The Guadalquivir—Arabic gardens—“Bird’s milk”—Wild camels—Tartessian cattle—The city of Hercules—The foundations of Tharsis—Subterranean galleries—The “Labyrinth”—A careful father—The potters’ suburb—The City of the Poles—Triana under flood—Rising wells—A tower of refuge—Villages under water—Humours of the inundated—Governmental neglect—A night of terror—The gallant priest—King Alfonso feeds the hungry—The “Economical Kitchen”—Honours for the English ladies.
The Guadalquivir—Arabic gardens—“Bird’s milk”—Wild camels—Tartessian cattle—The city of Hercules—The foundations of Tharsis—Subterranean galleries—The “Labyrinth”—A careful father—The potters’ suburb—The City of the Poles—Triana under flood—Rising wells—A tower of refuge—Villages under water—Humours of the inundated—Governmental neglect—A night of terror—The gallant priest—King Alfonso feeds the hungry—The “Economical Kitchen”—Honours for the English ladies.
The Guadalquivir seems to be known to the English chiefly by Byron’s references to it, and unluckily he rhymes it with “river,” which was convenient for him, but not for the tourist who takes Byron for his guide to the pronunciation. For the Guadalquivir is theWady al kabirof the Arabs (the great river) and the name is still pronounced with the accent, as in Arabic, on the last syllable. Thus when the traveller asks his way to the “Gwaddlequiver,” the native is at a loss for his meaning. Baedeker might usefully see to this; and while he is about it he might also mention that Granáda has the accent on the second syllable. For when a traveller in a hurry asks for the train to “Grannader” the porters are apt to get confused and put him into the first train for any town the name of which is accented on the first syllable—e.g.Málaga. This actually happenedin the case of an acquaintance of ours, who was rather deaf and did not know a word of Spanish. He found himself at Málaga instead of “Grannader,” and his language was vigorous and picturesque. All this waste of time, temper, and money might have been avoided had Baedeker instructed his readers how to pronounce the Spanish for pomegranate.
“THE ENGLISH ECONOMICAL KITCHEN.”
“THE ENGLISH ECONOMICAL KITCHEN.”
Since time began Seville seems to have been the victim of floods. The catchment area of the Guadalquivir is enormous, since with its tributaries it drains practically the whole of Andalucia, from the Sierra Morena in the north to the Sierra Nevada in the south. From Cordova the river runs through vast plains, mostly alluvial soil of great fertility. So rich is this soil that the Arabs used to say that bird’s milk could be got from the gardens round Seville, meaning that there is nothing that will not grow there with sufficient care and attention. The Arabic historians assure us that, nine centuries ago, there were twenty thousand farms and villages between Cordova and Seville, all living by agriculture and gardening; and although the number is obviously exaggerated, there can be no doubt that the whole of the riparian plain was highly cultivated. At that time the great river and its tributaries were so carefully dyked and dammed for purposes of milling and irrigation, that floods were far less frequent than now.
But the local archives show that within a century after the Christians became rulers of Seville the irrigation system was falling into decay, and the bed of the river was rapidly silting up. Now hardly a trace remains of the system of hydraulics inheritedfrom Egypt, or perhaps inherited from Tartessus, for the Tartessians too constructed admirable water-works. To-day, chiefly for lack of water, most of the valley of the Guadalquivir is a waste of rough pasture, a swamp in winter and a desert in summer, ranged over by herds of half-wild cattle when the spring and autumn showers have raised a crop of coarse grass; the resort of birds of every description, the dwelling-place of boar, deer, hares, and other wild creatures, great and small, and the safe refuge of a herd of wild camels, never approached and seldom seen unless by the passenger or crew of some river steamer when they come down to the water at dawn. Thus they were once observed by a friend of mine, who took them for cattle until the sun rose suddenly and she saw their humps. After that she was always on the look out for them, and saw them again not long after, near enough and for long enough to count sixteen of them, old and young.
The origin of this herd of wild camels is unknown, but it seems clear that they have a good deal of vitality. For generations the marsh men used to shoot the young and sell their flesh as venison in the towns; yet the herd continued to breed in its secret places in the wilds, and now that the shooting of them is strictly prohibited it is increasing—a testimony to the immense extent of the waste lands as well as to the mild climate of this province. What the camels do when the valley is flooded no one knows, but they must go to some place of refuge, for every one knows what happens to the cattle if they are caught by the flood.
