The Syracuse Herald Syracuse, New York April 20, 1930 College Professor Tells How He Fiddled His Way Into Strange Adventures With Hungarian Gypsies Dr. Walter STARKIE of Trinity College, Dublin, Describes Fantastic Fights and Frolics in Real Vagabondia With Tribes That Have Never Slept Under A Roof By: Hazel CANNING In all of us there are two selves. As our first conventional, self, solicitous of what the neighbors may say, we go through our nine to five routine, comb our hair as custom decrees, put away a little something regularly in the savings bank, and sigh at night - because our day has left us so unsatisfied. In the person of this proper, civilized self, we sit at desks through all the golden hours of the light, and write books or transact a weary mass of sedentary business. We play our roles as men, ultra civilized. But all the while our second self is making faces at our respectable self, and clamoring to be let out of prison. Sometimes some of us wish we might join the crew of Captain Kidd, or hold up the robber barons in the forest, as the right hand man of Robin Hood. We may, perhaps, wish to ride a wild horse in the circus, or to play gypsy across a strange land and lie down at night under twinkling stars. We want to let ourselves go - to feel strange delights, to indulge in frenzy, maybe. For such reasons did Dr. Walter STARKIE shake the learned dust of Trinity College, Dublin, from his shoes, put on a soiled old khaki suit, toss a knapsack over his back and set out, on foot, to travel with a band of Hungarian gypsies and pay his way with his violin. So Dr. STARKIE explains himself the reason why he, a college professor and director of the Abbey Theater, Dublin, and the chairman of the reception committee to great distinguished visitors for the Irish Free State), started off one day this last year to live by his fiddle with the gypsies. "All men need to let themselves go. I wanted to study gypsy music as a member of a gypsy band. I wanted to find out, what influence it had on peasants of Hungary and Rumania. Gypsy music. I found out, does for the gypsy and the peasant what Dionysius did for the citizens of old Greece. He did more than free them with the influence of his wine. He showed them what it is to be elevated in spirit. What a good thing for a man is a little frenzy, now and then. We have small chance of becoming elevated, in our prosaic modern age. We have little chance of frenzy, in our mechanized era. But these I found, when I danced at gypsy weddings and mourned with the mourners to the wailing cadence of the fiddle and the cello and the bass violin at a gypsy funeral. Life would not be possible, to me, without this elevation and this frenzy." Dr. Sparkie spoke recently about gypsy music, and his adventures with the gypsies of Hungary and Rumania. And this story of his is one to make Robert Louis Stevenson's, "Travels with a donkey" mild and tame, by comparison. First, Dr. Starkie tells how he was able to join a gypsy band at all. "The gypsies are very natural people, and they found me natural, I believe. The way I introduced myself to any horde that took my fancy was to approach them in a café, or in a village square, and to play my fiddle. To the gypsy, the old music handed down from primitive times, the folk lore of the countries where their ancestors have told fortunes and robbed doughty folk who live in houses - to them this music is a sacred thing. "It is they who have preserved it. Well, once I remember I played in a tavern where one of the gypsies prided himself on being the premier fiddler, I played my best, old gypsy strains, and they all paid attention. Finally a bystander, one of the peasants for whom the gypsies have kept alive the old music, remarked that my music was most acceptable. The conceited fellow responded: 'For a non-gypsy his talent is not bad.' "They accepted me as one of them and we set out on our vagabondage. They knew well that I was not one of them, but it did not seem at all strange that I, of the race of men who sleep under a roof, should want to roam the world with my fiddle and lie down in their mixed company at night, to sleep under the stars. They did not know that I had left a suitcase, with decent clothes and a sum of money that would seem big to them, in a town toward which we were faring, nor did they imagine that when we reached Budapest I donned those clothes of civilization and fraternized with the colleagues of mine, college professors. "The Hungarian gypsy professes to be a Catholic. They have a legend telling how one of their ancetors stole the fourth nail from the Cross. That is shy the crucifix has always only three. And that is also why they explain they have license to steal, once every seven years. Actually, they steal oftener than that. "Their weddings are the most frenzied ceremonies. The father of the bride will spend everything he has and invite everybody, gypsy and peasant. They drink, they play their marvellous, stirring music. In the middle of the three day rites, the father may send his old silver cups to the bank to raise more money for the festivities. All laugh, take joy in life and in marriage, its continuance, except the little bride. The one I saw sat in a corner and wept, ghastly frightened at her own bridal." But potent drama happened to this young man who, during eight months of most years, is a college professor and "greeter" for the Irish Free State. Let him tell about how once he was robbed. "It was in the hold of a vessel where I was traveling with a gypsy band in the evil-smelling steerage. I had a small sum of money with me, enough to pay my expenses for a 30 mile journey to the city where my clothes were waiting for me. The was one evil-smelling oil lamp burning on a table in the center of the steerage room. A gypsy man got up, wound the lamp with a cloth saturated in oil. The lamp flared up. A tongue of fire flew down to the floor. There was tremendous hysteria, shouts, cries of women and children, and all was overhung with a vile stench of burning oil and the heat of gross unwashed bodies. "After the hubbub was over I lay back to sleep, overcome by all the noxious fumes. When I wakened, my money was gone. I knew the rascal had started the fire for a smoke screen, that he might rob me during the confusion. I sought him out. "You have robbed me!" I said. "You cannot prove it!" he said. And he laughed in my face. There was nothing to do but to make a pleasant face of it. After we landed, I set out alone to connect up with my clothes. It was a travel of 30 miles, which I had to do on foot. If I ate, it would be thanks to my fiddle. At night I reached the house of a Hungarian peasant, I knocked and tried to make him understand I wanted shelter for the night. He would not open his door. They do not like to open, after they have gone to bed. I raised my fiddle and played a tune 'Hullamzg-Balatsn,' it is called, and it is one of their folk melodies, passionately beloved. "He opened the door and threw his arms about me. He took me in, fed me, insisted that I stay two days with him, and insisted that I sleep in his own bed. The houses, beds and food of the Hungarian peasant are scrupulously clean. "These gypsies whose souls are filled with music, these pagans who could teach melody to our tutored musicians, as they taught music to me, sometimes behaved like the most vicious wild men. The suddenness in which a fight could start, or tears could flow among them, was astounding. Once I started to take the picture of four gypsies playing at cards. One of the men came towards me and dealt me a terrific blow. I was on the ground in a moment, stunned and badly hurt. Others came rushing in to defend me. "Don't mind him!" they urged me, he is ugly. He has had bad luck at cards and he thinks it is your evil eye'. They pointed at the camera, I treated to 'reca' ? - a native brandy - all around. "I never knew of one marriage between a gypsy girl and Christian man to be successful. For one reason, to marry a gypsy girl is to marry her whole tribe. They come about visiting with their vermin and their rags and their stealing ways and, of course, their music. "So I could tell you many more stories of my travels with the gypsies, but, instead, I must now draw the moral. It is good for people to go vagabonding some time in their lives. In America you work that instinct out when, in your Middle West, you desert the quiet farms and go into the lumber camps of a winter. Or when you rig a bed in the Ford and set off for California. We may laugh at the gypsies; we may even scorn them as much as they scorn us, for the prisons of our houses and the slavery of our days.