Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. Douglas James
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,’ 11 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 very person 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 he swept 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.
Glanville’s prose story, upon which Arnold’s poem is based, was read first. In this Rhona was much interested. But when I went on to read to her Arnold’s poem, though her eyes flashed now and then at the lovely bits of description – for the country about Oxford is quite remarkably like the country in which she was born – she looked sadly bewildered, and then asked to have it all read again. After a second reading she said in a meditative way: ‘Can’t make out what the lil’s all about – seems all about nothink! Seems to me that the pretty sights what makes a Romany fit to jump out o’ her skin for joy makes this ’ere gorgio want to cry. What a rum lot gorgios is surely!’
And then she sprang up and ran off towards the camp
Bosom.