"Because I look thee in the face,Set not for this thy hopes too high,For many go to the market-placeTo see and not to buy."
"Because I look thee in the face,
Set not for this thy hopes too high,
For many go to the market-place
To see and not to buy."
The girl's opportunity is in her dancing. Every Andalusian woman, high or low, knows theSevillana. Some have been trained in it by accredited teachers of the art, but the most learn the dance in childhood, as naturally as they learn to speak and sing. They are never weary of dancing it, morning, noon, and night, two girls together, or a girl and a lad, but such dancing is confined to the Moorish privacy of the Spanish home—except in Fair time. Then the whole world may stand before thecasetasand see the choicest daughters ofSeville dancing the dance that is very coquetry in motion. Rows of girls awaiting their turn, and of matrons who are chaperoning the spectacle, sit about the three sides of the mimic drawing-room. A dense crowd of men, crying "Ole! Ole!" and commenting as freely on the figures and postures of the dancers as if they were ballet artistes in a café chantant, is gathered close in front. For their view these rhythmic maidens dance on, hour after hour, until their great, dusky eyes are dim with sleep. The tassels of curly ribbon, tinted to match the dainty touches of color in their costumes, seem to droop in exhaustion from the tossing castanets. What matter? For a Spanish girl to reach her twenty-fifth birthday without anoviois a tragedy of failure, and these tired dancers are well aware thatcaballerosare making the rounds fromcasetatocaseta, on purpose to select a wife.
In Gypsy Lane there is no sugar coating. The Flamenco dances are directly seductive. The life of the forest animal seems reproduced in the fierceness, the fitfulness, the abandon, of each strange series of abrupt gesticulations. Yet these gypsy women, boldly as they play on the passions of the spectators, care only for Gentile money, and fling off with fiery scorn the addresses that their songs and dances court. Many a flouted gallant could tell the tale of one who
"Like a right gypsy, hath, at fast and loose,Beguiled me to the very heart of loss."
"Like a right gypsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguiled me to the very heart of loss."
Husbands and lovers look on at the dancers' most extreme poses, even caresses, in nonchalant security. While onegitanaafter another takes the stage, a crescent of men and women, seated behind, cheer her on with cries and clappings,strummings of the guitar, and frenzied beatings of the floor with staff and stool. Yet their excitement, even at its apparent height, never sweeps them out of their crafty selves. Beyond the dancer they see the audience. Disdain and dislike are in the atmosphere, and never more than when the rain of silver is at its richest. Still they follow the gypsy law, "To cheat and rob the stranger always and ever, and be true only to our own blood."
The Passing of the PageantsThe Passing of the Pageants
The Passing of the Pageants
XI
THE ROUTE OF THE SILVER FLEETS
"Paul, the Physician, to Cristobal Colombo, greeting. I perceive your magnificent and great desire to find a way to where the spices grow.""And thus leade they their lyves in fullfilling the holy hunger of golde. But the more they fill their handes with finding, the more increaseth their covetous desire."—Decades in the New Worlde.
"Paul, the Physician, to Cristobal Colombo, greeting. I perceive your magnificent and great desire to find a way to where the spices grow."
"And thus leade they their lyves in fullfilling the holy hunger of golde. But the more they fill their handes with finding, the more increaseth their covetous desire."—Decades in the New Worlde.
Iwanted to go from Seville to Cadiz by water. I longed to sail by the "Silver Road" in the wake of the silver fleets. The little artist, as befitted her youth, preferred a Manila shawl to that historic pilgrimage. So I proposed to make this trifling trip alone.
Don José was shocked. Merriest and most indulgent of hosts, he was inclined at this point to play the tyrant. If I must see Cadiz, well and good. He would take me to the morning express and put me under charge of the conductor. At Utrera, an hour farther on, his son would come to the train and see that all was well. AtPuerto de Santa Maria, another hour distant, I should be met by a trusted friend of the family, who would transfer me to another train and another conductor, and so speed me for my third hour to Cadiz, where I should be greeted by a relative of mine hostess and conveyed in safety to his home.
I appreciated the kindness involved in this very Andalusianprogramme, but otherwise it did not appeal to me. That was not the way Columbus went, nor Cortés. And much as I delighted in the Alhambra, and the Mosque of Cordova, and the Alcázar of Seville, I did not feel called upon to bow a New England bonnet beneath the Moorish yoke.
Thus Don José and I found ourselves quietly engaged in an Hispano-American contest. He heartily disapproved of my going, even by train. "Una señora sola!It is not the custom in Andalusia." His plan of campaign consisted in deferring the arrangements from day to day. "Mañana!" Whenever I attempted to set a time for departure he blandly assented, and presently projected some irresistibly attractive excursion for that very date. His household were all with him. His wife had not been able to procure the particulardulcesindispensable to a traveller's luncheon. Even my faithless comrade, draped in her flower-garden shawl, practised the steps of aseguidillato the rattle of the castanets and laughed at my defeats.
