26 the Court of Flags and Tower Of The Giralda
I remember it especially from beyond the Guadalquivir in the drive we took through Triana to the village of Italica, where three Roman emperors were born, as the guide-books will officiously hasten to tell, and steal away your chance of treating your reader with any effect of learned research. These emperors (I will not be stopped by any guide-book from saying) were Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius; and Triana is named for the first of them. Fortunately, we turned to the right after crossing the bridge and so escaped the gipsy quarter, but we paused through a long street so swarming with children that we wondered to hear whole schoolrooms full of them humming and droning their lessons as we made our way among the tenants. Fortunately, they played mostly in the gutters, the larger looking after the smaller when their years and riches were so few more, with that beautiful care which childhood bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe. To say that those Spanish children were as tenderly watchful of these Spanish babies as English children is to say everything. Now and then a mother cared for a babe as only a mother can in an office which the pictures and images of the Most Holy Virgin consecrate and endear in lands where the sterilized bottle is unknown, but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms and crooned whatever was the Spanish of—
Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b’ar;Rack back, baby, see it hangin’ thar.
For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came to the Spanish throne from Naples, full of beneficent projects and ideals, bestowed upon his unwilling and ungrateful subjects. These roads were made about the middle of the eighteenth century, and they have been gathering dust ever since, so that the white powder now lies in the one beyond Triana five or six inches deep. Along the sides occasional shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened away, though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens, and the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats. In some of the foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards with olives heaped under them and peasants still resting from their midday breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully fringed the wayside; our driver said it had no name, and later an old peasant said it was “bad.”
VII
We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we met a troop of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and very effective in their black robes against the white road. When we came to the village that was amunicipiumunder Augustus and acoloniaunder Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as we glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless, but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. We did not meet with universal favor as we drove by; some groups of girls mocked our driver; when we said one of them was pretty he answered that he had seen prettier.
At the entrance to the ruins of the amphitheater which forms the tourist’s chief excuse for visiting Italica the popular manners softened toward us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They followed us into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless old custodian who took possession of us as his proper prey and led us through the moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats which form the amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off from the mass and lie detached, but the mass keeps the form and dignity of the original design; and in the lonely fields there it had something august and proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or the Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced the interior, and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth, but near the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them which restored the vision of the “grandeur that was Rome” pretty well over the known world when this great work was in its prime. Our custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any old Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own Spanish was so slight and hispatoiswas so dense that the best we could do was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On this his one word of English, repeated as we passed through the subterranean doors, “Lion, lion, lion,” cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened into a vivid community of ideas when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell us some of the small Roman coins which formed his stock in trade. The poor place was beautifully neat, and from his window he made us free of a sight of Seville, signally the cathedral and the Giralda, such as could not be bought for money in New York.
Then we set out on our return, leaving unvisited to the left the church of San Isidore de Campo, with its tombs of Guzman the Good and that Better Lady Dona Urraca Osorio, whom Peter the Cruel had burned. I say better, because I hold it nobler in Urraca to have rejected the love of a wicked king than in Guzman to have let the Moors slay his son rather than surrender a city to them. But I could only pay honor to her pathetic memory and the memory of that nameless handmaid of hers who rushed into the flames to right the garments on the form which the wind had blown them away from, and so perished with her. We had to take on trust from the guide-books all trace of the Roman town where the three emperors were born, and whose “palaces, aqueducts, and temples and circus were magnificent.” We had bought some of the “coins daily dug up,” but we intrusted to the elements those “vestiges of vestiges” left of Trajan’s palaces after an envious earthquake destroyed them so lately as 1755.
The one incident of our return worthy of literature was the dramatic triumph of a woman over a man and a mule as we saw it exhibited on the parapet of a culvert over a dry torrent’s bed. It was the purpose of this woman, standing on the coping in statuesque relief and showing against the sky the comfortable proportions of the Spanish housewife, to mount the mule behind the man. She waited patiently while the man slowly and as we thought faithlessly urged the mule to the parapet; then, when she put out her hands and leaned forward to take her seat, the mule inched softly away and left her to recover her balance at the risk of a fall on the other side. We were too far for anything but the dumb show, but there were, no doubt, words which conveyed her opinions unmistakably to both man and mule. With our hearts in our mouths we witnessed the scene and its repetitions till we could bear it no longer, and we had bidden our cabman drive on when with a sudden spring the brave woman launched herself semicircularly forward and descended upon the exact spot which she had been aiming at. There solidly established on the mule, with her arms fast round the man, she rode off; and I do not think any reader of mine would like to have been that mule or that man for the rest of the way home.
