The English Gipsies and Their Language Part 3

Difficulty of coming to an Understanding with Gipsies.--The Cabman.--Rommany for French.--"Wanderl.u.s.t."--Gipsy Politeness.--The Tinker and the Painting.--Secrets of Bat-catching.--The Piper of Hamelin, and the Tinker's Opinion of the Story.--The Walloon Tinker of Spa.--Argot.

One summer day in London, in 1871, I was seated alone in an artist's studio. Suddenly I heard without, beneath the window, the murmur of two voices, and the sleepy, hissing, grating sound of a scissors-grinder's wheel.

By me lay a few tools, one of which, a chisel, was broken. I took it, went softly to the window, and looked down.

There was the wheel, including all the apparatus of a travelling tinker.

I looked to see if I could discover in the two men who stood by it any trace of the Rommany. One, a fat, short, mind-his-own-business, ragged son of the roads, who looked, however, as if a st.u.r.dy drinker might be hidden in his sh.e.l.l, was evidently not my "affair." He seemed to be the "Co." of the firm.

But by him, and officiating at the wheeling smithy, stood a taller figure--the face to me invisible--which I scrutinised more nearly. And the instant I observed his _hat_ I said to myself, "This looks like it."

For dilapidated, worn, wretched as that hat was, there was in it an attempt, though indescribably humble, to be something melo-dramatic, foreign, Bohemian, and poetic. It was the mere blind, dull, dead germ of an effort--not even _life_--only the ciliary movement of an antecedent embryo--and yet it _had_ got beyond Anglo-Saxondom. No costermonger, or common cad, or true Englishman, ever yet had that indefinable touch of the opera-supernumerary in the streets. It _was_ a sombrero.

"That's the man for me," I said. So I called him, and gave him the chisel, and after a while went down. He was grinding away, and touched his hat respectfully as I approached.

Now the reader is possibly aware that of all difficult tasks one of the most difficult is to induce a disguised Gipsy, or even a professed one, to utter a word of Rommany to a man not of the blood. Of this all writers on the subject have much to say. For it is so black-swanish, I may say so centenarian in unfrequency, for a gentleman to speak Gipsy, that the Zingaro thus addressed is at once subjected to morbid astonishment and nervous fears, which under his calm countenance and infinite "cheek" are indeed concealed, but which speedily reduce themselves to two categories.

1. That Rommany is the language of men at war with the law; therefore you are either a detective who has acquired it for no healthy purpose, or else you yourself are a scamp so high up in the profession that it behooves all the little fish of outlawdom to beware of you.

2. Or else--what is quite as much to be dreaded--you are indeed a gentleman, but one seeking to make fun of him, and possibly able to do so. At any rate, your knowledge of Rommany is a most alarming coin of vantage. Certainly, reader, you know that a regular London streeter, say a cabman, would rather go to jail than be beaten in a chaffing match. I nearly drove a hansom into sheer convulsions one night, about the time this chapter happened, by a very light puzzler indeed. I had hesitated between him and another.

"You don't know _your own mind_," said the disappointed candidate to me.

"_Mind your own_ business," I replied. It was a poor palindrome, {38} reader--hardly worth telling--yet it settled him. But he swore--oh, of course he did--he swore beautifully.

Therefore, being moved to caution, I approached calmly and gazed earnestly on the revolving wheel.

"Do you know," I said, "I think a great deal of your business, and take a great interest in it."

"Yes, sir."

"I can tell you all the names of your tools in French. You'd like to hear them, wouldn't you?"

"Wery much indeed, sir."

So I took up the chisel. "This," I said, "is a _churi_, sometimes called a _chinomescro_."

"That's the French for it, is it, sir?" replied the tinker, gravely. Not a muscle of his face moved.

"The _coals_," I added, "are _hangars_ or _wongurs_, sometimes called _kaulos_."

"Never heerd the words before in my life," quoth the sedate tinker.

"The bellows is a _pudemengro_. Some call it a _pishota_."

