don't stop half-way for such a small matter! And those who have some
troublesome disease and hope to cure it here aren't afraid of the
thieves nor their vermin. Take away my hump, mighty saints, and I will
undertake to get rid of my lice and my fleas one by one, without any
assistance!"
This speech was greeted by a roar of laughter, which stopped abruptly,
as if by enchantment. The little gate to the spring was opened at
last, and, at the sound of the water rushing from the pipe, all the
women ran to take their places in the line--not without some trifling
disputes for precedence.
At last, some of Livette's girl friends arrived. Spying them at some
little distance, she went to meet them.
"What brings Livette here so early, on horseback?" said the women,
when she had moved away.
"Why, she's looking for her rascal of a Renaud, of course!" said the
hunchback. "That fellow isn't used to being tied like a goat to a
stake, and the little one will have a hard time to keep him true to
her, for all her fine _dot_!--The other day, Rampal--you know, the
drover, a good fellow--saw him at a distance on the beach talking with
a gipsy who wasn't dressed for winter!"
"Not dressed for winter? what do you mean?"
"She wore no furs, nor cloak, nor anything else, poor me! She was
taking a bath as God made her. The plain isn't a safe place for that
sort of thing. You think you can't be seen because you think you can
see a long distance yourself, but a tuft of heather is enough for the
lizard to hide his two eyes behind while he looks."
Again the women began to chuckle and laugh, but for a moment only.
Meanwhile, Livette's friends were saying to her:
"No, we haven't seen your sweetheart, my dear; but they are already
putting the benches in place against the church for the branding, and
he can't fail to be here soon."
At that moment, a strain of weird music arose not far away. It was
produced by a flute, and the notes, softly modulated at first, were
abruptly changed to heart-rending shrieks. A strange, dull, monotonous
accompaniment seemed to encourage the sick heart, that called for help
with piercing cries.
"Hark! there are the gipsies and their devil's music, Livette. Just go
and look--it is such an amusing sight. We will join you in a little
while."
"What about my horse?" said Livette.
"If you haven't come to stay, there's a heavy iron bracelet just set
into the wall of the church to hold the bars of the enclosure for the
branding. Tie your horse to that, and don't be afraid that he will
disappear. Every one will know he's yours by those pretty letters in
copper nails you have had put on your saddle-bow."
Livette fastened her horse to the ring in the church-wall, and walked
in the direction of the gipsy music. It seemed to her that she might
probably learn something there.
Now, Zinzara the Egyptian had seen Livette ride into the village, and
her music had no other purpose than to attract her, and Renaud, her
fiance, with her, if he were there. Why? to see;--to bring together
for an instant, with no fixed purpose, upon the same point of the vast
world through which she wandered, two of the personages with whom she
"beguiled her time;" to look on at the comedy of life, and to watch
the sequel, with the inclination to give an evil turn to it, chance
aiding. She loved the anomalies that result from the chaotic jumbling
together of circumstances.
Zinzara was turning a kaleidoscope whose field was vast like the
horizon of her never-ending travels, and whose bits of glass,
multicolored, were living souls.--She turned the wheel to see what
calamity destiny, with her assistance, would bring to pass. The
amusement of a woman, of a sorceress.
XIII
THE SNAKE-CHARMER
Life is an enigma. The everlasting silence of space is but the endless
murmuring of invisible circles which, twining in and out, part and
meet again, lose and never find one another, or are inextricably
interwoven forever. Life is an enigma. We can see something of its
beginning, nothing of its close; its meaning escapes us, but all the
links make the chain, and some one knows the rest.
That there are two ends to the ladder is certain. Day is not night,
and one does not exist without the other. There are joy and sorrow,
health and sickness, happiness and unhappiness, life and death--in a
word, good and evil, for the beast of flesh and bone. This is a good
man, that a bad. Religion and morals have nothing to do with it, and
afford no explanation; but little children know that it is so, and
fools know it likewise. They who undertake to reason the thing out
learnedly, befog it. They who pull the thread break it. There is some
one and there is something. Nothing is null, I tell you, my good
friends, and yonder drivelling old idiot, sitting on the stone at the
foot of the Calvary before the church, and holding out his hand to
Livette, knows two things better than we--good and evil. The idiot,
when he passed the gipsies' wagons in the morning, talked amicably,
yes, he talked for some minutes with two or three gaunt dogs chained
up under the wagons; but when he saw Zinzara, the queen, fix her eyes
upon him, the idiot was afraid and limped away as fast as he could. He
was afraid because _there was_, in Zinzara's look, _something not
good_.