At last, grown desperate, I suavely announced at the Sunday dinner table that I was going to Cadiz that week. My host said, "Bueno!" and my hostess, "Muy bien!" But there was no surrender in their tones. On Monday, instead of writing the requisite notes to these relays of protectors along the route, Don José took us himself, on a mimic steamboat, for a judicious distance down the Guadalquivír. Tuesday he put me off with Roman ruins, and Wednesday with a private gallery of Murillos. By Thursday I grew insistent, and, with shrug and sigh, he finally consented to my going by train on Friday. I still urged the boat, but he heaped up a thousand difficulties. There wasn't any; it would be overcrowded;I should be seasick; the boat would arrive, wherever it might arrive, too late for my train, whatever my train might be. Compromise is always becoming, and I agreed to take the nine o'clock express in the morning.
After the extended Spanish farewells, for to kiss on both cheeks and be kissed on both cheeks down a long feminine line, mother, daughters, and maid-servants, is no hasty ceremony, I sallied forth at half-past eight with Don José in attendance. He called a cab, but in Spain the cabbies are men and brothers, and this one, on learning our destination, declared that the train did not start until half-past nine and it was much better for a lady to waiten casathan at the depot. This additional guardianship goaded me to active remonstrance. Why not take the cab for the hour and look up a procession on our way to the station? There are always processions in Seville. This appealed to both the pleasure-loving Spaniards, and we drove into the palmyPlaza de San Fernando, where an array of military bands was serenading some civic dignitary.
The music was of the best, and we fell in with the large and varied retinue that escorted the musicians to the palace of the archbishop. As they were rousing him from his reverend slumbers withLa Marcha de Cadiz, I caught a twinkle in Don José's eye. Did he hope to keep me chasing after those bands all the forenoon? I awakened the cabman, whom the music had lulled into the easy Andalusian doze, and we clattered off to the station. Of all silent and forsaken places! I looked suspiciously at Don José, whose swarthy countenance wore an overdone expression of innocent surprise. A solitary official sauntered out.
"Good morning, señor! Is the express gone?" asked the driver.
"Good morning, señor! There isn't any express to-day," was the reply. "The express runs only Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays."
"What a pity," cooed Don José, contentedly. "You will have to wait till to-morrow."
"Yes, you can go to-morrow," indulgently added the driver, and the official chimed sweetly in, "Mañana por la mañana!"
"But is there no other train to-day?" I asked.
The official admitted that there was one at three o'clock. Don José gave him a reproachful glance.
"But you do not want to go by train," said my ingenious host. "Perhaps to-morrow you can go by steamboat."
"Perhaps I can go by steamboat now," I returned, seizing my opportunity. "When does that boat start?"
Nobody knew. I asked the cabman to drive us to the Golden Tower, off which sea-going vessels usually anchor. Don José fell back in his seat, exhausted.
The cabman drove so fast, for Seville, that we ran into a donkey and made a paralyzed beggar jump, but we reached the river in time to see a small steamer just in the act of swinging loose from the pier. In the excitement of the moment Don José forgot everything save the necessity of properly presenting me to the captain, and I, for my part, was absorbed in the ecstasy of sailing from the foot of the Golden Tower along the Silver Road.
It was not until a rod of water lay between boat and wharf that the captain shouted to Don José, who struck an attitude of utter consternation, that this craft went only to Bonanza,and no connection could be made from there to Cadiz until the following afternoon. And I, mindful of the austere dignity that befitted these critical circumstances, could not even laugh.
It was a dirty little boat, with a malodorous cargo of fish, and for passengers two soldiers, two peasants, and a commercial traveller. But what of that? I was sailing on a treasure ship of the Indies, one of those lofty galleons of Spain, "rowed by thrice one hundred slaves and gay with streamers, banners, music," that had delivered at the Golden Tower her tribute from the hoard of the Incas, and was proudly bearing back to the open roads of Cadiz.
We dropped down past a noble line of deep-sea merchantmen, from Marseilles, Hamburg, and far-away ports of Norway and Sweden. We passed fishing boats casting their nets, and met a stately Spanish bark, theCalderon. On the shores we caught glimpses of orange grove and olive orchard, lines of osiers and white poplars, and we paused at the little town of Coria, famous for its earthen jars, to land one of our peasants, while a jolly priest, whose plain black garb was relieved by a vermilion parasol, tossed down cigars to his friends among the sailors.
Then our galleon pursued her course into the flat and desolate regions of themarismas. These great salt marshes of the Guadalquivír, scarcely more than a bog in winter, serve as pasture for herds of hardy sheep and for those droves of mighty bulls bred in Andalusia to die in the arenas of all Spain. For long stretches the green bank would be lined with the glorious creatures, standing like ebony statues deep amid the reeds, some entirely black, and many black withslight markings of white. The Guadalquivír intersects in triple channel this unpeopled waste, concerning whose profusion of plant life and animal life English hunters tell strange tales. They report flocks of rosy flamingoes, three hundred or five hundred in a column, "glinting in the sunshine like a pink cloud," and muddy islets studded thick with colonies of flamingo nests. Most wonderful of all, the camel, that ancient and serious beast of burden, a figure pertaining in all imaginations to the arid, sandy desert, keeps holiday in these huge swamps. It seems that, in 1829, a herd of camels was brought into the province of Cadiz, from the Canaries, for transport service in road-building and the like, and for trial in agriculture. But the peculiar distaste of horses for these humpy monsters spoiled the scheme, and the camels, increased to some eighty in number, took merrily to the marshes, where, in defiance of all caravan tradition, they thrive in aquatic liberty. The fascination of this wilderness reached even the dingy steamer deck. Gulls, ducks, and all manner of wild fowl flashed in the sunshine, which often made the winding river, as tawny as our James, sparkle like liquid gold.
