I had intended to go to London at once after leaving Gypsy Dell, but
something that Sinfi told me during our interview impelled me to go
on to Raxton Hall, which was so near. The fact that Sinfi was my
kinswoman opened up new and exciting vistas of thought.
I understood now what was that haunting sense of recognition which
came upon me when I first saw Sinfi at the wayside inn in Wales. Day
by day had proofs been pouring in upon me that the strain of Romany
blood in my veins was asserting itself with more and more force. Day
by day I had come to realise how closely, though the main current of
my blood was English, I was affined to the strange and mysterious
people among whom I was now thrown--the only people in these islands,
as it seemed to me, who would be able to understand a love-passion
like mine. And there were many things in the great race of my
forefathers which I had found not only unsympathetic to me, but
deeply repugnant. In Great Britain it is the Gypsies alone who
understand nature's supreme charm, and enjoy her largesse as it used
to be enjoyed in those remote times described in Percy Aylwin's poems
before the Children of the Roof invaded the Children of the Open Air,
before the earth was parcelled out into domains and ownerships as it
now is parcelled out. In the mind of the Gorgio, the most beautiful
landscape or the most breezy heath or the loveliest meadow-land is
cut up into allotments, whether of fifty thousand acres or of two
roods, and owned by people. Of ownership of land the Romany is
entirely unconscious. The landscape around him is part of Nature
herself, and the Romany on his part acknowledges no owner. No doubt
he yields to _force majeure_ in the shape of gamekeeper or constable,
but that is because he has no power to resist it. Nature to him is as
free and unowned by man as it was to the North American Indian in his
wigwam before the invasion of the Children of the Roof.
During the time that I was staying in Flintshire and near Capel
Curig, rambling through the dells or fishing in the brooks, it was
surprising how soon the companionship of a Gorgio would begin to pall
upon me. And here the Cymric race is just as bad as the Saxon. The
same detestable habit of looking upon nature as a paying
market-garden, the same detestable inquiry as to who was the owner of
this or that glen or waterfall, was sure at last to make me sever
from him. But as to Sinfi, her attitude towards nature, though it was
only one of the charms that endeared her to me, was not the least of
them. There was scarcely a point upon which she and I did not touch.
And what about her lack of education? Was that a drawback? Not in the
least. The fact that she knew nothing of that traditional ignorance
which for ages has taken the name of knowledge--that record of the
foolish cosmogonies upon which have been built the philosophies and
the social systems of the blundering creature Man--the fact that she
knew nothing of these gave an especial piquancy to everything she
said. I had been trying to educate myself in the new and wonderful
cosmogony of growth which was first enunciated in the sixties, and
was going to be, as I firmly believed, the basis of a new philosophy,
a new system of ethics, a new poetry, a new everything. But in
knowledge of nature as a sublime consciousness, in knowledge of the
human heart, Sinfi was far more learned than I. And believing as I
did that education will in the twentieth century consist of
unlearning, of unlading the mind of the trash previously called
knowledge, I could not help feeling that Sinfi was far more advanced,
far more in harmony than I could hope to be With the new morning of
Life of which we are just beginning to see the streaks of dawn.
'I must go and see Fenella's portrait,' I said, as I Walked briskly
towards Raxton.
When I reached Raxton Hall I seemed to startle the butler and the
servants, as though I had come from the other world.
I told the butler that I should sleep there that night, and then went
at once to the picture gallery and stood before Reynolds' famous
picture of Fenella Stanley as the Sibyl. The likeness to Sinfi was
striking. How was it that it had not previously struck me more
forcibly? The painter had evidently seized the moment when Fenella's
eyes expressed that look of the seeress which Sinfi's eyes, on
occasion, so powerfully expressed. I stood motionless before it while
the rich, warm light of evening bathed it in a rosy radiance. And
when the twilight shadows fell upon it, and when the moon again lit
it up, I stood there still. The face seemed to pass into my very
being, and Sinfi's voice kept singing in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's
dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in
your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.'
I left the picture and went into the library: for I bethought me of
that sheaf of Fenella's letters to my great-grandfather which he had
kept so sacredly, and which had come to me as representative of the
family. My previous slight inspection of them had shown me what a
wonderful woman she was, how full of ideas the most original and the
most wild. The moment a Gypsy-woman has been taught to write there
comes upon her a passion for letter-writing.
Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the
illiterate locutions and the eccentric orthography of Fenella's
letters and the subtle remarks and speculations upon the symbols of
nature.--the dukkeripen of the woods, the streams, the stars, and the
winds. But when I came to analyse the theories of man's place in
nature expressed in the ignorant language of this Romany heathen,
they seemed to me only another mode of expressing the mysticism of
the religious enthusiast Wilderspin, the more learned and
philosophic mysticism of my father, and the views of D'Arcy, the
dreamy painter.
As I rode back to London, I said to myself, 'What change has come
over me? What power has been gradually sapping my manhood? Why do I,
who was so self-reliant, long now so passionately for a friend to
whom to unburthen my soul--one who could give me a sympathy as deep
and true as that I got from Sinfi Lovell, and yet the sympathy of a
mind unclouded by ignorant superstitions?'
With the exception of D'Arcy, whose advice as to the disposal of the
cross had proclaimed him to be as superstitious as Sinfi herself, not
a single friend had I in all London. Indeed, besides Lord Sleaford (a
tall, burly man with the springy movement of a prize-tighter, with
blue-grey eyes, thick, close-cropped hair, and a flaxen moustache,
who had lately struck up a friendship with my mother) I had not even
an acquaintance. Cyril Aylwin, whom I had not seen since we parted in
Wales, was now on the Continent with Wilderspin. Strange as it may
seem, I looked forward with eagerness to the return of this
light-hearted jester. Cyril's sagacity and knowledge of the world had
impressed me in Wales; but his cynical attitude, whether genuine or
assumed, towards subjects connected with deep passion, had prevented
my confiding in him. He must, I knew, have gathered from Sinfi, and
from other sources, that I was mourning the loss of a Welsh girl in
humble life; but during our very brief intercourse in Wales neither
of us had mentioned the matter to the other. Now, however, in my
present dire strait I longed to call in the aid of his penetrative
mind.