an earlier chapter. It has a swing like that of no other poem:—
GYPSY HEATHER‘If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your man it’ll show him the selfsame heather where it wur born.’—Sinfi Lovell.[Percy Aylwin, standing on the deck of the ‘Petrel,’ takes from his pocket a letter which, before he had set sail to return to the south seas, the Melbourne post had brought him—a letter from Rhona, staying then with the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by the Boswells, called ‘Gypsy Heather.’ He takes from the envelope a withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll of paper on which Rhona has written the words, ‘Remember Gypsy Heather.’]IRemember Gypsy Heather?Remember Jasper’s camping-placeWhere heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,And scents of meadow, wood and chase,Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?Remember where, in Rington Furze,I kissed her and she asked me whetherI ‘thought my lips of teazel-burrs,That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,Felt nice on a rinkenny moey[76]like hers?’—Gypsy Heather!IIRemember Gypsy Heather?Remember her whom nought could tameBut love of me, the poacher-maidenWho showed me once my father’s gameWith which her plump round arms were ladenWho, when my glances spoke reproach,Said, “Things o’ fur an’ fin an’ featherLike coneys, pheasants, perch an’ loach,An’ even the famous ‘Rington roach,’Wur born for Romany chies to poach!”—Gypsy Heather!IIIRemember Gypsy Heather?Atolls and reefs, you change, you changeTo dells of England dewy and tender;You palm-trees in yon coral rangeSeem ‘Rington Birches’ sweet and slenderShading the ocean’s fiery glare:We two are in the Dell together—My body is here, my soul is thereWith lords of trap and net and snare,The Children of the Open Air,—Gypsy Heather!IVRemember Gypsy Heather?Its pungent breath is on the wind,Killing the scent of tropic water;I see her suitors swarthy skinned,Who pine in vain for Jasper’s daughter.The ‘Scollard,’ with his features tannedBy sun and wind as brown as leather—His forehead scarred with Passion’s brand—Scowling at Sinfi tall and grand,Who sits with Pharaoh by her hand,—Gypsy Heather!VRemember Gypsy Heather?Now Rhona sits beneath the treeThat shades our tent, alone and weeping;And him, the ‘Scollard,’ him I see:From bush to bush I see him creeping—I see her mock him, see her runAnd free his pony from the tether,Who lays his ears in love and fun,And gallops with her in the sunThrough lace the gossamers have spun,—Gypsy Heather!VIRemember Gypsy Heather?She reaches ‘Rington Birches’; now,Dismounting from the ‘Scollard’s’ pony,She sits alone with heavy brow,Thinking, but not of hare or coney.The hot sea holds each sight, each soundOf England’s golden autumn weather:The Romanies now are sitting roundThe tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;Now Rhona dances heather-crowned,—Gypsy Heather!VIIRemember Gypsy Heather?She’s thinking of this withered sprayThrough all the dance; her eyes are gleamingDarker than night, yet bright as day,While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;I see the lips—the upper curled,A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,Whence—while the floating shawl is twirled,As if a ruddy cloud were swirled—Her scornful laugh at him is hurled,—Gypsy Heather!VIIIRemember Gypsy Heather?In storm or calm, in sun or rain,There’s magic, Rhona, in the writingWound round these flowers whose purple stainDims the dear scrawl of Love’s inditing:Dear girl, this spray between the leaves(Now fading like a draggled featherWith which the nesting song-bird weaves)Makes every wave the vessel cleavesSeem purple of heather as it heaves,—Gypsy Heather!IXRemember Gypsy Heather?Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of homeAre everywhere; the skylark wingingThrough amber cloud-films till the domeSeems filled with love, our love, a-singing.The sea-wind seems an English breezeBearing the bleat of ewe and wetherOver the heath from Rington Leas,Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,You taught me Romany ’neath the trees,—Gypsy Heather!
GYPSY HEATHER
‘If you breathe on a heather-spray and send it to your man it’ll show him the selfsame heather where it wur born.’—Sinfi Lovell.
[Percy Aylwin, standing on the deck of the ‘Petrel,’ takes from his pocket a letter which, before he had set sail to return to the south seas, the Melbourne post had brought him—a letter from Rhona, staying then with the Boswells on a patch of heath much favoured by the Boswells, called ‘Gypsy Heather.’ He takes from the envelope a withered heather-spray, encircled by a little scroll of paper on which Rhona has written the words, ‘Remember Gypsy Heather.’]
I
Remember Gypsy Heather?Remember Jasper’s camping-placeWhere heath-bells meet the grassy dingle,And scents of meadow, wood and chase,Wild thyme and whin-flower seem to mingle?Remember where, in Rington Furze,I kissed her and she asked me whetherI ‘thought my lips of teazel-burrs,That pricked her jis like whin-bush spurs,Felt nice on a rinkenny moey[76]like hers?’—Gypsy Heather!
II
Remember Gypsy Heather?Remember her whom nought could tameBut love of me, the poacher-maidenWho showed me once my father’s gameWith which her plump round arms were ladenWho, when my glances spoke reproach,Said, “Things o’ fur an’ fin an’ featherLike coneys, pheasants, perch an’ loach,An’ even the famous ‘Rington roach,’Wur born for Romany chies to poach!”—Gypsy Heather!
III
Remember Gypsy Heather?Atolls and reefs, you change, you changeTo dells of England dewy and tender;You palm-trees in yon coral rangeSeem ‘Rington Birches’ sweet and slenderShading the ocean’s fiery glare:We two are in the Dell together—My body is here, my soul is thereWith lords of trap and net and snare,The Children of the Open Air,—Gypsy Heather!
IV
Remember Gypsy Heather?Its pungent breath is on the wind,Killing the scent of tropic water;I see her suitors swarthy skinned,Who pine in vain for Jasper’s daughter.The ‘Scollard,’ with his features tannedBy sun and wind as brown as leather—His forehead scarred with Passion’s brand—Scowling at Sinfi tall and grand,Who sits with Pharaoh by her hand,—Gypsy Heather!
V
Remember Gypsy Heather?Now Rhona sits beneath the treeThat shades our tent, alone and weeping;And him, the ‘Scollard,’ him I see:From bush to bush I see him creeping—I see her mock him, see her runAnd free his pony from the tether,Who lays his ears in love and fun,And gallops with her in the sunThrough lace the gossamers have spun,—Gypsy Heather!
VI
Remember Gypsy Heather?She reaches ‘Rington Birches’; now,Dismounting from the ‘Scollard’s’ pony,She sits alone with heavy brow,Thinking, but not of hare or coney.The hot sea holds each sight, each soundOf England’s golden autumn weather:The Romanies now are sitting roundThe tea-cloth spread on grassy ground;Now Rhona dances heather-crowned,—Gypsy Heather!
VII
Remember Gypsy Heather?She’s thinking of this withered sprayThrough all the dance; her eyes are gleamingDarker than night, yet bright as day,While round her a gypsy shawl is streaming;I see the lips—the upper curled,A saucy rose-leaf, from the nether,Whence—while the floating shawl is twirled,As if a ruddy cloud were swirled—Her scornful laugh at him is hurled,—Gypsy Heather!
VIII
Remember Gypsy Heather?In storm or calm, in sun or rain,There’s magic, Rhona, in the writingWound round these flowers whose purple stainDims the dear scrawl of Love’s inditing:Dear girl, this spray between the leaves(Now fading like a draggled featherWith which the nesting song-bird weaves)Makes every wave the vessel cleavesSeem purple of heather as it heaves,—Gypsy Heather!
IX
Remember Gypsy Heather?Oh, Rhona! sights and sounds of homeAre everywhere; the skylark wingingThrough amber cloud-films till the domeSeems filled with love, our love, a-singing.The sea-wind seems an English breezeBearing the bleat of ewe and wetherOver the heath from Rington Leas,Where, to the hymn of birds and bees,You taught me Romany ’neath the trees,—Gypsy Heather!
Another reason that makes it necessary for me to touch upon the inland part of East Anglia is that I have certain remarks to make upon what are called ‘the Omarian poems of Mr. Watts-Dunton.’ Although, as I have before hinted, St. Ives, being in Hunts, belongs topographically to the East Midlands, its sympathies are East Anglian. This perhaps is partly because it is the extremeeast of Hunts, and partly because the mouth of the Ouse is at Lynn: to those whom Mr. Norris affectionately calls St. Ivians and Hemingfordians, the seaside means Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Cromer, Hunstanton, and the towns on the Suffolk coast. The splendour of Norfolk ale may also partly account for it. This perhaps also explains why the famous East Anglian translator of Omar Khayyàm would seem to have been known to a few Omarians on the banks of the Ouse and Cam as soon as the great discoverer of good things, Rossetti, pounced upon it in the penny box of a second-hand bookseller. Readers of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s obituary notice of F. H. Groome in the ‘Athenæum’ will recall these words:—
“It was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of sympathy at ‘The Pines’ during that first luncheon; there was that other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm. We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be esoteric. And here was a guest who had been brought into actual personal contact with the wonderful old ‘Fitz.’ As a child of eight he had seen him, talked with him, been patted on the head by him. Groome’s father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald’s most intimate friends. This was at once a delightful and a powerful link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when he heard, as he soon did, the toast to ‘Omar Khayyàm,’ none drank that toast with more gusto than he. The fact is, as the Romanies say, true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first sight.”