Some years ago a ten months’ drought was broken by a terrific thunderstorm which in one night raised the Guadalquivir many feet. A friend of ours had some eight hundred cattle herded on the Isla Mayor, a large island in the river about half-way between Seville and San Lucar. They were caught by the flood water, although it did not rise high enough to sweep them away. Next morning over four hundred of them lay dead, not from drowning but from the sudden chill, which their frames, weakened by the long drought and by struggling against the rush of water, were unable to resist.
In Tartessian times the cattle of the famous breed of Geryon, afterwards dedicated to the new deity adopted by the Tartessians and known as Hercules, used to feed in the valley of the Guadalquivir, or river Tartessus. But their pasturage area cannot have been anything as large as it is now, for we are told that the river was like a great lagoon then, and contained a chain of islands, great and small, on which the Tartessian cattle fed and bred, to the great profit of their owners. There must have been, however, plenty of shallows and elevations formed by the ever-growing alluvial deposits of the river, for Strabo tells us that twice every day, when the tide came up from the sea, the Tartessian cattle of their own accord left the lower pastures and took refuge on the higher ground of the islands.
In the annals of a sixteenth-century Sevillian writer I find a note to the effect than when Hercules first came up the Guadalquivir he discovered Seville itself lying on an island in the middle of the river,and called it the City of Poles, because it was built on piles. Afterwards, say our non-critical chroniclers, Hercules and his “brother” Atlas decided to build the “great city” on the highest point of the same islands, and replaced the “poles” by more solid material.
Down to the seventeenth century these ingenuous legends were so firmly believed by the Sevillians that no sceptic dared risk a broken head by disputing them. And indeed to this day we see three granite monoliths on the precise spot indicated as that chosen by Hercules, after consultation with Atlas, for the erection of his temple. They are still commonly known as the Columns of Hercules, although half a century or so ago an intelligent municipality, for no apparent reason, elected to change the name of the street to Marmoles, which means not granite but marbles.
With the gradual spread of knowledge the legend of Hercules and the city he built here became discredited, until after the seventeenth century it was dismissed as a ridiculous myth without any foundation. But the silly “common” people went on calling their monoliths “The Pillars of Hercules,” because, as they could not read or write, the antiquarian discussions of the Sevillian professors did not affect their traditional beliefs.
And now comes the point of my story. Three or four years ago a worthy man of business, who knew nothing and cared less for any of the theories of the learned gentlemen who decided what was or was not to be believed in Seville, began to dig forhis own purposes near the place which tradition marks as chosen by Hercules for the site of his city. And to his annoyance he found one layer of ancient buildings below another, until he had got some twenty-seven feet down below the level of the present street of Marmoles, in his search for firm foundations on which to build new shops. Here he found subterranean galleries, man high and wide enough for two men to walk abreast, built of stone and of that indestructible cement which seems to have been the secret of Tartessus, together with small broken columns of the same granite and the same cutting as those three of Hercules, twenty of whose forty feet still project from the top of this same hill. And now it seems clear that this was the lost city of Tharsis, whose site has so long been a mystery.
Subterranean galleries, the purpose of which has not yet been discovered, are found beneath all this quarter of Seville. One begins to see that the sixteenth-century Heraclean legend may have had some foundation in fact, and that the worshippers of Hercules or his forerunner Geryon may literally have substituted these galleries of masonry for the perishable foundations of the prehistoric “lake-dwellings” built on poles. This view is supported by Don Carlos Cañal, Deputy to Cortes, who wrote a book onPrehistoric Sevilletwenty years or more ago, before the discoveries in Crete had revolutionised the science of archæology.
Some portions of the Tartessian galleries still exist in a state of perfect preservation; but theseare under the highest part of the town, where floods could never have come, and I think must have been built for some of the mysteries of the Tartessian sun-worship, relics of which one finds elsewhere. Others, at a lower level, seem as if they must have been intended to afford free passage to the water of the river.
One most interesting and perfectly accessible gallery is unluckily private property, and it is exceedingly difficult to get permission to visit it. I have done so three times, thanks to the insistence of a priest as keen about archæology as I am. But it was sorely against the grain of the owner.
