Aylwin Part 39

'What are you listening to?' I inquired at last. 'Reia,' said Sinfi, 'I've been a-listenin' to a v'ice as n.o.body can't hear on'y me, an'

I've bin a-seein' a face peepin' atween the leaves o' the trees as n.o.body can't see on'y me; my mammy's been to me. I thought she would come here. They say my mammy's mammy wur buried here, an' she wur the child of Fenella, an' that's why it's called Gypsy Ring. The moment I sat down in this Ring a mullo [spirit] come and whispered in my ear, but I can't make out whether it's my mammy or Fenella Stanley, and I can't make out what she said. It's hard sometimes for them as has to gnaw their way out o' the groun' to get their words out clear.

[Footnote] Howsomever, this I do know, reia, you an' me must part. I felt as we must part when we was in Wales togither last time, and now I knows it.'

[Footnote: Some Romanies think that spirits rise from the ground.]

'Part, Sinfi! Not if I can prevent it.'

'Reia,' replied Sinfi emphatically, 'when I've wonst made up my mind, you know it's made up for good an' all. When us two leaves this 'ere Ring to-night, you'll turn your ways and I shall turn mine.'

I thought it best to let the subject drop. Perhaps by the time we had left the Ring this mood would have pa.s.sed. After a minute or so she said,

'You needn't see no fear about not marryin' Winifred Wynne. You _must_ marry her; your dukkeripen on Snowdon didn't show itself there for nothink. When you two was a-settin' by the pool, a-eatin' the breakfiss, I was a-lookin' at you round the corner of the rock. I seed a little kindlin' cloud break away and go floatin' over your heads, and then it shaped itself into what us Romanies calls the Golden Hand. You know what the Golden Hand means when it comes over two sweethearts? You don't believe it? Ask Rhona Boswell! Here she comes a-singin' to herself. She's trying to get away from that devil of a Scollard as says she's bound to marry him. I've a good mind to go and give him a left-hand body-blow in the ribs and settle him for good and all. He means mischief to the Tarno Rye, and Rhona too.

Brother, I've noticed for a long while that the Romany blood is a good deal stronger in you than the Gorgio blood. And now mark my words, that cuss o' your feyther's'll work itself out. You'll go to his grave and you'll jist put that trushul back in that tomb, and arter that, and not afore, you'll marry Winnie Wynne.'

Sinfi's creed did not surprise me: the mixture of guile and simplicity in the Romany race is only understood by the few who know it thoroughly: the race whose profession it is to cheat by fortune-telling, to read the false 'dukkeripen' as being 'good enough for the Gorgios,' believe profoundly in nature's symbols; but her bearing did surprise me.

'Your dukkeripen will come true,' said she; 'but mine won't, for I won't let it.'

'And what is yours?' I asked.

'That's nuther here nor there.'

Then she stood again as though listening to something, and again I thought, as her lips moved, that I heard her whisper, 'I will, I will.'

III

I had intended to go to London at once after leaving Gypsy Dell, but something that Sinfi told me during our interview impelled me to go on to Raxton Hall, which was so near. The fact that Sinfi was my kinswoman opened up new and exciting vistas of thought.

I understood now what was that haunting sense of recognition which came upon me when I first saw Sinfi at the wayside inn in Wales. Day by day had proofs been pouring in upon me that the strain of Romany blood in my veins was a.s.serting itself with more and more force. Day by day I had come to realise how closely, though the main current of my blood was English, I was affined to the strange and mysterious people among whom I was now thrown--the only people in these islands, as it seemed to me, who would be able to understand a love-pa.s.sion like mine. And there were many things in the great race of my forefathers which I had found not only unsympathetic to me, but deeply repugnant. In Great Britain it is the Gypsies alone who understand nature's supreme charm, and enjoy her largesse as it used to be enjoyed in those remote times described in Percy Aylwin's poems before the Children of the Roof invaded the Children of the Open Air, before the earth was parcelled out into domains and owners.h.i.+ps as it now is parcelled out. In the mind of the Gorgio, the most beautiful landscape or the most breezy heath or the loveliest meadow-land is cut up into allotments, whether of fifty thousand acres or of two roods, and owned by people. Of owners.h.i.+p of land the Romany is entirely unconscious. The landscape around him is part of Nature herself, and the Romany on his part acknowledges no owner. No doubt he yields to _force majeure_ in the shape of gamekeeper or constable, but that is because he has no power to resist it. Nature to him is as free and unowned by man as it was to the North American Indian in his wigwam before the invasion of the Children of the Roof.

During the time that I was staying in Flints.h.i.+re and near Capel Curig, rambling through the dells or fis.h.i.+ng in the brooks, it was surprising how soon the companions.h.i.+p of a Gorgio would begin to pall upon me. And here the Cymric race is just as bad as the Saxon. The same detestable habit of looking upon nature as a paying market-garden, the same detestable inquiry as to who was the owner of this or that glen or waterfall, was sure at last to make me sever from him. But as to Sinfi, her att.i.tude towards nature, though it was only one of the charms that endeared her to me, was not the least of them. There was scarcely a point upon which she and I did not touch.