We met many other mules, much more exemplary, in teams of two, three, and four, covered with bells and drawing every kind of carryall and stage and omnibus. These vehicles were built when the road was, about 1750, and were, like the road, left to the natural forces for keeping themselves in repair. The natural forces were not wholly adequate in either case, but the vehicles were not so thick with dust as the road, because they could shake it off. They had each two or four passengers seated with the driver; passengers clustered over the top and packed the inside, but every one was in the joyous mood of people going home for the day. In a plaza not far from the Triana bridge you may see these decrepit conveyances assembling every afternoon for their suburban journeys, and there is no more picturesque sight in Seville, more homelike, more endearing. Of course, when I say this I leave out of the count the bridge over the Guadalquivir at the morning or evening hour when it is covered with brightly caparisoned donkeys, themselves covered with men needing a shave, and gay-kerchiefed women of every age, with boys and dogs underfoot, and pedestrians of every kind, and hucksters selling sea-fruit and land-fruit and whatever else the stranger would rather see than eat. Very little outcry was needed for the sale of these things, which in Naples or even in Venice would have been attended by such vociferation as would have sufficed to proclaim a city in flames.
On a day not long after our expedition to Italica we went a drive with a young American friend living in Seville, whom I look to for a book about that famous city such as I should like to write myself if I had the time to live it as he has done. He promised that he would show us a piece of the old Roman wall, but he showed us ever so much more, beginning with the fore court of the conventual church of Santa Paula, where we found the afternoon light waiting to illumine for us with its tender caress the Luca della Robbia-like colored porcelain figures of the portal and the beautiful octagon tower staying a moment before taking flight for heaven: the most exquisite moment of our whole fortnight in Seville. Tall pots of flowers stood round, and the grass came green through the crevices of the old foot-worn pavement. When we passed out a small boy scuffled for our copper with the little girl who opened the gate for us, but was brought to justice by us, and joined cheerfully in the chorus of children chanting “Mo-ney, mo-ney!” round us, but no more expecting an answer to their prayer than if we had been saints off the church door.
We passed out of the city by a gate where in a little coign of vantage a cobbler was thoughtfully hammering away in the tumult at a shoe-sole, and then suddenly on our right we had the Julian wall: not a mere fragment, but a good long stretch of it. The Moors had built upon it and characterized it, but had not so masked it as to hide the perdurable physiognomy of the Roman work. It was vastly more Roman wall than you see at Rome; but far better than this heroic image of war and waste was the beautiful old aqueduct, perfectly Roman still, with no visible touch from Moor, or from Christian, before or after the Moor, and performing its beneficent use after two thousand years as effectively as in the years before Christ came to bless the peacemakers. Nine miles from its mountain source the graceful arches bring the water on their shoulders; and though there is now an English company that pipes other streams to the city through its underground mains, the Roman aqueduct, eternally sublime in its usefulness, is constant to the purpose of the forgotten men who imagined it. The outer surfaces of the channel which it lifted to the light and air were tagged with weeds and immemorial mosses, and dripped as with the sweat of its twenty-centuried toil.
We followed it as far as it went on our way to a modern work of peace and use which the ancient friend and servant of man would feel no unworthy rival. Beyond the drives and gardens of the Delicias, where we lingered our last to look at the pleasurers haunting them, we drove far across the wheat-fields where a ship-canal five miles long is cutting to rectify the curve of the Guadalquivir and bring Seville many miles nearer the sea than it has ever been before; hitherto the tramp steamers have had to follow the course of the ships of Tarshish in their winding approach. The canal is the notion of the young king of Spain, and the work on it goes forward night and day. The electric lights were shedding their blinding glare on the deafening clatter of the excavating machinery, and it was an unworthy relief to escape from the intense modernity of the scene to that medieval retreat nearer the city where theaficionadosnight-long watch the bulls coming up from their pastures for the fight or the feast, whichever you choose to call it, of the morrow. These amateurs, whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk in the wayside cafe over their cups of chocolate and wait till in that darkest hour before dawn, with irregular trampling and deep bellowing, these hapless heroes of the arena pass on to their doom. It is a great thing for theaficionadoswho may imagine in that bellowing the the gladiator’s hail ofMorituri salutant.At any rate, it is very chic; it gives a man standing in Seville, which disputes with Madrid the primacy in bull-feasting. If the national capital has bull-feasting every Sunday of the year, all the famoustorreroscome from Andalusia, with the bulls, their brave antagonists, and in the great provincial capital there are bull-feasts of insurpassable, if not incomparable, splendor.
Before our pleasant drive ended we passed, as we had already passed several times, the scene of the famous Feria of Seville, the cattle show which draws tens of thousands to the city every springtime for business and pleasure, but mostly pleasure. The Feria focuses in its greatest intensity at one of the entrances to the Delicias, where the street is then so dense with every sort of vehicle that people can cross it only by the branching viaduct, which rises in two several ascents from each footway, intersecting at top and delivering their endless multitudes on the opposite sidewalk. Along the street are gay pavilions and cottages where the nobility live through the Feria with their families and welcome the public to the sight of their revelry through the open doors and windows. Then, if ever, the stranger may see the dancing, and hear the singing and playing which all the other year in Seville disappoints him of.