If only it had been gold indeed, and had kept the traceries of the Roman keels that have traversed it, the Vandal swords whose red it has washed away, the Moorish faces it has mirrored, the Spanish—
"Usted come?"
It might have been Cortes who was offering that bowl ofpuchero, but no! Cortes would have mixed it in his plumy helmet and stirred it with that thin, keen sword one may see in the MadridArmería. This was a barefooted cabin boy, in bluelinen blouse and patched blue trousers, with a scarlet cloth cap tied over his head by means of an orange-colored handkerchief. The dancing eyes that lit his shy brown face had sea blues in them. He was a winsome little fellow enough, but I did not incline to his cookery. While I was watching river, shores, and herds and chatting with thesimpáticosailor, who, taking his cue from my look, expressed the deepest abhorrence of the bull-fights, which, I make no doubt, he would sell his dinner, jacket, bed, even his guitar, to see, I had taken secret note of the cuisine. This child, who could not have counted his twelfth birthday, kindled the fire in a flimsy tin pail, lined with broken bricks. He cracked over his knee a few pieces of driftwood, mixed the fragments with bits of coal which he shook out of a sheepskin bottle, doused oil over the whole, and cheerfully applied the match, while the commercial traveller hastily drew up a bucket of water to have on hand for emergencies. Then the boy, with excellent intentions in the way of neatness, whisked his blackened hands across the rough end of a rope and plunged them into the pot ofgarbanzos, to which he added beans, cabbage, remnants of fried fish, and other sundries at his young discretion. And while the mess was simmering, he squatted down on the deck, with his grimy little feet in his fists, rocking himself back and forth to his own wild Malaga songs, and occasionally disengaging one hand or the other to plunge it into the pot after a tasty morsel.
"Will you eat?" he repeated manfully, reddening under the scrutiny of stranger eyes.
"Many thanks! May it profit yourself!"
I opened my luncheon, and again we exchanged these fixedphrases of Spanish etiquette, although after the refusals enjoined by code of courtesy, the boy was finally induced to relieve me of my more indigestible goodies.
"Did you ever hear of Columbus?" I asked, as we munched chestnut cakes together, leaning on the rail.
"No, señora," he replied, with another blush, "I have heard of nothing. I know little. I am of very small account. I cook and sing. I am good for nothing more."
And is it to this those arrogant Spanish boasts, which rang like trumpets up and down the Guadalquivír, have come at last!
We were in the heart of a perfect sapphire day. The river, often turbulent and unruly, was on this April afternoon, the sailors said,buen muchacho, a good boy. The boat appeared to navigate herself. The captain nodded on his lofty perch, and the engineer was curled up in his own tiny hatchway, trying to read a newspaper, which the fresh breeze blew into horns and balloons. The rough cabin bunks were full of sleeping forms, and the leather wine-bottles, flung down carelessly in the stern, had cuddled each to each in cozy shapes, and seemed to be sleeping, too. The two soldiers, who had been gambling with coppers over innumerable games of dominos, were listening grimly to the oratory of the commercial traveller.
"No fighting for me!" this hero was declaiming. "In strenuous times like these a man ought to cherish his life for the sake of his country. Spain needs her sons right here at home. It is sweet, as the poet says, to die for thepatria, but to live for thepatriais, in my opinion, just as glorious."
"And more comfortable," grunted one of the soldiers,while the other gave a hitch to those red infantry trousers which look as if they had been wading in blood, and walked forward to view from the bows the little white port of Bonanza.
As the boat went no farther, I had to stain my silver route by a prosaic parenthesis of land. It was some comfort to remember that Magellan waited here for that expedition from Seville which was the first to sail around the globe. I think I travelled the three miles from Bonanza, Good Weather, to San Lúcar de Barrameda in Magellan's own carriage. It was certainly old enough. As I sat on a tipsy chair in the middle of a rude wagon frame mounted on two shrieking wooden wheels, and hooded with broken arches of bamboo, from which flapped shreds of russet oilcloth, I entered into poignant sympathy with Magellan's ups and downs of hope and fear. The jolting was such a torture that, to divert my attention, I questioned the driver as to the uses of this and that appliance in his rickety ark.
"And what are those ropes for, there in the corner?" was my final query.
"Those are to tie the coffins down when I have a fare for the cemetery," he replied, cracking his whip over the incredibly lean mule that was sulkily jerking us along.
"Please let me get out and walk," I entreated. "You may keep the valise and show me the way to the inn, and I can go quite as fast as that mule."
"Now, don't!" he begged, with even intenser pathos. "Strangers always want to walk before they get to the inn, and then the people laugh at me. I know my carriage isn't very handsome, but it's the only one in Bonanza. Just do me the favor to keep your seat a little longer."
I had been lurched out of it only a minute before, but I could not refuse to sacrifice mere bodily ease to the pride of Spanish spirit.
Notwithstanding Don José's dark predictions, this was the only trial of the trip. To realize to the full the honesty, kindliness, and dignity of the everyday Spaniard, one needs to turn off from the sight-seer's route. On the beaten tourist track are exorbitant hotels, greedy guides, cheating merchants, troops of beggars—everywhere "the itching palm." But here in San Lúcar, for instance, where I had to spend twenty-four hours at a genuine Spanishfonda, the proprietor took no advantage of the facts that I was a foreigner, a woman, and practically a prisoner in the place until the Saturday afternoon train went out, but gave me excellent accommodations, most respectful and considerate treatment, and the lowest hotel bill that I had seen in Spain.