“It was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of sympathy at ‘The Pines’ during that first luncheon; there was that other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm. We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be esoteric. And here was a guest who had been brought into actual personal contact with the wonderful old ‘Fitz.’ As a child of eight he had seen him, talked with him, been patted on the head by him. Groome’s father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald’s most intimate friends. This was at once a delightful and a powerful link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when he heard, as he soon did, the toast to ‘Omar Khayyàm,’ none drank that toast with more gusto than he. The fact is, as the Romanies say, true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first sight.”
This is the poem alluded to: it is entitled, ‘Toast to Omar Khayyàm: An East Anglian echo-chorus inscribedto old Omarian Friends in memory of happy days by Ouse and Cam’:—
ChorusIn this red wine, where memory’s eyes seem glowing,And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showingWhat beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,We drink to thee, right heir of Nature’s knowing,Omar Khayyàm!IStar-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowingHer scriptured orbs on Time’s wide oriflamme,Nature’s proud blazon: ‘Who shall bless or damn?Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!’Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!IIPoet, whose stream of balm and music, flowingThrough Persian gardens, widened till it swam—A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam—Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were blowing,—Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!IIIWho blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,And swish of scythe in Bredfield’s dewy mowing?Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!IV’Twas Fitz, ‘Old Fitz,’ whose knowledge, farther goingThan lore of Omar, ‘Wisdom’s starry Cham,’Made richer still thine opulent epigram:Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.—Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!VIn this red wine, where Memory’s eyes seem glowing,And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showingWhat beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,We drink to thee till, hark! the cock is crowing!Omar Khayyàm!
Chorus
In this red wine, where memory’s eyes seem glowing,And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showingWhat beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,We drink to thee, right heir of Nature’s knowing,Omar Khayyàm!
I
Star-gazer, who canst read, when Night is strowingHer scriptured orbs on Time’s wide oriflamme,Nature’s proud blazon: ‘Who shall bless or damn?Life, Death, and Doom are all of my bestowing!’Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!
II
Poet, whose stream of balm and music, flowingThrough Persian gardens, widened till it swam—A fragrant tide no bank of Time shall dam—Through Suffolk meads, where gorse and may were blowing,—Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!
III
Who blent thy song with sound of cattle lowing,And caw of rooks that perch on ewe and ram,And hymn of lark, and bleat of orphan lamb,And swish of scythe in Bredfield’s dewy mowing?Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!
IV
’Twas Fitz, ‘Old Fitz,’ whose knowledge, farther goingThan lore of Omar, ‘Wisdom’s starry Cham,’Made richer still thine opulent epigram:Sowed seed from seed of thine immortal sowing.—Chorus: Omar Khayyàm!
V
In this red wine, where Memory’s eyes seem glowing,And days when wines were bright by Ouse and Cam,And Norfolk’s foaming nectar glittered, showingWhat beard of gold John Barleycorn was growing,We drink to thee till, hark! the cock is crowing!Omar Khayyàm!
It was many years after this—it was as a member of another Omar Khayyàm Club of much greater celebrity than the little brotherhood of Ouse and Cam—not large enough to be called a club—that Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote the following well-known sonnet:—
PRAYER TO THE WINDSOn planting at the head of FitzGerald’s grave two rose-trees whose ancestors had scattered their petals over the tomb of Omar Khayyàm.“My tomb shall be on a spot where the north wind may strow roses upon it.”Omar Khayyàm to Kwájah Nizami.Hear us, ye winds! From where the north-wind strowsBlossoms that crown ‘the King of Wisdom’s’ tomb,The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,Dreaming in seed of Love’s ancestral rose,To meadows where a braver north-wind blowsO’er greener grass, o’er hedge-rose, may, and broom,And all that make East England’s field-perfumeDearer than any fragrance Persia knows.Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West, and South!This granite covers him whose golden mouthMade wiser ev’n the Word of Wisdom’s King:Blow softly over Omar’s Western heraldTill roses rich of Omar’s dust shall springFrom richer dust of Suffolk’s rare FitzGerald.
PRAYER TO THE WINDS
On planting at the head of FitzGerald’s grave two rose-trees whose ancestors had scattered their petals over the tomb of Omar Khayyàm.
“My tomb shall be on a spot where the north wind may strow roses upon it.”
Omar Khayyàm to Kwájah Nizami.
Hear us, ye winds! From where the north-wind strowsBlossoms that crown ‘the King of Wisdom’s’ tomb,The trees here planted bring remembered bloom,Dreaming in seed of Love’s ancestral rose,To meadows where a braver north-wind blowsO’er greener grass, o’er hedge-rose, may, and broom,And all that make East England’s field-perfumeDearer than any fragrance Persia knows.
Hear us, ye winds, North, East, and West, and South!This granite covers him whose golden mouthMade wiser ev’n the Word of Wisdom’s King:Blow softly over Omar’s Western heraldTill roses rich of Omar’s dust shall springFrom richer dust of Suffolk’s rare FitzGerald.
I must now quote another of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s East Anglian poems, partly because it depicts the weird charm of the Norfolk coast, and partly because it illustrates that sympathy between the poet and the loweranimals which I have already noted. I have another reason: not long ago, that good East Anglian, Mr. Rider Haggard interested us all by telling how telepathy seemed to have the power of operating between a dog and its beloved master in certain rare and extraordinary cases. When the poem appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ (December 20, 1902), it was described as ‘part of a forthcoming romance.’ It records a case of telepathy between man and dog quite as wonderful as that narrated by Mr. Rider Haggard:—
CAUGHT IN THE EBBING TIDEThe mightiest Titan’s stroke could not withstandAn ebbing tide like this. These swirls denoteHow wind and tide conspire. I can but floatTo the open sea and strike no more for land.Farewell, brown cliffs, farewell, beloved sandHer feet have pressed—farewell, dear little boatWhere Gelert,[82]calmly sitting on my coat,Unconscious of my peril, gazes bland!All dangers grip me save the deadliest, fear:Yet these air-pictures of the past that glide—These death-mirages o’er the heaving tide—Showing two lovers in an alcove clear,Will break my heart. I see them and I hearAs there they sit at morning, side by side.The First VisionWith Raxton elms behind—in front the sea,Sitting in rosy light in that alcove,They hear the first lark rise o’er Raxton Grove;‘What should I do with fame,dear heart?’says he.‘You talk of fame,poetic fame,to meWhose crown is not of laurel but of love—To me who would not give this little gloveOn this dear hand for Shakspeare’s dower in fee.While,rising red and kindling every billow,The sun’s shield shines’neath many a golden spear,To lean with you against this leafy pillow,To murmur words of love in this loved ear—To feel you bending like a bending willow,This is to be a poet—this,my dear!’O God, to die and leave her—die and leaveThe heaven so lately won!—And then, to knowWhat misery will be hers—what lonely woe!—To see the bright eyes weep, to see her grieveWill make me a coward as I sink, and cleaveTo life though Destiny has bid me go.How shall I bear the pictures that will glowAbove the glowing billows as they heave?One picture fades, and now above the sprayAnother shines: ah, do I know the bowersWhere that sweet woman stands—the woodland flowers,In that bright wreath of grass and new-mown hay—That birthday wreath I wove when earthly hoursWore angel-wings,—till portents brought dismay?The Second VisionProud of her wreath as laureate of his laurel,She smiles on him—on him,the prouder giver,As there they stand beside the sunlit riverWhere petals flush with rose the grass and sorrel:The chirping reed-birds,in their play or quarrel,Make musical the stream where lilies quiver—Ah!suddenly he feels her slim waist shiver:She speaks:her lips grow grey—her lips of coral!‘From out my wreath two heart-shaped seeds are swaying,The seeds of which that gypsy girl has spoken—’Tis fairy grass,alas!the lover’s token.’She lifts her fingers to her forehead,saying,‘Touch the twin hearts.’Says he, ‘’Tis idle playing’:He touches them;they fall—fall bruised and broken.* * * * *Shall I turn coward here who sailed with DeathThrough many a tempest on mine own North Sea,And quail like him of old who bowed the knee—Faithless—to billows of Genesereth?Did I turn coward when my very breathFroze on my lips that Alpine night when heStood glimmering there, the Skeleton, with me,While avalanches rolled from peaks beneath?Each billow bears me nearer to the vergeOf realms where she is not—where love must wait.—If Gelert, there, could hear, no need to urgeThat friend, so faithful, true, affectionate,To come and help me, or to share my fate.Ah! surely I see him springing through the surge.[The dog, plunging into the tide and strikingtowards him with immense strength, reacheshim and swims round him.]Oh, Gelert, strong of wind and strong of pawHere gazing like your namesake, ‘Snowdon’s Hound,’When great Llewelyn’s child could not be found,And all the warriors stood in speechless awe—Mute as your namesake when his master sawThe cradle tossed—the rushes red around—With never a word, but only a whimpering soundTo tell what meant the blood on lip and jaw.In such a strait, to aid this gaze so fond,Should I, brave friend, have needed other speechThan this dear whimper? Is there not a bondStronger than words that binds us each to each?—But Death has caught us both. ’Tis far beyondThe strength of man or dog to win the beach.Through tangle-weed—through coils of slippery kelpDecking your shaggy forehead, those brave eyesShine true—shine deep of love’s divine surmiseAs hers who gave you—then a Titan whelp!I think you know my danger and would help!See how I point to yonder smack that liesAt anchor—Go! His countenance replies.Hope’s music rings in Gelert’s eager yelp![The dog swims swiftly away down the tide.Now, life and love and death swim out with him!If he should reach the smack, the men will guessThe dog has left his master in distress.You taught him in these very waves to swim—‘The prince of pups,’ you said, ‘for wind and limb’—And now those lessons, darling, come to bless.Envoy(The day after the rescue: Gelert and I walking along the sand.)’Twas in no glittering tourney’s mimic strife,—’Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove,While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above,And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife—’Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife,Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-gloveConquered and found his foe a soul to love,Found friendship—Life’s great second crown of life.So I this morning love our North Sea moreBecause he fought me well, because these wavesNow weaving sunbows for us by the shoreStrove with me, tossed me in those emerald cavesThat yawned above my head like conscious graves—I love him as I never loved before.
