A FREE LIFE ON THE ROAD
I woke very early, though I had taken kindly to my pillow, as I found
by my having an arm round my companion's neck, and her fingers
intertwisted with mine. For awhile I lay looking at her eyes, which had
every imaginable light and signification in them; they advised me to
lie quiet, they laughed at my wonder, they said, 'Dear little fellow!'
they flashed as from under a cloud, darkened, flashed out of it, seemed
to dip in water and shine, and were sometimes like a view into a
forest, sometimes intensely sunny, never quite still. I trusted her,
and could have slept again, but the sight of the tent stupefied me; I
fancied the sky had fallen, and gasped for air; my head was extremely
dizzy too; not one idea in it was kept from wheeling. This confusion of
my head flew to my legs when, imitating her, I rose to go forth. In a
fit of horror I thought, 'I've forgotten how to walk!'
Summoning my manful resolution, I made the attempt to step across the
children swaddled in matting and straw and old gowns or petticoats. The
necessity for doing it with a rush seized me after the first step. I
pitched over one little bundle, right on to the figure of a sleeping
woman. All she did was to turn round, murmuring, 'Naughty Jackie.' My
companion pulled me along gravely, and once in the air, with a good
breath of it in my chest, I felt tall and strong, and knew what had
occurred. The tent where I had slept struck me as more curious than my
own circumstances. I lifted my face to the sky; it was just sunrise,
beautiful; bits of long and curling cloud brushed any way close on the
blue, and rosy and white, deliciously cool; the grass was all grey, our
dell in shadow, and the tops of the trees burning, a few birds
twittering.
I sucked a blade of grass.
'I wish it was all water here,' I said.
'Come and have a drink and a bathe,' said my companion.
We went down the dell and over a juniper slope, reminding me of my day
at John Salter's house and the last of dear Heriot. Rather to my shame,
my companion beat me at running; she was very swift, and my legs were
stiff.
'Can you swim?' she asked me.
'I can row, and swim, and fence, and ride, and fire a pistol,' I said.
'Oh, dear,' said she, after eyeing me enviously. I could see that I had
checked a recital of her accomplishments.
We arrived at a clear stream in a gentleman's park, where grass rolled
smooth as sea-water on a fine day, and cows and horses were feeding.
'I can catch that horse and mount him,' she said.
I was astonished.
'Straddle?'
She nodded down for 'Yes.'
'No saddle?'
She nodded level for 'No.'
My respect for her returned. But she could not swim.
'Only up to my knees,' she confessed.
'Have a look at me,' said I; and I stripped and shot into the water,
happy as a fish, and thinking how much nicer it was than champagne. My
enjoyment made her so envious that she plucked off her stockings, and
came in as far as she dared. I called to her. 'You're like a cow,' and
she showed her teeth, bidding me not say that.
'A cow! a cow!' I repeated, in my superior pleasure.
She spun out in a breath, 'If you say that, I'll run away with every
bit of your clothes, and you'll come out and run about naked, you
will.'
'Now I float,' was my answer, 'now I dive'; and when I came up she
welcomed me with a big bright grin.
A smart run in the heat dried me. I dressed, finding half my money on
the grass. She asked me to give her one of those bits—a shilling. I
gave her two, upon which she asked me, invitingly, if ever I tossed. I
replied that I never tossed for money; but she had caught a shilling,
and I could not resist guessing 'heads,' and won; the same with her
second shilling. She handed them to me sullenly, sobbing, yet she would
not take them back.
'By-and-by you give me another two,' she said, growing lively again. We
agreed that it would be a good thing if we entered the village and
bought something. None of the shops were open. We walked through the
churchyard. I said, 'Here's where dead people are buried.'
'I'll dance if you talk about dead people,' said she, and began
whooping at the pitch of her voice. On my wishing to know why she did
it, her reply was that it was to make the dead people hear. My feelings
were strange: the shops not open, and no living people to be seen. We
climbed trees, and sat on a branch talking of birds' eggs till hunger
drove us to the village street, where, near the public-house, we met
the man-tramp, who whistled.
