Chapter IX: George Borrow

IT was 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 into contact 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 how little 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 Bronte 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 Bronte, 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, which they 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 the very 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 seaside inn, 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 special
glories 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 dappled coat 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 Bronte would certainly have been had she been
placed in such circumstances as Charlotte Bronte 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 description the 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 expression on 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 me to 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 and the 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 stride
To 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 romance
To Petulengro with his boxing glory,
Your Amazonian Sinfi's noble story!

In the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' and in Chambers' 'Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' and scattered through scores of articles in the 'Athenaeum,' 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 of gypsy 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's intelligence, 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 at and 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 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.

[Picture: A Letter Box on the Broads. (From an Oil Painting at 'The
Pines.')]

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 with the agility
of a greyhound, turning round every few moments, pirouetting and
laughing aloud.

'Let's go to the camp!' said Dereham. 'That was all true about the
nicotine--was it not?'

'Partly, I think,' said I, 'but not being a medical man I must not be
too emphatic. If it is true it ought to be a criminal offence for
any woman to smoke in excess while she is suckling a child.'

'Say it ought to be a criminal offence for a woman to smoke at all,'
growled Dereham. 'Fancy kissing a woman's mouth that smelt of stale
tobacco--pheugh!'"

After giving these two delightful descriptions of Borrow and his environment, I will now quote Mr. Watts-Dunton's description of their last meeting:--

'The last time I ever saw Borrow was shortly before he left London to
live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge,
where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular and striking
splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were reeling and
boiling over the West End. Borrow came up and stood leaning over the
parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like most
people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turner
could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could
not describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun
and had lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose
above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the
sinking sun in a rosy vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a
golden rim, which gleamed as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and
clearest air--a peculiar effect which struck Borrow deeply. I never
saw such a sunset before or since, not even on Waterloo Bridge; and
from its association with 'the last of Borrow' I shall never forget
it.'

A TALK ON WATERLOO BRIDGE
THE LAST SIGHT OF GEORGE BORROW

We talked of 'Children of the Open Air,'
Who once on hill and valley lived aloof,
Loving the sun, the wind, the sweet reproof
Of storms, and all that makes the fair earth fair,
Till, on a day, across the mystic bar
Of moonrise, came the 'Children of the Roof,'
Who find no balm 'neath evening's rosiest woof,
Nor dews of peace beneath the Morning Star.

We looked o'er London where men wither and choke,
Roofed in, poor souls, renouncing stars and skies,
And lore of woods and wild wind-prophecies--
Yea, every voice that to their fathers spoke:
And sweet it seemed to die ere bricks and smoke
Leave never a meadow outside Paradise.

While the noble music of this double valediction in poetry and prose is sounding in our ears, my readers and I, 'with wandering steps and slow,' may also fitly take our reluctant leave of George Borrow.