CAUGHT IN THE EBBING TIDE
The mightiest Titan’s stroke could not withstandAn ebbing tide like this. These swirls denoteHow wind and tide conspire. I can but floatTo the open sea and strike no more for land.Farewell, brown cliffs, farewell, beloved sandHer feet have pressed—farewell, dear little boatWhere Gelert,[82]calmly sitting on my coat,Unconscious of my peril, gazes bland!
All dangers grip me save the deadliest, fear:Yet these air-pictures of the past that glide—These death-mirages o’er the heaving tide—Showing two lovers in an alcove clear,Will break my heart. I see them and I hearAs there they sit at morning, side by side.
The First Vision
With Raxton elms behind—in front the sea,Sitting in rosy light in that alcove,They hear the first lark rise o’er Raxton Grove;‘What should I do with fame,dear heart?’says he.‘You talk of fame,poetic fame,to meWhose crown is not of laurel but of love—To me who would not give this little gloveOn this dear hand for Shakspeare’s dower in fee.
While,rising red and kindling every billow,The sun’s shield shines’neath many a golden spear,To lean with you against this leafy pillow,To murmur words of love in this loved ear—To feel you bending like a bending willow,This is to be a poet—this,my dear!’
O God, to die and leave her—die and leaveThe heaven so lately won!—And then, to knowWhat misery will be hers—what lonely woe!—To see the bright eyes weep, to see her grieveWill make me a coward as I sink, and cleaveTo life though Destiny has bid me go.How shall I bear the pictures that will glowAbove the glowing billows as they heave?
One picture fades, and now above the sprayAnother shines: ah, do I know the bowersWhere that sweet woman stands—the woodland flowers,In that bright wreath of grass and new-mown hay—That birthday wreath I wove when earthly hoursWore angel-wings,—till portents brought dismay?
The Second Vision
Proud of her wreath as laureate of his laurel,She smiles on him—on him,the prouder giver,As there they stand beside the sunlit riverWhere petals flush with rose the grass and sorrel:The chirping reed-birds,in their play or quarrel,Make musical the stream where lilies quiver—Ah!suddenly he feels her slim waist shiver:She speaks:her lips grow grey—her lips of coral!
‘From out my wreath two heart-shaped seeds are swaying,The seeds of which that gypsy girl has spoken—’Tis fairy grass,alas!the lover’s token.’She lifts her fingers to her forehead,saying,‘Touch the twin hearts.’Says he, ‘’Tis idle playing’:He touches them;they fall—fall bruised and broken.
* * * * *
Shall I turn coward here who sailed with DeathThrough many a tempest on mine own North Sea,And quail like him of old who bowed the knee—Faithless—to billows of Genesereth?Did I turn coward when my very breathFroze on my lips that Alpine night when heStood glimmering there, the Skeleton, with me,While avalanches rolled from peaks beneath?
Each billow bears me nearer to the vergeOf realms where she is not—where love must wait.—If Gelert, there, could hear, no need to urgeThat friend, so faithful, true, affectionate,To come and help me, or to share my fate.Ah! surely I see him springing through the surge.
[The dog, plunging into the tide and strikingtowards him with immense strength, reacheshim and swims round him.]
Oh, Gelert, strong of wind and strong of pawHere gazing like your namesake, ‘Snowdon’s Hound,’When great Llewelyn’s child could not be found,And all the warriors stood in speechless awe—Mute as your namesake when his master sawThe cradle tossed—the rushes red around—With never a word, but only a whimpering soundTo tell what meant the blood on lip and jaw.
In such a strait, to aid this gaze so fond,Should I, brave friend, have needed other speechThan this dear whimper? Is there not a bondStronger than words that binds us each to each?—But Death has caught us both. ’Tis far beyondThe strength of man or dog to win the beach.
Through tangle-weed—through coils of slippery kelpDecking your shaggy forehead, those brave eyesShine true—shine deep of love’s divine surmiseAs hers who gave you—then a Titan whelp!I think you know my danger and would help!See how I point to yonder smack that liesAt anchor—Go! His countenance replies.Hope’s music rings in Gelert’s eager yelp!
[The dog swims swiftly away down the tide.
Now, life and love and death swim out with him!If he should reach the smack, the men will guessThe dog has left his master in distress.You taught him in these very waves to swim—‘The prince of pups,’ you said, ‘for wind and limb’—And now those lessons, darling, come to bless.
Envoy
(The day after the rescue: Gelert and I walking along the sand.)
’Twas in no glittering tourney’s mimic strife,—’Twas in that bloody fight in Raxton Grove,While hungry ravens croaked from boughs above,And frightened blackbirds shrilled the warning fife—’Twas there, in days when Friendship still was rife,Mine ancestor who threw the challenge-gloveConquered and found his foe a soul to love,Found friendship—Life’s great second crown of life.
So I this morning love our North Sea moreBecause he fought me well, because these wavesNow weaving sunbows for us by the shoreStrove with me, tossed me in those emerald cavesThat yawned above my head like conscious graves—I love him as I never loved before.
In these days when so much is written about the intelligence of the lower animals, when ‘Hans,’ the ‘thinking horse,’ is ‘interviewed’ by eminent scientists, the exploit of the Second Gelert is not without interest. I may, perhaps, mention a strange experience of my own. The late Betts Bey, a well-known figure in St. Peter’s Port, Guernsey, had a fine black retriever, named Caro. During a long summer holiday which we spent in Guernsey, Caro became greatly attached to a friend, and Betts Bey presented him to her. He was a magnificent fellow,valiant as a lion, and a splendid diver and swimmer. He often plunged off the parapet of the bridge which spans the Serpentine. Indeed, he would have dived from any height. His intelligence was surprising. If we wished to make him understand that he was not to accompany us, we had only to say, ‘Caro, we are going to church!’ As soon as he heard the word ‘church’ his barks would cease, his tail would drop, and he would look mournfully resigned. One evening, as I was writing in my room, Caro began to scratch outside the door, uttering those strange ‘woof-woofs’ which were his canine language. I let him in, but he would not rest. He stood gazing at me with an intense expression, and, turning towards the door, waited impatiently. For some time I took no notice of his dumb appeal, but his excitement increased, and suddenly a vague sense of ill seemed to pass from him into my mind. Drawn half-consciously I rose, and at once with a strange half-human whine Caro dashed upstairs. I followed him. He ran into a bedroom, and there in the dark I found my friend lying unconscious. It is well-nigh certain that Caro thus saved my friend’s life.
BetweenMr. Watts-Dunton and the brother who came next to him, before mentioned, there was a very great affection, although the difference between them, mentally and physically, was quite noticeable. They were articled to their father on the same day and admitted solicitors on the same day, a very unusual thing with solicitors and their sons. Mr. Watts-Dunton afterwards passed a short term in one of the great conveyancing offices in London in order to become proficient in conveyancing. His brother did the same in another office in Bedford Row; but he afterwards practised for himself. Mr. A. E. Watts soon had a considerable practice as family solicitor and conveyancer. Mr. Hake identifies him with Cyril Aylwin, but before I quote Mr. Hake’s interesting account of him, I will give the vivid description of Cyril in ‘Aylwin’:—
“Juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wideawake. He had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the little crow’s feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have considered him small, had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and sonorous voice with which he hadaccosted Sinfi conveyed an impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of sedateness . . . but in the one glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.”
“Juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wideawake. He had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the little crow’s feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have considered him small, had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and sonorous voice with which he hadaccosted Sinfi conveyed an impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of sedateness . . . but in the one glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.”
