Part 33

As we sat, a gentleman came in below, wishing to have his fortune told. I remember to have read that the Pythoness of Delphian oracle prepared herself for dukkerin, or presaging, by taking a few drops of cherry-laurel water. (I have had it prescribed for my eyes as R aq. laur. cerasi. fiat lotio,--possibly to enable me to see into the future.) Perhaps it was the cherry-brandy beloved of British matrons and Brighton school-girls, taken at Mutton's. Mais revenons a nos moutons. The old mother had taken, not cherry-laurel water, nor even cherry-brandy, but joly good ale, and olde, which, far from fitting her to reveal the darksome lore of futurity, had rendered her loath to leave the festive board of the present. Wrathful was the sybil, furious as the Vala when waked by Odin, angry as Thor when he missed his hammer, to miss her merriment. "May the devil take the old dog for coming when we are eating, and when thou art here, my Britannia! Little good fortune will he hear this day. Evil shall be the best I'll promise him." Thus spake the sorceress, and out she went to keep her word. Truly it was a splendid picture this of "The Enraged Witch," as painted by Hexenmeister von Teufel, of Hollenstadt,--her viper eyes flashing infernal light and most unchristian fire, shaking les noirs serpents de ses cheveux, as she went forth. I know how, in an instant, her face was beautiful with welcome, smiling like a Neapolitan at a cent; but the poor believer caught it hot, all the same, and had a sleepless night over his future fate. I wonder if the Pythoness of old, when summoned from a petit souper, or a holy prophet called out of bed of a cold night, to decide by royal command on the fate of Israel, ever "took it out" on the untimely king by promising him a lively, unhappy time of it. Truly it is fine to be behind the scenes and see how they work the oracle. For the gentleman who came to consult my witch was a man of might in the secrets of state, and one whom I have met in high society. And, oh! if he had known who it was that was up-stairs, laughing at him for a fool!

While she was forth, A. asked me, "Do you tell fortunes, or what?" "My sister," I replied, "I'll tell thee the truth. I do tell fortunes. I keep a house for the purchase of stolen goods. I am largely engaged in making counterfeit money and all kinds of forgery. I am interested in burglary. I lie, swear, cheat, and steal, and get drunk on Sunday. And I do many other things. I am a real Romany witch." This little confession of faith brought down the house. "Bravo! bravo!" they cried, laughing.

Sister and I had brought a great tipsy-cake for the children, and they were all sitting under a table, eating it. It was a pretty picture. I thought I saw in it myself and all my sisters and brothers as we were once. Just such little gypsies and duckling Romanys! And now! And then! What a comedy some lives are,--yea, such lives as mine! And now it is you who are behind the scenes; anon, I shall change with you. Va Pierre, vient Pierette. Then I surprised a little brown maiden imp of five summers stealing my beer, and as she was caught in the act, and tore away shrieking with laughter, she looked, with her great black eyes and flowing jetty curling locks, like a perfect little Bacchante.

Then we said, "Thank you for the happy time!" "Good luck!" and "Good day!" giving our promises to come again. So we went home all well. I hope to see you at the races here. Good luck and good-night also to you.

Always your friend,

BRITANNIA LEE

I have somewhat abbreviated the Romany text of this letter, and Miss Lee herself has somewhat polished and enlarged the translation, which is strictly fit and proper, she being a very different person in English from what she is in gypsy, as are most of her kind. This letter may be, to many, a strange lesson, a quaint essay, a social problem, a fable, an epigram, or a frolic,--just as they choose to take it. To me it is a poem. Thou, my friend, canst easily understand why all that is wild and strange, out-of-doors, far away by night, is worthy of being Tennysoned or Whitmanned. If there be given unto thee stupendous blasted trees, looking in the moonlight like the pillars of a vast and ghostly temple; the fall of cataracts down awful rocks; the wind wailing in wondrous language or whistling Indian melody all night on heath, rocks, and hills, over ancient graves and through lonely caves, bearing with it the hoot of the night-owl; while over all the stars look down in eternal mystery, like eyes reading the great riddle of the night which thou knowest not,--this is to thee like Ariel's song. To me and to us there are men and women who are in life as the wild river and the night-owl, as the blasted tree and the wind over ancient graves. No man is educated until he has arrived at that state of thought when a picture is quite the same as a book, an old gray-beard jug as a manuscript, men, women, and children as libraries. It was but yester morn that I read a cuneiform inscription printed by doves' feet in the snow, finding a meaning where in by-gone years I should have seen only a quaint resemblance. For in this by the ornithomanteia known of old to the Chaldean sages I saw that it was neither from arrow-heads or wedges which gave the letters to the old Assyrians. When thou art at this point, then Nature is equal in all her types, and the city, as the forest, full of endless beauty and piquancy,--in saecula saeculorum.

