Lillie
So, I was on the internet (duh!) and I found this comment on Wikipedia.
'In a curious book, Bohemia in London by Arthur Ransome which is a partly fictional account of his early years in London, published in 1907 when he was 23, there are some fascinating, rather over-romanticised accounts of bohemian goings-on in the quarter. The American artist Pamela Colman Smith, the designer of A. E. Waite's Tarot card pack and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, features as "Gypsy" in the chapter "A Chelsea Evening".'
Arthur Ransome being the author of Swallows and Amazons.
So, anyway, I had to go look and I found the book and the bit about Gypsy
I include it here.
********************
At last we turned to the right, between houses with narrow gardens and little trees in front of them, and then to the right again, till we stopped at the end of a short street "Her name is
Gypsy," he said dramatically. "No one ever calls her anything else." Then he swung open the garden gate, walked up the steps of the house, and knocked vigorously on the door. Througha window on the left I had caught a glimpse of a silver lamp, and a brazen candle-stick, and a weird room in shaded lamplight. I was tiptoe with excitement For I was very young.
Someone broke off in a song inside, and quick steps shuffled in the passage. The door was flung open, and we saw a little round woman, scarcely more than a girl, standing in the threshold. She looked as if she had been the same age all her life, and would be so to the end. She was dressed in an orange-coloured coat that hung loose over a green skirt, with black tassels sewn all over the orange silk, like the frills on a red Indian's trousers. She welcomed us with a little shriek. It was the oddest, most uncanny little shriek, half laugh, half exclamation. It made me very shy. It was obviously an affectation, and yet seemed just the right manner of welcome from the strange little creature, "god-daughter of a witch and sister to a fairy," who uttered it She was very dark, and not thin, and when she smiled, with a smile that was peculiarly infectious, her twinkling gypsy eyes seemed to vanish altogether. Just now at the door they were the eyes of a joyous, excited child meeting the guests of a birthday party.
The actor shook hands, and, in his annoying, laughable, dramatic manner, introduced me as "a clever young man who has read philosophy." I could have kicked him.
"Come in!" she cried, and went shuffling down the passage in that heavy parti-coloured dress.
We left our hats and followed her into a mad room out of a fairy tale. As soon as I saw it I knew she could live in no other. It had been made of two smaller chambers by the removal of the partition wall, and had the effect of a well-designed curiosity shop, a place that Gautier would have loved to describe. The walls were dark green, and covered with brilliant-coloured drawings, etchings, and pastel sketches. A large round table stood near the window, spread with bottles of painting inks with differently tinted stoppers, china toys, paperweights of odd designs, ashtrays, cigarette boxes, and books ; it was lit up by a silver lamp, and there was an urn in the middle of it, in which incense was burning. A woolly monkey perched ridiculously on a pile of portfolios, and grinned at the cast of a woman^s head, that stood smiling austerely on the top of a black cupboard, in a medley of Eastern pottery and Indian gods. The mantel shelves, three stories high, were laden with gimcracks. A low bookcase, crammed and piled with books, was half hidden under a drift of loose pieces of music. An old grand piano, on which two brass bedroom candlesticks were burning, ran back into the inner room, where in the darkness was a tall mirror, a heap of crimson silks, and a low table with another candle flickering among the bottles and glasses on a tray. Chairs and stools were crowded everywhere, and on a big blue sofa against the wall a broadly whiskered picture dealer was sitting, looking at a book of Japanese prints.
We had scarcely been introduced to him, and settled into chairs, while the little woman in the orange coat was seating herself on a cushion, when a quick tap sounded on the window-pane. "The Birds!" she cried, and ran back into the passage. A moment or two later she came back, and a pair of tiny artists, for all the world like happy sparrows, skipped into the room. The actor knew them, and welcomed them in his magnificent way. They were the Benns, and had but recently married; she modelled in clay and wax, and he was painter newly come from Paris.