Cyril Aylwin was at first thought to be a portrait of Whistler, which is not quite so outrageously absurd as the wild conjecture that William Morris was the original of Wilderspin. Mr. Hake says:—
“I am especially able to speak of this character, who has been inquired about more than any other in the book. I knew him, I think, even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group. He was a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s—Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts. He lived at Sydenham, and died suddenly, either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly after I had met him at a wedding party. Among the set in which I moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist. His style of humour always struck me as being more American than English. While bringing out humorous things that would set a dinner table in a roar, he would himself maintain a perfectly unmoved countenance. And it was said of him, as ‘Wilderspin’ says of ‘Cyril Aylwin,’ that he was never known to laugh.”[88]
“I am especially able to speak of this character, who has been inquired about more than any other in the book. I knew him, I think, even before I knew Rossetti and Morris, or any of that group. He was a brother of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s—Mr. Alfred Eugene Watts. He lived at Sydenham, and died suddenly, either in 1870 or 1871, very shortly after I had met him at a wedding party. Among the set in which I moved at that time he had a great reputation as a wit and humorist. His style of humour always struck me as being more American than English. While bringing out humorous things that would set a dinner table in a roar, he would himself maintain a perfectly unmoved countenance. And it was said of him, as ‘Wilderspin’ says of ‘Cyril Aylwin,’ that he was never known to laugh.”[88]
After a time Mr. Watts-Dunton joined his brother, and the two practised together in London. They also lived together at Sydenham. Some time after this, however,Mr. Watts-Dunton determined to abandon the law for literature. The brothers migrated to Sydenham, because at that time Mr. Watts-Dunton pursued music with an avidity and interest which threatened for a time to interfere with those literary energies which it was now his intention to exercise. At that time the orchestral concerts at the Crystal Palace under Manns, given every morning and every afternoon, were a great attraction to music lovers, and Mr. Watts-Dunton, who lived close by, rarely missed either the morning or the afternoon concert. It was in this way that he became steeped in German music; and afterwards, when he became intimate with Dr. F. Hueffer, the musical critic of the ‘Times,’ and the exponent of Wagner in Great Britain, he became a thorough Wagnerian.
It was during this time, and through the extraordinary social attractions of his brother, that Mr. Watts-Dunton began to move very much in London life, and saw a great deal of what is called London society. After his brother’s death he took chambers in Great James Street, close to Mr. Swinburne, with whom he had already become intimate. And according to Mr. Hake, in his paper in ‘T. P.’s Weekly’ above quoted from, it was here that he wrote ‘Aylwin.’ I have already alluded to his record of this most interesting event:—
“I have just read,” he says, “with the greatest interest the article in your number of Sept. 18, 1903, called ‘How Authors Work Best.’ But the following sentence in it set me reflecting: ‘Flaubert took ten years to write and repolish “Madame Bovary,” Watts-Dunton twenty years to write, recast, and conclude “Aylwin.”’ The statement about ‘Aylwin’ has often been made, and inthese days of hasty production it may well be taken by the author as a compliment; but it is as entirely apocryphal as that about Scott’s brother having written the Waverley Novels, and as that about Bramwell Brontë having written ‘Wuthering Heights.’ As to ‘Aylwin,’ I happen to be in a peculiarly authoritative position to speak upon the genesis of this very popular book. If any one were to peruse the original manuscript of the story he would find it in four different handwritings—my late father’s, and two of my brothers’, but principally in mine.Yet I can aver that it was not written by us, and also that its composition did not take twenty years to achieve. It was dictated to us.”
“I have just read,” he says, “with the greatest interest the article in your number of Sept. 18, 1903, called ‘How Authors Work Best.’ But the following sentence in it set me reflecting: ‘Flaubert took ten years to write and repolish “Madame Bovary,” Watts-Dunton twenty years to write, recast, and conclude “Aylwin.”’ The statement about ‘Aylwin’ has often been made, and inthese days of hasty production it may well be taken by the author as a compliment; but it is as entirely apocryphal as that about Scott’s brother having written the Waverley Novels, and as that about Bramwell Brontë having written ‘Wuthering Heights.’ As to ‘Aylwin,’ I happen to be in a peculiarly authoritative position to speak upon the genesis of this very popular book. If any one were to peruse the original manuscript of the story he would find it in four different handwritings—my late father’s, and two of my brothers’, but principally in mine.
Yet I can aver that it was not written by us, and also that its composition did not take twenty years to achieve. It was dictated to us.”
Dr. Gordon Hake is mainly known as the ‘parable poet,’ but as a fact he was a physician of extraordinary talent, who had practised first at Bury St. Edmunds and afterwards at Spring Gardens, until he partly retired to be private physician to the late Lady Ripon. After her death he left practice altogether in order to devote himself to literature, for which he had very great equipments. As ‘Aylwin’ touched upon certain subtle nervous phases it must have been a great advantage to the author to dictate these portions of the story to so skilled and experienced a friend. The rare kind of cerebral exaltation into which Henry Aylwin passed after his appalling experience in the Cove, in which the entire nervous system was disturbed, was not what is known as brain fever. The record of it in ‘Aylwin’ is, I understand, a literal account of a rare and wonderful case brought under the professional notice of Dr. Hake.
As physician to Rossetti, a few years after the death of his beloved wife, Dr. Hake’s services must have been priceless to the poet-painter; for, as is only too wellknown, Rossetti’s grief for the death of his wife had for some time a devastating effect upon his mind. It was one of the causes of that terrible insomnia to relieve himself from which he resorted to chloral, though later on the attacks upon him by certain foes intensified the distressing ailment. The insomnia produced fits of melancholia, an ailment, according to the skilled opinion of Dr. Hake, more difficult than all others to deal with; for when the nervous system has sunk to a certain state of depression, the mind roams over the universe, as it were, in quest of imaginary causes for the depression. This accounts for the ‘cock and bull’ stories that were somewhat rife immediately after Rossetti’s death about his having expressed remorse on account of his ill-treatment of his wife. No one of his intimates took the least notice of these wild and whirling words. For he would express remorse on account of the most fantastic things when the fits of melancholia were upon him; and when these fits were past he would smile at the foolish things he had said. I get this knowledge from a very high authority, Dr. Hake’s son—Mr. Thomas St. E. Hake, before mentioned—who knew Rossetti intimately from 1871 until his death, having lived under the same roof with him at Cheyne Walk, Bognor and Kelmscott. After Rossetti’s most serious attack of melancholia, his relations and friends persuaded him to stay with Dr. Hake at Roehampton, and it was there that the terrible crisis of his illness was passed.
It is interesting to know that in the original form of ‘Aylwin’ the important part taken in the development of the story by D’Arcy was taken by Dr. Hake, under the name of Gordon, and that afterwards, when all sorts of ungenerous things were written about Rossetti, D’Arcy was substituted for Gordon in order to give the authoran opportunity of bringing out and showing the world the absolute nobility and charm of Rossetti’s character.
A Corner in ‘The Pines,’ showing the Painted and Carved Cabinet
Among the many varieties of life which Mr. Watts-Dunton saw at this time was life in the slums; and this was long before the once fashionable pastime of ‘slumming’ was invented. The following lines in Dr. Hake’s ‘New Day’ allude to the deep interest that Mr. Watts-Dunton has always shown in the poor—shown years before the writers who now deal with the slums had written a line. Artistically, they are not fair specimens of Dr. Gordon Hake’s verses, but nevertheless it is interesting to quote them here:—
Know you a widow’s home? an orphanage?A place of shelter for the crippled poor?Did ever limbless men your care engageWhom you assisted of your larger store?Know you the young who are to early die—At their frail form sinks not your heart within?Know you the old who paralytic lieWhile you the freshness of your life begin?Know you the great pain-bearers who long carryThe bullet in the breast that does not kill?And those who in the house of madness tarry,Beyond the blest relief of human skill?These have you visited, all these assisted,In the high ranks of charity enlisted.
Know you a widow’s home? an orphanage?A place of shelter for the crippled poor?Did ever limbless men your care engageWhom you assisted of your larger store?Know you the young who are to early die—At their frail form sinks not your heart within?Know you the old who paralytic lieWhile you the freshness of your life begin?Know you the great pain-bearers who long carryThe bullet in the breast that does not kill?And those who in the house of madness tarry,Beyond the blest relief of human skill?These have you visited, all these assisted,In the high ranks of charity enlisted.
That Mr. Watts-Dunton has retained his interest in the poor is shown by the sonnet, ‘Father Christmas in Famine Street,’ which was originally printed as ‘an appeal’ on Christmas Eve in the ‘Athenæum’:—
When Father Christmas went down Famine StreetHe saw two little sisters: one was tryingTo lift the other, pallid, wasted, dying,Within an arch, beyond the slush and sleet.From out the glazing eyes a glimmer sweetLeapt, as in answer to the other’s sighing,While came a murmur, ‘Don’t ’ee keep on crying—I wants to die: you’ll get my share to eat.’Her knell was tolled by joy-bells of the cityHymning the birth of Jesus, Lord of Pity,Lover of children, Shepherd of Compassion.Said Father Christmas, while his eyes grew dim,‘They do His bidding—if in thrifty fashion:They let the little children go to Him.’
When Father Christmas went down Famine StreetHe saw two little sisters: one was tryingTo lift the other, pallid, wasted, dying,Within an arch, beyond the slush and sleet.
From out the glazing eyes a glimmer sweetLeapt, as in answer to the other’s sighing,While came a murmur, ‘Don’t ’ee keep on crying—I wants to die: you’ll get my share to eat.’Her knell was tolled by joy-bells of the cityHymning the birth of Jesus, Lord of Pity,Lover of children, Shepherd of Compassion.Said Father Christmas, while his eyes grew dim,‘They do His bidding—if in thrifty fashion:They let the little children go to Him.’
With this sonnet should be placed that entitled, ‘Dickens Returns on Christmas Day’:—
A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim: ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’—June 9, 1870.‘Dickens is dead!’ Beneath that grievous cryLondon seemed shivering in the summer heat;Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:‘Dickens is dead!’ said they, and hurried by;Street children stopped their games—they knew not why,But some new night seemed darkening down the street.A girl in rags, staying her wayworn feet,Cried, ‘Dickens dead? Will Father Christmas die?’City he loved, take courage on thy way!He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey—Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened years,Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears—Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!