VIII
On the eve of All Saints, after we had driven over the worst road in the world outside of Spain or America, we arrived at the entrance of the cemetery where Baedeker had mysteriously said “some sort of fair was held.” Then we perceived that we were present at the preparations for celebrating one of the most affecting events of the Spanish year. This was the visit of kindred and friends bringing tokens of remembrance and affection to the dead. The whole long, rough way we had passed them on foot, and at the cemetery gate we found them arriving in public cabs, as well as in private carriages, with the dignity and gravity of smooth-shaven footmen and coachmen. In Spain these functionaries look their office more solemnly even than in England and affect you as peculiarly correct and eighteenth-century. But apart from their looks the occasion seemed more a festivity than a solemnity. The people bore flowers, mostly artificial, as well as lanterns, and within the cemetery they were furbishing up the monuments with every appliance according to the material, scrubbing the marble, whitewashing the stucco, and repainting the galvanized iron. The lanterns were made to match the monuments and fences architecturally, and the mourners were attaching them with a gentle satisfaction in their fitness; I suppose they were to be lighted at dark and to burn through the night. There were men among the mourners, but most of them were women and children; some were weeping, like a father leading his two little ones, and an old woman grieving for her dead with tears. But what prevailed was a community of quiet resignation, almost to the sort of cheerfulness which bereavement sometimes knows. The scene was tenderly affecting, but it had a tremendous touch of tragic setting in the long, straight avenue of black cypresses which slimly climbed the upward slope from the entrance to the farther bound of the cemetery. Otherwise there was only the patience of entire faith in this annually recurring visit of the living to the dead: the fixed belief that these should rise from the places where they lay. and they who survived them for yet a little more of time should join them from whatever end of the earth in the morning of the Last Day.
All along I have been shirking what any right-minded traveler would feel almost his duty, but I now own that there is a museum in Seville, the Museo Provincial, which was of course once a convent and is now a gallery, with the best, but not the very best, Murillos in it, not to speak of the best Zurburans. I will not speak at all of those pictures, because I could in no wise say what they were, or were like, and because I would not have the reader come to them with any opinions of mine which he might bring away with him in the belief that they were his own. Let him not fail to go to the museum, however; he will be the poorer beyond calculation if he does not; but he will be a beggar if he does not go to the Hospital de la Caridad, where in the church he will find six Murillos out-Murilloing any others excepting always the incomparable “Vision of St. Anthony” in the cathedral. We did not think of those six Murillos when we went to the hospital; we knew nothing of the peculiar beauty and dignity of the church; but we came because we wished to see what the repentance of a man could do for others after a youth spent in wicked riot. The gentle, pensive little Mother who received us carefully said at once that the hospital was not for the sick, but only for the superannuated and the poor and friendless who came to pass a night or an indefinite time in it, according to the pressure of their need; and after showing us the rich little church, she led us through long, clean corridors where old men lay in their white beds or sat beside them eating their breakfasts, very savory-looking, out of ample white bowls. Some of them saluted us, but the others we excused because they were so preoccupied. In a special room set apart for them were what we brutally call tramps, but who doubtless are known in Spain for indigent brethren overtaken on their wayfaring without a lodging for the night. Here they could come for it and cook their supper and breakfast at the large circular fireplace which filled one end of their room. They rose at our entrance and bowed; and how I wish I could have asked them, every one, about their lives!
There was nothing more except the doubt of that dear little Mother when I gave her a silver dollar for her kindness. She seemed surprised and worried, and asked, “Is it for the charity or for me?” What could I do but answer, “Oh, for your Grace,” and add another for the charity. She still looked perplexed, but there was no way out of our misunderstanding, if it was one, and we left her with her sweet, troubled face between the white wings of her cap, like angel’s wings mounting to it from her shoulders. Then we went to look at the statue of the founder bearing a hapless stranger in his arms in a space of flowers before the hospital, where a gardener kept watch that no visitor should escape without a bunch worth at least a peseta. He had no belief that the peseta could possibly be for the charity, and the poverty of the poor neighborhood was so much relieved by the mere presence of the hospital that it begged of us very little as we passed through.