He is a middle-aged gentleman who has never in his life ventured down the staircase which was built to give access to the labyrinth, as it is called, when it was accidentally discovered in the sixteenth century. On my first visit I went down the twenty-seven feet to the floor level of the galleries with the owner’s son, an intelligent lad keenly interested in the strange place. Although it is pitch dark, it is perfectly ventilated through invisible openings to the upper air, the outlets of which have long been lost sight of, and we easily made our way from one circular chamber to another by the light of candles along the barrel-shaped passages, which are of convenient width and more than a man’s height, and I was delighted at finding such an opportunity for study at my own door, as it were.
But alas! I had reckoned without my host. Before we had been there ten minutes that gentleman began to shout from the head of the stairs for us to come back—
“You have been down there quite long enough. You will get lost in the dark. You will catch pneumonia in the cold and the damp. Come up! Come up! I insist! I command! My son, why do you not obey me? I will not have you catch pneumonia. You have had more than time to see everything. There is nothing to see. For thirty years I have lived here and I have never gone down. The place is of no importance whatever. You must come up at once.”
Not for a moment did he stop shouting. At first the boy told me to pretend I did not hear, and to pay no attention to his father’s protestations, but very soon he said he dared not remain longer, and that if I would come up now he would take me down again the day after to-morrow, by which time he would talk his father over into letting us stay below as long as we wished.
Again, alas! With much protest I was allowed to go down again the day after to-morrow, as arranged, but the shouts to “come up!” were more continuous and more insistent than ever, and little work could be done.
Once more, some months later, I wrung a reluctant permission from the owner to take down a distinguished architect, but the only time we were allowed to enter the sacred precincts was at eight in the morning, when the friendly son, uninformed of our visit, was safe in bed. Two ancient female servants were sent down to see that we did not get into mischief, while for a whole hour the owner shouted that if we had any regard for ourhealth we would not linger in that dangerous darkness.
When next I saw the boy, who was anxious to have the place scientifically studied, he told me that his father was determined to refuse all further applications for permission to visit this almost unique survival of a vanished civilisation.
“And to make quite sure that I shall not open the door when he is out of the way,” said the lad, “he now keeps the key in his pocket all day and sleeps with it under his pillow.”
Such is the encouragement given to archæologists in Seville.
It seems clear that the inhabitants of a town built on the principle of a prehistoric lake-dwelling, but having solid stone galleries instead of piles for its foundations, would have little to fear from floods. And it is the case that from the dawn of Spanish history until after the reconquest in 1248 we find nothing to suggest any serious trouble of the kind. But from then onwards we hear more and more of the increasing ravages wrought by the water, and these can only be attributed to persistent neglect of the hydraulic engineering works which the Seville Arabs and Mozarabs had carried to such perfection.
Triana, the potters’ suburb of Seville from time immemorial, although now to some extent protected by wharves, lies considerably below the level of even a moderate flood. Probably in old times it was all built on galleries and arcades, and even now the main street has ancient arcades on either side for some little distance. The road between hasrisen so much that one column, perhaps Roman, is only three or four feet high, and when the floods come the water quickly fills the ground-floor rooms to the ceilings. It is possible that this is an actual relic of the “City of the Poles,” although of course rebuilt again and again until only the idea of the primitive part remains.
Triana is always the first quarter to be flooded and the last to be cleared when the river overflows, for the sewer outfalls are below the flood-level, and it seems impossible to close them against the weight of the flood water—moreover, when they are closed, the rain has no outlet and pools in the streets. Some day perhaps the petition of the 10,000 Trianeros, repeated year after year for goodness knows how long, will be attended to by the authorities in Madrid, and then the old river-bed (la madre vieja), which has been silted up for centuries, will be cleared out and used to carry off the flood water. But this obvious remedy has not yet been applied by the wisdom of the Ministers who rule Spain, and the terror that seizes upon all who live below the flood-level when heavy rains set in is a thing to be remembered.
In February 1912 we were living in a modern house in a low-lying part of Seville, some little way from the river. The ground floor of the house had been artificially raised about five feet above the level of the street, but if the river had risen two or three inches above the twenty-seven feet that it had reached the night before it began to go down, the whole street would quickly have been flooded,and we, like Triana, would have had to be fed by boat. All that night a violent thunderstorm raged, to add the finishing touch to our panic; for there was nothing now between Seville and the river save some improvised barriers hastily erected with sixty hours of incessant labour by the soldiers of the garrison, and against these the water was already streaming with force.