A ragged girl in Drury Lane was heard to exclaim: ‘Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?’—June 9, 1870.
‘Dickens is dead!’ Beneath that grievous cryLondon seemed shivering in the summer heat;Strangers took up the tale like friends that meet:‘Dickens is dead!’ said they, and hurried by;Street children stopped their games—they knew not why,But some new night seemed darkening down the street.A girl in rags, staying her wayworn feet,Cried, ‘Dickens dead? Will Father Christmas die?’
City he loved, take courage on thy way!He loves thee still, in all thy joys and fears.Though he whose smile made bright thine eyes of grey—Though he whose voice, uttering thy burthened years,Made laughters bubble through thy sea of tears—Is gone, Dickens returns on Christmas Day!
Let me say here, parenthetically, that ‘The Pines’ is so far out of date that for twenty-five years it has been famous for its sympathy with the Christmas sentiment which now seems to be fading, as this sonnet shows:—
THE CHRISTMAS TREE AT ‘THE PINES.’Life still hath one romance that naught can bury—Not Time himself, who coffins Life’s romances—For still will Christmas gild the year’s mischances,If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry—To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry—To smile with eyes outshining by their glancesThe Christmas tree—to dance with fairy dancesAnd crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.And as to us, dear friend, the carols sungAre fresh as ever. Bright is yonder boughOf mistletoe as that which shone and swungWhen you and I and Friendship made a vowThat Childhood’s Christmas still should seal each brow—Friendship’s, and yours, and mine—and keep us young.
THE CHRISTMAS TREE AT ‘THE PINES.’
Life still hath one romance that naught can bury—Not Time himself, who coffins Life’s romances—For still will Christmas gild the year’s mischances,If Childhood comes, as here, to make him merry—To kiss with lips more ruddy than the cherry—To smile with eyes outshining by their glancesThe Christmas tree—to dance with fairy dancesAnd crown his hoary brow with leaf and berry.
And as to us, dear friend, the carols sungAre fresh as ever. Bright is yonder boughOf mistletoe as that which shone and swungWhen you and I and Friendship made a vowThat Childhood’s Christmas still should seal each brow—Friendship’s, and yours, and mine—and keep us young.
I may also quote from ‘Prophetic Pictures at Venice’ this romantic description of the Rosicrucian Christmas:—
(The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called ‘The Rosy Scar,’ depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine galley, watching, on Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of Rosenkreutz, as a ‘rosy phantom.’ The Lover reads aloud the descriptive verses on the frame.)While Night’s dark horses waited for the wind,He stood—he shone—where Sunset’s fiery glaivesFlickered behind the clouds; then, o’er the waves,He came to them, Faith’s remnant sorrow-thinned.The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,Cried, ‘Who is he that comes to Christian slaves?Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.’All night he stood till shone the Christmas star;Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,Flushed the grey sky—flushed sea and sail and spar,Flushed, blessing every slave’s woe-wasted cheek.Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King speak:‘Sufferers, take heart! Christ lends the Rosy Scar.’
(The morning light falls on the Rosicrucian panel-picture called ‘The Rosy Scar,’ depicting Christian galley-slaves on board an Algerine galley, watching, on Christmas Eve, for the promised appearance of Rosenkreutz, as a ‘rosy phantom.’ The Lover reads aloud the descriptive verses on the frame.)
While Night’s dark horses waited for the wind,He stood—he shone—where Sunset’s fiery glaivesFlickered behind the clouds; then, o’er the waves,He came to them, Faith’s remnant sorrow-thinned.The Paynim sailors clustering, tawny-skinned,Cried, ‘Who is he that comes to Christian slaves?Nor water-sprite nor jinni of sunset caves,The rosy phantom stands nor winged nor finned.’
All night he stood till shone the Christmas star;Slowly the Rosy Cross, streak after streak,Flushed the grey sky—flushed sea and sail and spar,Flushed, blessing every slave’s woe-wasted cheek.Then did great Rosenkreutz, the Dew-King speak:‘Sufferers, take heart! Christ lends the Rosy Scar.’
Itwas not until 1872 that Mr. Watts-Dunton was introduced to Borrow by Dr. Gordon Hake, Borrow’s most intimate friend.
The way in which this meeting came about has been familiar to the readers of an autobiographical romance (not even yet published!) wherein Borrow appears under the name of Dereham, and Hake under the name of Gordon. But as some of these passages in a modified form have appeared in print in an introduction by Mr. Watts-Dunton to the edition of Borrow’s ‘Lavengro,’ published by Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co., in 1893, there will be nothing incongruous in my quoting them here:—
“Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon grew up an intimacy between us. It has been my experience to learn that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference of age between friends of either sex. At that time I do not think I had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men, each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father. Basevi was one of these: so was Lineham. I daresay it was owing to some idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young fellows with whom I was brought intocontact was mainly confined to matters connected with field-sports. I found it far easier to be brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age than with men. But as Basevi told me that it was the same with himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all. When Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same with himself.One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common, evidently bound for the house.‘Dereham!’ I said. ‘Is there a man in the world I should so like to see as Dereham?’And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.‘Why do you want so much to see him?’ asked Gordon.‘Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the Open Air.’Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant. But it is necessary here to explain what that meaning was.We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels, ‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was—perhaps rarer. It was, we believed, quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows howlittle it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it. In human souls—in one, perhaps, as much as in another—there is always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘Natura Benigna’ herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English savants, and Emily Brontë among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the ‘Children of the Open Air.’ But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Brontë, the sensitivity to human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love passion—disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were undoubtedly endowed. I was perfectly conscious that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers—that is, I was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child of the Open Air.Between the true ‘Children of the Open Air’ and their fellows there are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other barriers quite indefinable, whichthey find most difficult to overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what this kind of Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close, soul to soul—but another ego enisled like his own—sensitive, shrinking, like his own—a soul which, love him as it may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations. But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love, ‘a most equal love’ that varies no more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious life.To the ‘Child of the Open Air’ life has but few ills; poverty cannot touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky, the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature seems ‘to know him and love him’ in her turn.Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced.He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in thevery tone of his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still. My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully. I knew from his books that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its ignorance. Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be ‘prying,’ though there I should have been quite at home. I knew, however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Dereham evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I touched upon beer, the British bruiser, ‘gentility nonsense,’ and other ‘nonsense’; then upon etymology—traced hoity-toityism to ‘toit,’ a roof—but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a withering smile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seasideinn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim, having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’ walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to sea, where he had been in service ever since. I introduced the subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold’s play upon it, and at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.We all went out of the house and looked over the common. It chanced that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the sunken road opposite to Gordon’s house. These same gypsies, by the by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared in the ‘Graphic.’ Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but basket-makers. After passing this group we went on the common. We did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham’s suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the ‘Bald-Faced Stag’ in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw’s sword, which was one of the specialglories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I remember—a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Dereham’s special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away. Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in connection with the rainbow—how, by making a ‘trus’hul’ (cross) of two sticks, the Romany chi who ‘pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of the sky,’ etc. Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the ‘Spirit of the Rainbow’ which I, as a child, went out to find.Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with every dappledcoat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true ‘Child of the Open Air.’‘Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?’ I murmured to Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said in a dreamy way, ‘Old England! Old England!’It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham’s arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the trees, ‘Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?’ And then, calling to mind the books he had written, I said: ‘He went into the Dingle, and lived alone—went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as Emily Brontë would certainly have been had she been placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë placed Shirley.’‘But the most damning thing of all,’ said Gordon, ‘is that umbrella, gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.’‘Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,’ said I. ‘So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never. No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story finds himself able to realize from Dereham’s descriptionthe misery of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with starvation staring him in the face. It is not passion,’ I said to Gordon, ‘that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the Nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.’‘Ambition and the green gamp,’ said Gordon. ‘But look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries; and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light.’But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind which the ‘Child of the Open Air’ must needs lack.Knowing Dereham’s extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why Dereham should at once take to me—reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon Dereham’s character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably had their nests. By the expressionon Dereham’s face as he stood and gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.‘Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was drained?’ I said.‘I should think so,’ said he dreamily, ‘and every kind of water bird.’Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, ‘But how do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?’‘You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.’‘I don’t mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,’ he said.‘No,’ said I, ‘but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.’‘Then you know Whittlesea Mere?’ said Dereham, much interested.‘I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,’ I said, ‘and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized. He was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.’I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him Marcianus’s story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper’s bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper—as he, Dereham, when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.‘The gypsies,’ said Dereham, ‘always believed meto be a Romany. But surely you are not a Romany Rye?’‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?’‘I should think not,’ said Dereham indignantly.‘But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.’‘Gordon is my only link to that dark world,’ I said, ‘and even you don’t object to Gordon. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of printers’ ink.’He laughed. ‘Who are you?’‘The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in short frocks,’ I said, ‘and have never yet found an answer. But Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such troublesome query.’This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man’s personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.‘You are an Englishman?’ said Dereham.‘Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,’ I said, using a phrase of his own in one of his books—‘if not a thorough East Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.’‘Nearly,’ said Dereham.And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine ‘Shales mare,’ a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a dogcart—an East Anglian dogcart; when I praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was ‘the glassy Ouse’ of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment we became friends.Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.‘It is on sand alone,’ said Dereham, ‘that the sea strikes its true music—Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.’‘The best of the sea’s lutes,’ I said, ‘is made by the sands of Cromer.’”