I had written the foregoing, and had enveloped and directed it to be mailed, when I met in a lady-book entitled "Magyarland" with the following passages:--

"The gypsy girl in this family was a pretty young woman, with masses of raven hair and a clear skin, but, notwithstanding her neat dress and civilized surroundings, we recognized her immediately. It is, in truth, not until one sees the Romany translated to an entirely new form of existence, and under circumstances inconsistent with their ordinary lives, that one realizes how completely different they are from the rest of mankind in form and feature. Instead of disguising, the garb of civilization only enhances the type, and renders it the more apparent. No matter what dress they may assume, no matter what may be their calling, no matter whether they are dwellers in tents or houses, it is impossible for gypsies to disguise their origin. Taken from their customary surroundings, they become at once an anomaly and an anachronism, and present such an instance of the absurdity of attempting to invert the order of nature that we feel more than ever how utterly different they are from the human race; that there is a key to their strange life which we do not possess,--a secret free masonry that renders them more isolated than the veriest savages dwelling in the African wilds,--and a hidden mystery hanging over them and their origin that we shall never comprehend. They are indeed a people so entirely separate and distinct that, in whatever clime or quarter of the globe they may be met with, they are instantly recognized; for with them forty centuries of association with civilized races have not succeeded in obliterating one single sign."

* * * * *

"Alas!" cried the princess; "I can never, never find the door of the enchanted cavern, nor enter the golden cavern, nor solve its wonderful mystery. It has been closed for thousands of years, and it will remain closed forever."

"What flowers are those which thou holdest?" asked the hermit.

"Only primroses or Mary's-keys, {285} and tulips," replied the princess.

"Touch the rock with them," said the hermit, "and the door will open."

* * * * *

The lady writer of "Magyarland" held in her hand all the while, and knew it not, a beautiful primrose, which might have opened for her the mysterious Romany cavern. On a Danube steamboat she saw a little blind boy sitting all day all alone: only a little Slavonian peasant boy, "an odd, quaint little specimen of humanity, with loose brown garments, cut precisely like those of a grown-up man, and his bits of feet in little raw-hide moccasins." However, with a tender, gentle heart she began to pet the little waif. And the captain told her what the boy was. "He is a guslar, or minstrel, as they call them in Croatia. The Yougo-Slavs dedicate all male children who are born blind, from infancy, to the Muses. As soon as they are old enough to handle anything, a small mandolin is given them, which they are taught to play; after which they are taken every day into the woods, where they are left till evening to commune in their little hearts with nature. In due time they become poets, or at any rate rhapsodists, singing of the things they never saw, and when grown up are sent forth to earn their livelihood, like the troubadours of old, by singing from place to place, and asking alms by the wayside.

"It is not difficult for a Slav to become a poet; he takes in poetic sentiment as a river does water from its source. The first sounds he is conscious of are the words of his mother singing to him as she rocks his cradle. Then, as she watches the dawning of intelligence in his infant face, her mother language is that of poetry, which she improvises at the moment, and though he never saw the flowers nor the snow-capped mountains, nor the flowing streams and rivers, he describes them out of his inner consciousness, and the influence which the varied sounds of nature have upon his mind."

Rock and river and greenwood tree, sweet-spiced spring flower, rustling grass, and bird-singing nature and freedom,--this is the secret of the poets' song and of the Romany, and there is no other mystery in either. He who sleeps on graves rises mad or a poet; all who lie on the earth, which is the grave and cradle of nature, and who live al fresco, understand gypsies as well as my lady Britannia Lee. Nay, when some natures take to the Romany they become like the Norman knights of the Pale, who were more Paddyfied than the Paddies themselves. These become leaders among the gypsies, who recognize the fact that one renegade is more zealous than ten Turks. As for the "mystery" of the history of the gypsies, it is time, sweet friends, that 't were ended. When we know that there is to-day, in India, a sect and set of Vauriens, who are there considered Gipsissimae, and who call themselves, with their wives and language and being, Rom, Romni, and Romnipana, even as they do in England; and when we know, moreover, that their faces proclaim them to be Indian, and that they have been a wandering caste since the dawn of Hindu history, we have, I trow, little more to seek. As for the rest, you may read it in the great book of Out-of Doors, capitulo nullo folio nigro, or wherever you choose to open it, written as distinctly, plainly, and sweetly as the imprint of a school-boy's knife and fork on a mince-pie, or in the uprolled rapture of the eyes of Britannia when she inhaleth the perfume of a fresh bunch of Florentine violets. Ite missa est.

GYPSIES IN THE EAST.

Noon in Cairo.