San Lúcar has, in early Spanish literature, a very ill name for roguery, but, so far as my brief experience went, Boston could not have been safer and would not have been so genial. I strayed, for instance, into a modest little shop to buy a cake of soap, which its owner declined to sell, insisting that I ought to have a choicer variety than his, and sending his son, a lad of sixteen, to point me out more fashionable counters. This youth showed me the sights of the pleasant seashore town, with its tiers of closely grated windows standing out from the white fronts of the houses, and its sturdy packhorses and orange-laden donkeys streaming along the rough stone streets, and when, at the inn door, I hesitatingly offered him a piece of silver, doffed his cap with smiling ease, and said he did not take pay for a pleasure.
Once off the regular lines of travel, however, speed is out of the question. I might have gone from Seville to Cadiz in three hours; thanks to historic enthusiasms, it took me nearer three days. After escaping from San Lúcar, I had to pass four hours in Jerez, another whitewashed, palm-planted town, whose famous sherry has made it the third city in Spain for wealth. The thing to do at Jerez is to visit the greatbodegasand taste the rich white liquors treasured in those monster casks, which bear all manner of names, from Christ and His twelve disciples to Napoleon the Great; but mindful, in the light of Don José's admonitions, that the weak feminine estate is "as water unto wine," I contented myself with seeing the strange storage basin of the mountain aqueduct—an immense, immaculate cellar, where endless vistas of low stone arches stretch away in the silent dusk above the glimmer of a ghostly lake.
The train for Cadiz must needs be two hours late this particular evening, but my cabman drove me to approved shops for the purchase of bread and fruit, and then, of his own motion, drew up our modest equipage in a shady nook opposite the villa of the English consul, that I might enjoy my Arcadian repast with a secure mind. Jehu accepted, after due protestations, a share of the viands, and reciprocated the attention by buying me a glass of water at the nearest stand, much amused at my continued preference for Jerez water over Jerez wine.
One of the Jerez wine merchants, German by birth, shared the railway carriage with me for a while, and after the social wont of Continental travel fell to discussing the war. "The Spaniards deserved to be beaten," he declared, "but the Yankeesdidn't deserve to beat. They were conceited enough before, heaven knows, and now they expect all Europe to black their shoddy shoes. Your own country was a bit to blame in blocking every effort to keep them in their place."
I felt it time to explain that I was not English, but American. Much disconcerted, he did his best to make amends.
"I wouldn't have said that for the world if I had known you were an American—but it's every syllable true."
He thought over this remark in silence for a moment, his Teutonic spirit sorely strained between kindliness and honesty, and tried again.
"I would like to say something good about the United States, I would indeed,—if there was anything to say."
It seemed to occur to him, after a little, that even this apology left something to be desired, and he brightened up.
"Wouldn't you like some roses? They sell them here at this station. There comes a boy now with a nice, big bunch. Onepeseta! I think that's too dear, don't you?"
I hastened to assent.
"The lady says that's too dear. Seventy-fivecentimos? No. The lady can't pay that. Sixtycentimos? No. The lady can't afford sixtycentimos. Fiftycentimos? No. The lady says fiftycentimosis too much. She will take them at fortycentimos. Here's a halfpeseta. And you must give me back a fat dog."
The boy held back the penny and tried to substitute a cent.
"Oh, sir, please, sir, forty-fivecentimos! There are two dozen roses here, and all fresh as the dawn. Give me the puppy-dog over."
But the German, who knew how to put even a sharper edge on the inveterate Spanish bargaining, secured for the value of eight cents, instead of twenty, his great bouquet of really beautiful roses, and presented it with as much of a bow as the carriage limits permitted.
"I meant to pay all the time, you know; but one can always make a better trade, in Spain, if it is done in the name of a lady." And he added, with that sudden tact which innate goodness and delicacy give to the most blundering of us mortals, "If you don't like to take them from a stranger for yourself, you will take them as my peace-offering to your country."
I was reminded again of my native land by another fellow-traveller—a Spaniard of the Spaniards, this time, one of the Conservative and Catholic leaders, greeted at the various stations by priests and monks and friars, whose hands he solemnly kissed. This distinguished personage was absorbed in a voluminous type-written manuscript, from which he occasionally read aloud to the band of political confidants who accompanied him. It was an arraignment of the Liberal Party, and, by way of exposing the errors of the Sagasta government, included a merciless résumé of the Spanish naval and military disasters, with elaborate comparisons of the American and Spanish equipments. He was then on his way to join in a consoling pilgrimage to a certain image of Christ, which had been cudgelled by a grief-maddened priest whose dying mother the image had failed to heal.
These surroundings more or less jostled my sixteenth-century dream, but I held to it so stubbornly that, when pyramids of salt began to glimmer like ghosts along the way,and a sweeping curve of lights warned me of our approach to Cadiz, I made a point of seeing as little as possible. It was midnight, but Spanish hours are luckily so late that Don José's friends were still at the height of evening sociability and regaled me with alternate showers of sweetmeats and questions. Finally, after many exclamations of horror at the audacity of the trip, all the feminine hospitality of the household lighted me to a chamber whose walls were hung with pictures of martyrs and agonizing saints. Among these I counted five colored representations of Christ opening his breast to display the bleeding heart.
