Familiar Spanish Travels Part 10

When the procession was housed again, we went off and forgot it in the gardens of the Alcazar. But I must not begin yet on the gardens of the Alcazar. We went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but we did not see them until our second morning in Seville. We gave what was left from the first morning in the cathedral to a random exploration of the streets and places of the city. There was, no doubt, everywhere some touch of the bravery of our square of San Fernando, where the public windows were hung with crimson tapestries and brocades in honor of St.

Raphael; but his holiday did not make itself molestively felt in the city's business or pleasure. Where we could drive we drove, and where we must we walked, and we walked of course through the famous Calle de las Sierpes, because no one drives there. As a rule no woman walks there, and naturally there were many women walking there, under the eyes of the popular cafes and aristocratic clubs which princ.i.p.ally abound in Las Sierpes, for it is also the street of the princ.i.p.al shops, though it is not very long and is narrower than many other streets of Seville. It has its name from so commonplace an origin as the sign over a tavern door, with some snakes painted on it; but if the example of sinuosity had been set it by prehistoric serpents, there were scores of other streets which have bettered its instruction. There were streets that crooked away everywhere, not going anywhere, and breaking from time to time into irregular angular s.p.a.ces with a church or a convent or a n.o.bleman's house looking into them.

VI

The n.o.blemen's houses often showed a severely simple facade to the square or street, and hid their inner glories with what could have been fancied a haughty reserve if it had not been for the frankness with which they opened their _patios_ to the gaze of the stranger, who, when he did not halt his carriage before them, could enjoy their hospitality from a sidewalk sometimes eighteen inches wide. The pa.s.sing tram-car might grind him against the tall grilles which were the only barriers to the _patios,_ but otherwise there would be nothing to spoil his enjoyment of those marble floors and tiled walls and fountains potted round with flowering plants. In summer he could have seen the family life there; and people who are of such oriental seclusion otherwise will sometimes even suffer the admiring traveler to come as well as look within. But one who would not press their hospitality so far could reward his forbearance by finding some of the _patios_ too new-looking, with rather a glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron pillars, and their gla.s.s roofs which the rain comes through in the winter. The ladies sit and sew there, or talk, if they prefer, and receive their friends, and turn night into day in the fas.h.i.+on of climates where they are so easily convertible. The _patio_ is the place of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the _tertulia,_ and the family nightly meets its next of kin and then its nearer and farther friends there with that Latin regularity which may also be monotony. One _patio_ is often much like another, though none was perhaps of so much public interest as the _patio_ of the lady who loved a bull-fighter and has made her _patio_ a sort of shrine to him. The famous _espada_ perished in his heroic calling, no worse if no better than those who saw him die, and now his bust is in plain view, with a fit inscription recognizing his worth and prowess, and with the heads of some of the bulls he slew.

Under that clement sky the elements do not waste the works of man as elsewhere, and many of the houses of Seville are said to be such as the Moors built there. We did not know them from the Christian houses; but there are no longer any mosques, while in our wanderings we had the pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they are still in the keeping of their sisterhoods and brotherhoods, remain monuments of the medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to secular uses, attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution and reform. It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the Street of the Love of G.o.d, and are then startled by the pagan presence of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the t.i.tular demiG.o.d. Statues and pillars are alike antique, and give you a moment of the Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of an unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which the Roman Forum used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is shady, but I do not remember the trees--only those glorious columns climbing the summer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and proclaiming the imperishable memory of the republic that conquered and the empire that ruled the world, and have never loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly from the gra.s.s-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and in this other Iberian land we were always meeting the witnesses of the grandeur which no change short of some universal sea change can wholly sweep from the earth. Before it Goth and Arab shrink, with all their works, into the local and provisional; Rome remains for all time imperial and universal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 24 ANCIENT ROMAN COLUMNS LIFTING ALOFT THE FIGURES OF HERCULES AND CAESAR]