“Great as was the difference in age between Gordon and me, there soon grew up an intimacy between us. It has been my experience to learn that an enormous deal of nonsense has been written about difference of age between friends of either sex. At that time I do not think I had one intimate friend of my own age except Rosamond, while I was on terms of something like intimacy with two or three distinguished men, each one of whom was certainly old enough to be my father. Basevi was one of these: so was Lineham. I daresay it was owing to some idiosyncrasy of mine, but the intimacy between me and the young fellows with whom I was brought intocontact was mainly confined to matters connected with field-sports. I found it far easier to be brought into relations of close intimacy with women of my own age than with men. But as Basevi told me that it was the same with himself, I suppose that this was not an eccentricity after all. When Gordon and I were together it never occurred to me that there was any difference in our ages at all, and he told me that it was the same with himself.
One day when I was sitting with him in his delightful house near Roehampton, whose windows at the back looked over Richmond Park, and in front over the wildest part of Wimbledon Common, one of his sons came in and said that he had seen Dereham striding across the common, evidently bound for the house.
‘Dereham!’ I said. ‘Is there a man in the world I should so like to see as Dereham?’
And then I told Gordon how I had seen him years before swimming in the sea off Yarmouth, but had never spoken to him.
‘Why do you want so much to see him?’ asked Gordon.
‘Well, among other things I want to see if he is a true Child of the Open Air.’
Gordon laughed, perfectly understanding what I meant. But it is necessary here to explain what that meaning was.
We both agreed that, with all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of watercolour landscape, descriptive novels, ‘Cook’s excursions,’ etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was—perhaps rarer. It was, we believed, quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows howlittle it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it. In human souls—in one, perhaps, as much as in another—there is always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the blessing, not the bane that, owing to some exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to ‘Natura Benigna’ herself, closer to her whom we now call ‘Inanimate Nature,’ than to brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English savants, and Emily Brontë among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the ‘Children of the Open Air.’ But in regard to Darwin, besides the strength of his family ties, the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodizing pedantry of the man of science; in Emily Brontë, the sensitivity to human contact; and in Sinn Lovell, subjection to the love passion—disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were undoubtedly endowed. I was perfectly conscious that I belonged to the third case of Nature-worshippers—that is, I was one of those who, howsoever strongly drawn to Nature and to a free and unconventional life, felt the strength of the love passion to such a degree that it prevented my claiming to be a genuine Child of the Open Air.
Between the true ‘Children of the Open Air’ and their fellows there are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other barriers quite indefinable, whichthey find most difficult to overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what this kind of Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close, soul to soul—but another ego enisled like his own—sensitive, shrinking, like his own—a soul which, love him as it may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations. But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love, ‘a most equal love’ that varies no more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter’s sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious life.
To the ‘Child of the Open Air’ life has but few ills; poverty cannot touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his bonds, and he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky, the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love of Nature grows, both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature seems ‘to know him and love him’ in her turn.
Dereham entered, and, suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced.
He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in thevery tone of his voice that drew my heart to him, for to me he was the hero of my boyhood still. My own shyness was being rapidly fingered off by the rough handling of the world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it was; yet I attacked it manfully. I knew from his books that Dereham had read but little except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then, unfortunately, like all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions lay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appeared to Dereham as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its ignorance. Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his own published books, or of gypsies, appeared to him to be ‘prying,’ though there I should have been quite at home. I knew, however, from his books that in the obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording the sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventures, Dereham was very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that direction. I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Dereham evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then I touched upon beer, the British bruiser, ‘gentility nonsense,’ and other ‘nonsense’; then upon etymology—traced hoity-toityism to ‘toit,’ a roof—but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a withering smile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth century pamphlet narrating the story of Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seasideinn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’s supposed victim, having been seized on the night in question with a violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few minutes’ walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and bore him off to sea, where he had been in service ever since. I introduced the subject of Ambrose Gwinett, and Douglas Jerrold’s play upon it, and at once the ice between us thawed and we became friends.
We all went out of the house and looked over the common. It chanced that at that very moment there were a few gypsies encamped on the sunken road opposite to Gordon’s house. These same gypsies, by the by, form the subject of a charming sketch by Herkomer which appeared in the ‘Graphic.’ Borrow took the trouble to assure us that they were not of the better class of gypsies, the gryengroes, but basket-makers. After passing this group we went on the common. We did not at first talk much, but it delighted me to see the mighty figure, strengthened by the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he crushed them, now stopping to watch the water wagtails by the ponds.
After the stroll we turned back and went, at Dereham’s suggestion, for a ramble through Richmond Park, calling on the way at the ‘Bald-Faced Stag’ in Kingston Vale, in order that Dereham should introduce me to Jerry Abershaw’s sword, which was one of the specialglories of that once famous hostelry. A divine summer day it was I remember—a day whose heat would have been oppressive had it not been tempered every now and then by a playful silvery shower falling from an occasional wandering cloud, whose slate-coloured body thinned at the edges to a fringe of lace brighter than any silver.
These showers, however, seemed, as Dereham remarked, merely to give a rich colour to the sunshine, and to make the wild flowers in the meadows on the left breathe more freely. In a word, it was one of those uncertain summer days whose peculiarly English charm was Dereham’s special delight. He liked rain, but he liked it falling on the green umbrella (enormous, shaggy, like a gypsy-tent after a summer storm) he generally carried. As we entered the Robin Hood Gate we were confronted by a sudden weird yellow radiance, magical and mysterious, which showed clearly enough that in the sky behind us there was gleaming over the fields and over Wimbledon Common a rainbow of exceptional brilliance, while the raindrops sparkling on the ferns seemed answering every hue in the magic arch far away. Dereham told us some interesting stories of Romany superstition in connection with the rainbow—how, by making a ‘trus’hul’ (cross) of two sticks, the Romany chi who ‘pens the dukkerin can wipe the rainbow out of the sky,’ etc. Whereupon Gordon, quite as original a man as Dereham, and a humourist of a rarer temper, launched out into a strain of wit and whim, which it is not my business here to record, upon the subject of the ‘Spirit of the Rainbow’ which I, as a child, went out to find.
Dereham loved Richmond Park, and he seemed to know every tree. I found also that he was extremely learned in deer, and seemed familiar with every dappledcoat which, washed and burnished by the showers, seemed to shine in the sun like metal. Of course, I observed him closely, and I began to wonder whether I had encountered, in the silvery-haired giant striding by my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true ‘Child of the Open Air.’
‘Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?’ I murmured to Gordon, while Dereham lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said in a dreamy way, ‘Old England! Old England!’
It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Dereham’s arm, that made me ask Gordon, as Dereham walked along beneath the trees, ‘Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air?’ And then, calling to mind the books he had written, I said: ‘He went into the Dingle, and lived alone—went there, not as an experiment in self-education, as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the ‘horrors’ to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the Nature-worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as Emily Brontë would certainly have been had she been placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Brontë placed Shirley.’
‘But the most damning thing of all,’ said Gordon, ‘is that umbrella, gigantic and green: a painful thought that has often occurred to me.’
‘Passion has certainly never disturbed his nature-worship,’ said I. ‘So devoid of passion is he that to depict a tragic situation is quite beyond his powers. Picturesque he always is, powerful never. No one reading an account of the privations of the hero of this story finds himself able to realize from Dereham’s descriptionthe misery of a young man tenderly reared, and with all the pride of an East Anglian gentleman, living on bread and water in a garret, with starvation staring him in the face. It is not passion,’ I said to Gordon, ‘that prevents Dereham from enjoying the peace of the Nature-worshipper. It is Ambition! His books show that he could never cleanse his stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff of ambition. To become renowned, judging from many a peroration in his books, was as great an incentive to Dereham to learn languages as to Alexander Smith’s poet-hero it was an incentive to write poetry.’
‘Ambition and the green gamp,’ said Gordon. ‘But look, the rainbow is fading from the sky without the intervention of gypsy sorceries; and see how the ferns are changing colour with the change in the light.’
But I soon found that if Dereham was not a perfect Child of the Open Air, he was something better: a man of that deep sympathy with human kind which the ‘Child of the Open Air’ must needs lack.
Knowing Dereham’s extraordinary shyness and his great dislike of meeting strangers, Gordon, while Dereham was trying to get as close to the deer as they would allow, expressed to me his surprise at the terms of cordial friendship that sprang up between us during that walk. But I was not surprised: there were several reasons why Dereham should at once take to me—reasons that had nothing whatever to do with any inherent attractiveness of my own.
By recalling what occurred I can throw a more brilliant light upon Dereham’s character than by any kind of analytical disquisition.
Two herons rose from the Ponds and flew away to where they probably had their nests. By the expressionon Dereham’s face as he stood and gazed at them, I knew that, like myself, he had a passion for herons.
‘Were there many herons around Whittlesea Mere before it was drained?’ I said.
‘I should think so,’ said he dreamily, ‘and every kind of water bird.’
Then, suddenly turning round upon me with a start, he said, ‘But how do you know that I knew Whittlesea Mere?’
‘You say in one of your books that you played among the reeds of Whittlesea Mere when you were a child.’
‘I don’t mention Whittlesea Mere in any of my books,’ he said.