Two people better deserving their nickname would be hard to find. They flitted about the place, looking at the new prints hung on the walls, at the new china toy that Gypsy had been unable to deny herself, and chattering all the time. Benn and I were soon friendly, and he presently asked me to visit his studio. Just as he gave me a card with his address upon it, for which he had to ask his wife, he was caught by a sudden remembrance, and turning about asked Gypsy point blank across the broadside of conversation, " I say, you haven't such a thing as a big sword, have you? " Oh, yes, but she had, and in a minute the two little people were looking at a gigantic two-edged sword, as long as either of them, that hung from a hook on the wall. The actor, with a delighted exhibition of grace and height, reached it easily down, and Benn was for swinging it at once, with all the strength that he had, if his wife had not instantly brought him to sense and saved the place from devastation. Instead, he described the picture he was painting. The central figure, he told us, was to be an old knight looking regretfully at the armour and weapons he had used in his youth. This was the very sword for his purpose.
Just then there was another tap, and two women came in together. The first was a tall, dark Scottish girl, with a small head and a beautiful, graceful neck, very straight and splendid (I called her the Princess at once in my fantastic boyhood) y and the other a plump, jolly American.
As soon as the shaking of hands was all over someone asked Gypsy for a song. " Got very little voice to-night," she coughed, " and everybody wants something to drink first But I'll sing you a song afterwards." She went through to die table with the glasses in the inner room. "Who is for opal hush?" she cried, and all, except the American girl and the picture dealer, who preferred whisky, declared their throats were dry for nothing else. Wondering what the strange-named drink might be, I too asked for opal hush, and she read the puzzlement in my face. "You make it like this," she said, and
squirted lemonade from a syphon into a glass of red claret, so that a beautiful amethystine foam rose shimmering to the brim. " The Irish poets over in Dublin called it so ; and once, so they say, they went all round the town and asked at every public-house for two tall cymbals and an opal hush. They did not get what they wanted very easily, and I do not know what a tall cymbal may be. But this is the opal hush." It was very good, and as I drank I thought of those Irish poets, whose verses had meant much to me, and sipped the stuff with reverence as if it had been nectar from Olympus.
When everybody had their glasses, Gypsy came back into the front part of the room, and, sitting in a high-backed chair that was covered with gold and purple embroideries, she cleared her throat, leaned forward so that the lamplight fell on her weird little face, and sang, to my surprise, the old melody:
"O the googoo bird is a giddy bird,
No other is zo gay.
O the googoo bird is a merry bird,
Her zingeth all day.
Her zooketh zweet flowers
To make her voice clear,
And when her cryeth googoo, googoo.
The zummer draweth near."
Somehow I had expected something else. It seemed odd to hear that simple song drop word by word in the incense-laden atmosphere of that fantastic room.
After that she chanted in a monotone one of the poems from Mr. Yeats's " Wind Among the Reeds " :
"I went out into the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head.
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread."
And then the stately Scottish girl sat down at the old piano, and after playing an indolent little melody over the faded yellow keys, brought out in tinkling sweetness the best of all the songs that have ever come to London from the sea. Nearly all the company knew it by heart and sang together:
"Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies,
Adieu and farewell to you, ladies of Spain ;
For we've received orders for to sail for Old England,
And we may never see you, fair ladies, again.
So we'll rant and we'll roar, like true British sailors,
We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas,
Until we strike anchor in the channel of Old England;
From Ushant to Scilly 'tis thirty-five leagues.''
It is no wonder that such a lad as I was then should find the scene quite unforgettable. There was the beautiful head of the pianist, swaying a little with her music, and the weird group beside her — Gypsy in the orange coat leaning over her shoulder, the two small artists, on tiptoe, bending forward to remind themselves of the words, the hairy picture-dealer smiling on them benignantly, the actor posing against the mantelpiece, the plump American leaning forward with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, a cigarette between her lips, with the background of that uncanny room, with the silver lamp, the tall column of smoke from the incense urn, and the mad colours, that seemed, like the discordant company, to harmonise perfectly in those magical surroundings.
When the song was done, the actor told me how its melody had been taken down from an old sailor in this very room. The old fellow, brought here for the purpose, had been shy, as well he might be, and his mouth screwed into wrinkles so that no music would come from it. At last they made him comfortable on a chair, with a glass and a pipe, and built a row of screens all around him, that he might not be shamed. After a minute or two, when the smoke, rising in regular puffs above the screens, told them that he had regained his peace of mind, someone said, "Now, thenl" and a trembling whistling of the tune had given a musician the opportunity to catch the ancient melody on the keyboard of the piano. They had thus the pride of a version of their own, for they did not know until much later that another had already been printed in a song-book.