He was rather amusing. He remarked that he put no questions to me,
because he put no question to anybody, because answers excited him
about subjects that had no particular interest to him, and did not
benefit him to the extent of a pipe of 'tobacco; and all through not
being inquisitive, yesterday afternoon he had obtained, as if it had
been chucked into his lap, a fine-flavoured fat goose honourably for
his supper, besides bottles of ale, bottles of ginger-pop, and a
fair-earned half-crown. That was through his not being inquisitive, and
he was not going to be inquisitive now, knowing me for a gentleman: my
master had tipped him half-a-crown.
Fortunately for him, and perhaps for my liberty, he employed a verb
marvellously enlightening to a schoolboy. I tipped him another
half-crown. He thanked me, observing that there were days when you lay
on your back and the sky rained apples; while there were other days
when you wore your fingers down to the first joint to catch a flea.
Such was Fortune!
In a friendly manner he advised me to go to school; if not there, then
to go home. My idea, which I had only partly conceived, was to have a
look at Riversley over a hedge, kiss my aunt Dorothy unaware, and fly
subsequently in search of my father. Breakfast, however, was my
immediate thought. He and the girl sat down to breakfast at the inn as
my guests. We ate muttonchops and eggs, and drank coffee. After it,
though I had no suspicions, I noticed that the man grew thoughtful. He
proposed to me, supposing I had no objection against slow travelling,
to join company for a couple of days, if I was for Hampshire, which I
stated was the county I meant to visit.
'Well then, here now, come along, d'ye see, look,' said he, 'I mustn't
be pounced on, and no missing young gentleman in my society, and me
took half-a-crown for his absence; that won't do. You get on pretty
well with the gal, and that's a screaming farce: none of us do. Lord!
she looks down on such scum as us. She's gipsy blood, true sort;
everything's sausages that gets into their pockets, no matter what it
was when it was out. Well then, now, here, you and the gal go t' other
side o' Bed'lming, and you wait for us on the heath, and we's be there
to comfort ye 'fore dark. Is it a fister?'
He held out his hand; I agreed; and he remarked that he now counted a
breakfast in the list of his gains from never asking questions.
I was glad enough to quit the village in a hurry, for the driver of the
geese, or a man dreadfully resembling him, passed me near the
public-house, and attacked my conscience on the cowardly side, which
is, I fear, the first to awaken, and always the liveliest half while we
are undisciplined. I would have paid him money, but the idea of a
conversation with him indicated the road back to school. My companion
related her history. She belonged to a Hampshire gipsy tribe, and had
been on a visit to a relative down in the East counties, who died on
the road, leaving her to be brought home by these tramps: she called
them mumpers, and made faces when she spoke of them. Gipsies, she said,
were a different sort: gipsies camped in gentlemen's parks; gipsies,
horses, fiddles, and the wide world—that was what she liked. The wide
world she described as a heath, where you looked and never saw the end
of it. I let her talk on. For me to talk of my affairs to a girl
without bonnet and boots would have been absurd. Otherwise, her society
pleased me: she was so like a boy, and unlike any boy I knew.
My mental occupation on the road was to calculate how many hill-tops I
should climb before I beheld Riversley. The Sunday bells sounded homely
from village to village as soon as I was convinced that I heard no
bells summoning boarders to Rippenger's school. The shops in the
villages continued shut; however, I told the girl they should pay me
for it next day, and we had an interesting topic in discussing as to
the various things we would buy. She was for bright ribands and
draper's stuff, I for pastry and letter-paper. The smell of people's
dinners united our appetites. Going through a village I saw a man
carrying a great baked pie, smelling overpoweringly, so that to ask him
his price for it was a natural impulse with me. 'What! sell my Sunday
dinner?' he said, and appeared ready to drop the dish. Nothing stopped
his staring until we had finished a plateful a-piece and some beer in
his cottage among his family. He wanted to take me in alone. 'She's a
common tramp,' he said of the girl.
'That's a lie,' she answered.
Of course I would not leave her hungry outside, so in the end he
reluctantly invited us both, and introduced us to his wife.
'Here's a young gentleman asks a bit o' dinner, and a young
I-d'n-know-what's after the same; I leaves it to you, missus.'