A silent old court-yard, half sun and half shadow in which quaintly graceful, strangely curving columns seem to have taken from long companionship with trees something of their inner life, while the palms, their neighbors, from long in-door existence, look as if they had in turn acquired household or animal instincts, if not human sympathies. And as the younger the race the more it seeks for poets and orators to express in thought what it only feels, so these dumb pillars and plants found their poet and orator in the fountain which sang or spoke for them strangely and sweetly all night and day, uttering for them not only their waking thoughts, but their dreams. It gave a voice, too, to the ancient Persian tiles and the Cufic inscriptions which had seen the caliphs, and it told endless stories of Zobeide and Mesrour and Haroun al Raschid.

Beyond the door which, when opened, gave this sight was a dark ancient archway twenty yards long, which opened on the glaring, dusty street, where camels with their drivers and screaming sais, or carriage-runners and donkey-boys and crying venders, kept up the wonted Oriental din. But just within the archway, in its duskiest corner, there sat all day a living picture, a dark and handsome woman, apparently thirty years old, who was unveiled. She had before her a cloth and a few shells; sometimes an Egyptian of the lower class stopped, and there would be a grave consultation, and the shells would be thrown, and then further solemn conference and a payment of money and a departure. And it was world-old Egyptian, or Chaldean, as to custom, for the woman was a Rhagarin, or gypsy, and she was one of the diviners who sit by the wayside, casting shells for auspices, even as shells and arrows were cast of old, to be cursed by Israel.

It is not remarkable that among the myriad manteias of olden days there should have been one by shells. The sound of the sea as heard in the nautilus or conch, when

"It remembers its august abode And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there,"

is very strange to children, and I can remember how in childhood I listened with perfect faith to the distant roaring, and marveled at the mystery of the ocean song being thus forever kept alive, inland. Shells seem so much like work of human hands, and are often so marked as with letters, that it is not strange that faith soon found the supernatural in them. The magic shell of all others is the cowrie. Why the Roman ladies called it porcella, or little pig, because it has a pig's back, is the objective explanation of its name, and how from its gloss that name, or porcellana, was transferred to porcelain, is in books. But there is another side to the shell, and another or esoteric meaning to "piggy," which was also known to the dames du temps jadis, to Archipiada and Thais, qui fut la belle Romaine,--and this inner meaning makes of it a type of birth or creation. Now all that symbolizes fertility, birth, pleasure, warmth, light, and love is opposed to barrenness, cold, death, and evil; whence it follows that the very sight of a shell, and especially of a cowrie, frightens away the devils as well as a horse-shoe, which by the way has also its cryptic meaning. Hence it was selected to cast for luck, a world-old custom, which still lingers in the game of props; and for the same reason it is hung on donkeys, the devil being still scared away by the sight of a cowrie, even as he was scared away of old by its prototype, as told by Rabelais.

As the sibyls sat in caves, so the sorceress sat in the dark archway, immovable when not sought, mysterious as are all her kind, and something to wonder at. It was after passing her, and feeling by quick intuition what she was, that the court-yard became a fairy-land, and the fountain its poet, and the palm-trees Tamar maids. There are people who believe there is no mystery, that an analysis of the gypsy sorceress would have shown an ignorant outcast; but while nature gives chiaro-oscuro and beauty, and while God is the Unknown, I believe that the more light there is cast by science the more stupendous will be the new abysses of darkness revealed. These natures must be taken with the life in them, not dead,--and their life is mystery. The Hungarian gypsy lives in an intense mystery, yes, in true magic in his singing. You may say that he cannot, like Orpheus, move rocks or tame beasts with his music. If he could he could do no more than astonish and move us, and he does that now, and the why is as deep a mystery as that would be.

So far is it from being only a degrading superstition in those who believe that mortals like themselves can predict the future, that it seems, on the contrary ennobling. It is precisely because man feels a mystery within himself that he admits it may be higher in others; if spirits whisper to him in dreams and airy passages of trembling light, or in the music never heard but ever felt below, what may not be revealed to others? You may tell me if you will that prophecies are all rubbish and magic a lie, and it may be so,--nay, is so, but the awful mystery of the Unknown without a name and the yearning to penetrate it is, and is all the more, because I have found all prophecies and jugglings and thaumaturgy fail to bridge over the abyss. It is since I have read with love and faith the evolutionists and physiologists of the most advanced type that the Unknown has become to me most wonderful, and that I have seen the light which never shone on sea or land as I never saw it before. And therefore to me the gypsy and all the races who live in freedom and near to nature are more poetic than ever. For which reason, after the laws of acoustics have fully explained to me why the nautilus sounds like a far off-ocean dirge, the unutterable longing to know more seizes upon me,

"Till my heart is full of longing For the secret of the sea, And the heart of the great ocean Sends a thrilling pulse through me."