Presently the American girl begged for a story. Gypsy had spent some part of her life in the Indies, and knew a number of the old folk tales, of Annansee the spider, another Brer Rabbit in his cunning and shrewdness, and Chim Chim the little bird, and the singing turtle, and the Obeah Woman, who was a witch, "wid wrinkles deep as ditches on her brown face." She told them in the old dialect, in a manner of her own. Fastening a strip of ruddy tow about her head, so that it mingled with her own black hair, she flopped down on the floor, behind a couple of lighted candles, and, after a little introductory song that she had learned from a Jamaican nurse, told story after story, illustrating them with the help of wooden toys that she had made herself. She told them with such precision of phrasing that those who came often to listen soon had them by heart, and would interrupt her like children when, in a single word, she went astray. Tohear her was to be carried back to the primitive days of story-telling, and to understand, a little, how it was that the stories of the old minstrels were handed on from man to man with so little change upon the way.
That was my first evening of friendliness in Chelsea. For a long time after that I never let a week pass without going to that strange room to listen to the songs and tales, and to see the odd parties of poets and painters, actors and actresses, and nondescript irregulars who
there almost as regularly as I. Sometimes there would be half a dozen of us, sometimes twenty. Always we were merry. The evening was never wasted. There I heard poetry read as if the ghost of some old minstrel had descended on the reader, and shown how the words should be chanted aloud. There I heard stories told that were yet unwritten, and talk that was so good that it seemed a pity that it never would be. There I joined in gay jousts of caricature. There was a visitors' book that we filled with drawings and rhymes. Every evening that we met we used its pages as a tournament field,
"And mischievous and bold were the strokes we gave,
And merrily were they received."
There, too, we used to bring our work when we were busy upon some new thing, a painting, or a book, and work on with fresh ardour aftercheers or criticism.
The party broke up on that first night soon after the stories. We helped Gypsy to shut up the rooms and dowse the lights, and waved our good-nights to her as we saw her disappear into the house next door where she lodged.
****************
There may be more about Gypsy, later in the book, but I couldn't see any. I hate PDF's.
Beautiful picturesque description of that milieu though.
EDIT
If anyone wants to read the whole book, it's here http://www.archive.org/details/bohemiainlondon00ransgoog, and out of copyright, so it's OK.
'In a curious book, Bohemia in London by Arthur Ransome which is a partly fictional account of his early years in London, published in 1907 when he was 23, there are some fascinating, rather over-romanticised accounts of bohemian goings-on in the quarter. The American artist Pamela Colman Smith, the designer of A. E. Waite's Tarot card pack and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, features as "Gypsy" in the chapter "A Chelsea Evening".'
Arthur Ransome being the author of Swallows and Amazons.
So, anyway, I had to go look and I found the book and the bit about Gypsy
I include it here.
********************
At last we turned to the right, between houses with narrow gardens and little trees in front of them, and then to the right again, till we stopped at the end of a short street "Her name is
Gypsy," he said dramatically. "No one ever calls her anything else." Then he swung open the garden gate, walked up the steps of the house, and knocked vigorously on the door. Througha window on the left I had caught a glimpse of a silver lamp, and a brazen candle-stick, and a weird room in shaded lamplight. I was tiptoe with excitement For I was very young.
Someone broke off in a song inside, and quick steps shuffled in the passage. The door was flung open, and we saw a little round woman, scarcely more than a girl, standing in the threshold. She looked as if she had been the same age all her life, and would be so to the end. She was dressed in an orange-coloured coat that hung loose over a green skirt, with black tassels sewn all over the orange silk, like the frills on a red Indian's trousers. She welcomed us with a little shriek. It was the oddest, most uncanny little shriek, half laugh, half exclamation. It made me very shy. It was obviously an affectation, and yet seemed just the right manner of welcome from the strange little creature, "god-daughter of a witch and sister to a fairy," who uttered it She was very dark, and not thin, and when she smiled, with a smile that was peculiarly infectious, her twinkling gypsy eyes seemed to vanish altogether. Just now at the door they were the eyes of a joyous, excited child meeting the guests of a birthday party.
The actor shook hands, and, in his annoying, laughable, dramatic manner, introduced me as "a clever young man who has read philosophy." I could have kicked him.
"Come in!" she cried, and went shuffling down the passage in that heavy parti-coloured dress.