His wife took it off his shoulders in good humour, saying it was lucky
she made the pie big enough for her family and strays. They would not
accept more than a shilling for our joint repast. The man said that was
the account to a farthing, if I was too proud to be a poor man's guest,
and insisted on treating him like a public. Perhaps I would shake hands
at parting? I did cordially, and remembered him when people were not so
civil. They wanted to know whether we had made a runaway match of it.
The fun of passing a boys'-school and hearing the usher threaten to
punish one fellow for straying from ranks, entertained me immensely. I
laughed at them just as the stupid people we met laughed at me, which
was unpleasant for the time; but I knew there was not a single boy who
would not have changed places with me, only give him the chance, though
my companion was a gipsy girl, and she certainly did look odd company
for a gentleman's son in a tea-garden and public-house parlour. At
nightfall, however, I was glad of her and she of me, and we walked hand
in hand. I narrated tales of Roman history. It was very well for her so
say, 'I'll mother you,' as we lay down to sleep; I discovered that she
would never have hooted over churchyard graves in the night. She
confessed she believed the devil went about in the night. Our bed was a
cart under a shed, our bed-clothes fern-leaves and armfuls of straw.
The shafts of the cart were down, so we lay between upright and level,
and awakening in the early light I found our four legs hanging over the
seat in front. 'How you have been kicking!' said I. She accused me of
the same. Next minute she pointed over the side of the cart, and I saw
the tramp's horse and his tents beneath a broad roadside oak-tree. Her
face was comical, just like a boy's who thinks he has escaped and is
caught. 'Let's run,' she said. Preferring positive independence, I
followed her, and then she told me that she had overheard the tramp
last night swearing I was as good as a fistful of half-crowns lost to
him if he missed me. The image of Rippenger's school overshadowed me at
this communication. With some melancholy I said: 'You'll join your
friends, won't you?'
She snapped her fingers: 'Mumpers!' and walked on carelessly.
We were now on the great heaths. They brought the memory of my father
vividly; the smell of the air half inclined me to turn my steps toward
London, I grew so full of longing for him. Nevertheless I resolved to
have one gaze at Riversley, my aunt Dorothy, and Sewis, the old
grey-brown butler, and the lamb that had grown a sheep; wonderful
contrasts to my grand kings of England career. My first clear
recollection of Riversley was here, like an outline of a hill seen
miles away. I might have shed a tear or two out of love for my father,
had not the thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image. I
could not but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me.
Suppose I joined the gipsies? My companion wished me to. She had
brothers, horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers. Suppose I learnt the
fiddle? Suppose I learnt their language and went about with them and
became king of the gipsies? My companion shook her head; she could not
encourage this ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of
the gipsies or a queen either. 'We fool people,' she said, and offended
me, for our school believed in a gipsy king, and one fellow, Hackman,
used to sing a song of a gipsy king; and it was as much as to say that
my schoolfellows were fools, every one of them. I accused her of
telling lies. She grinned angrily. 'I don't tell 'em to friends,' she
said. We had a quarrel. The truth was, I was enraged at the sweeping
out of my prospects of rising to distinction among the gipsies. After
breakfast at an inn, where a waiter laughed at us to our faces, and we
fed scowling, shy, and hungry, we had another quarrel. I informed her
of my opinion that gipsies could not tell fortunes.
'They can, and you come to my mother and my aunt, and see if they can't
tell your fortune,' said she, in a fury.
'Yes, and that's how they fool people,' said I. I enjoyed seeing the
flash of her teeth. But my daring of her to look me in the eyes and
swear on her oath she believed the fortunes true ones, sent her into a
fit of sullenness.
'Go along, you nasty little fellow, your shadow isn't half a yard,' she
said, and I could smile at that; my shadow stretched half across the
road. We had a quarrelsome day wherever we went; rarely walking close
together till nightfall, when she edged up to my hand, with, 'I say,
I'll keep you warm to-night, I will.' She hugged me almost too tight,
but it was warm and social, and helped to the triumph of a feeling I
had that nothing made me regret running away from Rippenger's school.
An adventure befell us in the night. A farmer's wife, whom we asked for
a drink of water after dark, lent us an old blanket to cover us in a
dry ditch on receiving our promise not to rob the orchard. An old
beggar came limping by us, and wanted to share our covering. My
companion sank right under the blanket to peer at him through one of
its holes. He stood enormous above me in the moonlight, like an
apparition touching earth and sky.