And now Livette, as she passes by, glances at him, and the idiot--poor
human worm--smiles and holds out to her a glass pearl,--a treasure in
his eyes,--which he found that morning in the filth of the gutter near
by. The pearl glistens. It is bright blue. The idiot sees beauty in
it, and offers it to the pretty girl passing by. Livette smiles at
him, and he, the drivelling idiot, the cripple who drags himself along
the ground, laughs back at Livette. He laughs and feels his man's
heart vaguely opening within him--why?--because of _something good_ in
Livette's eyes.
God is above us, and the devil beneath us. God? what do you mean by
God? Kindly humanity, which is above us and toward which we are
ascending; the ideal, evolved from ourselves which, by dint of
declaring itself and compelling love, will be realized in our
children. The devil? what is that? the obscure beast, the ravenous,
blind worm, which we were, and from which we are moving farther and
farther away.
There is something nearer the mystery than the mind, and that
something is the instinct. Certainly we are nearer to our origin than
to our end, and instinct almost explains the origin because it is
still near at hand, but the mind cannot explain the end because it is
still so far away! Whence come we? The crawling beast may
suspect.--Whither go we? How can the beast tell, when he cannot fly?
The bond that binds us fast to earth is not cut. Man bears forever the
scar of his birth. He has, therefore, always before him evidence of
how he is connected with infinity _behind_ him; but how he is
connected, by death, with the life everlasting, _before_ him, he does
not see.
Instinct, like a glow-worm, lights up the depths from which man comes
forth, but intelligence casts no light into the boundless expanse on
high, wherein it loses itself, just at the point where God
begins.--Ah! how mysterious is God!
Yes, between the intelligence and man's origin, instinct stretches
like a bridge. Between the intelligence and man's end, there is a
yawning chasm. The reason cannot cross it. There is no way but to
leap. Man finds it easy to imagine what lies below; his own weight
draws him down to a point where he can understand it.
To understand what is above, it is essential to have a power of
lightening one's self, a wing which man has not. Here instinct acts
upon the mind in a direction opposed to mental effort.
To some minds this faculty of rising sometimes comes, but man's
conceptions depend upon his experiences, and the time has passed when
reliance was placed upon the "wise men," upon those whose conceptions
far outran their experiences. Perhaps it is better so. Perhaps every
man ought to form his ideas for himself and no one will know anything
_for good and all_ until he has earned the right.
Sometimes, for a moment, especially in dreams, but occasionally in his
waking hours, man _knows_. He has profound intuition; but nothing is
more fleeting than this sudden glimpse of eternity.
The best of us are blind men haunted by the memory of a flash of
light.
Which of us has not known, by personal experience, how a man can fly
away from himself? The sense of mystery, scarcely detected, has
escaped us, but who has not been conscious of it for a second?
Truth, like love, reveals itself for a second only, but we must
believe in it--forever.
These thoughts are properly presented here, for everything is in
everything. One man studies the hyssop, another the oak; Cuvier the
mastodon, and Lubbock the ant, but they all arrive at the same point,
a point which includes everything.
Do you know why the gipsies, Bohemians, gitanos, zincali, zingari,
zigeuners, zinganes, tziganes, romani, romichal,--all different
appellations of the same wandering race,--arouse such intense interest
on the part of civilized peoples?
There are two reasons.
The first is, that the gipsy, being very primitive and wild, appears
among civilized beings as the image of themselves in the past. It is
as if they were our own ghosts.
When we see them among us, we amuse ourselves, in the shelter of our
established homes, by thinking regretfully that we no longer have
before us the broad plains so dear to the beasts we are; that we are
no longer in constant contact with the earth, the plants, the animals,
which are the _mothers_ that bore us, and whom we love for that
reason. They have remained what we were when we left them, and that
touches us.
The second reason is that they really discovered long ago something of
the meaning of life.
