Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

‘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 ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and in Chambers’ ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature,’ and scattered through scores of articles in the ‘Athenæum,’ 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,’ [11 - Bosom.] 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.’