'Cold, cold,' he whined: 'there's ne'er a worse off but there's a
better off. Young un!' His words dispersed the fancy that he was
something horrible, or else my father in disguise going to throw off
his rags, and shine, and say he had found me. 'Are ye one, or are ye
two?' he asked.
I replied that we were two.
'Then I'll come and lie in the middle,' said he.
'You can't; there's no room,' I sang out.
'Lord,' said he, 'there's room for any reckoning o' empty stomachs in a
ditch.'
'No, I prefer to be alone: good-night,' said I.
'Why!' he exclaimed, 'where ha' you been t' learn language? Halloa!'
'Please, leave me alone; it's my intention to go to sleep,' I said,
vexed at having to conciliate him; he had a big stick.
'Oho!' went the beggar. Then he recommenced:
'Tell me you've stole nothing in your life! You've stole a gentleman's
tongue, I knows the ring o' that. How comes you out here? Who's your
mate there down below? Now, see, I'm going to lift my stick.'
At these menacing words the girl jumped out of the blanket, and I
called to him that I would rouse the farmer.
'Why... because I'm goin' to knock down a apple or two on your head?'
he inquired, in a tone of reproach. 'It's a young woman you've got
there, eh? Well, odd grows odder, like the man who turned three
shillings into five. Now, you gi' me a lie under your blanket, I'll
knock down a apple apiece. If ever you've tasted gin, you's say a apple
at night's a cordial, though it don't intoxicate.'
The girl whispered in my ear, 'He's lame as ducks.' Her meaning seized
me at once; we both sprang out of the ditch and ran, dragging our
blanket behind us. He pursued, but we eluded him, and dropped on a
quiet sleeping-place among furzes. Next morning, when we took the
blanket to the farm-house, we heard that the old wretch had traduced
our characters, and got a breakfast through charging us with the
robbery of the apple-tree. I proved our innocence to the farmer's wife
by putting down a shilling. The sight of it satisfied her. She combed
my hair, brought me a bowl of water and a towel, and then gave us a
bowl of milk and bread, and dismissed us, telling me I had a fair face
and dare-devil written on it: as for the girl, she said of her that she
knew gipsies at a glance, and what God Almighty made them for there was
no guessing. This set me thinking all through the day, 'What can they
have been made for?' I bought a red scarf for the girl, and other
things she fixed her eyes on, but I lost a great deal of my feeling of
fellowship with her. 'I dare say they were made for fun,' I thought,
when people laughed at us now, and I laughed also.
I had a day of rollicking laughter, puzzling the girl, who could only
grin two or three seconds at a time, and then stared like a dog that
waits for his master to send him off again running, the corners of her
mouth twitching for me to laugh or speak, exactly as a dog might wag
his tail. I studied her in the light of a harmless sort of
unaccountable creature; witness at any rate for the fact that I had
escaped from school.
We loitered half the morning round a cricketers' booth in a field,
where there was moderately good cricketing. The people thought it of
first-rate quality. I told them I knew a fellow who could bowl out
either eleven in an hour and a half. One of the men frightened me by
saying, 'By Gearge! I'll in with you into a gig, and off with you after
that ther' faller.' He pretended to mean it, and started up. I watched
him without flinching. He remarked that if I 'had not cut my lucky from
school, and tossed my cap for a free life, he was ——' whatever may be
expressed by a slap on the thigh. We played a single-wicket side game,
he giving me six runs, and crestfallen he was to find himself beaten;
but, as I let him know, one who had bowled to Heriot for hours and
stood against Saddlebank's bowling, was a tough customer, never mind
his age.
This man offered me his friendship. He made me sit and eat beside him
at the afternoon dinner of the elevens, and sent platefuls of food to
the girl, where she was allowed to squat; and said he, 'You and I'll
tie a knot, and be friends for life.'
I replied, 'With pleasure.'
We nodded over a glass of ale. In answer to his questions, I stated
that I liked farms, I would come and see his farm, I would stay with
him two or three days, I would give him my address if I had one, I was
on my way to have a look at Riversley Grange.