It is certain that they are magicians. They have seen the hidden
spring and have a vague remembrance of it; they have retained its dark
reflection in their glance.
The glance! they know its dormant and insinuating power. They know how
to subdue weak minds by a glance.
The least skilled in magic among them still believe that the "secret"
of things is hidden away somewhere under a stone, and in their travels
through every country on earth they often raise heavy boulders, whose
peculiar shapes seem to indicate that they may conceal the mystery.
They never find under the boulders anything but toads and snakes and
scorpions, but they are skilled at making powerful potions from the
blood and venom of the reptiles.
They know, also, the secret properties of plants, and that the hemlock
and belladonna vary in their effects when cut at certain times of the
year and at certain hours, according to the influence of the seasons
and the moon's rays.
The gipsies are skilled in the science of poisons. Men and
women--_roms_ and _juwas_--excel in the art of giving diseases to
cattle.
Their trades are only pretexts for calling at the houses they pass.
They are coppersmiths simply because the art of subjecting metals to
the action of fire was invented by the son of Cain, the progenitor of
all accursed mortals. And they are saddlers because they like to be
about horses, dear to all vagabonds.
The gipsies, who were originally worshippers of fire, and now have no
religion of their own, but always adopt that of the country they are
passing through, are to mankind what Lucifer is to the angels.
"We come from Egypt, if you please," Zinzara would sometimes say to
the people of her tribe. "Indeed, that is where we had our homes and
were a powerful race in the days of Moses. Then our ancestors were
magicians to the kings of Egypt, who overcame death; but our origin is
higher and farther away.
"We come from a country where the _Secret Power of the World_ was
discovered: a dragon guards the mystery on the summit of a lofty
mountain, in a cavern, out of reach of whatever floods may come.
"Our ancestor Coudra learned from the high-priests the method of
compelling the dragon to obey him. He entered the cavern and conceived
the idea of universal knowledge, and resolved to avail himself of it
in the outside world, in order that he might become a king and mighty
among men--for why was he poor? Why does poverty exist, why death?
"He had no sooner conceived his project of justifiable rebellion than
the dragon sought to devour him. Our ancestor eluded him, and believed
that, by virtue of the secrets he had discovered, he would be
omnipotent on earth, but suddenly he found that he had almost
forgotten them all, as if by magic. He no longer remembered any of
them except those that do harm, those that produce disease, sorrow,
misery, and death--all the evils from which he would have liked to
free himself.
"And the high-priests cursed him and his sons. Manou spoke against
them thus: _They shall dwell outside of cities; they shall possess
none but broken vessels; they shall have nothing of their own, except
it be an ass or a dog. They shall wear the clothes they steal from
the dead; their plates shall be broken; their jewels shall be of iron.
They shall journey, without rest, from place to place. Every man who
is faithful to his duty shall hold himself aloof from them. They shall
have no dealings except with one another. And they shall marry only in
their own race._
"And the _Tchandalas_ were able to flee the country, but not the
sentence.
"And that is our present case.
"The crown of Coudra is a broken ring--with sharp points, like a dog's
collar, and his sceptre is an iron staff, broken but formidable. For
why does want exist, and pain and death? God is wicked!"
With this tale, set to music, the gipsy queen sometimes lulled her son
to sleep.
And when, at the entrance to some chateau, she cast a long, malevolent
glance upon a young mother, who, upon catching sight of her, quickly
carried her little child within, such thoughts as these would run
through Zinzara's head: "The secrets that are known to our prophets,
our dukes and princes and kings, will cause all your cities, your
churches, and your thrones to tremble on their foundations, for why
does want exist, and pain and death? The hour will come--we await
it--when your nations will be scattered to the winds of wrath, unless
the wise men who invoked a curse on us become their masters--but you
are too far from their wisdom for that! You will be ours.
"Meanwhile, woe to those of you whom we find alone! We look fixedly
at them, and the spirit of evil does the rest."
And this is what little Livette saw when she approached the gipsy
camp.