IX
We had expected to go to Granada after a week in Seville, but man is always proposing beyond his disposing in strange lands as well as at home, and we were fully a fortnight in the far lovelier capital. In the mean time we had changed from our rooms in the rear of the hotel to others in the front, where we entered intimately into the life of the Plaza San Fernando as far as we might share it from our windows. It was not very active life; even the cabmen whose neat victorias bordered the place on three sides were not eager for custom; they invited the stranger, but they did not urge; there was a continual but not a rapid passing through the ample oblong; there was a good deal of still life on the benches where leisure enjoyed the feathery shadow of the palms, for the sun was apt to be too hot at the hour of noon, though later it conduced to the slumber which in Spain accompanies the digestion of the midday meal in all classes. As the afternoon advanced numbers of little girls came into the plaza and played children’s games which seemed a translation of games familiar to our own country. One evening a small boy was playing with them, but after a while he seemed to be found unequal to the sport; he was ejected from the group and went off gloomily to grieve apart with his little thumb in his mouth. The sight of his dignified desolation was insupportable, and we tried what a copper of the big-dog value would do to comfort him. He took it without looking up and ran away to the peanut-stand which is always steaming at the first corner all over Christendom. Late in the evening—in fact, after the night had fairly fallen—we saw him making his way into a house fronting on the plaza. He tried at the door with one hand and in the other he held an unexhausted bag of peanuts. He had wasted no word of thanks on us, and he did not now. When he got the door open he backed into the interior still facing us and so fading from our sight and knowledge.
He had the touch of comedy which makes pathos endurable, but another incident was wholly pathetic. As we came out of an antiquity shop near the cathedral one afternoon we found on the elevated footway near the Gate of Pardon a mother and daughter, both of the same second youth, who gently and jointly pronounced to us the magical wordencajes.Rather, they questioned us with it, and they only suggested, very forbearingly, that we should come to their house with them to see those laces, which of course were old laces; their house was quite near. But that one of us twain who was singly concerned inencajeshad fatigued and perhaps overbought herself at the antiquity shop, and she signified a regret which they divined too well was dissent. They looked rather than expressed a keen little disappointment; the mother began a faint insistence, but the daughter would not suffer it. Here was the pride of poverty, if not poverty itself, and it was with a pang that we parted from these mutely appealing ladies. We could not have borne it if we had not instantly promised ourselves to come the next day and meet them and go home with them and buy all theirencajesthat we had money for. We kept our promise, and we came the next day and the next and every day we remained in Seville, and lingered so long that we implanted in the cabmen beside the curbing the inextinguishable belief that we were in need of a cab; but we never saw those dear ladies again.
These are some of the cruel memories which the happiest travel leaves, and I gratefully recall that in the case of a custodian of the Columbian Museum, which adjoins the cathedral, we did not inflict a pang that rankled in our hearts for long. I gave him a handful of copper coins which I thought made up a peseta, but his eyes were keener, and a sorrow gloomed his brow which projected its shadow so darkly over us when we went into the cathedral for one of our daily looks that we hastened to return and make up the full peseta with another heap of coppers; a whole sunburst of smiles illumined his face, and a rainbow of the brightest colors arched our sky and still arches it whenever we think of that custodian and his rehabilitated trust in man.
This seems the crevice where I can crowd in the fact that bits of family wash hung from the rail of the old pulpit in the Court of Oranges beside the cathedral, and a pumpkin vine lavishly decorated an arcade near a doorway which perhaps gave into the dwelling of that very custodian. At the same time I must not fail to urge the reader’s seeing the Columbian Museum, which is richly interesting and chiefly for those Latin and Italian authors annotated by the immortal admiral’s own hand. These give the American a sense of him as the discoverer of our hemisphere which nothing else could, and insurpassably render the New World credible. At the same time they somehow bring a lump of pity and piety into the throat at the thought of the things he did and suffered. They bring him from history and make him at home in the beholder’s heart, and there seems a mystical significance in the fact that the volume most abounding in marginalia should beSeneca’s Prophecies.
The frequent passing of men as well as women and children through our Plaza San Fernando and the prevalence of men asleep on the benches; the immense majority of boys everywhere; the moralizedabattoiroutside the walls where the humanity dormant at the bull-feast wakes to hide every detail of slaughter for the market; a large family of cats basking at their ease in a sunny doorway; trains of milch goats with wicker muzzles, led by a milch cow from door to door through the streets; the sudden solemn beauty of the high altar in the cathedral, seen by chance on a brilliant day; the bright, inspiriting air of Seville; a glorious glimpse of the Giralda coming home from a drive; the figure of a girl outlined in a lofty window; a middle-aged Finnish pair trying to give themselves in murmured talk to the colored stucco of the Hall of the Ambassadors in what seems their wedding journey; two artists working near with sketches tilted against the wall; a large American lady who arrives one forenoon in traveling dress and goes out after luncheon in a mantilla with a fan and high comb; another American lady who appears after dinner in the costume of a Spanish dancing-girl; the fact that there is no Spanish butter and that the only good butter comes from France and the passable butter from Denmark; the soft long veils of pink cloud that trail themselves in the sky across our Plaza, and then dissolve in the silvery radiance of the gibbous moon; the yellowish-red electric Brush lights swinging from palm to palm as in the decoration of some vast ballroom; a second drive through Triana, and a failure to reach the church we set out for; the droves of brown pigs and flocks of brown sheep; the goatherds unloading olive boughs in the fields for the goats to browse; a dirty, kind, peaceful village, with an English factory in it, and a mansion of galvanized iron with an automobile before it; a pink villa on a hillside and a family group on the shoulder of a high-walled garden; a girl looking down from the wall, and a young man resting his hand on the masonry and looking up at her; the good faces of the people, men and women; boys wrestling and frolicking in the village streets; the wide dust-heap of a road, full of sudden holes; the heat of the sun in the first November week after touches of cold; the tram-cars that wander from one side of the city street to the other, and then barely miss scraping the house walls; in our drive home from our failure for that church, men with trains of oxen plowing and showing against the round red rayless sun; a stretch of the river with the crimson-hulled steamers, and a distant sail-boat seen across the fields; the gray moon that burnishes itself and rides bright and high for our return; people in balconies, and the air full of golden dust shot with bluish electric lights; here is a handful of suggestions from my note-book which each and every one would expand into a chapter or a small volume under the intensive culture which the reader may well have come to dread. But I fling them all down here for him to do what he likes with, and turn to speak at more length of the University, or, rather the University Church, which I would not have any reader of mine fail to visit.