The next morning I promptly took boat toPuerto de Santa Maria, embarked on the return steamer, and so at last found myself once more on the Silver Road, entering Cadiz harbor from the sea.
To be sure, theMontserratwas riding proudly in my view, although the warships to which she had been used to curtsy in the open roads of Cadiz would never cut those shining waves again. The waters were as turquoise blue as if they had just come from the brush of an old master, and the towered city rose before us like a crystal castle in the air. Its limited space, built as it is within great sea walls on an outlying rock, which only a rope of sand moors to the mainland, has necessitated narrow streets and high houses, whosemiradores, lookouts that everywhere crown the terraced roofs, give this battlemented aspect to the town. One of the most ancient and tragic cities known to time, claiming Hercules for its founder, in turn Phœnician, Carthaginian, Roman, Gothic, Moorish, Spanish, it yet looks fresh as a water-lily. I could have spent another three days in gazing. And this sparklingvision was Spain'sCopa de Plata, the Silver Cup which has brimmed with the gold and pearls of America, with blood and flame and glory. Its riches have taken to themselves wings, but its high, free spirit and frank gayety abide. Still the Andalusians sing:—
"VivaCadiz, Silver Cadiz,Whose walls defy the sea,Cadiz of the pretty girls,Of courtesy and glee!"Good luck to merry Cadiz,As white as ocean spray,And her five and twenty cannonThat point Gibraltar way!"
"VivaCadiz, Silver Cadiz,Whose walls defy the sea,Cadiz of the pretty girls,Of courtesy and glee!
"VivaCadiz, Silver Cadiz,
Whose walls defy the sea,
Cadiz of the pretty girls,
Of courtesy and glee!
"Good luck to merry Cadiz,As white as ocean spray,And her five and twenty cannonThat point Gibraltar way!"
"Good luck to merry Cadiz,
As white as ocean spray,
And her five and twenty cannon
That point Gibraltar way!"
But I am bound to add that the cannon do not look dangerous.
XII
MURILLO'S CHERUBS
"Angels o'er the palm trees flying,Touch their waving fronds to rest.Bid them give no wind replying.Jesus sleeps on Mary's breast.Blesséd angels, hold the peepingBranches still as altar-place,For the Holy Child is sleepingClose beneath His Mother's face."—Lope de Vega.
"Angels o'er the palm trees flying,
Touch their waving fronds to rest.
Bid them give no wind replying.
Jesus sleeps on Mary's breast.
Blesséd angels, hold the peeping
Branches still as altar-place,
For the Holy Child is sleeping
Close beneath His Mother's face."
—Lope de Vega.
Spanish love for childhood, and the precocity and winsomeness of Spanish children, impressed me from my first hour in the Peninsula. "There is no road so level as to be without rough places," and the initial days of my Madrid residence, after my artist comrade had gone back to Paris and the spring salons, might have been a trifle lonely save for baby society. I was living in a delightful Spanish household, but the very excess of courtesy reminded me continually that I was a Yankee and a heretic. As time passed, friendship ripened, and it is to-day no empty form of words when I am assured that I have "my house in Madrid." But at the outset I felt myself not only an American alien, but an Andalusian exile. The "only Court" is such a prosaic contrast to Seville that my impulse was to betake myself withbooks to the great park of the Buen Retiro, the magnificent gift of Olivares to his royal master, and let the Madrid world, at least the adult portion of it, go by. For while the larger Madrileños were busy with their own plays of politics, bull-fights, and flirtation, the little ones had happy afternoons in that historic park of many a tragedy, where convents, palaces, and fortifications have all made way for the children's romping ground. Resting on a rustic seat in the leafy shade, with the rich, thrilling notes of the nightingale answering the bell call of the cuckoo from the deeper groves beyond, I could watch these budding Spaniards to heart's content.
It was well to observe them from a distance, however, for their young voices were of the shrillest. Among the boys, an energetic few were developing muscle by tag and leap-frog; more were flying kites, cracking whips, twirling slings, and brandishing the terrors of pewter swords; while at every turn, beside some flashing fountain or beneath some spreading oak, I would come upon a group of urchins playingal torowith the cheap, gaudy capes of red and yellow manufactured for the children's sport. The girls were skipping rope, rolling hoop, teaching one another the steps of endless dances, and whispering momentous secrets in statue-guarded grottos, or thickets of flowering shrubs, or whatsoever safe, mysterious nook their fluttering search could find.
Here was a school out for its daily airing, a pretty procession of rainbow-clad little damsels, marshalled by the black-veiled figures of graceful nuns, and pacing with all decorum down a crowded avenue; but the moment the troop turned into some sequestered by-path, how it would break into a shimmeringconfusion of butterflies, darting hither and thither in those jewel-green lights and sea-green shadows, the nuns casting their dignity to the winds and scampering with the swiftest! Wandering after I would come, perhaps, upon an open space where the smaller boys were gathered, delicate little lads riding horse-headed sticks, digging with mimic spades, and tossing big, soft, red and yellow balls, while mothers and nurses sat about in circle on the stone benches, calling out sharp-toned cautions to their respective charges.