The whole tribe was there. Their numerous wagons were of different
sizes, most of them being made in the shape of small oblong houses,
with little windows, very like the Noah's arks made for children in
Germany. The gipsies had arranged their wagons side by side, in a
line, each one opposite a house in the village. Thus the line of
wheeled houses formed with the houses of the village a winding street,
which, if prolonged, would have surrounded Saintes-Maries like a
girdle. Thus, while their sojourn lasted, the gipsies could cherish
the illusion that they were settled there, that they were inhabitants
of the village, one dwelling opposite the baker, another opposite the
wine-shop; but no one forgot that the gipsy houses were built upon
wheels that turn and can make the tour of the world.
"I pity the tree," says the gipsy, "it looks enviously at me as I
pass. It is jealous of my ass's feet."
Most of the wagons were patched with boards of many colors, picked up
or stolen here and there.
As a matter of fact, the wagons of the tribe were placed in the rear
of the village houses, so that the occupants of those houses, the
innkeeper or the baker, being busy in the front part of their
establishments, could naturally dispense with a too frequent
appearance in the gipsy street.
The nomads alone swarmed there undisturbed. They passed but little
time in the wagons, except when they were on the road or tired or
sick; their days were passed in the open air, squatting in the dust,
or on the steps of the little ladders which they lowered from the
doors of their wagons to the ground; or else they passed long hours
lying in the shade under the wagon--smoking their pipes and dreaming.
For the moment, some of the women here and there through the camp were
intent upon the same occupation: searching, in the bright morning
light, for vermin among the matted hair of their children, whom they
held tightly between their knees as in a vise.
From time to time, one of the little fellows would howl with pain,
when his mother inadvertently pulled or tore out one of his wiry,
coal-black hairs. Then he would wriggle and squirm to get away, but
the vise formed by the knees would nip him again and hold him tight,
and there would be a squealing as of sucking pigs loth to be bled.
Then blows would rain down and the shrieks redouble. Suddenly the
urchin that was howling most lustily would cease, and follow, with a
lively interest, the movements of a chicken from some neighboring
coop, or the antics of a hunting-dog that had wandered that way and
was well worth stealing.
The mothers went through with their matutinal task in an automatic
way that said as clearly as possible: "It is of no use to try to do
this, for the vermin breed and always will breed; but we must do
something. It is always a good thing to be busy; and then it makes an
excellent impression, here under the eye of civilized people. They see
that we are clean and neat."
"Buy my dog," said one of them with a leer to an open-mouthed
villager. "You will be well satisfied with his fidelity. He is
faithful, I tell you! so faithful that I have been able to sell him
four times.--He always comes back!"
All these women had a coppery, sun-burned, almost black skin, and hair
of a peculiar, dull charcoal-like black.--Some wore it twisted in a
heavy coil on top of the head. Several of the younger women let it
hang in long, snake-like locks over their breasts and backs. Their
eyes also were a curious shade of black, very bright, like black
velvet seen through glass. Life shone but dully in them, without
definite expression. Some mothers were attending to their duties with
a child on their back, wrapped in a sheet which they wore
bandoleer-fashion, with the ends knotted at the shoulder. The little
one slept with his head hanging, tossed and shaken by every movement.
Red, orange, and blue were the prevailing colors of their tattered
garments, but they were tarnished and faded and almost blotted out by
layers of dust and filth;--a smoke-begrimed Orient.
Many of the women had short pipes between their teeth. The men who
lay about here and there, with their elbows on the ground, were almost
all smoking placidly, their Sylvanus-like eyes fixed on vacancy. They
made a great show of pride under their rags. Some were asleep under
the rolling cabins.
The line of wagons along the outskirts of the village was still in
shadow, but at the head of the line, the first of the wagons, standing
a little apart, beyond the line of the houses, was in the sunlight.
This wagon, which was painted and kept up better than the others, was
Zinzara's, and a few of the villagers had collected in the sunshine in
front of it, attracted by the notes of the flute and tambourine.
Livette, as she approached the group, had no suspicion that, in the
wine-shop facing the wagon, behind the curtains of a window on the
first floor, Renaud had stationed himself, there, at his ease, to
watch the gipsy, who was playing the flute and dancing at the same
time, her feet and arms bare.