But our case, though serious enough, was nothing like so critical as that of many others, for it was at any rate not likely that the water would actually come into our house. A friend of mine, like scores of residents in Seville, has in her house a well of brackish water, and all these wells are fed in some way from the river bed. My friend knows that it is only the walls of the new wharves, built during the last twenty years or so, that keeps her well from overflowing whenever the river rises even a few feet. And once the wells in that part of the town overflow from the river, nothing can check the ingress of the water, for the whole district lies far below flood-level. Day and night for a week she kept on taking soundings, until during the last night, that of the thunderstorm, the water in the well at last began to rise, one metre ... two metres ... three metres.... By daybreak, notwithstanding all her prayers and vows to the Virgin, it was within six feet of the top, and was still rising rapidly.
“And then,” said she, “at the last moment Our Lady answered my prayers.”
The storm ceased, the sun came out, and before the tide turned at midday the flag was flying onthe Torre del Oro to tell panic-stricken Seville that the river was going down. Indeed the change came only just in time, for the flood was within an ace of overlapping the frail temporary barriers which alone kept the water out of the main part of the town.
By that time Triana, on the opposite bank, had been for six days under water, with from six to nine feet of it in every single house. The whole of the river valley, from Cordova down to the mouth, was one vast inland sea. In the riverside villages hardly a house was above water. Algaba, the first village above Seville, was entirely submerged, and about 750 out of the 800 inhabitants, having nowhere else to go, were huddled together in the ancient tower which, the villagers say, was built expressly as a refuge when the river rises. Imagine 750 people shut up for a week in one small tower! As soon as it was possible to row against the subsiding stream, I went up with a boat-load of good Samaritans to carry help to some families we knew, and I shall never forget what I saw.
The fields were feet deep in silt, the spring crops ruined, the streets a mass of indescribable filth, the poor cottages, generally trim and sweet with frequent whitewash, were banked up with stinking mud. But the blazing February sun was streaming down on all the misery; gay-coloured clothes, blankets, mats, curtains, beds and bedding, were hung out to dry, the women were all hard at work with their whitewash and scrubbing pails, and an astonishing spirit of courage and philosophy pervaded the whole place.
From the moment they could get across the ferry, three families had been tramping into Seville—about a mile and a half of road, mostly under water—to get rations from the “English” soup kitchen, and it was to verify their incredible tales of distress that we had rowed up.
“Yes, it was quite true that there was hardly anything to eat. It was also true that there was no work at present, and thus the supplies of rice, garbanzos, and haricot beans given by the Señores were more welcome than words could say. But the good sun was shining and everything would soon dry up, and then the rich Señors Fulano and Mengano, who owned all the land round about, would have to employ every hand they could get to sow the fields over again, for they certainly would not lose a whole season’s crops, and they would have to pay good wages too, for there would be work for every able-bodied man from Seville to Cordova. And thus, if God pleased, good might soon come out of their present misery.”
One of the more prosperous women, who had a loft above her cottage—a great rarity in this single-storeyed village—and thus had been able to save her furniture, insisted on giving us hot coffee before we left, and indignantly refused to be paid for it. “It was the least she could do when we had been so good to them,” she said, and she had a brazier burning so that we should not feel the damp of the room, which she had just finished whitewashing before we came.
We felt ashamed to demur at sitting for tenminutes in the kitchen, reeking with damp, where the family had to live, but we were shivering with cold before we could decently take our leave, and since then I have always wondered why the whole village did not die of fever and ague, instead of being noted for their excellent health.
The cheerfulness with which the disaster was met at Algaba was even more striking at Triana. Here those whose houses had two or three storeys all took refuge on the upper floors, and were fed from boats for the six days during which the suburb was under water. Rations for all were provided by the authorities, and no one here need have starved, although the organisation of supplies for some ten thousand people in this quarter alone, besides several thousands more in flooded streets on the outskirts of the town itself, was a task of no small difficulty. Every one fared alike, getting only bread and the plainest fare, but in sufficient quantities to keep body and soul together if each took no more than his fair share. Very few could get ferried through the flooded streets to the bridge into Seville, and indeed for a day or two wheeled traffic over the single bridge was forbidden, save to convey food, for the water was nearly up to the top of the arch, and the whole structure was threatened. Had the bridge gone, all Triana must have starved, for no boat could cross that raging torrent.