'Hey!' says he, 'Riversley Grange! Well, to be sure now! I'm a tenant
of Squire Beltham's, and a right sort of landlord, too.'
'Oh!' says I, 'he's my grandfather, but I don't care much about him.'
'Lord!' says he. 'What! be you the little boy, why, Master Harry
Richmond that was carried off in the night, and the old squire shut up
doors for a fortnight, and made out you was gone in a hearse! Why, I
know all about you, you see. And back you are, hurrah! The squire 'll
be hearty, that he will. We've noticed a change in him ever since you
left. Gout's been at his leg, off and on, a deal shrewder. But he rides
to hounds, and dines his tenants still, that he does; he's one o' th'
old style. Everything you eat and drink's off his estate, the day he
dines his tenants. No humbug 'bout old Squire Beltham.
I asked him if Sewis was alive.
'Why, old Sewis,' says he, 'you're acquainted with old Sewis? Why, of
course you are. Yes, old Sewis's alive, Master Harry. And you bet me at
single-wicket! That's be something to relate to 'em all. By Gearge, if
I didn't think I'd got a nettle in my fist when I saw you pitch into my
stumps. Dash it! thinks I. But th' old squire 'll be proud of you, that
he will. My farm lies three miles away. You look at a crow flying due
South-east five minutes from Riversley, and he's over Throckham farm,
and there I'll drive ye to-night, and to-morrow, clean and tidy out o'
my wife's soap and water, straight to Riversley. Done, eh? My name's
Eckerthy. No matter where you comes from, here you are, eh, Master
Harry? And I see you last time in a donkey-basket, and here you come in
breeches and defy me to singlewicket, and you bet me too!'
He laughed for jollity. An extraordinary number of emotions had
possession of me: the most intelligible one being a restless vexation
at myself, as the principal person concerned, for not experiencing
anything like the farmer's happiness. I preferred a gipsy life to
Riversley. Gipsies were on the road, and that road led to my father. I
endeavoured to explain to Farmer Eckerthy that I was travelling in this
direction merely to have a short look at Riversley; but it was
impossible; he could not understand me. The more I tried, the more he
pressed me to finish my glass of ale, which had nothing to do with it.
I drank, nevertheless, and I suppose said many funny things in my
anxiety that the farmer should know what I meant; he laughed enough.
While he was fielding against the opposite eleven, the tramp came into
the booth, and we had a match of cunning.
'Schoolmaster's out after you, young gentleman,' said he, advising me
to hurry along the road if I sought to baffle pursuit.
I pretended alarm, and then said, 'Oh, you'll stand by me,' and treated
him to ale.
He assured me I left as many tracks behind me as if I went spilling a
box of lucifer-matches. He was always for my hastening on until I
ordered fresh ale for him. The girl and he grimaced at one another in
contempt. So we remained seeing the game out. By the time the game
ended, the tramp had drunk numbers of glasses of ale.
'A fine-flavoured fat goose,' he counted his gains since the
commencement of our acquaintance, 'bottles of ale and ginger-pop, two
half-crowns, more ale, and more to follow, let's hope. You only stick
to your friends, young gentleman, won't you, sir? It's a hard case for
a poor man like me if you don't. We ain't got such chances every
morning of our lives. Do you perceive, sir? I request you to inform me,
do you perceive, sir? I'm muddled a bit, sir, but a man must look after
his interests.'
I perceived he was so muddled as to be unable to conceal that his
interests were involved in my capture; but I was merry too. Farmer
Eckerthy dealt the tramp a scattering slap on the back when he returned
to the booth, elated at having beaten the enemy by a single run.
'Master Harry Richmond go to Riversley to his grandfather in your
company, you scoundrel!' he cried in a rage, after listening to him. 'I
mean to drive him over. It's a comfortable ten-mile, and no more. But I
say, Master Harry, what do you say to a peck o' supper?'
He communicated to me confidentially that he did not like to seem to
slink away from the others, who had made up their minds to stop and
sup; so we would drive home by moonlight, singing songs. And so we did.
I sat beside the farmer, the girl scrambled into the hinder part of the
cart, and the tramp stood moaning, 'Oh dear! oh dear! you goes away to
Riversley without your best friend.'