Zinzara held the flute--a double flute with two reeds diverging
slightly--with much grace, and blew upon it with full cheeks, raising
and lowering her fingers to suit the requirements of a weird air,
sometimes slow, sometimes furiously fast and jerky. Her head was
thrown back, so that she appeared more haughty and aggressive than
ever.
As she played upon her flute, Zinzara danced--a dance as mysterious
as herself. With her bare feet she simply beat time on the ground. Her
dance was naught but a play of attitudes, so to speak. She constantly
varied the rhythmical undulations of her flexible, vigorous body,
whose outline could be traced at every movement beneath the clinging
material of her dress. When the movement quickened, she stamped her
feet faster, still without moving from where she stood, as if in haste
to reach a lover's rendezvous, where languor would replace activity.
Seated a few steps from the dancer, a young gipsy, with a vague,
dreamy expression, was pounding with his fist, thinking of other
things the while, upon a large tambourine, to which amulets of divers
kinds were attached,--Egyptian beetles, mother-of-pearl shells,
finger-rings, and great ear-rings,--which danced up and down as he
played.
And the tambourine seemed to say to the double flute:
"Never fear: your mate is watching over you. I am here, father or
betrothed, I, your strong-voiced mate, and you can sing freely of your
joy and sorrow; no one shall disturb you; I am on the watch, and for
you my heart beats in my great, sonorous breast."
But to the gipsy's ear the music of the tambourine said something very
different; and with a smile upon her lips, blowing into her flute with
its diverging reeds, raising and lowering her slender fingers over the
holes, Zinzara, exerting a subtle influence over all about her,
dressed in soft rags that clung tightly to her form and marked the
outlines of her hips and of her breast in turn; displaying her tawny
calves beneath her skirts, which were lifted up and tucked into her
belt,--Zinzara seemed not to see the spectators.
Twenty or thirty people were looking at her, and still she seemed to
be dancing for her own amusement; but her witch's eye followed,
without seeming to do so, the slightest movement of Renaud's head, the
whole of which could be seen at times between the serge curtains with
red borders, behind the windows of the wine-shop, under the eaves of
the house across the way.
When she saw Livette approach, the dancer beat her feet upon the
ground more rapidly, as if annoyed, and the flute emitted a cry, a
shrill war-cry, like the sound made by tearing silk quickly.
Livette involuntarily shuddered, but she mingled with the group,
momentarily increasing in size, and looked on.
Zinzara made a sign, and uttered some strange, guttural words between
two loud notes--words that were, evidently, a precise command, for a
gipsy child, who had come to her side a moment before, glided under
the wagon, whence he emerged armed with a long white stick, with which
he motioned to the spectators to fall back a little. Then he stationed
himself in front of Zinzara, in the centre of the first row of
spectators, and, turning toward them, enjoined silence upon them by
placing his finger on his lips. The word was passed along, and the
bystanders ceased their conversation, realizing that _something_ was
about to happen.
The dance was at an end.--The tambourine ceased to beat time. The
flute alone sang on in Zinzara's hands, as her fingers moved slowly up
and down.--Now it gave forth a thin, clear note, like the prolongation
of the sound made by a drop of water falling in a fountain; it was a
sweet, insinuating appeal, as melancholy as the croaking of a frog at
night, on the shores of a pond, at the bottom of an echoing, rocky
valley.
And, with the end of his wand, the child pointed out to one of the
spectators something that came crawling out from under the wagon. It
was a tiny snake, with red and yellow spots, and it drew near,
evidently attracted by the notes of the flute. Another followed, and
soon there were several of them--five in all.
When they were in front of the flute-player, between her and the boy
with the wand, they raised their heads and waved them back and forth,
slowly at first, then more quickly, keeping time with the flute. The
serpents danced, and the mind of every spectator involuntarily
compared their dance with the woman's that he had seen a moment
before. There was the same undulating movement, the same evil charm,
and every one was conscious of an uncomfortable feeling at the sight.
Livette, surprised and strangely moved, thought that she was
dreaming. The spectacle before her was curiously, deplorably in accord
with the state of her heart. She did not understand its hidden,
intimate connection with her own destiny, but she felt its baleful
effects. Zinzara's glance, from time to time, swept over the girl's
face, but did not rest upon it. On the subject of her own influence,
Zinzara knew what she knew.