X
With my desire to find likeness rather than difference in strange peoples, I was glad to have two of the students loitering in thepatioplay just such a trick on a carter at the gate as school-boys might play in our own land. While his back was turned they took his whip and hid it and duly triumphed in his mystification and dismay. We did not wait for the catastrophe, but by the politeness of another student found the booth of the custodian, who showed us to the library. A noise of recitation from the windows looking into thepatiofollowed us up-stairs; but maturer students were reading at tables in the hushed library, and at a large central table a circle of grave authorities of some sort were smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One, who seemed chief among them, rose and bowed us into the freedom of the place, and again rose and bowed when we went out. We did not stay long, for a library is of the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the books or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There are eighty thousand volumes in that library, but we had to come away without examining half of them. The church was more appreciable, and its value was enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff old sacristan to unlock it. We found it rich in a most wonderfulretablocarved in wood and painted. Besides the excellent pictures at the high altar, there are two portrait brasses which were meant to be recumbent, but which are stood up against the wall, perhaps to their surprise, without loss of impressiveness. Most notable of all is the mural tomb of Pedro Enriquez de Ribera and his wife: he who built the Casa de Pilatos, and as he had visited the Holy Land was naturally fabled to have copied it from the House of Pilate. Now, as if still continuing his travels, he reposes with his wife in a sort of double-decker monument, where the Evil One would have them suggest to the beholder the notion of passengers in the upper and lower berths of a Pullman sleeper.
Of all the Spanish cities that I saw, Seville was the most charming, not for those attributive blandishments of the song and dance which the tourist is supposed to find it, but which we quite failed of, but for the simpler and less conventional amiabilities which she was so rich in. I have tried to hint at these, but really one must go to Seville for them and let them happen as they will. Many happened in our hotel where we liked everybody, from the kindly, most capable Catalonian head waiter to the fine-headed little Napoleonic-looking waiter who had identified us at San Sebastian as Americans, because we spoke “quicklier” than the English, and who ran to us when we came into the hotel and shook hands with its as if we were his oldest and dearest friends. There was a Swiss concierge who could not be bought for money, and the manager was the mirror of managers. Fancy the landlord of the Waldorf-Astoria, or the St. Regis, coming out on the sidewalk and beating down a taxicabman from a charge of fifteen pesetas to six for a certain drive! It is not thinkable, and yet the like of it happened to xis in Seville from our manager. It was not his fault, when our rear apartment became a little too chill, and we took a parlor in the front and came back on the first day hoping to find it stored full of the afternoon sun’s warmth, but found that thecamererahad opened the windows and closed the shutters in our absence so that our parlor was of a frigidity which no glitter of the electric light could temper. The halls and public rooms were chill in anticipation and remembrance of any cold outside, but in otir parlor there was a hole for the sort of stove which we saw in the reading-room, twice as large as an average teakettle, with a pipe as big around as the average rain-pipe. I am sure this apparatus would have heated us admirably, but the weather grew milder and milder and we never had occasion to make the successful experiment. Meanwhile the moral atmosphere of the hotel was of a blandness which would have gone far to content us with any meteorological perversity. When we left it we were on those human terms with every one who ruled or served in it which one never attains in an American hotel, and rarely in an English one.
At noon on the 4th of November the sun was really hot in our plaza; but we were instructed that before the winter was over there would be cold enough, not of great frosty severity, of course, but nasty and hard to bear in the summer conditions which prevail through the year. I wish I could tell how the people live then in their beautiful, cool houses, but I do not know, and I do not know how they live at any season except from the scantiest hearsay. The women remain at home except when they go to church or to drive in the Delicias—that is to say, the women of society, of the nobility. There is no society in our sense among people of the middle classes; the men when they are not at business are at the cafe; the women when they are not at mass are at home. That is what we were told, and yet at a moving-picture show we saw many women of the middle as well as the lower classes. The frequent holidays afford them an outlet, and indoors they constantly see their friends and kindred at theirtertulias.
