When Gypsy and Ginger got married—
Oh, but before that I ought to say that those were not their names. Hers was the name of the most beautiful of women, and his the name of the most victorious of men. But they were not a bit like that really. Parents make these mistakes, and the false prophecies they invent for their infants at the font continue to be their delusions through life. But nobody else’s. As they grow up the children find their level, and are called according to their deserts. And so Gypsy was called Gypsy because his hair wasn’t really quite as black as a gypsy’s; and Ginger was called Ginger because her hair was the sort of hair that those who adore it love to insult. It was anything but ginger; or rather, it was everything besides. Such as mace, and cinnamon, and nutmeg, and cayenne, and ochre, and burnt sienna, and vandyke brown and a touch of chrome no. 3; and one hair, named Vivien, was pure vermilion. It was a ridiculous mixture really, and resembled the palette of an artist trying to paint beechwoods in Autumn. No, it didn’t; it resembled the beechwoods. In thinking of Ginger’s hair you must begin again, and wash out all the above colours, which are not really colours, but paints. Ginger’s hair, like all the colours of earth and sky, was made of fire and light. That is why colours can never be painted. I’m sorry to have gone on so long about Ginger’s hair, but I couldn’t help it; yet I should have been able to, for the hair itself was short. When she combed it over her head and face it hung as low as her upper lip, and so on all the way round, very smooth on the top, very thick at the bottom, and doing a lovely serpentine in and out just below the level of her eyebrows. When it got to her lip it did another one in, and never came out again.
When Gypsy and Ginger got married—
By the way, it was by the merest fluke that they did get married. A month before that Ginger chanced to be in Sussex (she never was anywhere by design), and she saw an empty cottage that took her fancy; it had a thatched roof with martins under the thatch, and two brick floors downstairs, and two whitewashed ceilings upstairs. Between the two ceilings was a green door three feet high, so you had to play at elephants to get from one ceiling to the other. When you were there you could stand upright; but if you wanted to look out of the window to talk to the martins you had to go down on your knees again. The cottage had got two chains of hills all to itself, one on each side, and a river at the bottom of the garden, running very full and level between green grass and gold kingcups.
Therefore Ginger knew that the cottage had got to be hers. She went to the Pub to ask about it, and the Pub gave her shandygaff and cheese and said it belonged to the Blacksmith.
“Why doesn’t the Blacksmith live in it?” asked Ginger.
“He’s keeping it for his son, till he gets married,” said the Pub.
“Is he going to get married?” asked Ginger.
“Not as we knows on,” said the Pub.
Ginger finished her shandygaff so hastily that she choked, and ran as fast as she could to the Blacksmith’s, with her mouth full of cheese. Between cheese and breathlessness she was unable to speak when she got there, so she merely leaned against the door waving her hands at the Blacksmith and his Son. They looked round at her. The Blacksmith said, “What d’ye want, missy?” and the Son didn’t say anything. Ginger gulped down the last of her cheese and said, “I want to marry your son.” The Blacksmith said, “He’s tokened to Lizzie Hooker,” and the Son didn’t say anything. Ginger stamped her foot and said, “When?” “Come dinner-time,” said the Blacksmith. The Son said nothing. “There!” said Ginger, “I knew I’d be too late.” And she turned and ran down the hill and took the next train to Sligo. The men went back to their work, and come supper-time the Blacksmith’s Son broke it off with Lizzie Hooker. But by then Ginger was nearly in Wales, which shows how fatal a thing is procrastination.
Gypsy knew this. He never procrastinated. But at that time he and Ginger were strangers, or this narrow squeak would never have happened. Ginger stayed a week in Sligo, went to Abbeyville for another, came back in a hurry because the Ballet was dancing Carnaval on Saturday afternoon, and then ran up to Ilkley for three days. She was next said to have been seen simultaneously in Northamptonshire and Petersfield, but the certain fact is that exactly a month after not marrying the Blacksmith’s Son in Sussex, she was in a boat on the Cam with Gypsy. He had come across her in the Backs five minutes previously, and asked her to go for a row. The next day Gypsy and Ginger got married.