To descend from this high-horsed reflection, as I must, I have to record that there did not seem to be so many small boys in Seville as in the Castillian capitals we had visited; in the very home of the bull-feast we did not see one mimic _corrida_ given by the _torreros_ of the future. Not even in the suburb of Triana, where the small boys again consolingly superabounded, was the great national game played among the wheels and hoofs of the dusty streets to which we crossed the Guadalquivir that afternoon. To be sure, we were so taken with other things that a boyish bull-feast might have rioted unnoticed under our horses' very feet, especially on the long bridge which gives you the far upward and downward stretch of the river, so simple and quiet and empty above, so busy and noisy and thronged with s.h.i.+pping below. I suppose there are lovelier rivers than that--we ourselves are known to brag of our Pharpar and Abana--but I cannot think of anything more n.o.bly beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace in her bed, where she has had so many bad dreams of Carthaginian and Roman and Gothic and Arab and Norman invasion. Now her waters redden, for the time at least, only from the scarlet hulls of the tramp steamers lying in long succession beside the sh.o.r.e where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fas.h.i.+on of Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers; and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose from the midst of them. It was built in the last century of the Moorish dominion to mark the last point to which the gardens of the Moorish palace of the Alcazar could stretch, but they were long ago obliterated behind it; and though it was so recent, no doubt it would have had its pathos if I could ever have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem power in Spain. As it was, I found the tramp steamers more moving, and it was these that my eye preferably sought whenever I crossed the Triana bridge.

VII

We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were especially going to see the gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes with that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable.

Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward visit the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were possible I would willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I will try eventually to be just, and I must even now advise the reader to visit the tile potteries there. If he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly and vainly struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of manner; his cla.s.sically regular face was as swarthy as the darkest mulatto's, but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the sense of his fine decency with me when we drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled round the corner of the street into the gipsy quarter, and made it my prophylactic against the human noisomeness which instantly beset our course. Let no Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those persistent savages have even the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to the interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally and physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, and treated with insecticides and put away in mothb.a.l.l.s. Our own settled order of things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks and it smells, especially in Spain, when you get down to its lower levels; but it does not a.s.sail the senses with such rank offense as smites them in the gipsy quarter with sights and sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well as nose, were all stenches.

Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged children running beside us and after us and screaming, "Minny, niooney, _ money!"_ in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against the door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and fat, sat on the thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes; younger women ranged the sidewalks and offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, and some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a green waist, with both white and red flowers in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the road a troop of children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented a hapless a.s.s colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could persuade our cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street in reserve which made us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled the river, and into the center of it every manner of offal had been cast from the beginning of time to reek and fester and juicily ripen and rot in unspeakable corruption. It was such a thoroughfare as Dante might have imagined in his h.e.l.l, if people in his time had minded such horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it was worse than infernal, it was medieval, and that we were driving in such putrid foulness as the gilded carriages of kings and queens and the prancing steeds and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through whenever they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent waterside, and then by the helpful bridge to the other sh.o.r.e of the Guadalquivir, painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp steamers.

After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its children never left except to do a little fortune-telling and mule and donkey trading, eked out with theft in the country round, any show of honest industry looked wholesome and kind. I rejoiced almost as much in the machinery as in the men who were loading the steamers; even the huge casks of olives, which were working from the salt-water poured into them and frothing at the bung in great white sponges of spume, might have been examples of toil by which those noisome vagabonds could well have profited. But now we had come to see another sort of leisure--the famous leisure of fortune and fas.h.i.+on driving in the Delicias, but perhaps never quite fulfilling the traveler's fond ideal of it. We came many times to the Delicias in hope of it, with decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last without entire fruition. For our first visit we could not have had a fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening from a streak of sunset beyond Triana, and we arrived in appropriate circ.u.mstance, round the immense circle of the bull-ring and past the palace which the Duc de Montpensier has given the church for a theological seminary, with long stretches of beautiful gardens. Then we were in the famous Paseo, a drive with footways on each side, and on one side dusky groves widening to the river. The paths were lit with gleaming statues, and among the palms and the eucalyptuses were orange trees full of their golden globes, which we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were of that bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, not because they are in accord with the acrid nature of man there, but that they may be wrought into marmalade. On the other hand stretched less formal woods, with fields for such polite athletics as tennis, which the example of the beloved young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of dust and every evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, and that evening we had it mostly to ourselves, though there were two or three carriages with ladies in hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted and courageously walking, while their carriages followed. A magnate of some sort was shut alone in a brougham, in the care of footman and coachman with deeply silver-banded hats; there were a few military and civil riders, and there was distinctly a young man in a dog-cart with a groom, keeping abreast the landau of three ladies in mantillas, with whom he was improving what seemed a chance acquaintance. Along the course the public park gave way at times to the grounds of private villas; before one of these a boy did what he could for us by playing ball with a priest. At other points there were booths with chairs and tables, where I am sure interesting parties of people would have been sitting if they could have expected us to pa.s.s.