The land is in large holdings which are managed by the factors or agents of the noble proprietors. These, when they are not at Madrid, are to be found at their clubs, where their business men bring them papers to be signed, often unread. This sounds a little romantic, and perhaps it is not true. Some gentlemen take a great interest in the bull-feasts and breed the bulls and cultivate the bull-fighters; what other esthetic interests they have I do not know. All classes are said to be of an Oriental philosophy of life; they hold that the English striving and running to and fro and seeing strange countries comes in the end to the same thing as sitting still; and why should they bother? There is something in that, but one may sit still too much; the Spanish ladies, as I many times heard, do overdo it. Not only they do not walk abroad; they do not walk at home; everything is carried to and from them; they do not lift hand or foot. The consequence is that they have very small hands and feet; Gautier, who seems to have grown tired when he reached Seville, and has comparatively little to say of it, says that a child may hold a Sevillian lady’s foot in its hand; he does not say he saw it done. What is true is that no child could begin to clasp with both hands the waist of an average Sevillian lady. But here again the rule has its exceptions and will probably have more. Not only is the English queen-consort stimulating the Andalusian girls to play tennis by her example when she comes to Seville, but it has somehow become the fashion for ladies of all ages to leave their carriages in the Delicias and walk up and down; we saw at least a dozen doing it.
Whatever flirting and intriguing goes on, the public sees nothing of it. In the street there is no gleam of sheep’s-eying or any manner of indecorum. The women look sensible and good, and I should say the same of the men; the stranger’s experience must have been more unfortunate than mine if he has had any unkindness from them. One heard that Spanish women do not smoke, unless they arecigarrerasand work in the large tobacco factory, where the “Carmen” tradition has given place to the mother-of-a-family type, with her baby on the floor beside her. Even these may prefer not to set the baby a bad example and have her grow up and smoke like those English and American women. The strength of the Church is, of course, in the women’s faith, and its strength is unquestionable, if not quite unquestioned. In Seville, as I have said, there are two Spanish Protestant churches, and their worship, is not molested. Society does not receive their members; but we heard that with most Spanish people Protestantism is a puzzle rather than offense. They know we are not Jews, but Christians; yet we are not Catholics; and what, then, are we? With the Protestants, as with the Catholics, there is always religious marriage. There is civil marriage for all, but without the religious rite the pair are not well seen by either sect.
It is said that the editor of the ablest paper in Madrid, which publishes a local edition at Seville, is a Protestant. The queen mother is extremely clerical, though one of the wisest and best women who ever ruled; the king and queen consort are as liberal as possible, and the king is notoriously a democrat, with a dash of Haroun al Rashid, he likes to take his governmental subordinates unawares, and a story is told of his dropping in at the post-office on a late visit to Seville, and asking for the chief. He was out, and so were all the subordinate officials down to the lowest, whom the king found at his work. The others have since been diligent at theirs. The story is characteristic of the king, if not of the post-office people.
Political freedom is almost grotesquely unrestricted. In our American republic we should scarcely tolerate a party in favor of a monarchy, but in the Spanish monarchy a republican party is recognized and represented. It holds public meetings and counts among its members many able and distinguished men, such as the novelist Perez Galdos, one of the most brilliant novelists not only in Spain but in Europe. With this unbounded liberty in Andalusia, it is said that the Spaniards of the north are still more radical.
Though the climate is most favorable for consumptives, the habits of the people are so unwholesome that tuberculosis prevails, and there are two or three deaths a day from it in Seville. There is no avoidance of tuberculous suspects; they cough, and the men spit everywhere in the streets and on the floors and carpets of the clubs. The women suffer for want of fresh air, though now with the example of the English queen before them and the young girls who used to lie abed till noon getting up early ta play tennis, it will be different. Their mothers and aunts still drive to the Delicias to prove that they have carriages, but when there they alight and walk up and down by their doctor’s advice.
I only know that during our fortnight in Seville I suffered no wound to a sensibility which has been kept in full repair for literary, if not for humanitarian purposes. The climate was as kind as the people. It is notorious that in summer the heat is that of a furnace, but even then it is bearable because it is a dry heat, like that of our indoor furnaces. The 5th of November was our last day, and then it was too hot for comfort in the sun, but one is willing to find the November sun too hot; it is an agreeable solecism; and I only wish that we could have found the sun too hot during the next three days in Granada. If the 5th of November had been worse for heat than it was it must still remain dear in our memory, because in the afternoon we met once more these Chilians of our hearts whom we had met in San Sebastian and Burgos and Valladolid and Madrid. We knew we should meet them in Seville and were not the least surprised. They were as glad and gay as ever, and in our common polyglot they possessed us of the fact that they had just completed the eastern hemicycle of their Peninsular tour. They were latest from Malaga, and now they were going northward. It was our last meeting, but better friends I could not hope to meet again, whether in the Old World or the New, or that Other World which we hope will somehow be the summation of all that is best in both.