I tossed him a shilling. We sang beginnings and ends of songs. The
farmer looked at the moon, and said, 'Lord! she stares at us!' Then he
sang:
'The moon is shining on Latworth lea,
And where'll she see such a jovial three
As we, boys, we? And why is she pale?
It's because she drinks water instead of ale.'
'Where's the remainder? There's the song—!
“Oh! handsome Miss Gammon
Has married Lord Mammon,
And jilted her suitors,
All Cupid's sharpshooters,
And gone in a carriage
And six to her marriage,
Singing hey! for I've landed my salmon, my salmon!”
Where's the remainder? I heard it th' only time I ever was in London
town, never rested till I'd learnt it, and now it's clean gone. What's
come to me?'
He sang to 'Mary of Ellingmere' and another maid of some place, and a
loud song of Britons.
It was startling to me to wake up to twilight in the open air and
silence, for I was unaware that I had fallen asleep. The girl had
roused me, and we crept down from the cart. Horse and farmer were quite
motionless in a green hollow beside the roadway. Looking across fields
and fir plantations, I beheld a house in the strange light of the hour,
and my heart began beating; but I was overcome with shyness, and said
to myself, 'No, no, that's not Riversley; I'm sure it isn't'; though
the certainty of it was, in my teeth, refuting me. I ran down the
fields to the park and the bright little river, and gazed. When I could
say, 'Yes, it is Riversley!' I turned away, hurt even to a sense of
smarting pain, without knowing the cause. I dare say it is true, as the
girl declared subsequently, that I behaved like one in a fit. I
dropped, and I may have rolled my body and cried. An indefinite
resentment at Riversley was the feeling I grew conscious of after very
fast walking. I would not have accepted breakfast there.
About mid-day, crossing a stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her
people-men. Near evening we entered one of their tents. The women set
up a cry, 'Kiomi! Kiomi!' like a rising rookery. Their eyes and teeth
made such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool. The
strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a word,
rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all
round,—not musical, but catching and incessant,—gave me an idea that I
had fallen upon a society of birds, exceedingly curious ones. They
welcomed me kindly, each of them looking me in the face a bright second
or so. I had two helps from a splendid pot of broth that hung over a
fire in the middle of the tent.
Kiomi was my companion's name. She had sisters Adeline and Eveleen, and
brothers Osric and William, and she had a cousin a prizefighter.
'That's what I'll be,' said I. Fiddling for money was not a prospect
that charmed me, though it was pleasant lying in Kiomi's arms to hear
Osric play us off to sleep; it was like floating down one of a number
of visible rivers; I could see them converging and breaking away while
I floated smoothly, and a wonderful fair country nodded drowsy. From
that to cock-crow at a stride. Sleep was no more than the passage
through the arch of a canal. Kiomi and I were on the heath before
sunrise, jumping gravel-pits, chasing sandpipers, mimicking pewits; it
seemed to me I had only just heard the last of Osric's fiddle when
yellow colour filled in along the sky over Riversley. The curious dark
thrill of the fiddle in the tent by night seemed close up behind the
sun, and my quiet fancies as I lay dropping to sleep, followed me like
unobtrusive shadows during daylight, or, to speak truthfully, till
about dinner-time, when I thought of nothing but the great stew-pot. We
fed on plenty; nicer food than Rippenger's, minus puddings. After
dinner I was ready for mischief. My sensations on seeing Kiomi beg of a
gentleman were remarkable. I reproached her. She showed me sixpence
shining in the palm of her hand. I gave her a shilling to keep her from
it. She had now got one and sixpence, she said: meaning, I supposed
upon reflection, that her begging had produced that sum, and therefore
it was a good thing. The money remaining in my pocket amounted to five
shillings and a penny. I offered it to Kiomi's mother, who refused to
accept it; so did the father, and Osric also. I might think of them,
they observed, on my return to my own house: they pointed at Riversley.