And everywhere in the park were toddling babies, clasping dolls, tugging at gay balloons, dragging wooden donkeys on wheels, and tumbling over live puppies. They were pale, engaging, persistent little creatures, with a true Spanish inability to learn from experience. I saw one aristocratic cherub, white as snow from feathered cap to ribboned shoes, take ten successive slappings because he muddied his hands. The angry nurse would make a snatch for the naughty fingers, roughly beat off the dirt, and cuff the culprit soundly. His proud little mouth would tremble; he would wink hard and fast, but there was not a tear to be seen, not a cry to be heard, and no sooner had her peasant clutch released him than back went the baby hands, grubbing deep into the mire. A gorgeous civil guard finally distracted her attention, and the last view I had of the child showed him blissfully squatted in the very middle of a puddle, splashing with arms and legs.
White is almost the universal wear of the prattling age in the Buen Retiro, although now and then some lily fairy would flit by with saffron sash and harmonious saffron stockings, or costume similarly touched by pink or blue. The Scotch plaids, too, were in favor as sashes, and at rare intervals Iencountered a tot sensibly attired in stout plaid frock. But the white of this childish multitude was thickly flecked with mourning suits, complete to bits of black gloves and even to jet studs in the collars. Among the sad sights of the Retiro was an epileptic boy, led and half supported between two sweet-faced, youthful ladies, both in widow's crêpe, who screened him with caresses as his fit took him and he foamed and screamed in piteous helplessness. This pathetic trio, ever seeking seclusion, was ever followed by a retinue of idlers, who, for all their intrusive staring, were silent and sympathetic.
The nursemaids formed not the least attractive feature of the kaleidoscopic picture. Most wore white caps, fastened with gilded pins or knots of rose or russet; but the nurses counted the best, from the mountain province of Santander, were distinguished by bright-colored handkerchiefs twisted about the head. Here, as in theÉlysées, baby-wagons are seldom seen. The nurses carry in arms the black-eyed infants, who bite away at their coral necklaces quite like little Yankees.
But Spanish traits soon declare themselves. In the centre of the park is an artificial pond, where lads in their first teens, too old for play, lean languidly over the iron railings, and, while they throw crumbs to the flock of forlorn-looking ducks or watch the dip of the red oar-blades that impel the pleasure boats, brag of their amorous adventures and exchange the scandal of thePrado. Sometimes their love chat is of sweeter tenor, for many of these schoolboys have already spoken their betrothal vows, which the Church will not let them lightly break. Spaniards often marry under twenty-one, and even a recent wedding in Madrid, where neither bridenor bridegroom had reached the fifteenth year, was hardly thought amiss, in view of the fact that there was parental money to maintain them.
And why had the stately city of Valladolid been under a reign of terror for half the week just past, with shutters up, doors barred, and women and children kept at home for safety, while bands of young men swayed in bloody struggle through her famous squares and streets, but because a cadet and a student must needs lose heart to the same maid? Cupid, not Santiago, is the patron saint of Spain. And Cupid, for all his mischief, has some very winning ways. Our boyish sentimentalists of the Buen Retiro, for instance, easily fall into song, and the native melodies, always with something wild and Oriental in their beat, ring across the little lake into the woods beyond till the birds take up the challenge and every tree grows vocal.
One afternoon, on my way to the park, I bought from a roadside vender a handful of small, gaudily bound children's books, and had no sooner found what I fondly supposed was a sequestered seat than a tumult of little folks surrounded me, coaxing to hear the stories. These tales, so taken at random, may throw a little light on the literature of Spanish nurseries. There was the life of the Madonna, which we passed over, as the children said they had read it in school and knew it, every word, already. So we turned to the astonishing career of the great soldier, Kill-Bullet, who could easily stop a cannon-ball against his palm, and to an account of that far-off land where it rained gold in such profusion that nobody would work, until finally all the people, weary of a wealth which induced no tailor to stitch and no shoemaker to cobble, nobaker to bake and no dairy-maid to churn, rose by common consent and shovelled the gold into the river. We read of hot-tempered little Ambrose, who left the gate of his garden open, so that a hen cackled in and began to scratch under a rose bush, whereupon the angry boy chased her furiously all over the garden-beds until his summer's work was trampled into ruin, and his papa came and explained to him how disastrous a thing is wrath. There was a companion moral tale for little girls, telling how Inez used to make faces until her mamma told her that she would grow up with a twisted mouth and nobody would marry her, whereat did little Inez promptly reform her manners. One favorite volume, with a cover which displayed a wild-whiskered old ogre in a fiery skullcap gloating over a platterful of very pink baby, told how good little Violet saved her bad sisters, Rose and Daisy, from his dreadful gullet, by aid of an ugly monkey, whom her promised kiss transformed into a fairy prince. I was glad to find, in that country where so little is done to train children in the love of animals, the ancient tale of the four musicians, the donkey, the dog, the cat, and the cock, who escaped in their old age from the death that threatened them at the hands of ungrateful masters and, by a free exercise of their musical talents, captured the house of a robber-band, putting its inmates to confusion and flight. Many of the stories, indeed, would have been recognized by young Americans, but the proportion of saint-lore was larger than that of fairy-lore, and, now and then, some familiar property had suffered a Spanish change, as the invisible cap which had become an invisible cape of the sort used for playing bull-fight.
