God's Sparrows. Philip Child
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of grown people, that he felt miserable, but a terrible dart pierced him, as when in a dream you fall suddenly before you can brace yourself. He felt a sickening dread, but he felt it as a child feels it, with no remembered pattern of dismay and panic to teach him that even despair heals, leaving a scar to be sure, but smoothed out to a recollection.
The picture that flashed in his memory was of Joanna crumpled on the floor of the barn with her head gashed … the other children stricken suddenly into silence … his father carrying Joanna in his arms and giving Dan, as he passed him, an unforgettable look of horror. “Come into the house, all of you,” he had said. Hours later, it seemed, his father had come out to them and asked sternly: “How did this happen?”
They had all answered at once, except Dan, who could not have spoken. “We were playing theatre — Dan was going to juggle with croquet balls and —”
“Alastair, you tell me,” said Pen.
“Dan had on a dress suit, Father, and when he started to juggle, he fell and lost his temper and —”
“Mr. Thatcher,” exclaimed Beatrice Elton indignantly (she always took Dan’s side), “it wasn’t like that at all. Alastair tripped Dan on purpose and Dan fell and was hit by a ball and ripped his dress suit. Then Dan lost his temper and he threw a ball at Alastair and Alastair ducked and it hit Joanna and it knocked her off the stage and she hit a shovel and Alastair is a sneak and Dan didn’t do it on purpose, truly he didn’t.”
His father had said: “My boy, you have done a terrible thing.”
Joanna’s voice, calling in panic out of the night’s vacancy, froze his heart. He was too young to bear the knowledge of man’s insecurity in life, and yet the urgency of the cry sank down to that dark fear born with the child, only later to be understood completely by the man.… Beyond the door he could still hear his parents’ voices whispering so that he should not hear. He could not bear it.
There was only one thing for a child to do, and he did it instinctively. He had to run away. He was fleeing from himself, not from persons or places.
He crept back to his room and sat down on the bed, dangling his legs in the path of the moonbeam. Silence now in the house except for the footsteps pacing up and down, up and down in Joanna’s room.… You wished to march out into the wide world — there it lay, outside the window, you had only to step into it.
He put on old clothes, quietly, so as not to wake Alastair. Then he took his twenty-two rifle out of the bureau drawer; for a gipsy often had to shoot rabbits for the pot. Gipsies lived by their good right arm; here today and gone tomorrow, they roamed over the wide world with never a care as long as they had horses and tents and their guns to get food with. He dropped the rifle from the window, climbed out, walked along a ledge to the upper veranda, and swarmed down a post onto the lawn. The grass was wet with dew and shone like silver.
At the gate he turned and looked back at Ardentinny. It stood rambling, ivy-clad , its incongruities mellowed as age mellows the visible marks of conflict in a man; dark, though, and a little grim, like the visage of a puritan. But to the boy it was simply his home. He said goodbye to it.
He turned his face down Galinée Street and began to walk fast. The gipsies! Kekkeno mush’s poov. There was not a single footfall but his own in the deserted streets. Presently, he had passed the limits of the city and was walking down a dusty country road toward Cholera Point. He began to feel tired, but he was still elated. Beside the road there was a neglected garden; he climbed the fence and lay down in the long grass under a snowball bush in blossom, and stared up through the leaves into the moon-white sky. Behind the bush a Lombardy poplar pointed its spear to the sky, standing guard over the blossoming shrub like a pikeman over dreaming beauty. But Dan did not think of that; no words came to him to express the poetry of the night. Uncorrupted by the need of maturity to voice the beauty that eluded us, he could drink it in, not with coldly analyzing reason, but with his whole soul. This is to be free! No moment before or after — only this!
He got up and walked on and on.
A dog barked and Dan, rounding a turn in the road, spied the gaudy gipsy wagons with their empty shafts nuzzling the grass and the horses tethered to their carved sides. A man was sitting beside the embers of a fire in front of the wagons, mending a harness. He was the colour of an Indian, Dan thought, only with sharper features. He went on working at the harness without looking up. Dan was very tired, and all at once he felt frightened. His boy’s dream of himself living a glorious life among gipsies changed to reality. These were strangers; what would they say?
He marched forward over his fear, and the gipsy looked up and surveyed with sharp eyes the small apparition shouldering a twenty-two rifle. He showed no surprise, and Dan suddenly realized that he had been observed for some time.
He planted himself in front of the man and said, “Good morning,” in a faltering voice.
“Is it?” said the gipsy impassively.… “Now who may you be?”
“I’m Daniel Thatcher.”
“Thatcher? And where do you live?”
“I live in Ardentinny. That’s the big house under the hill, near the asylum.… Only I don’t anymore.”
“Oho! So you don’t anymore?”
“No.… I’d like to be a gipsy.”
The man did not seem in the least surprised. He turned his head a little, without taking his eyes from Dan, and called: “Lil, auvacoi !” A woman glided out from the caravan door and stood beside him. The man spoke to her quietly and so low that Dan could not hear what they said. Gipsy talk? he wondered. Then the man raised his voice. “He wants to be a Romany chal , Lil.”
The woman stared at Dan, then she and the man looked at each other. Dan thought they smiled.
“He looks like a —” began the woman, but the man said imperiously, “Jal a bit!” Then to Dan, “So you want to be a gipsy, boy?”
“Yes,” said Dan.
“What does your father do?”
“He is a maner — manufacturer of steel.”
“Of steel, eh? Why did you run away?”
“Because — because I wanted to.”
“To see the world, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And what will your father and mother say?”
Dan hung his head.
“Don’t they want you at home?”
“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Dan, “but — but you see my sister —” But he could not tell strangers about Joanna. “What can you do, boy? Could you go without food for three days? Could you lie all night under a hedgerow when it’s raining? Could you walk all day and watch the horses at night? Could you?”
“Yes,” said Dan stoutly.
“Do you know how to steal chickens?” asked the man with a twinkle. “Do you know how to lie? Can you bakkarder a horse — tell fortunes — read a patteran ? What can you do?”
“I can shoot rabbits,” asserted Dan.
“He can shoot rabbits!” repeated the gipsy drolly to Lil, and they both burst into laughter that was so contagious and so friendly that he began to like them.
“Now look you, boy. You have to be born free to be a gipsy.… Now you lie down here and put this blanket over you.”
“But I don’t want to sleep,” said Dan suspiciously.
“Then look at the stars. Which is the Pole Star?”
“I don’t know,” said Dan sheepishly.
“And you want to be a gipsy!”
Dan settled into the blanket which the gipsy woman tucked around his shoulders. From the caravan