The train which leaves Seville at ten of a sunny morning is supposed to arrive in Granada at seven of a moonlight evening. This is a mistake; the moonlight is on time, but the train arrives at a quarter of nine. Still, if the day has been sunny the whole way and the moonlight is there at the end, no harm has really been done; and measurably the promise of the train has been kept.
I
There was not a moment of the long journey over the levels of Andahisia which was not charming; when it began to be over the uplands of the last Moorish kingdom, it was richly impressive. The only thing that I can remember against the landscape is the prevalence of olive orchards. I hailed as a relief the stubble-fields immeasurably spread at times, and I did not always resent the roadside planting of some sort of tall hedges which now and then hid the olives. But olive orchards may vary their monotony by the spectacle of peasants on ladders gathering their fruit into wide-mouthed sacks, and occasionally their ranks of symmetrical green may be broken by the yellow and red of poplars and pomegranates around the pleasant farmsteads. The nearer we drew to Granada the pleasanter these grew, till in the famous Vega they thickly dotted the landscape with their brown roofs and white walls.
We had not this effect till we had climbed the first barrier of hills and began to descend on the thither side; but we had incident enough to keep us engaged without the picturesqueness. The beggars alone, who did not fail us at any station, were enough; for what could the most exacting tourist ask more than to be eating his luncheon under the eyes of the children who besieged his car windows and protested their famine in accents which would have melted a heart of stone or of anything less obdurate than travel? We had always our brace of Civil Guards, who preserved us from bandits, but they left the beggars unmolested by getting out on the train next the station and pacing the platform, while the rabble of hunger thronged us on the other side. There was especially a hoy who, after being compassionated in money for his misfortune, continued to fling his wooden leg into the air and wave it at our window by some masterly gymnastics; and there was another boy who kept lamenting that he had no mother, till, having duly feed and fed him, I suggested, “But you have a father?” Then, as if he had never seen the case in that light before, he was silent, and presently went away without further insistence on his bereavement.
The laconic fidelity of my note-book enables me to recall here that the last we saw of Seville was the Cathedral and the Giralda, which the guide-books had promised us we should see first; that we passed some fields of alfalfa which the Moors had brought from Africa and the Spanish have carried to America; that in places men were plowing and that the plowed land was red; that the towns on the uplands in the distance were white and not gray, or mud-colored, as in Castile; that the morning sky was blue, with thin, pale clouds; that the first station out was charmingly called Two Brothers, and that the loungers about it were plain, but kind-looking men-folk with good faces, some actually clean-shaven, and a woman with a white rose in her hair; that Two Brothers is a suburb of Seville, frequented in the winter, and has orange orchards about it; that farther on at one place the green of the fields spread up to the walls of a white farm with a fine sense of color; that there were hawks sailing in the blue air; that there were grotesque hedges of cactus and piles of crooked cactus logs; that there were many eucalyptus trees; that there were plantations of young olives, as if never to let that all-pervading industry perish; that there were irregular mountain ranges on the right, but never the same kind of scenery on both sides of the track; that there was once a white cottage on a yellow hill and a pink villa with two towers; that there was a solitary fig tree near the road, and that there were vast lonely fields when there were not olive orchards.
Taking breath after one o’clock, much restored by our luncheon, my note-book remembers a gray-roofed, yellow-walled town, very suitable for a water-color, and just beyond it the first vineyard we had come to. Then there were pomegranate trees, golden-leaved, and tall poplars pollarded plume fashion as in southern France; and in a field a herd of brown pigs feeding, which commended itself to observance, doubtless, as color in some possible word-painting. There now abounded pomegranates, figs, young corn, and more and more olives; and as if the old olives and young olives were not enough, the earth began to be pitted with holes dug for the olives which had not yet been planted.
II
At Bobadilla, the junction where an English railway company begins to get in its work and to animate the Spanish environment to unwonted enterprise, there was a varied luncheon far past our capacity. But when a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, “Tea, sir?” I gladly closed with the proposition. “But you’ve put hot milk into it!” I protested. “I know it, sir. We ‘ave no cold milk at Bobadilla,” and instantly a baleful suspicion implanted itself which has since grown into a upas tree of poisonous conviction: goat’s milk does not keep well, and it was not only hot milk, but hotgoat’smilk which they were serving us at Bobadilla. However, there were admirable ham sandwiches, not of goat’s flesh, at the other end of the room, and with these one could console oneself. There was also a commendable pancake whose honored name I never knew, but whose acquaintance I should be sorry not to have made; and all about Bobadilla there was an agreeable bustle, which we enjoyed the more when we had made sure that we had changed into the right train for Granada and found in our compartment the charming young Swedish couple who had come with us from Seville.
