“Hullo!” said the young man, whose name was Sylvester.
“Hullo!” said Gian-Luca smiling. Then he sat down beside him where he squatted near the fire, and all of a sudden he was friends with this man—friends as one tree may be friends with another through sharing a common soil.
The gipsies, it seemed, were remaining for some weeks; they talked quite frankly to Gian-Luca. They were busy, they said, making brackets and flower-stands from wood collected in the forest. These objects they would sell later on at the fairs; but they had many other occupations. At swarming time they made beehives, for instance; in the autumn they collected beech-mast and acorns, for which there was quite a good market. Sometimes they would go hop-picking for a change; this, they said, was great fun for the children.
“Gives ’em a chance to see a bit of life,” smiled Sylvester, glancing at his litter.
During the time that they stayed in the forest Gian-Luca was often with these people. They had strangely good manners, a kind of natural breeding which forbade them to express their curiosity about him.
“Grand place, the forest—” was all Sylvester said, as though that in itself explained Gian-Luca.
They were not over-clean, and their animals were thin, but never unkindly treated. The gipsies’ worst crime was the snaring of rabbits; but this crime Gian-Luca only suspected, for even Sylvester, so frank in most matters, ignored the existence of rabbits. He was something of an ornithologist, however, and from him Gian-Luca learnt the names of the birds, their migratory habits, their matrimonial codes, the months in which they mated, the construction of their nests—this latter often touching and amazing. Sylvester, on the whole, possessed a very kindly heart, and if he killed he did so to eat; he had the woodland instinct of hunting for his young, which instinct he shared with the wild creatures.
Their names were very musical, these brown-faced, nomad people—Sylvester, Claretto, Morelia, Clementina; but their children were just plain Jim, and Bill, and Maggie; there were also a Syd, a Jennie and a Bobbie—the latter a baby at the breast. For, according to Morelia, their very ancient grand-dame, the traditions of the race were fast dying; it was all the fault of towns and motors, said Morelia, and those devilish flying machines. Their language was now dead, she told Gian-Luca sadly, and the Romanies were passing away—then Morelia spoke some soft-sounding words to Gian-Luca, in the beautiful lost language of her people.
Gian-Luca learnt a great deal from this wise old woman who was only too glad to find anyone to listen. The unwritten laws of the wanderers he learnt, and the unwritten laws of the roads and of the forests; the virtues of herbs, and what berries might be eaten and the seasons in which to find them. Then one day he must ask her what she thought about God; did she think that He really existed? But at this Morelia could only shake her head; she had never thought much about such things, it seemed. She had had nine children, she explained rather grimly; four of them were alive, but five of them had died—one way and another she had not had much time, what with their father and all. Then Gian-Luca must ask her what she felt about death, for had she not lost five children? Did she think that the soul lived on after death? Did she think that her children still existed?
“Who knows?—it don’t seem likely,” she told him; “leastways, it don’t to me.”
But Gian-Luca was curious; now he wanted to know the Romany word for death. He who had always been a lover of words was trying to pick up their language.
Morelia surveyed him out of rheumy old eyes; “Merripen,” she said gravely.
“And for life?” he inquired. “What is life in your language?”
And she answered him: “Merripen.”
One day the gipsies were no longer to be found when Gian-Luca went to the clearing; they had slipped away like shades in the night—only their wheel-tracks remained on the turf, and the guilty ashes of their fire. So now once more he had the forest to himself, except for the charcoal-burner, and he felt half glad and half sorry in his heart; he had liked that companionable, guilty fire, and Sylvester, and the old Morelia. He had felt at peace with these vagabond people whose problems were all so simple; for the aged, the quiet waiting for death, without hope, without fear, without questioning; for the young, the mating of the man with his woman, the passing on of life to their children. He envied this placid acceptance of the world as they conceived it to be, and their courage—what was it that gave them such courage? The courage to ignore, the courage not to fret—was it, perhaps, belief after all, a kind of unrecognized belief?
IV
The heat of the summer lay heavy on the forest in spite of its splendid trees. The air was often a-shimmer with heat, and small, winged insects would dance in the shimmer or scud across the surface of the pools. The nights were disturbed by the hooting of owls, flying on their wide, soundless wings; but the streams grew less noisy, and by noontide the ponies must draw in to shelter from the sun. Gian-Luca continued to feed his songbirds while forgetting to feed himself—for now there was no Maddalena to remind him, and his distaste for food had been growing again lately; he never felt really hungry these days, which was strange considering his life. It began to irk him to walk into Lyndhurst—and of course the less
