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 'll 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 'll 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 'll 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.