VIII

The reader, pampered by the brilliant excitements of our American promenades, may think this spectacle of the gay world of Seville dull; but he ought to have been with us a colder, redder, and sadder evening when we had the Delicias still more to ourselves. Afterward the Delicias seemed to cheer up, and the place was fairly frequented on a holiday, which we had not suspected was one till our cabman convinced us from his tariff that we must pay him double, because you must always do that in Seville on holidays. By this time we knew that most of the Sevillian rank and riches had gone to Madrid for the winter, and we were the more surprised by some evident show of them in the private turnouts where by far most of the turnouts were public. But in Spain a carriage is a carriage, and the Sevillian cabs are really very proper and sometimes even handsome, and we felt that our own did no discredit to the Delicias. Many of the holiday-makers were walking, and there were actually women on foot in hats and hobble-skirts without being openly mocked. On the evening of our last resort to the Delicias it was quite thronged far into the twilight, after a lemon sunset that continued to tinge the east with pink and violet. There were hundreds of carriages, fully half of them private, with coachmen and footmen in livery. With them it seemed to be the rule to stop in the circle at a turning-point a mile off and watch the going and coming. It was a serious spectacle, but not solemn, and it had its reliefs, its high-lights. It was always pleasant to see three Spanish ladies on a carriage seat, the middle one protruding because of their common bulk, and oftener in umbrella-wide hats with towering plumes than in the charming mantilla. There were no top-hats or other formality in the men's dress; some of them were on horseback, and there were two women riding.

Suddenly, as if it had come up out of the ground, I perceived a tram-car keeping abreast of the riding and walking and driving, and through all I was agreeably aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing donkeys on the bridle-path next the tram. I confess that they interested me more than my social equals and superiors; I should have liked to talk with those fathers and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on the cruppers of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially to know what pa.s.sed in the mind of one dear little girl who sat before her father with her bare brown legs tucked into the pockets of the pannier.

X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

It is always a question how much or little we had better know about the history of a strange country when seeing it. If the great ma.s.s of travelers voted according to their ignorance, the majority in favor of knowing next to nothing would be overwhelming, and I do not say they would be altogether unwise. History itself is often of two minds about the facts, or the truth from them, and when you have stored away its diverse conclusions, and you begin to apply them to the actual conditions, you are constantly embarra.s.sed by the misfits. What did it avail me to believe that when the Goths overran the north of Spain the Vandals overran the south, and when they swept on into Africa and melted away in the hot sun there as a distinctive race, they left nothing but the name Vandalusia, a letter less, behind them? If the Vandals were what they are reported to have been, the name does not at all characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, the very next history told me that they took even their name with them, and forbade me the simple and apt etymology which I had pinned my indolent faith to.

I

Before I left Seville I convinced a princ.i.p.al bookseller, much against his opinions, that there must be some such brief local history of the city as I was fond of finding in Italian towns, and I took it from his own reluctant shelf. It was a very intelligent little guide, this _Seville in the Hand,_ as it calls itself, but I got it too late for use in exploring the city, and now I can turn to it only for those directions which will keep the reader from losing his way in the devious past. The author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight in, and holds with historians who accept the Phoenicians as the sufficiently remote founders of Seville. This does not put out of commission those Biblical "s.h.i.+ps of Tars.h.i.+sh" which Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in his graphic sketch of Spanish history, has sailing to and from the neighboring coasts. Very likely they came up the Guadalquivir, and lay in the stream where a few thousand years later I saw those cheerful tramp-steamers lying. At any rate, the Phoenicians greatly flourished there, and gave their colony the name of Hispalis, which it remained content with till the Romans came and called the town Julia Romula, and Julius Caesar fenced it with the strong walls which the Moorish conquerors, after the Goths, reinforced and have left plain to be seen at this day. The most casual of wayfaring men must have read as he ran that the Moorish power fell before the sword of San Fernando as the Gothic fell before their own, and the Roman before the Gothic. But it is more difficult to realize that earlier than the Gothic, somewhere in between the Vandals and the Romans, had been the Carthaginians, whose great general Hamilcar fancied turning all Spain into a Carthaginian province. They were a branch of the Phoenicians as even the older, unadvertised edition of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ will tell, and the Phoenicians were a sort of Hebrews. Whether they remained to flourish with the other Jews under the Moors, my _Sevilla en la Mano_ does not say; and I am not sure whether they survived to share the universal exile into which Islam and Israel were finally driven. What is certain is, that the old Phoenician name of Hispalis outlived the Roman name of Julia Romula and reappeared in the Arabic as Ishbiliya (I know it from my Baedeker) and is now permanently established as Seville.