‘No,’ said I, ‘but you speak of a lake near the old State prison at Norman Cross, and that was Whittlesea Mere.’
‘Then you know Whittlesea Mere?’ said Dereham, much interested.
‘I know the place that was Whittlesea Mere before it was drained,’ I said, ‘and I know the vipers around Norman Cross, and I think I know the lane where you first met that gypsy you have immortalized. He was a generation before my time. Indeed, I never was thrown much across the Petulengroes in the Eastern Counties, but I knew some of the Hernes and the Lees and the Lovells.’
I then told him what I knew about Romanies and vipers, and also gave him Marcianus’s story about the Moors being invulnerable to the viper’s bite, and about their putting the true breed of a suspected child to the test by setting it to grasp a viper—as he, Dereham, when a child, grasped one of the vipers of Norman Cross.
‘The gypsies,’ said Dereham, ‘always believed meto be a Romany. But surely you are not a Romany Rye?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I am a student of folk-lore; and besides, as it has been my fortune to see every kind of life in England, high and low, I could not entirely neglect the Romanies, could I?’
‘I should think not,’ said Dereham indignantly.
‘But I hope you don’t know the literary class among the rest.’
‘Gordon is my only link to that dark world,’ I said, ‘and even you don’t object to Gordon. I am purer than he, purer than you, from the taint of printers’ ink.’
He laughed. ‘Who are you?’
‘The very question I have been asking myself ever since I was a child in short frocks,’ I said, ‘and have never yet found an answer. But Gordon agrees with me that no well-bred soul should embarrass itself with any such troublesome query.’
This gave a chance to Gordon, who in such local reminiscences as these had been able to take no part. The humorous mystery of Man’s personality had often been a subject of joke between him and me in many a ramble in the Park and elsewhere. At once he threw himself into a strain of whimsical philosophy which partly amused and partly vexed Dereham, who stood waiting to return to the subject of the gypsies and East Anglia.
‘You are an Englishman?’ said Dereham.
‘Not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman,’ I said, using a phrase of his own in one of his books—‘if not a thorough East Anglian, an East Midlander; who, you will admit, is nearly as good.’
‘Nearly,’ said Dereham.
And when I went on to tell him that I once used to drive a genuine ‘Shales mare,’ a descendant of that same famous Norfolk trotter who could trot fabulous miles an hour, to whom he with the Norfolk farmers raised his hat in reverence at the Norwich horse fair; and when I promised to show him a portrait of this same East Anglian mare with myself behind her in a dogcart—an East Anglian dogcart; when I praised the stinging saltness of the sea water off Yarmouth, Lowestoft, and Cromer, the quality which makes it the best, the most buoyant, the most delightful of all sea-water to swim in; when I told him that the only English river in which you could see reflected the rainbow he loved was ‘the glassy Ouse’ of East Anglia, and the only place in England where you could see it reflected in the wet sand was the Norfolk coast; and when I told him a good many things showing that I was in very truth, not only an Englishman, but an East Englishman, my conquest of Dereham was complete, and from that moment we became friends.
Gordon meanwhile stood listening to the rooks in the distance. He turned and asked Dereham whether he had never noticed a similarity between the kind of muffled rattling roar made by the sea waves upon a distant pebbly beach and the sound of a large rookery in the distance.
‘It is on sand alone,’ said Dereham, ‘that the sea strikes its true music—Norfolk sand; a rattle is not music.’
‘The best of the sea’s lutes,’ I said, ‘is made by the sands of Cromer.’”
These famous walks with Borrow (or Dereham, as he is called in the above quotation) in Richmond Park andthe neighbourhood, have been thus described by the ‘Gordon’ of the story in one of the sonnets in ‘The New Day’:—
And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!How often ’mid the deer that grazed the park,Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,Made musical with many a soaring lark,Have we not held brisk commune with him there,While Lavengro, there towering by your side,With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,Would stop amid his swift and lounging strideTo tell the legends of the fading race—As at the summons of his piercing glance,Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,While you called up that pendant of romanceTo Petulengro with his boxing glory,Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!
And he the walking lord of gipsy lore!How often ’mid the deer that grazed the park,Or in the fields and heath and windy moor,Made musical with many a soaring lark,Have we not held brisk commune with him there,While Lavengro, there towering by your side,With rose complexion and bright silvery hair,Would stop amid his swift and lounging strideTo tell the legends of the fading race—As at the summons of his piercing glance,Its story peopling his brown eyes and face,While you called up that pendant of romanceTo Petulengro with his boxing glory,Your Amazonian Sinfi’s noble story!
In the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and in Chambers’ ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ and scattered through scores of articles in the ‘Athenæum,’ I find descriptions of Borrow and allusions to him without number. They afford absolutely the only portrait of that wonderful man that exists or is ever likely to exist. But, of course, it is quite impossible for me to fill my pages with Borrow when there are so many more important figures waiting to be introduced. Still, I must find room for the most brilliant little Borrow scene of all, for it will flush these pages with a colour which I feel they need. Mr. Watts-Dunton has been described as the most picturesque of all living writers, whether in verse or in prose, and it is not for me to gainsay that judgment; but never, I think, is he so picturesque as when he is writing about Borrow.
I am not quite clear as to where the following picture ofgypsy life is to be localized; but the scenery seems to be that of the part of England where East Anglia and the Midlands join. It adds interest to the incident to know that the beautiful gypsy girl was the prototype of Rhona Boswell, and that Dereham is George Borrow. This also is a chapter from the unpublished story before mentioned, which was afterwards modified to be used in an introductory essay to another of Borrow’s books:—
“It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with what Dereham called ‘gypsy gold,’ and the bright green of the foliage showed scarcely a touch of bronze—at that very moment, indeed, when the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy, and pimpernel. Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man could give. He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days. In conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume of Matthew Arnold in which appears ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’ Dereham said he well remembered my directing his attention to ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’ After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever the merits of Matthew Arnold’s poem might be, from any supposed artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or even understand its motive in the least degree. I challenged this, contending that howsoever Arnold’s classic language might soar above a gypsy’sintelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the most illiterate person could grasp it.‘I wish,’ said Dereham, ‘you would come with me to the camp and try the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp. As to gypsy men,’ said he, ‘they are too prosaic to furnish a fair test.’We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense, and many other pet subjects of his. I already knew that he was no lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the ‘trumpery great,’ although in other regards he was such a John Bull. By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition. As we were walking along, Dereham’s eyes, which were as longsighted as a gypsy’s, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush some distance off. He stopped and said: ‘At first I thought that white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it’s a magpie,’—next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies’ most famous bird. On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the leaves. As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: ‘It is wounded—or else dying—or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?’ ‘Hawk!’ said Dereham 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 fancied he has himself been ‘chivvied’ by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.’And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that speckled 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, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to swoop atand devour it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident, for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk. Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as a protecting friend.As we were gazing at the bird a woman’s voice at our elbows said,—‘It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie. I shall stop here till the hawk’s flew away.’We turned round, and there stood a fine young 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 gypsy girl. She was beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not of the typical Romany kind. It was, as I afterwards learned, 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 dragonflies, of the crimson kind called ‘sylphs.’To Dereham these gypsies were evidently well known. The woman with the child was one of the Boswells; I dare not say what was her connection, if any, with ‘Boswell the Great’—I mean Sylvester Boswell, the grammarian and ‘well-known and popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,’ who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others, ‘on the accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life.’Dereham told me in a whisper that her name was Perpinia, and that the other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, was the famous beauty of the neighbourhood—Rhona Boswell, of whom many stories had reached him with regard to Percy Aylwin, a relative of Rosamond’s father.After greeting the two, Dereham looked at the weakling child with the deepest interest, and said to the mother: ‘This chavo ought not to look like that—with such a mother as you, Perpinia.’ ‘And with such a daddy, too,’ said she. ‘Mike’s stronger for a man nor even I am for a woman’—a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; ‘and as to good looks, it’s him as has got the good looks, not me. But none on us can’t make it out about the chavo. He’s so weak and sick he don’t look as if he belonged to Boswell’s breed at all.’‘How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?’ said I, looking at the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia’s finely cut lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.‘Can’t say,’ said she, laughing.‘About as many as she can afford to buy,’ interrupted ‘the beauty of the Ouse,’ as Rhona Boswell was called. ‘That’s all. Mike don’t like her a-smokin’. He says it makes her look like a old Londra Irish woman in Common Garding Market.’‘You must not smoke another pipe,’ said I 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-living without her baccy!’ laughed Rhona.‘Your child can’t live with it,’ said I to Perpinia. ‘That pipe of yours is full of a poison called nicotine.’‘Nick what?’ said Rhona, laughing. ‘That’s a new kind of nick. Why, you smoke yourself!’‘Nicotine,’ said I. ‘And the first part of Pep’s body that the poison gets into is her breast, and—’‘Gets into my burk,’[112]said Perpinia. ‘Get along wi’ ye.’‘Yes.’‘Do it pison Pep’s milk?’ said Rhona.‘Yes.’‘That ain’t true,’ said Perpinia—‘can’t be true.’‘It is true,’ said I. ‘If you don’t give up that pipe for a time, the child will die, or else be a ricketty thing all his life. If you do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a gypsy as ever your husband can be.’‘Chavo agin pipe, Pep!’ said Rhona.‘Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,’ said Dereham, 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.’‘He be’s a good friend to the Romanies,’ said Rhona, 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 soon began to smile again, however, and let Dereham retain the pipe. Dereham and I then moved away towards the dusty high-road leading to the camp, and were joined by Rhona. Perpinia remained, keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking child.It was determined now that Rhona was the veryperson to be used as the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold’s poem, for she was exceptionally intelligent. So instead of going to the camp, the oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse, and heather towards ‘Kingfisher brook,’ and when we reached it we sat down on a fallen tree.Nothing, as afterwards I came to know, delights a gypsy girl so much, in whatever country she may be born, as to listen to a story either told or read to her, and when I pulled my book from my pocket the gypsy girl began to clap her hands. Her anticipation of enjoyment sent over her face a warm glow.Her complexion, though darker than an English girl’s, was rather lighter than an ordinary gypsy’s. Her eyes were of an indescribable hue; but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for me, 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 peculiar 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.Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and cried, ‘Look at the Devil’s needles! They’re come to sew my eyes up for killing their brothers.’And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of sky blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like a rainbow gauze, caught the sun as heswept dazzling by, did really seem to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by the lights shed from the girl’s eyes.‘I dussn’t set here,’ said she. ‘Us Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly Brook.’ And that’s the king o’ the dragon-flies: he lives here.’As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of about a dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some bronze, some green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if they meant to justify their Romany name and sew up the girl’s eyes.‘The Romanies call them the Devil’s needles,’ said Dereham; ‘their business is to sew up pretty girls’ eyes.’In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a while sat down again to listen to the ‘lil,’ as she called the story.