We left our hats and followed her into a mad room out of a fairy tale. As soon as I saw it I knew she could live in no other. It had been made of two smaller chambers by the removal of the partition wall, and had the effect of a well-designed curiosity shop, a place that Gautier would have loved to describe. The walls were dark green, and covered with brilliant-coloured drawings, etchings, and pastel sketches. A large round table stood near the window, spread with bottles of painting inks with differently tinted stoppers, china toys, paperweights of odd designs, ashtrays, cigarette boxes, and books ; it was lit up by a silver lamp, and there was an urn in the middle of it, in which incense was burning. A woolly monkey perched ridiculously on a pile of portfolios, and grinned at the cast of a woman^s head, that stood smiling austerely on the top of a black cupboard, in a medley of Eastern pottery and Indian gods. The mantel shelves, three stories high, were laden with gimcracks. A low bookcase, crammed and piled with books, was half hidden under a drift of loose pieces of music. An old grand piano, on which two brass bedroom candlesticks were burning, ran back into the inner room, where in the darkness was a tall mirror, a heap of crimson silks, and a low table with another candle flickering among the bottles and glasses on a tray. Chairs and stools were crowded everywhere, and on a big blue sofa against the wall a broadly whiskered picture dealer was sitting, looking at a book of Japanese prints.
We had scarcely been introduced to him, and settled into chairs, while the little woman in the orange coat was seating herself on a cushion, when a quick tap sounded on the window-pane. "The Birds!" she cried, and ran back into the passage. A moment or two later she came back, and a pair of tiny artists, for all the world like happy sparrows, skipped into the room. The actor knew them, and welcomed them in his magnificent way. They were the Benns, and had but recently married; she modelled in clay and wax, and he was painter newly come from Paris.
Two people better deserving their nickname would be hard to find. They flitted about the place, looking at the new prints hung on the walls, at the new china toy that Gypsy had been unable to deny herself, and chattering all the time. Benn and I were soon friendly, and he presently asked me to visit his studio. Just as he gave me a card with his address upon it, for which he had to ask his wife, he was caught by a sudden remembrance, and turning about asked Gypsy point blank across the broadside of conversation, " I say, you haven't such a thing as a big sword, have you? " Oh, yes, but she had, and in a minute the two little people were looking at a gigantic two-edged sword, as long as either of them, that hung from a hook on the wall. The actor, with a delighted exhibition of grace and height, reached it easily down, and Benn was for swinging it at once, with all the strength that he had, if his wife had not instantly brought him to sense and saved the place from devastation. Instead, he described the picture he was painting. The central figure, he told us, was to be an old knight looking regretfully at the armour and weapons he had used in his youth. This was the very sword for his purpose.
Just then there was another tap, and two women came in together. The first was a tall, dark Scottish girl, with a small head and a beautiful, graceful neck, very straight and splendid (I called her the Princess at once in my fantastic boyhood) y and the other a plump, jolly American.
As soon as the shaking of hands was all over someone asked Gypsy for a song. " Got very little voice to-night," she coughed, " and everybody wants something to drink first But I'll sing you a song afterwards." She went through to die table with the glasses in the inner room. "Who is for opal hush?" she cried, and all, except the American girl and the picture dealer, who preferred whisky, declared their throats were dry for nothing else. Wondering what the strange-named drink might be, I too asked for opal hush, and she read the puzzlement in my face. "You make it like this," she said, and
squirted lemonade from a syphon into a glass of red claret, so that a beautiful amethystine foam rose shimmering to the brim. " The Irish poets over in Dublin called it so ; and once, so they say, they went all round the town and asked at every public-house for two tall cymbals and an opal hush. They did not get what they wanted very easily, and I do not know what a tall cymbal may be. But this is the opal hush." It was very good, and as I drank I thought of those Irish poets, whose verses had meant much to me, and sipped the stuff with reverence as if it had been nectar from Olympus.
When everybody had their glasses, Gypsy came back into the front part of the room, and, sitting in a high-backed chair that was covered with gold and purple embroideries, she cleared her throat, leaned forward so that the lamplight fell on her weird little face, and sang, to my surprise, the old melody:
"O the googoo bird is a giddy bird,
No other is zo gay.
O the googoo bird is a merry bird,
Her zingeth all day.
Her zooketh zweet flowers
To make her voice clear,
And when her cryeth googoo, googoo.
The zummer draweth near."