Under the Moors the city was subordinate to Cordova, though I can hardly bear to think so in my far greater love of Seville. But it was the seat of schools of science, art, and agriculture, and after the Christians had got it back, Alfonso the Learned founded other schools there for the study of Latin and Arabic. But her greatest prosperity and glory came to Seville with the discovery of America. Not Columbus only, but all his most famous contemporaries, sailed from the ports of her coasts; she was the capital of the commerce with the new world, ruling and regulating it by the oldest mercantile tribunal in the world, and becoming the richest city of Spain. Then riches flowered in the letters and arts, especially the arts, and Herrera, Pacheco, Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurburan were born and flourished in Seville. In modern times she has taken a prominent part in political events. She led in the patriotic war to drive out the armies of Napoleon, and she seems to have been on both sides in the struggle for liberal and absolutist principles, the establishment of the brief republic of 1868, and the restoration of the present monarchy.

Through all the many changes from better to Worse, from richer to poorer, Seville continued faithful to the ideal of religious unity which the wise Isabel and the shrewd Ferdinand divined was the only means of consolidating the intensely provincial kingdoms of Spain into one nation of Spaniards. Andalusia not being Gothic had never been Aryan, and it was one of her kings who carried his orthodoxy to Castile and established it inexpugnably at Toledo after he succeeded his heretical father there. When four or five hundred years later it became a political necessity of the Catholic Kings to expel their Jewish and Moorish subjects and convert their wealth to pious and patriotic uses, Andalusia was one of the most zealous provinces in the cause. When presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office began, some five hundred heretics were burned alive at Seville before the year was out; many others, who were dead and buried, paid the penalty of their heresy in effigy; in all more than two thousand suffered in the region round about. Before he was in Valladolid, Torquemada was in Seville, and there he drew up the rules that governed the procedure of the Inquisition throughout Spain. A magnificent _quemadero,_ or crematory, second only to that of Madrid, was built: a square stone platform where almost every day the smoke of human sacrifice ascended. This crematory for the living was in the meadow of San Sebastian, now a part of the city park system which we left on the right that first evening when we drove to the Delicias. I do not know why I should now regret not having visited the place of this dreadful altar and offered my unavailing pity there to the memory of those scores of thousands of hapless martyrs who suffered there to no end, not even to the end of confirming Spain in the faith one and indivisible, for there are now, after so many generations of torment, two Protestant churches in Seville. For one thing I did not know where the place of the _quemadero_ was; and I do not yet know where those Protestant churches are.

II

[Ill.u.s.tration: 25 GARDENS OF THE ALCAZAR]

If I went again to Seville I should try to visit them--but, as it was, we gave our second day to the Alcazar, which is merely the first in the series of palaces and gardens once stretching from the flank of the cathedral to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir. A rich sufficiency is left in the actual Alcazar to suggest the splendor of the series, and more than enough in the gardens to invite our fatigue, day after day, to the sun and shade of its quiet paths and seats when we came spent with the glories and the bustling piety of the cathedral. In our first visit we had the guidance of a patriotic young Granadan whose zeal for the Alhambra would not admit the Alcazar to any comparison, but I myself still prefer it after seeing the Alhambra. It is as purely Moorish as that and it is in better repair if not better taste. The taste in fact is the same, and the Castilian kings consulted it as eagerly as their Arabic predecessors in the talent of the Moslem architects whom they had not yet begun to drive into exile. I am not going to set up rival to the colored picture postals, which give a better notion than I could give of the painted and gilded stucco decoration, the ingenious geometrical designs on the walls, and the cloying sweetness of the honeycombing in the vaulted roofs. Every one will have his feeling about Moorish architecture; mine is that a little goes a great way, and that it is too monotonous to compete with the Gothic in variety, while it lacks the dignity of any form of the Greek or the Renaissance. If the phrase did not insult the s.e.x which the faith of the Moslem insufferably insults, one might sum up one's slight for it in the word effeminate.