And what about her lack of education? Was that a drawback? Not in the least. The fact that she knew nothing of that traditional ignorance which for ages has taken the name of knowledge--that record of the foolish cosmogonies upon which have been built the philosophies and the social systems of the blundering creature Man--the fact that she knew nothing of these gave an especial piquancy to everything she said. I had been trying to educate myself in the new and wonderful cosmogony of growth which was first enunciated in the sixties, and was going to be, as I firmly believed, the basis of a new philosophy, a new system of ethics, a new poetry, a new everything. But in knowledge of nature as a sublime consciousness, in knowledge of the human heart, Sinfi was far more learned than I. And believing as I did that education will in the twentieth century consist of unlearning, of unlading the mind of the trash previously called knowledge, I could not help feeling that Sinfi was far more advanced, far more in harmony than I could hope to be With the new morning of Life of which we are just beginning to see the streaks of dawn.

'I must go and see Fenella's portrait,' I said, as I Walked briskly towards Raxton.

When I reached Raxton Hall I seemed to startle the butler and the servants, as though I had come from the other world.

I told the butler that I should sleep there that night, and then went at once to the picture gallery and stood before Reynolds' famous picture of Fenella Stanley as the Sibyl. The likeness to Sinfi was striking. How was it that it had not previously struck me more forcibly? The painter had evidently seized the moment when Fenella's eyes expressed that look of the seeress which Sinfi's eyes, on occasion, so powerfully expressed. I stood motionless before it while the rich, warm light of evening bathed it in a rosy radiance. And when the twilight shadows fell upon it, and when the moon again lit it up, I stood there still. The face seemed to pa.s.s into my very being, and Sinfi's voice kept singing in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'

I left the picture and went into the library: for I bethought me of that sheaf of Fenella's letters to my great-grandfather which he had kept so sacredly, and which had come to me as representative of the family. My previous slight inspection of them had shown me what a wonderful woman she was, how full of ideas the most original and the most wild. The moment a Gypsy-woman has been taught to write there comes upon her a pa.s.sion for letter-writing.

Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the illiterate locutions and the eccentric orthography of Fenella's letters and the subtle remarks and speculations upon the symbols of nature.--the dukkeripen of the woods, the streams, the stars, and the winds. But when I came to a.n.a.lyse the theories of man's place in nature expressed in the ignorant language of this Romany heathen, they seemed to me only another mode of expressing the mysticism of the religious enthusiast Wilderspin, the more learned and philosophic mysticism of my father, and the views of D'Arcy, the dreamy painter.

As I rode back to London, I said to myself, 'What change has come over me? What power has been gradually sapping my manhood? Why do I, who was so self-reliant, long now so pa.s.sionately for a friend to whom to unburthen my soul--one who could give me a sympathy as deep and true as that I got from Sinfi Lovell, and yet the sympathy of a mind unclouded by ignorant superst.i.tions?'

With the exception of D'Arcy, whose advice as to the disposal of the cross had proclaimed him to be as superst.i.tious as Sinfi herself, not a single friend had I in all London. Indeed, besides Lord Sleaford (a tall, burly man with the springy movement of a prize-tighter, with blue-grey eyes, thick, close-cropped hair, and a flaxen moustache, who had lately struck up a friends.h.i.+p with my mother) I had not even an acquaintance. Cyril Aylwin, whom I had not seen since we parted in Wales, was now on the Continent with Wilderspin. Strange as it may seem, I looked forward with eagerness to the return of this light-hearted jester. Cyril's sagacity and knowledge of the world had impressed me in Wales; but his cynical att.i.tude, whether genuine or a.s.sumed, towards subjects connected with deep pa.s.sion, had prevented my confiding in him. He must, I knew, have gathered from Sinfi, and from other sources, that I was mourning the loss of a Welsh girl in humble life; but during our very brief intercourse in Wales neither of us had mentioned the matter to the other. Now, however, in my present dire strait I longed to call in the aid of his penetrative mind.

VIII

ISIS AS HUMOURIST

I

On reaching London I resumed my wanderings through the London streets. Bitter as these wanderings were, my real misery now did not begin until I got to bed. Then began the terrible struggle of the soul that wrestles with its ancestral fleshly prison--that prison whose warders are the superst.i.tions of bygone ages. 'Have you not seen the curse literally fulfilled?' ancestral voices of the blood--voices Romany and Gorgio--seemed whispering in my ears. 'Have you not heard the voice of his daughter upon whose head the curse of your dead father has fallen a beggar in the street, while not all your love can succour her or reach her?'

And then my soul would cry out in its agony, 'Most true, Fenella Stanley--most true, Philip Aylwin; but before I will succ.u.mb to such a theory of the universe as yours, a theory which reason laughs at and which laughs at reason, I will die--die by this hand of mine: this flesh that imprisons me in a world of mocking delusion shall be destroyed, but first the symbol itself of your wicked, cruel old folly shall go.'

I would then leap from my bed, light a candle, unlock my cabinet, take out the cross, and holding it aloft prepare to dash it against the wall, when my hand would be arrested by the same ancestral voices, Romany and Gorgio, whispering in my ears and at my heart,

'If you break that amulet, how shall you ever be able to see what would be the effect upon Winnie's fate of its restoration to your father's tomb?'