Few lives were lost, though house after house in the oldest and poorest quarters fell in, and in one case a whole family was shut up in an old building without a window to the street, and when theywere discovered three days later two of the children were dead from cold and hunger. For it was very cold during those grey, sunless days. But the rescue work was as well organised as the commissariat, and the young vicar of the parish, Don Bernardo Guerra, who was working like a man, became the hero of the imprisoned Trianeros. He himself seemed quite unaware of his popularity; indeed, he said his people were angry with him because, “although he was working at relief so many hours a day that he had hardly time to eat or drink or sleep or pray, it was impossible to supply a hundredth part of their needs.”
“But now that the sun is shining again, things are going better,” he said. “Indeed, even during the worst of the bad week it was surprising how a fitful gleam of sunshine enlivened the inundated people. The Trianeros have a gaiety of spirit peculiarly their own, which never deserts them for long, and it was curious to see how it came out among the hundreds of refugees housed in our new school buildings. It was also very noticeable how the women preserved even there their habits of cleanliness and decency. None of them had more privacy than they could obtain by hanging up shawls and sheets to separate one family from another, and yet most of them contrived to keep their own little places tidy and comparatively comfortable. The gipsies, it is true, looked as if they were picnicking in a rag fair, but they kept together at one end of the big class-rooms, apart from the other refugees. And you would have smiled to see the girls dressingtheir hair as if for afiesta, and even dancing while the young men sang to a guitar which one of them had saved from the wreck of his home. It was difficult to believe—when the sun shone for a few moments—what desolation there was outside. But when night fell the suffering was at its worst. The authorities managed to keep water, gas, and electric light going in the streets, but in the houses the fittings were all under water, and the darkness accentuated the distress. And then the pistol shots going off for help, and the difficulty of locating the sound along the flooded streets, and the fear of arriving too late to save lives ... it was an experience one would not forget in a century.”
Don Bernardo stopped speaking, with a look in his liquid-brown eyes as of one who sees a nightmare.
“But you did always get there in time?” I gently prompted; “what about the affair in the Calle Evangelio? I saw it mentioned in the papers. They said you got an ovation.”
“The papers talk a lot of nonsense,” said the priest, smiling once more. “It was nothing, and what credit there was is not mine. Now about those mattresses? How many more can you provide from the English Relief Fund? We are to get fifteen hundred from the Government grant, they tell me, but not until the money is paid, and I am wondering if it will come before next summer. Meanwhile the hundred sent by the English ladies have been a great boon, and there were also sixteen from a Spanish lady. But we want a thousand at once, for familieswho have lost everything and now are sleeping on the floors of houses which were under water a week ago.Ay de mi de mi alma!And all this suffering would have been prevented if the Government had agreed to the protective work on the old river bed last year!”
“But I want to know about the affair in the Calle Evangelio,” I persisted, and Don Bernardo, always courteous, could not refuse to tell me.
“It was nothing—there were many such incidents. I was in bed. Tired? Well, perhaps; we do not sleep much just now. Suddenly I heard pistol shots, several, fired quickly one after the other, so I knew the danger was imminent. I ran to my window to call the boatman, who was supposed to be at my service day and night, but the poor fellow was tired out, and a long way off, at the far end of this long street. I could make out his boat, tied to a balcony. I guessed he had fallen asleep, or perhaps, for we are all human, was inside the house getting a drink. Do not blame him. Those who had stayed out all day in the cold wind and soaking rain knew well how pardonable was his lapse from duty. If there had been a cart or even a donkey I should have taken it without asking permission. But it was the middle of the night. I dared not wade; I am not tall, and the water was over three feet deep in my street. And then one of my neighbours, excellent fellow, roused like myself by the shots, offered to take me on his back. He is a fisherman, strong in the legs and much taller than I. Understand that he asked no reward; indeed,he refused payment from the funds that I hold for relief. He carried me on his shoulders to the boat, and the boatman came out quickly, very much ashamed. My fisherman began to rate him, but I said, ‘Save your breath to help row, for I fear we may arrive too late.’ We all three rowed very hard, and the current seemed like a giant’s hand dragging back our boat. You see the embankment of the railway to Huelva causes the flood water to eddy in our streets. I do not understand engineering, but every one in Triana knows that the embankment is our ruin. It was planned by engineers in Madrid, and the protest of those who knew the river was not attended to. The poor people of Triana curse the embankment every time there is a flood, and this time they would have gone and torn it down with their own hands if they could have got to it without being drowned on the way. Well, we reached the Calle Evangelio at last. The shots were fired from a house with two storeys, and all the inhabitants had been living on the upper one since the flood began. The water was six feet deep in the street, and it was quite dark. We got them all into the boat from a balcony, except one man. He had to jump, for just as he was ready to climb over the rail the whole front of the house seemed to melt away. It had been undermined by the water, and fell in all at once. Yes, I suppose the poor people might all have been drowned, had the good God not woke the fisherman in time to go to their rescue. I was responsible in a certain sense, but I could not have got there in time but for him. Therefore, such creditas there was, should have been given by the papers to him, not to me.”