The Pageant of GethsemaneThe Pageant of Gethsemane
The Pageant of Gethsemane
The nursery rhymes, too, so far as I chanced upon them,were of the universal type with Spanish variations. A Castilian mother plays Peek-a-boo with her baby quite as an English mother does, except that the syllables areCú?Trás!The father's foot trots the child to a Catholic market.
"Trot, little donkey! Donkey, trot!We must buy honey to please the pet.If San Francisco has it not,We'll go to San Benet."
"Trot, little donkey! Donkey, trot!
We must buy honey to please the pet.
If San Francisco has it not,
We'll go to San Benet."
Baby's toes are counted as the eternal five little pigs, and also thus, with a preliminary tickling of the rosy sole:—
"Here passed a little dove. This one caught it. This one killed it. This one put it on to roast. This one took it off again. And this teeny-teeny-teeny scamp ate it all up!"
Spanish patty-cakes are followed by a Spanish grace.
"Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!The sweetest cakes are for dear mama.Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!The hardest pats are for poor papa,"Bread, O God! Bread, dear God,For this little child to-day!Because he's such a babyHe cannot pay his way."
"Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!The sweetest cakes are for dear mama.Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!The hardest pats are for poor papa,
"Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!
The sweetest cakes are for dear mama.
Patty-cakes, oh! Patty-cakes, ah!
The hardest pats are for poor papa,
"Bread, O God! Bread, dear God,For this little child to-day!Because he's such a babyHe cannot pay his way."
"Bread, O God! Bread, dear God,
For this little child to-day!
Because he's such a baby
He cannot pay his way."
The Spanish nursery seems richer in rhymes than ours. Nurse bends Baby's left hand into a rose-leaf purse, for example, and gives it little taps with one finger after another of Baby's right hand, singing:—
"A penny for Baby's purseFrom papa, mama, and nurse.A penny, a penny to pay!Let no thief steal it away!"
"A penny for Baby's purse
From papa, mama, and nurse.
A penny, a penny to pay!
Let no thief steal it away!"
And then the tiny fist is doubled tight.
When the child, again, is first dressed in short clothes, he is propped up in a corner and coaxed to take his first step with the rhyme:—
"One little step, Baby-boy mine!Come, Little Man, step up!And thou shalt have a taste of wineFrom Godfather's silver cup."
"One little step, Baby-boy mine!
Come, Little Man, step up!
And thou shalt have a taste of wine
From Godfather's silver cup."
This rhyming fashion the little ones take with them out of babyhood into their later childhood. The urchin admonishes his whistle:—
"Whistle, whistle, Margarita,And you'll get a crust of bread,But if you do not whistleI'll cut off your little head."
"Whistle, whistle, Margarita,
And you'll get a crust of bread,
But if you do not whistle
I'll cut off your little head."
The little girl learns the scales in process of rocking her doll to sleep:—
Don't pin-prick my poor old dolly,DoRespect my domestic matters.ReMethinks she grows melancholy,MiFast as her sawdust scatters.FaSole rose of your mama's posy,SolLaugh at your mama, so!LaSeal up your eyes all cozy.SiLa Sol Fa Mi Re Do.
Don't pin-prick my poor old dolly,Do
Respect my domestic matters.Re
Methinks she grows melancholy,Mi
Fast as her sawdust scatters.Fa
Sole rose of your mama's posy,Sol
Laugh at your mama, so!La
Seal up your eyes all cozy.Si
La Sol Fa Mi Re Do.
With Spanish children, as with ours, Christmas Eve, orNoche Buena, is a season of gleeful excitement. They do not hang up stockings for Santa Claus, but they put out their shoes on the balcony for the Kings of the East, riding high on camel-back, to fill with sweets and playthings. Considerate children, too, put out a handful of straw for the tired beasts who have journeyed so far over the Milky Way. On some balconies the morning sun beholds rocking-horses and rocking-donkeys, make-believe theatres and bull-rings, with toy images of soldiers, bulls and Holy Families; but if the child has been naughty and displeased the Magi, his poor little shoes will stand empty and ashamed.
The dramatic instinct, so strong in Spaniards, is strikingly manifested in the children's games. These little people are devoted to the theatre, too, and may be seen in force at the matinées in the Apolo, Lara, and Zarzuela. Afternoon performances are given only on Sundays and the other Catholicfiestas, which last, numerous enough, are well within reach of the Puritan conscience. At these matinées more than half the seats in the house are occupied by juvenile ticket-holders, from rows of vociferous urchins in the galleries, to round-eyed babies cooing over their nurses' shoulders. If the play is an extravaganza, abounding in magic and misadventure, the rapture of the childish audience is at its height.
The close attention with which mere three-year-olds follow the action is astonishing. "Bonito!" lisping voices cry after each fantastic ballet, and wee white hands twinkle up and down in time with the merry music. When the clown divests himself, one by one, of a score of waistcoats, or successively pulls thirty or forty smiling dairy-maids out of a churn, littlearithmeticians all over the house call out the count and dispute his numbers with him. When the dragon spits his shower of sparks, when chairs sidle away from beneath the unfortunates who would sit down or suddenly rise with them toward the ceiling, when signboards whirl, and dinners frisk up chimney, cigars puff out into tall hats, and umbrellas fire off bullets, the hubbub of wonder and delight drowns the voices of the actors.
