False Gypsies

ONE of the best restaurants in New York, and one of the most exacting for young purses, had once its vogue among discontented youths of irrepressible individuality. There they found, on happier days, some popular tenor, an approachable merchant from Martinique, a talkative boulevardier, or some other incarnation of their Mistress France. At least they found one another. When plain William had failed once more to vend his erotic verse, and the undoubted distinction of Edward’s black mane had not yet sufficed to palm off his impressionism, and Herbert had a thing for Town Topics, not quite finished, it was a distinct solace to leave work for condolence in the pose of the Latin Quarter. You sauntered into the café, saluted the very business-like woman at the counter, found a loose French weekly, and sat heside a marble-topped table at the window. The others would arrive; and together you would drink toward a serener view of life. To have hope rather than faith, to be idle under the guise of research into humanity, to indulge a smattering of French and a taste for spirits, to talk dispassionately of vaudeville, — these made you eligible; this was Bohemian. Deux mazagrans, said with quiet assurance, was almost equivalent to conversation. If you expatiated upon symbolism without boggling at the absinthe, you were a Bohemian professed. What have cigarettes and uncooked criticism in a French restaurant to do with Bohemia ?

Something, no doubt. Bohemia may be entered by the Pass of Discontent. Revolt from the conventional, as it may happily lead into generous enthusiasm for whatever asserts individuality, may arise from the assertion of one’s own individuality. Only, the assertion is not tolerable for long without proof; and merely to put on the manner of Bohemia is a convention, like any other. Alas ! for the perpetual youths at the marble-topped table it was the cloak of indolence, sham Bohemia dissipating the alms of Philistia. A murky basement not far away showed franker stuff. The company that met with friendly nods by the long tables had already weighed the price of freedom. Each held his half-success in what he loved and believed, and the fellowship of those that measured life so, worth a hall bedroom, and plain, irregular meals. The cutting away of pretense, instead of bringing a crop of cynicism, left the ground clear for the best of talk, for a criticism of life which, though sometimes thin, was never unreal. They were not artists and poets, nor even journalists, but second-rate illustrators, story-writers, and essayists in the dear leisure of a newspaper day, serious students of ideas, — ideas barren enough, it might chance, but still ideas. So dinner was an unaffected gayety, — the higher if there had been no luncheon, — asking no stimulus beyond the cheap ordinary wine and the man across the table. The low room clashed with conversation and laughter, reeked with pipesmoke; but there was no other intemperance. Until the foothold was gained, the mastery won, this for them was life. Brave travelers, they chose Bohemia for their crossing.

And Bohemia repaid the choice. At the long tables one was free to wear his own guise without apology, and sure of the welcome he gave. It was the code that you might not address a novice, however promising he, however talkative you, until he opened the way; but that you might smoke your rat-tail cigar on the back of a friend’s chair, or on the table after the apples and cheese. When music came in from the street, harp or guitar and violin tucking themselves between tables against the wall, the whole roomful would sometimes chink the measure on glasses, or sing a chorus from Trovatore. On one supreme evening the taciturn Colonel left his spaghetti, flung a coat-tail over each arm, and with a fine decorous abandon danced up and down the midst, precisely nimble. There was a roar of applause at this hyperbole of the spirit of the place ; but the Colonel, having had his fling, resumed his fork without word or smile. He had expressed himself.

Withal it would have been hard to find a tavern stricter. The few women that came were reporters, eager sometimes in talk, smoking when they chose, but rarely expansive, and commonly in the sober dignity of middle age ; or minor singers with their husbands, a hardworking few, less adept in conversation. Of drinking there was very little. Money was too hard won, and this was distinctly a place to eat in. When an Italian impresario and his presumable patron stumbled in by chance one evening and talked tipsily loud — no more — Teresa was in from the kitchen, ordering them from her house in brave Italian and broken English. The company silently approved, and they never came again.

For its little while, the time of passage, this was a solace in discipline. To be free, to be worthy of your neighbor’s keen question, to give and take the ease of simple gayety that you might the better work for yourself, it is a colored life. But not for long. Rather, “Woe is me that I have my habitation among the tents of Kedar.” They that dwell in Bohemia because they have unlearned the way forth suffer dreary and repulsive decline. An old gypsy is tolerable only if he be a real gypsy, not in choice or lapse of will, but in the blood. This is the race whose journey has no end, for whom life and all the world is Bohemia, only a space for travel. Moving always on the highway, stopping always short of the city, these are no shiftless tramps in wagons, but a race doomed to make no progress except in physical distance, and to make that always, to kill time. For any but the blood to spend a lifetime on the road is as unnatural as for this blood to keep house. The real gypsies are happy, doubtless, as the nomads of the world’s childhood. Perpetual youth is perpetual limitation; once the limitation is seen, intolerable to any zeal for manhood.

To us others, not of the blood, even to the least conventional of an elaborate civilization, Bohemia must be a country of inns, — inns for the poor adventurous young, responsive to the freedom in others which they must have in themselves. Like the actual Switzerland, it is only for our summer. A careless while to have no home is to some men, fewer women, an exhilaration. To let slip the hope of home is a cowardice or a curse. Clap pack on back, then, or ship as stowaways for the seacoast of Bohemia. But be ready for random fare and a truss of hay; be ready also to go on, or else to return, even to Philistia, not ungrateful for memories.

Charles Sears Baldwin.