Somehow I had expected something else. It seemed odd to hear that simple song drop word by word in the incense-laden atmosphere of that fantastic room.
After that she chanted in a monotone one of the poems from Mr. Yeats's " Wind Among the Reeds " :
"I went out into the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head.
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread."
And then the stately Scottish girl sat down at the old piano, and after playing an indolent little melody over the faded yellow keys, brought out in tinkling sweetness the best of all the songs that have ever come to London from the sea. Nearly all the company knew it by heart and sang together:
"Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies,
Adieu and farewell to you, ladies of Spain ;
For we've received orders for to sail for Old England,
And we may never see you, fair ladies, again.
So we'll rant and we'll roar, like true British sailors,
We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas,
Until we strike anchor in the channel of Old England;
From Ushant to Scilly 'tis thirty-five leagues.''
It is no wonder that such a lad as I was then should find the scene quite unforgettable. There was the beautiful head of the pianist, swaying a little with her music, and the weird group beside her — Gypsy in the orange coat leaning over her shoulder, the two small artists, on tiptoe, bending forward to remind themselves of the words, the hairy picture-dealer smiling on them benignantly, the actor posing against the mantelpiece, the plump American leaning forward with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, a cigarette between her lips, with the background of that uncanny room, with the silver lamp, the tall column of smoke from the incense urn, and the mad colours, that seemed, like the discordant company, to harmonise perfectly in those magical surroundings.
When the song was done, the actor told me how its melody had been taken down from an old sailor in this very room. The old fellow, brought here for the purpose, had been shy, as well he might be, and his mouth screwed into wrinkles so that no music would come from it. At last they made him comfortable on a chair, with a glass and a pipe, and built a row of screens all around him, that he might not be shamed. After a minute or two, when the smoke, rising in regular puffs above the screens, told them that he had regained his peace of mind, someone said, "Now, thenl" and a trembling whistling of the tune had given a musician the opportunity to catch the ancient melody on the keyboard of the piano. They had thus the pride of a version of their own, for they did not know until much later that another had already been printed in a song-book.
Presently the American girl begged for a story. Gypsy had spent some part of her life in the Indies, and knew a number of the old folk tales, of Annansee the spider, another Brer Rabbit in his cunning and shrewdness, and Chim Chim the little bird, and the singing turtle, and the Obeah Woman, who was a witch, "wid wrinkles deep as ditches on her brown face." She told them in the old dialect, in a manner of her own. Fastening a strip of ruddy tow about her head, so that it mingled with her own black hair, she flopped down on the floor, behind a couple of lighted candles, and, after a little introductory song that she had learned from a Jamaican nurse, told story after story, illustrating them with the help of wooden toys that she had made herself. She told them with such precision of phrasing that those who came often to listen soon had them by heart, and would interrupt her like children when, in a single word, she went astray. Tohear her was to be carried back to the primitive days of story-telling, and to understand, a little, how it was that the stories of the old minstrels were handed on from man to man with so little change upon the way.
That was my first evening of friendliness in Chelsea. For a long time after that I never let a week pass without going to that strange room to listen to the songs and tales, and to see the odd parties of poets and painters, actors and actresses, and nondescript irregulars who
there almost as regularly as I. Sometimes there would be half a dozen of us, sometimes twenty. Always we were merry. The evening was never wasted. There I heard poetry read as if the ghost of some old minstrel had descended on the reader, and shown how the words should be chanted aloud. There I heard stories told that were yet unwritten, and talk that was so good that it seemed a pity that it never would be. There I joined in gay jousts of caricature. There was a visitors' book that we filled with drawings and rhymes. Every evening that we met we used its pages as a tournament field,
"And mischievous and bold were the strokes we gave,
And merrily were they received."
There, too, we used to bring our work when we were busy upon some new thing, a painting, or a book, and work on with fresh ardour aftercheers or criticism.
The party broke up on that first night soon after the stories. We helped Gypsy to shut up the rooms and dowse the lights, and waved our good-nights to her as we saw her disappear into the house next door where she lodged.
****************
There may be more about Gypsy, later in the book, but I couldn't see any. I hate PDF's.
Beautiful picturesque description of that milieu though.
EDIT
If anyone wants to read the whole book, it's here http://www.archive.org/details/bohemiainlondon00ransgoog, and out of copyright, so it's OK.