“It was in the late summer, just before the trees were clothed with what Dereham called ‘gypsy gold,’ and the bright green of the foliage showed scarcely a touch of bronze—at that very moment, indeed, when the spirits of all the wild flowers that have left the commons and the hedgerows seem to come back for an hour and mingle their half-forgotten perfumes with the new breath of calamint, ground ivy, and pimpernel. Dereham gave me as hearty a greeting as so shy a man could give. He told me that he was bound for a certain camp of gryengroes, old friends of his in his wandering days. In conversation I reminded him of our previous talk, and I told him I chanced at that very moment to have in my pocket a copy of the volume of Matthew Arnold in which appears ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’ Dereham said he well remembered my directing his attention to ‘The Scholar-Gypsy.’ After listening attentively to it, Dereham declared that there was scarcely any latter-day poetry worth reading, and also that, whatever the merits of Matthew Arnold’s poem might be, from any supposed artistic point of view, it showed that Arnold had no conception of the Romany temper, and that no gypsy could sympathise with it, or even understand its motive in the least degree. I challenged this, contending that howsoever Arnold’s classic language might soar above a gypsy’sintelligence, the motive was so clearly developed that the most illiterate person could grasp it.
‘I wish,’ said Dereham, ‘you would come with me to the camp and try the poem upon the first intelligent gypsy woman we meet at the camp. As to gypsy men,’ said he, ‘they are too prosaic to furnish a fair test.’
We agreed, and as we were walking across the country Dereham became very communicative, and talked very volubly upon gentility-nonsense, and many other pet subjects of his. I already knew that he was no lover of the aristocracy of England, or, as he called them, the ‘trumpery great,’ although in other regards he was such a John Bull. By this time we had proceeded a good way on our little expedition. As we were walking along, Dereham’s eyes, which were as longsighted as a gypsy’s, perceived a white speck in a twisted old hawthorn-bush some distance off. He stopped and said: ‘At first I thought that white speck in the bush was a piece of paper, but it’s a magpie,’—next to the water-wagtail, the gypsies’ most famous bird. On going up to the bush we discovered a magpie couched among the leaves. As it did not stir at our approach, I said to him: ‘It is wounded—or else dying—or is it a tamed bird escaped from a cage?’ ‘Hawk!’ said Dereham 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 fancied he has himself been ‘chivvied’ by the hawk, as the gypsies would say.’
And there, sure enough, beneath one of the silver clouds that speckled 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, trying its best to get above a poor little lark in order to swoop atand devour it. That the magpie had seen the hawk and had been a witness of the opening of the tragedy of the lark was evident, for in its dread of the common foe of all well-intentioned and honest birds, it had forgotten its fear of all creatures except the hawk. Man, in such a crisis as this, it looked upon as a protecting friend.
As we were gazing at the bird a woman’s voice at our elbows said,—
‘It’s lucky to chivvy the hawk what chivvies a magpie. I shall stop here till the hawk’s flew away.’
We turned round, and there stood a fine young 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 gypsy girl. She was beautiful—quite remarkably so—but her beauty was not of the typical Romany kind. It was, as I afterwards learned, 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 dragonflies, of the crimson kind called ‘sylphs.’
To Dereham these gypsies were evidently well known. The woman with the child was one of the Boswells; I dare not say what was her connection, if any, with ‘Boswell the Great’—I mean Sylvester Boswell, the grammarian and ‘well-known and popalated gypsy of Codling Gap,’ who, on a memorable occasion, wrote so eloquently about the superiority of the gypsy mode of life to all others, ‘on the accont of health, sweetness of air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life.’
Dereham told me in a whisper that her name was Perpinia, and that the other gypsy, the girl of the dragon-flies, was the famous beauty of the neighbourhood—Rhona Boswell, of whom many stories had reached him with regard to Percy Aylwin, a relative of Rosamond’s father.
After greeting the two, Dereham looked at the weakling child with the deepest interest, and said to the mother: ‘This chavo ought not to look like that—with such a mother as you, Perpinia.’ ‘And with such a daddy, too,’ said she. ‘Mike’s stronger for a man nor even I am for a woman’—a glow of wifely pride passing over her face; ‘and as to good looks, it’s him as has got the good looks, not me. But none on us can’t make it out about the chavo. He’s so weak and sick he don’t look as if he belonged to Boswell’s breed at all.’
‘How many pipes of tobacco do you smoke in a day?’ said I, looking at the great black cutty pipe protruding from Perpinia’s finely cut lips, and seeming strangely out of place there.
‘Can’t say,’ said she, laughing.
‘About as many as she can afford to buy,’ interrupted ‘the beauty of the Ouse,’ as Rhona Boswell was called. ‘That’s all. Mike don’t like her a-smokin’. He says it makes her look like a old Londra Irish woman in Common Garding Market.’
‘You must not smoke another pipe,’ said I 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-living without her baccy!’ laughed Rhona.
‘Your child can’t live with it,’ said I to Perpinia. ‘That pipe of yours is full of a poison called nicotine.’
‘Nick what?’ said Rhona, laughing. ‘That’s a new kind of nick. Why, you smoke yourself!’
‘Nicotine,’ said I. ‘And the first part of Pep’s body that the poison gets into is her breast, and—’
‘Gets into my burk,’[112]said Perpinia. ‘Get along wi’ ye.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do it pison Pep’s milk?’ said Rhona.
‘Yes.’
‘That ain’t true,’ said Perpinia—‘can’t be true.’
‘It is true,’ said I. ‘If you don’t give up that pipe for a time, the child will die, or else be a ricketty thing all his life. If you do give it up, it will grow up to be as fine a gypsy as ever your husband can be.’
‘Chavo agin pipe, Pep!’ said Rhona.
‘Lend me your pipe, Perpinia,’ said Dereham, 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.’
‘He be’s a good friend to the Romanies,’ said Rhona, 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 soon began to smile again, however, and let Dereham retain the pipe. Dereham and I then moved away towards the dusty high-road leading to the camp, and were joined by Rhona. Perpinia remained, keeping guard over the magpie that was to bring luck to the sinking child.
It was determined now that Rhona was the veryperson to be used as the test-critic of the Romany mind upon Arnold’s poem, for she was exceptionally intelligent. So instead of going to the camp, the oddly assorted little party of three struck across the ferns, gorse, and heather towards ‘Kingfisher brook,’ and when we reached it we sat down on a fallen tree.
Nothing, as afterwards I came to know, delights a gypsy girl so much, in whatever country she may be born, as to listen to a story either told or read to her, and when I pulled my book from my pocket the gypsy girl began to clap her hands. Her anticipation of enjoyment sent over her face a warm glow.
Her complexion, though darker than an English girl’s, was rather lighter than an ordinary gypsy’s. Her eyes were of an indescribable hue; but an artist who has since then painted her portrait for me, 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 peculiar 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.
Before three lines of the poem had been read she jumped up and cried, ‘Look at the Devil’s needles! They’re come to sew my eyes up for killing their brothers.’
And surely enough a gigantic dragon-fly, whose body-armour of sky blue and jet black, and great lace-woven wings, shining like a rainbow gauze, caught the sun as heswept dazzling by, did really seem to be attracted either by the wings of his dead brothers or by the lights shed from the girl’s eyes.
‘I dussn’t set here,’ said she. ‘Us Romanies call this ‘Dragon-fly Brook.’ And that’s the king o’ the dragon-flies: he lives here.’
As she rose she seemed to be surrounded by dragon-flies of about a dozen different species of all sizes, some crimson, some bronze, some green and gold, whirling and dancing round her as if they meant to justify their Romany name and sew up the girl’s eyes.
‘The Romanies call them the Devil’s needles,’ said Dereham; ‘their business is to sew up pretty girls’ eyes.’
In a second, however, they all vanished, and the girl after a while sat down again to listen to the ‘lil,’ as she called the story.