"Wery fine language, sir, is French," rejoined the tinker. In every instance he repeated the words after me, and p.r.o.nounced them correctly, which I had not invariably done. "Wery fine language. But it's quite new to me."

"You wouldn't think now," I said, affably, "that _I_ had ever been on the roads!"

The tinker looked at me from my hat to my boots, and solemnly replied--

"I should say it was wery likely. From your language, sir, wery likely indeed."

I gazed as gravely back as if I had not been at that instant the worst sold man in London, and asked--

"Can you _rakher Rommanis_?" (_i.e_., speak Gipsy.)

And _he_ said he _could_.

Then we conversed. He spoke English intermingled with Gipsy, stopping from time to time to explain to his a.s.sistant, or to teach him a word.

This portly person appeared to be about as well up in the English Gipsy as myself--that is, he knew it quite as imperfectly. I learned that the master had been in America, and made New York and Brooklyn glad by his presence, while Philadelphia, my native city had been benefited as to its scissors and morals by him.

"And as I suppose you made money there, why didn't you remain?" I inquired.

The Gipsy--for he was really a Gipsy, and not a half-scrag--looked at me wistfully, and apparently a little surprised that I should ask him such a question.

"Why, sir, _you_ know that _we_ can't keep still. Somethin' kept telling me to move on, and keep a movin'. Some day I'll go back again."

Suddenly--I suppose because a doubt of my perfect Freemasonry had been aroused by my absurd question--he said, holding up a kettle--

"What do you call this here in Rommanis?"

"I call it a _kekavi_ or a _kavi_," I said. "But it isn't _right_ Rommany. It's Greek, which the Rommanichals picked up on their way here."

And here I would remark, by the way, that I have seldom spoken to a Gipsy in England who did not try me on the word for kettle.

"And what do you call a face?" he added.

"I call a face a _mui_," I said, "and a nose a _nak_; and as for _mui_, I call _rikker tiro mui_, 'hold your jaw.' That is German Rommany."

The tinker gazed at me admiringly, and then said, "You're 'deep' Gipsy, I see, sir--that's what _you_ are."

"_Mo rov a jaw_; _mo rakker so drovan_?" I answered. "Don't talk so loud; do you think I want all the Gorgios around here to know I talk Gipsy? Come in; _jal adree the ker and pi a curro levinor_."

The tinker entered. As with most Gipsies there was really, despite the want of "education," a real politeness--a singular intuitive refinement pervading all his actions, which indicated, through many centuries of brutalisation, that fountain-source of all politeness--the Oriental. Many a time I have found among Gipsies whose life, and food, and dress, and abject ignorance, and dreadful poverty were far below that of most paupers and prisoners, a delicacy in speaking to and acting before ladies, and a tact in little things, utterly foreign to the great majority of poor Anglo-Saxons, and not by any means too common in even higher cla.s.ses.

For example, there was a basket of cakes on the table, which cakes were made like soldiers in platoons. Now Mr Katzimengro, or Scissorman, as I call him, not being familiar with the anatomy of such delicate and winsome maro, or bread, was startled to find, when he picked up one biscuit de Rheims, that he had taken a row. Instantly he darted at me an astonished and piteous glance, which said--

"I cannot, with my black tinker fingers, break off and put the cakes back again; I do not want to take all--it looks greedy."

So I said, "Put them in your pocket." And he did so, quietly. I have never seen anything done with a better grace.

On the easel hung an unfinished picture, representing the Piper of Hamelin surrounded by rats without number. The Gipsy appeared to be much interested in it.

"I used to be a rat-catcher myself," he said. "I learned the business under old Lee, who was the greatest rat-catcher in England. I suppose you know, of course, sir, how to _draw_ rats?"

"Certainly," I replied. "Oil of rhodium. I have known a house to be entirely cleared by it. There were just thirty-six rats in the house, and they had a trap which held exactly twelve. For three nights they caught a dozen, and that finished the congregation."