AFTERNOON
“A gypsy camp!” Arthur repeated. “Sure I’d love to go.”
“Gypsies!” Laura shrank a little. “I think I’d be scared of gypsies.”
“You wouldn’t be scared of these gypsies,” Maida promised. “I’ve known
them ever since I was a little girl. I am very fond of them.”
“Well let’s go,” Arthur said, shifting from one foot to another in
impatient excitement.
The procession started again.
“Tell us more about the gypsies, Maida,” Arthur demanded at once.
“There isn’t very much to tell, except that they’ve come here every
summer ever since I can remember and, indeed, long before I was born.
Father has always permitted them to camp on this ground, rent free. I
don’t seem to remember much about them when I was very little, except
that I used to go and buy baskets with Granny Flynn and they always
told Granny’s fortune. ‘Cross my palm with silver,’ they say. That
means, ‘Put some money in my hand!’”
“How many are there?” Dicky enquired.
“Not many. Perhaps a dozen. Let me see there’s Aunt Save and Uncle Save
the father and mother, and Aunt Vashti, the old, old grandmother. She
would frighten even you, Rosie--She looks like a witch. But she’s very
kind and I’m very fond of her. And there’s Esther and Miriam, their
daughters and Hector and Tom, their husbands; and their children. And
then there are always three or four relatives--different ones every
year--who come up from the South with them.”
“They go South then every winter?” Arthur continued.
“Yes,” Maida answered. She continued to give them her memories of the
gypsies through the rest of the long, shaded, greenly-winding walk, and
the children asked many questions. Presently the trail expanded ahead
into a clearing.
“There they are!” Arthur called.
The clearing was surrounded by pines. Against this background, a group
of tents pointed their weather-stained pyramids up from the brown
pine-needles. In the middle, a fire was burning. A black pot, hanging
from a triangle of stout sticks, emitted a cloud of steam and a busy
bubbling. A wagon stood off among the trees and tethered by a long
rope two horses were feeding. A trio of hounds, two old and one young,
rose as the children approached; made slowly in their direction. An
old woman, so wrinkled that her face looked as though it could never
have been smooth, with great hoops of gold in her ears, a red kerchief
on her head and a black one around her neck, stood watching the pot. A
little distance off, a younger woman, buxom and brown, mended. Three
men, one middle-aged, two younger, sat smoking.
“Those dogs won’t bite us Maida,” Laura said in a panic, “will they?”
“Oh no,” Maida said, “they know me. Hi Lize! Hi Tige!” she called.
The hounds burst into a run; came bounding to her side; leaped up
and licked her face. Maida staggered under the onslaught, but Arthur
expertly seized their collars, held them.
The excitement in the gypsy camp was immediate. “It’s Maida!” ran a
murmur from mouth to mouth. The young woman leaped to her feet. The old
woman, less alert but still nimble, sprang from the grass also. They
all, even the men, came forward, smiling eagerly. Maida shook hands
with them and introduced her friends.
“When did you get here?” Maida asked. “I’ve had Zeke come down here
every day for a week looking for you--every day until yesterday, when
in the excitement of our arrival, he neglected to come.”
“We came yesterday,” they explained. They were most of them, dark, with
longish hair and flashing dark eyes but their look was very friendly.
They asked Maida a multitude of questions about her father and Granny
Flynn, her trip abroad. Finally Maida asked them if they had any
baskets ready for sale.
“A few,” Mrs. Savory said looking pleased. “Oh Silva, bring the baskets
out! Maida you have never seen Silva and Tyma, have you? They’re my
sister’s children. My sister died last summer and now they’re living
with us.”
A voice answered, “In a moment.” It was a child’s voice and yet it
had a curious grown-up accent as of an unusual decision of character.
The doors of one of the tents parted and a girl’s head appeared in
the opening. The children stared at her. For an instant nobody spoke.
The head disappeared. When the girl emerged, her hands were full of
baskets. Behind her came a lad very like her but older.
Silva Burle was a slender brown girl. She did not look any older than
Rosie; but she was much taller--and she was as tawny as Rosie was dark.
Her hair, a strange amber color, hung straight to her shoulders where
the ends turned upwards, not in a curl, but in a big soft wave. Her
eyes were not big but they were long; they were like bits of shining
amber set under her thin straight brows. Her skin was a tanned amber
too. She wore a much-patched rusty dark skirt with a white middy
blouse, a tattered, yellow-ribbon tie.
Tyma, her brother, was slim too but strong-looking, active. He had a
dark skin and hair so black that there was a purple steeliness about
it. In all this swarthy coloring, his eyes, a clear blue, seemed
strange and unexpected. His brows were thick and they lowered as the
eyes under them contemplated the group of children. Silva’s lips curled
disdainfully upwards.
Silva nodded briefly when her aunt performed the simple introduction,
“This is Maida and her friends, Silva,” but Tyma merely stared. Then
turning his back, he strolled away to where the horses were feeding;
untethered one of them. With a single leap of his athletic body, he
was on its back. In another instant, the green leaves of the forest
closed around him as he disappeared riding bare-back into it.
“What beautiful baskets you have Silva!” Maida said politely.
Silva did not deign to answer. She spread her handiwork out on
the table which stood not far from the fire and then, leaving her
prospective customers to their choice, went over to the fire; sat down
before it, her back to the children.
Aunt Save seemed to feel dimly that something was wrong. She moved over
to the table and began displaying the baskets.
Maida made an effort to relieve her embarrassment. “Oh Aunt Save,” she
said, “what do you suppose is the first thing I am going to do when I
get time?” Without waiting for an answer, she went swiftly on. “I’m
going to wash and iron all Lucy’s clothes and pack them nicely away in
a little old hair-cloth trunk which I found in the attic. Lucy,” she
explained to her friends, “is a great big rag-baby doll that Aunt Save
made for me when I was little. It’s as big as a baby two years old. I
was fonder of it than any doll I have ever had, and so Granny Flynn
made it a whole outfit of clothes--all the things a baby should have.
I am going to pack them away and keep them for my daughter.”
“Oh, do you mean that rag-baby doll that’s sitting in the little chair
in your room?” Rosie asked. “And that little queer brown trunk under
the window where the tree is?”
This slant of the conversation seemed to interest Silva for she turned
a little; listened intently to what followed.
“Yes, that’s Lucy,” Maida answered. “All her clothes are in that trunk.”
“When I made that doll for you,” Aunt Save said, “I didn’t think you’d
play with it long. None of us thought you were going to live.”
“That was before my illness,” Maida explained to the other children,
“when I was so lame.”
“I told your father,” Aunt Save went on, “that there was only one thing
that could save you. And that was to go South and live with us in the
piny woods and be a little Romany for a year. But he couldn’t seem to
let you go for so long.”
“Oh Aunt Save!” Maida exclaimed. “How I would have loved that! However
it all came out right because father gave me my Little Shop and I made
all these new friends.”