Thoroughly refreshed by the tea with hot goat’s milk in it, by the genuine ham sandwiches and the pancakes, my note-book takes up the tale once more. It dwells upon the rich look of the land and the comfort of the farms contrasting with the wild irregularity of the mountain ranges which now began to serrate the horizon; and I have no doubt that if I had then read that most charming of all Washington Irving’s Spanish studies, the story, namely, of his journey over quite the same way we had come seventy-five years later, my note-book would abound in lively comment on the changed aspect of the whole landscape. Even as it is, I find it exclamatory over the wonder of the mountain coloring which it professes to have found green, brown, red, gray, and blue, but whether all at once or not it does not say. It is more definite as to the plain we were traversing, with its increasing number of white cottages, cheerfully testifying to the distribution of the land in small holdings, so different from the vast estates abandoned to homeless expanses of wheat-fields and olive orchards which we had been passing through. It did not appear on later inquiry that these small holdings were of peasant ownership, as I could have wished; they were tenant farms, but their neatness testified to the prosperity of the tenants, and their frequency cheered our way as the evening waned and the lamps began to twinkle from their windows. At a certain station, I am reminded by my careful mentor, the craggy mountain-tops were softened by the sunset pink, and that then the warm afternoon air began to grow cooler, and the dying day to empurple the uplands everywhere, without abating the charm of the blithe cottages. It seems to have been mostly a very homelike scene, and where there was a certain stretch of woodland its loneliness was relieved by the antic feat of a goat lifting itself on its hind legs to browse the olive leaves on their native bough. The air was thinner and cooler, but never damp, and at times it relented and blew lullingly in at our window. We made such long stops that the lights began to fade out of the farm-windows, but kept bright in the villages, when at a station which we were so long in coming to that we thought it must be next to Granada, a Spanish gentleman got in with us; and though the prohibitory notice ofNo Fumadoresstared him in the face, it did not stare him out of countenance; for he continued to smoke like a locomotive the whole way to our journey’s end. From time to time I meditated a severe rebuke, but in the end I made him none, and I am now convinced that this was wise, for he probably would not have minded it, and as it was, when I addressed him some commonplace as to the probable time of our arrival he answered in the same spirit, and then presently grew very courteously communicative. He told me for one thing, after we had passed the mountain gates of the famous Vega and were making our way under the moonlight over the storied expanse, drenched with the blood of battles long ago, that the tall chimneys we began to see blackening the air with their volumed fumes were the chimneys of fourteen beet-root sugar factories belonging to the Duke of Wellington. Then I divined, as afterward I learned, that the lands devoted to this industry were part of the rich gift which Spain bestowed upon the Great Duke in gratitude for his services against the Napoleonic invasion. His present heir has imagined a benevolent use of his heritage by inviting the peasantry of the Vega to the culture of the sugar-beet; but whether the enterprise was prospering I could not say; and I do not suppose any reader of mine will care so much for it as I did in the pour of the moonlight over the roofs and towers that were now becoming Granada, and quickening my slow old emotions to a youthful glow. At the station, which, in spite of Boabdil el Chico and Ferdinand and Isabel, was quite like every other railway station of southern Europe, we parted friends with our Spanish fellow-traveler, whom we left smoking and who is probably smoking still. Then we mounted with our Swedish friends into the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen and which began, after discreet delays, to climb the hill town toward the Alhambra through a commonplace-looking town gay with the lights of cafes and shops, and to lose itself in the more congenial darkness of narrower streets barred with moonlight. It was drawn by four mules, covered with bells and constantly coaxed and cursed by at least two drivers on the box, while a vigorous boy ran alongside and lashed their legs without ceasing till we reached the shelf where our hotel perched.
III
I had taken the precaution to write for rooms, and we got the best in the house, or if not that then the best we could wish at a price which I could have wished much less, till we stepped out upon our balcony, and looked down and over the most beautiful, the most magnificent scene that eyes, or at least my eyes, ever dwelt on. Beside us and before us the silver cup of the Sierra Nevada, which held the city in its tiled hollow, poured it out over the immeasurable Vega washed with moonshine which brightened and darkened its spread in a thousand radiances and obscurities of windows and walls and roofs and trees and lurking gardens. Because it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may say now that this was our supreme moment of Granada. There were other fine moments, but none unmixed with the reservations which truth obliges honest travel to own. Now, when from some secret spot there rose the wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to another who caught it dying up and breathed new life into it and sent it echoing on till it had made the round of the whole fairy city, the heart shut with a pang of pure ecstasy. One could bear no more; we stepped within, and closed the window behind us. That is, we tried to close it, but it would not latch, and we were obliged to ring for acamereroto come and see what ailed it.