And then I would laugh aloud and mock the voices of Fenella Stanley and Philip Aylwin and millions of other voices that echoed or murmured or bellowed through half a million years, echoed or murmured or bellowed from European halls and castles, from Gypsy tents, from caves of palaeolithic man.

'How shall you stay the curse from working in the blood of the accursed one?' the voices would say. And then I would laugh again till I feared the people in the hotel would hear me and take me for a maniac.

But then my aunt's picture of a beggar-girl standing in the rain would fill my eyes and the whispers would grow louder than the voice of the North Sea in the March wind: 'Look at _that_. How dare you leave undone anything, howsoever wild, which might seem to any one--even to an illiterate Gypsy, even to a crazy mystic--a means of finding Winifred? What is the meaning of the great instinct which has always conquered the soul in its direst need--which has always driven man when in the grip of unbearable calamity to believe in powers that are unseen? What though that scientific reason of yours tells you that Winifred's misfortunes have nothing to do with any curse? what though your reason tells you that all these calamities may be read as being the perfectly natural results of perfectly natural causes? Is the voice of man's puny reason clothed with such authority that it dares to answer his heart, which knows nothing but that it bleeds?

The terrible facts of the case may be read in two ways. With an inscrutable symmetry these facts may and do fit in with the universal theory of the power of the spirit-world to execute a curse from the grave. Look at that beggar in the street! How dare you ignore the theory of the sorrowing soul, the logic of the lacerated heart, even though your reason laughs it to scorn?'

And then at last my laughter would turn to moans, and, replacing the cross in the cabinet, I would creep hack to my bed ashamed, like a guilty thing--ashamed before myself.

But the more I felt at my throat the claws of the ancestral ogre Superst.i.tion, the more enraged I became with myself for feeling them there. And the auger against my ancestors' mysticism grew with the growing consciousness that I was rapidly yielding to the very same mysticism myself. And then I would get up again and take from my escritoire the sheaf of Fenella Stanley's letters which I had brought from Raxton, and read again those stories about curses, such as that about the withering of a Romany family under a dead man's curse which Winnie had described to me that night on the sands.

II

I was delighted to be told by Sleaford, whom I met one afternoon in Piccadilly, that Cyril had returned to London within the last few days. 'He is appointed artist-in-chief of the new comic paper, _The Caricaturist,_ said Sleaford, 'and is in great feather. I have just been calling upon him.'

'The very man I want to see,' I replied. Sleaford thereupon directed me to Cyril's studio 'You'll find him at work,' said he, 'doin' a caricature of Wilderspin's great picture, "Faith and Love." Mother Gudgeon is sittin' as his model. He does everything from models, you know.'

'Mother Gudgeon?'

'A female costermonger that he picked up some where in the slums, the funniest woman in London: haw! haw! I promise you she'll make you laugh when Cyril draws her out.'

He then began to talk upon the subject which interested him above all others, the smartness and swiftness of his yacht. 'I am trying to persuade your mother and aunt to go for a cruise with me, and I think I shall succeed.'

He directed me to the studio, and we parted.

I found Cyril in a large and lofty studio in Chelsea, filled with the curiously carved black furniture of Bombay, mixed, for contrast, with a few Indian cabinets of carved and fretted ivory exquisitely wrought. He greeted me cordially. The walls were covered with j.a.panese drawings. I began by asking him about The Caricaturist.

'Well,' said he, 'now that the House of Commons has become a bear-garden, and t'other House a waxwork show, and the intellect and culture of the country are leaving politics to dummies and cads, how can the artistic mind condescend to caricature the political world--a world that has not only ceased to be intelligent, but has even ceased to be funny? The quarry of _The Caricaturist_ will be literature, science, and art. Instead of wasting artistic genius upon such small fry as premiers, diplomatists, and cabinet ministers, our cartoons will be caricatures of the pictures of Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Watts, Sandys, Whistler, Wilderspin: our letterpress will be Aristophanic parodies of Tennyson, Browning, Meredith, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne; game worth flying at, my boy! The art-world is in a dire funk, I can tell you, for the artistic epidermis has latterly grown genteel and thin.'

Already I was beginning to ask myself whether it was possible to make a confidant of this inscrutable cynic. 'You are fond of Oriental things?' I said, wis.h.i.+ng to turn the subject. I looked round at the Chinese, Indian, and j.a.panese monstrosities scattered about the room.

'That,' said he, pointing to a picture of a woman (apparently drunk) who was amusing herself by chasing b.u.t.terflies, while a number of broad-faced, mischievous-looking children were teasing her--'that is the masterpiece of Hokusai. The legend in the corner is "Kiyo-jo cho ni tawamureru," which, according to the lying j.a.panese scholars, means nothing more than "A cracked woman chasing b.u.t.terflies." It was left for me to discover that it represents Yoka, the G.o.ddess of Fun, sportively chasing the b.u.t.terfly souls of men, while the urchins, the little Yokas, are crying, "Ma! you're screwed."'