On the last and worst day of the floods the King came to Seville with the Minister of Public Works; and then the poor Trianeros were glad they had not pulled down the railway embankment, for the first thing His Majesty did was to steam off along that line, across the waste of waters, to visit a village which lay with little more than its roofs above the flood. I watched the engine with its single carriage crawl over the bridge and along the embankment, very slowly, for there was no knowing what unseen damage might have been done by the turbid yellow flood below the rails and sleepers.
Everybody thought that as the King and the Minister had now seen for themselves the intolerable injury that the piece of bad engineering was inflicting on Seville, the necessary authority for the work on the old river bed would be given immediately. That was a year and nine months ago, and Don Bernardo and his colleagues have been making ceaseless efforts ever since to get the matter attended to. But we have had three different Ministries in power during these twenty-one months, and none of them has had time to think of such trifles as protecting the third most important port in Spain from devastating inundations. During November 1913 the port had twice to be closed to navigation, owing to the height of the flood water, and it would not be difficult to calculate how much money has thus been lost to the town, though no one who has not seen Triana flooded can estimate the cost in fear and anxiety to thefathers who cannot earn bread for their children, and the mothers who watch in hourly dread of the irremediable ruin of their homes.
But no one blames the King. They know it is no fault of his, for they saw him in Triana that February day in 1912, going from house to house in a cart or a boat and hoisting up provisions with his own hands, in baskets slung down from the balconies, and they watched him standing ankle deep in water at the rise of the bridge, insisting on visiting the streets that had suffered most.
“God knows no one street had suffered more than another,” said the journeyman potter who told me this, “for all were under water alike. ‘What a terrible disaster!’ said the King. His gentlemen tried to hold him back, for they had to follow where he led, and they did not want to get their feet wet. But they might as well have tried to hold the river back. He is aKing! He gave two thousand pesetas then and there, and he sent twenty thousand more from Madrid as soon as he got back. But the best thing of all was the King’s Kitchen. He ordered free hot meals to be served at his expense every day and all day as long as the flood lasted, to every Trianero who chose to ask for them—no recommendations required, no religious conditions. The King said no one was to be asked a question: everybody who was hungry was to have a meal in his kitchen. It saved many lives. True, we all had bread from the Town Council, but we fathers could not take our share while the children were hungry, and we were weak from long fasting, foryou must understand that many of us had been out of work for a month, owing to bad weather, before the river overflowed. What a bad time God gave us this winter! But, thank God, there is work for all Triana now, for there are so many houses to be repaired and rebuilt that we cannot make bricks fast enough, and the masters have had to raise our wages.”
Soup kitchens, or as the Sevillians call them, “Economical kitchens” (cocinas economicas), are little used here in times of public distress. It never seems to occur to the wealthy Sevillian ladies that with a very little trouble and organisation they could easily start private soup kitchens in their own houses, if only for the friends and relations of their numerousménages. Of course, when the floods came, a soup kitchen was the first idea that occurred to some members of the English colony, and within twenty-four hours of the inundation of Triana, Mr. Keyser, our Consul, together with myself and a few other ladies, had collected enough money among our personal friends to supply two hundred rations a day for a fortnight.
The distribution took place in our house, because our patio happened to be the most convenient for the purpose, and all our servants, like those at the Consulate, worked double tides throughout the fortnight, so that none of the Relief Fund should be spent on extra hands. At first we only intended to feed families connected with the English business houses, but we soon found that it was impossible to lay down hard-and-fast rules. Oneafternoon a man who had been waiting an hour for what might remain after the privileged people were fed, dropped in a dead faint on the floor, and it took half an hour to bring him round. After that we ladled out our soup as fast as we could to every white-faced shivering creature that presented himself, without asking for his subscriber’s card, not wishing for a repetition of the fright that seized us when the man fainted, for on that occasion it looked for a while as if our very small amount of red tape was to cost a life.
