George Borrow | Page 5

his black features convulsed with excitement. The Westminster bravos eyed the Gypsy askance; but the comparison, if they made any, seemed by no means favourable to themselves. 'Gypsy! rum chap.--Ugly customer,--always in training.' Such were the exclamations which I heard, some of which at that period of my life I did not understand.
"No man would fight the Gypsy.--Yes! a strong country fellow wished to win the stakes, and was about to fling up his hat in defiance, but he was prevented by his friends, with--'Fool! he'll kill you!'
"As the Gypsies were mounting their horses, I heard the dusty phantom exclaim--
"'Brother, you are an arrant ring-maker and a horse-breaker; you'll make a hempen ring to break your own neck of a horse one of these days.'
"They pressed their horses' flanks, again leaped over the ditches, and speedily vanished, amidst the whirlwinds of dust which they raised upon the road.
"The words of the phantom Gypsy were ominous. Gypsy Will was eventually executed for a murder committed in his early youth, in company with two English labourers, one of whom confessed the fact on his death-bed. He was the head of the clan Young, which, with the clan Smith, still haunts two of the eastern counties."
In spite of this, Borrow said in the same book that this would probably be the last occasion he would have to speak of the Gypsies or anything relating to them. In "The Bible in Spain," written and revised several years later, he changed his mind. He wrote plenty about Gypsies and still more about himself. When he wished to show the height of the Spanish Prime Minister, Mendizabal, he called him "a huge athletic man, somewhat taller than myself, who measure six feet two without my shoes." He informed the public that when he met an immense dog in strolling round the ruins above Monte Moro, he stooped till his chin nearly touched his knee and looked the animal full in the face, "and, as John Leyden says, in the noblest ballad which the Land of Heather has produced:--
'The hound he yowled, and back he fled, As struck with fairy charm.'"
When his servant Lopez was imprisoned at Villallos, Borrow had reason to fear that the man would be sacrificed to political opponents in that violent time, so, as he told the English minister at Madrid, he bore off Lopez, single-handed and entirely unarmed, through a crowd of at least one hundred peasants, and furthermore shouted: "Hurrah for Isabella the Second." And as for mystery, "The Bible in Spain" abounds with invitations to admiration and curiosity. Let one example suffice. He had come back to Seville from a walk in the country when a man emerging from an archway looked in his face and started back, "exclaiming in the purest and most melodious French: 'What do I see? If my eyes do not deceive me--it is himself. Yes, the very same as I saw him first at Bayonne; then long subsequently beneath the brick wall at Novgorod; then beside the Bosphorus; and last at--at--O my respectable and cherished friend, where was it that I had last the felicity of seeing your well- remembered and most remarkable physiognomy?'"
Borrows answers: "It was in the south of Ireland, if I mistake not. Was it not there that I introduced you to the sorcerer who tamed the savage horses by a single whisper into their ear? But tell me, what brings you to Spain and Andalusia, the last place where I should have expected to find you."
Baron Taylor (Isidore Justin Severin, Baron Taylor, 1789-1879) now introduces him to a friend as "My most cherished and respectable friend, one who is better acquainted with Gypsy ways than the Chef de Bohemiens a Triana, one who is an expert whisperer and horse-sorcerer, and who, to his honour I say it, can wield hammer and tongs, and handle a horse-shoe, with the best of the smiths amongst the Alpujarras of Granada."
Borrow then lightly portrays his accomplished and extraordinary cosmopolitan friend, with the conclusion:
"He has visited most portions of the earth, and it is remarkable enough that we are continually encountering each other in strange places and under singular circumstances. Whenever he descries me, whether in the street or the desert, the brilliant hall or amongst Bedouin haimas, at Novgorod or Stamboul, he flings up his arms and exclaims, 'O ciel! I have again the felicity of seeing my cherished and most respectable B---.'"
Borrow could not avoid making himself impressive and mysterious. He was impressive and mysterious without an effort; the individual or the public was impressed, and he was naturally tempted to be more impressive. Thus, in December of the year 1832 he had to go to London for his first meeting with the Bible Society, who had been recommended to give him work where