The house is never still for one single instant. Babies cry wearily, nurses murmur soothingly, mystified innocents pipe out questions, papas rebuke and explain, exasperated old bachelors hiss for silence, saucy boys hiss back for fun—all together the Madrid matinée affords a far better opportunity to study child life than to hear the comedy upon the boards.
The boy king of Spain is, of course, a fascinating figure to his child subjects. We were told at San Sebastian, where the Queen Regent has a summer palace, that on those red-letter days when the king takes a sea dip, children come running from far and near to see him step into the surf, with two stalwart soldiers gripping the royal little fists. And no sooner has the Court returned to the sumptuous, anxious palace of Madrid, than the boy bathers of San Sebastian delight themselves in playing king, mincing down the beach under the pompous military escort that they take turns in furnishing one another.
In Madrid, too, the sightseeing crowds that gather before the royal palace or at the doors of theIglesia del Buen Suceso, where the Queen Regent, with her "august children," sometimes attends theSalveon Saturday afternoons, are thicklypeppered with little folks, eager to "see the king." They are often disappointed, for the precious life is jealously guarded, especially while the Carlist cloud still broods above the throne. During my stay in Madrid, a man with a revolver under his coat was arrested on suspicion in the vestibule of the theatre known asLa Comédia, where the queen was passing the evening. Sceptical Madrid shrugged its shoulders and said: "Stuff and nonsense! When the Ministers want the queen to sign a paper that isn't to her liking, they make a great show of devotion and pounce down on some poor devil as an anarchist, to frighten her into being meek and grateful." And, in fact, the prisoner was almost immediately released for lack of any incriminating evidence. For weeks after, nevertheless, the royal movements were more difficult to forecast, and on the daily drives the kinglet was often missing from the family group.
But, undiscouraged, every afternoon the children would fringe the palace side of thePlaza de Oriente, hoping to see the royal carriage go or come with their young sovereign, whose portrait, a wistful, boyish face above a broad lace collar, is printed in one of their school reading books over the inscription, "To the Head of the State honor and obedience are due." Expectant youngsters, in the all-enveloping black pinafores that remind the eye of Paris, with book satchels made of gay carpeting over the shoulder, would shake out their smudgy handkerchiefs, often stamped with the likenesses of famoustoreros, and help themselves to one another's hats in readiness to salute; but the elegant landau, preceded by an escort of two horsemen, dashes by so swiftly that their long waiting would be rewarded only by the briefest glimpse ofbowing bonnets and of a small gloved hand touching the military cap that shades a childish face.
It is a pale and sober little face as I have seen it, but Madrileños resent this impression and insist that his youthful Majesty is "sturdy enough," and as merry as need be. They say that the buoyancy which he inherits from his father is crossed by strange fits of brooding, due to his mother's blood, but that he is, in the main, a merry-hearted child. Although he has masters for his studies now, his affection still clings to his Austrian governess, whom, none the less, he dearly loves to tease. When she is honored by an invitation to drive with the Queen Regent, for example, Alphonsito hastens to hide her hat and then joins most solicitously in her fluttered search, until her suspicion darts upon him, and his prank breaks down in peals of laughter. Madrid was especially sensitive about him last year, for he, Alfonso XIII, godson of Pope Leo XIII, was thirteen years of age—an iteration of the unlucky omen that really ought to be satisfied with the loss of the Spanish colonies. His mother, in honor of his birthday, May seventeenth, distributed five thousand dollars among orphan asylums and other charities, and held a grand reception in the Hall of the Ambassadors, where the slight lad in cadet uniform, enthroned beside the Queen Regent between the two great lions of gilded bronze, received the congratulations of a long procession of bowing ministers, admirals, captain generals, prelates, and those haughty grandees of Spain whose ancient privilege it is to wear their hats in the royal presence; but the shrinkage of his realm since his last birthday must have been uppermost in the mind of even the young lord of the festival.Pobrecito!one wonderswhat thoughts go on behind those serious brows of his, when, for instance, he looks down from his palace windows at the daily ceremony of guard-mounting in the courtyard. It is such a gallant sight; the martial music is so stirring; the cavalry in blue and silver sit their white steeds so proudly, with the sun glistening on their drawn swords and the wind tossing their long, white, horsehair plumes, that all these tales of defeat and loss must puzzle the sore boy heart and cast confusing shadows down the path before him.
Little as the Spaniards love the Queen Regent, to whom they cannot pardon her two cardinal offences of being a "foreigner" and of disliking the bull-fight, they have a certain affection for Alfonso XIII, "the only child born a king since Christ." Indeed, Spain seems to have been always sympathetic toward childhood in palaces. Enter this wonderfulArmeríaof Madrid, where those plumed and armored kings, on richly caparisoned chargers, whom we have come to know in the paintings of theMuseo del Prado, seem to have leapt from the canvases to greet us here in still more lifelike guise, albeit not over graciously, with horse reined back and mighty lance at poise. Any fine morning they may all come clattering out into thePlaza de Armas—and where will the United States be then? Here stands a majestic row of them—Philip II, in a resplendent suit of gold-inlaid plate-armor; Maximilian, whose visor gives him the fierce hooked beak of an eagle; Sebastian of Portugal, with nymphs embossed in cunning work on his rich breastplate; and Charles V, three times over, in varieties of imperial magnificence.