We got up to five hundred rations a day before we closed our soup kitchen, and even then had money left to buy the hundred mattresses and pillows that were so useful to the Triana priest—and all for a little over £60 in English money. True, the mattresses were very cheap, for a maker of them contributed to the relief by selling us all that we asked for considerably below cost price—a practical form of charity that greatly appealed to the people. But if we had spent £6000 instead of £60 we could not have met with more gratitude. It was not so much the quantity or the quality of the soup, our parish priest explained. It was having it ready at the precise moment when it was wanted, for the thing was put in hand very promptly, and we got in ahead even of the King’s Kitchen. Strange though it may seem to English people, accustomed to organised charity, no other private individual or private association in Seville adopted this simple means of providing hot meals at a minimum of cost.
But we had no idea of the fame we were acquiring—indeed, we had no time to think of how our modest effort might strike the public. So we were surprised and amused when the editor of a local weekly paper sent round his photographer to get an illustration for an article on the “noble initiative of the English ladies.” We told him we preferred to remain in retirement with our kettles. But he pointed out that a photograph of our truly “economical” kitchen would encourage the ladies of Seville to go and do likewise when another occasion should arise; and after that we could not of course refuse to be immortalised with our tin pots about us, if only to show how easily five hundred people could be fed from a dozen petroleum tins boiled on gas rings. And having got his photograph and published his little article, our philanthropic editor proceeded to offer each of our helpers a copy of the photograph at three times the market price!
Another pretty speech brought further evidence, were it wanted, of the popular feeling towards the young Queen. We set aside a little of our money to redeem pawn-tickets in the case of two or three families who had been comparatively well-to-do before the floods and now only needed respectable clothing to obtain good employment again, and, of course, this was to be obtained much more cheaply by taking their own garments out of the Mont de Piétè than by buying new for them.
One of the poor women said with tears in her eyes as she handed me a sheaf of the depressing little papers—
“Oh, Señora Elena, you are like the Queen!”
I smiled at the remark, for although it has long been the fashion for Spanish gallants to tell English girls they resemble the Queen when they want to offer the greatest flattery, I could not imagine how even the most fervent gratitude could find any resemblance between an old woman with white hair and the beautiful young Queen.
“Not in face, Señora, although you too aremuy guapa(very attractive), but in generosity with the pawn-tickets. Have you not heard what the Queen did in that way? A very poor woman of Triana threw a whole bundle of tickets into the Queen’s carriage one day when she was driving through Triana, and instead of being vexed, the Queen sent down to Juana’s house after she got back to the palace to see if it was true that she had sold everything. And it was quite true, and the Queen redeemed her tickets and afterwards many more for other women, when she learnt of cases of great distress for which the women were not to blame. I wish the rich knew how helpful it is to redeem our pawn-tickets, for many of our clothes and especially our boots are very good when we ‘put them away,’—indeed, if they are not good the Mont de Piétè will not give us anything for them.”
Nor was this the end of the compliments paid us; for a few days later our man-servant came to tell me that he had been asked for the full names, family and baptismal, of all the English ladies who had helped to serve the soup, the same having beenrequested by a popular performer of “Flamenco” songs at a certain music-hall.
“But I refused to tell him,” said our man proudly. “Having been in England with the Señores and knowing English customs, I informed him that compliments in your country had to be paid in a roundabout way, and that if your names were mentioned he would offend instead of pleasing.”
“But what in the world did he want to know our names for?” I asked, completely mystified.
“Por Dios, Señora! Don’t you know that a couplet in praise of the English economical kitchen is sung every night at the Blankblankblank, along with one about the King’s Kitchen and the brave deeds of Don Bernardo Guerra? Señora! That song has been the most popular item in the programme for many nights past, and for that reason Pepito wanted to improvise a second couplet giving all the ladies’ names. But don’t be anxious: I assure you I refused with quite sufficient coldness to make him understand that he was taking a liberty.”
The joke of it was that the Blankblankblank is a well-known café chantant in Seville which has been for years a stone of offence to Mrs. Grundy, both the English and the Spanish variety, and well-behaved members of society like ourselves would not have set foot inside it for worlds. Of course our disapproval, even if they had been aware of it, would not have troubled the café chantant people at all, but we felt rather as if those black sheep were heaping coals of fire on our respectable heads, when we learned that songs about our civic virtues weredelighting crowded houses every night. But at any rate we were in good company, with the King on one side and the parish priest on the other.
And thus on a note of comedy closed our part in the tragedy of the greatest floods ever known in the long annals of the devastation wrought century after century by the Guadalquivir.