'No,' said I, 'I shan't go there, you may be sure.' The women grinned,
and the men yawned. The business of the men appeared to be to set to
work about everything as if they had a fire inside them, and then to
stretch out their legs and lie on their backs, exactly as if the fire
had gone out. Excepting Osric's practice on the fiddle, and the
father's bringing in and leading away of horses, they did little work
in my sight but brown themselves in the sun. One morning Osric's
brother came to our camp with their cousin the prizefighter—a young man
of lighter complexion, upon whom I gazed, remembering John Thresher's
reverence for the heroical profession. Kiomi whispered some story
concerning her brother having met the tramp. I did not listen; I was
full of a tempest, owing to two causes: a studious admiration of the
smart young prizefighter's person, and wrathful disgust at him for
calling Kiomi his wife, and telling her he was prepared to marry her as
soon as she played her harp like King David. The intense folly of his
asking a girl to play like David made me despise him, but he was
splendidly handsome and strong, and to see him put on the gloves for a
spar with big William, Kiomi's brother, and evade and ward the huge
blows, would have been a treat to others besides old John of Dipwell
Farm. He had the agile grace of a leopard; his waistcoat reminded me of
one; he was like a piece of machinery in free action. Pleased by my
enthusiasm, he gave me a lesson, promising me more.
'He'll be champion some day,' said Kiomi, at gnaw upon an apple he had
given her.
I knocked the apple on the ground, and stamped on it. She slapped my
cheek. In a minute we stood in a ring. I beheld the girl actually
squaring at me.
'Fight away,' I said, to conceal my shame, and imagining I could slip
from her hits as easily as the prizefighter did from big William's. I
was mistaken.
'Oh! you think I can't defend myself,' said Kiomi; and rushed in with
one, two, quick as a cat, and cool as a statue.
'Fight, my merry one; she takes punishment,' the prizefighter sang out.
'First blood to you, Kiomi; uncork his claret, my duck; straight at the
nozzle, he sees more lamps than shine in London, I warrant. Make him
lively, cook him; tell him who taught you; a downer to him, and I'll
marry you to-morrow!'
I conceived a fury against her as though she had injured me by
appearing the man's property—and I was getting the worst of it; her
little fists shot straight and hard as bars of iron; she liked
fighting; she was at least my match. To avoid the disgrace of seriously
striking her, or of being beaten at an open exchange of blows, I made a
feint, and caught her by the waist and threw her, not very neatly, for
I fell myself in her grip. They had to pluck her from me by force.
'And you've gone a course of tuition in wrestling, squire?' the
prizefighter said to me rather savagely.
The others were cordial, and did not snarl at me for going to the
ropes, as he called it. Kiomi desired to renew the conflict. I said
aloud:
'I never fight girls, and I tell you I don't like their licking me.'
'Then you come down to the river and wash your face,' said she, and
pulled me by the fingers, and when she had washed my face clear of
blood, kissed me. I thought she tasted of the prizefighter.
Late in the afternoon Osric proposed that he and I and the prizefighter
should take a walk. I stipulated for Kiomi to be of the party, which
was allowed, and the gipsy-women shook my hand as though I had been
departing on a long expedition, entreating me not to forget them, and
never to think evil of poor gipsy-folk.
'Why, I mean to stay with you,' said I.
They grinned delightedly, and said I must be back to see them break up
camp in the evening. Every two or three minutes Kiomi nudged my elbow
and pointed behind, where I saw the women waving their coloured
neckerchiefs. Out of sight of our tents we came in view of the tramp.
Kiomi said, 'Hide!' I dived into a furze dell. The tramp approached,
calling out for news of me. Now at Rippenger's school, thanks to
Heriot, lying was not the fashion; still I had heard boys lie, and they
can let it out of their mouths like a fish, so lively, simple, and
solid, that you could fancy a master had asked them for it and they
answered, 'There it is.' But boys cannot lie in one key spontaneously,
a number of them to the same effect, as my friends here did. I was off,
they said; all swung round to signify the direction of my steps; my
plans were hinted at; particulars were not stated on the plea that
there should be no tellings; it was remarked that I ought to have fair
play and 'law.' Kiomi said she hoped he would not catch me. The tramp
winced with vexation, and the gipsies chaffed him. I thanked them in my
heart for their loyal conduct. Creeping under cover of the dell I
passed round to the road over a knoll of firs as quick as my feet could
carry me, and had just cried, 'Now I'm safe'; when a lady stepping from
a carriage on the road, caught me in her arms and hugged me blind. It
was my aunt Dorothy.