The Alcazar gardens are the best of the Alcazar. But I would not ignore the homelike charm of the vast court by which you enter from the street outside to the palace beyond. It is planted casually about with rather shabby orange trees that children were playing under, and was decorated with the week's wash of the low, simple dwellings which may be hired at a rental moderate even for Seville, where a handsome and commodious house in a good quarter rents for sixty dollars a year. One of those two-story cottages, as we should call them, in the ante-court of the Alcazar had for the student of Spanish life the special advantage of a lover close to a ground-floor window dropping tender nothings down through the slats of the shutter to some maiden lurking within. The nothings were so tender that you could not hear them drop, and, besides, they were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served any purpose for the stranger to listen for them. Once afterward we saw the national courts.h.i.+p going on at another cas.e.m.e.nt, but that was at night, and here the precious first sight of it was offered at ten o'clock in the morning. n.o.body seemed to mind the lover stationed outside the shutter with which the iron bars forbade him the closest contact; and it is only fair to say that he minded n.o.body; he was there when we went in and there when we came out, and it appears that when it is a question of love-making time is no more an object in Spain than in the United States. The scene would have been better by moonlight, but you cannot always have it moonlight, and the sun did very well; at least, the lover did not seem to miss the moon.

He was only an incident, and I hope the most romantic reader will let me revert from him to the Alcazar gardens. We were always reverting to them on any pretext or occasion, and we mostly had them to ourselves in the gentle afternoons when we strayed or sat about at will in them. The first day we were somewhat molested by the instruction of our patriotic Granadan guide, who had a whopper-jaw and grayish blue eyes, but coal-black hair for all his other blondness. He smoked incessant cigarettes, and he showed us especially the pavilion of Charles the Fifth, whom, after that use of all English-speaking Spanish guides, he called Charley Fift. It appeared that the great emperor used this pavilion for purposes of meditation; but he could not always have meditated there, though the frame of a brazier standing in the center intimated that it was tempered for reflection. The first day we found a small bird in possession, flying from one bit of the carved wooden ceiling to another, and then, taking our presence in dudgeon, out into the sun. Another day there was a nursery-girl there with a baby that cried; on another, still more distractingly, a fas.h.i.+onable young French bride who went kodaking round while her husband talked with an archaeological official, evidently Spanish. In his own time, Charley probably had the place more to himself, though even then his thoughts could not have been altogether cheerful, whether he recalled what he had vainly done to keep out of Spain and yet to take the worst of Spain with him into the Netherlands, where he tried to plant the Inquisition among his Flemings; he was already much soured with a world that had cloyed him, and was perhaps considering even then how he might make his escape from it to the cloister.

III

We did not know as yet how almost entirely dramatic the palace of the Alcazar was, how largely it was representative of what the Spanish successors of the Moorish kings thought those kings would have made it if they had made it; and it was probably through an instinct for the genuine that we preferred the gardens after our first cries of wonder.

What remains to me of our many visits is the ma.s.s of high borders of box, with roses, jasmine, and orange trees, palms, and cypresses. The fountains dribbled rather than gushed, and everywhere were ranks and rows of plants in large, high earthen pots beside or upon the tiled benching that faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit on if you had not had to supply the back yourself. The flowers were not in great profusion, and chiefly we rejoiced in the familiar quaintness of clumps of ma.s.sive blood-red c.o.xcombs and strange yellow ones. The walks were bordered with box, and there remains distinctly the impression of marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid with tiles; all Seville seems inlaid with tiles. One afternoon we lingered longer than usual because the day was so sunnily warm in the garden paths and s.p.a.ces, without being hot. A gardener whom we saw oftenest hung about his flowers in a sort of vegetable calm, and not very different from theirs except that they were not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle or falter in his apparently unseeing gaze; but when one of us picked a seed from the ground and wondered what it was he said it was a magnolia seed, and as if he could bear no more went away. In one wilding place which seemed set apart for a nursery several men were idly working with many pauses, but not so many as to make the spectator nervous. As the afternoon waned and the sun sank, its level rays dwelt on the galleries of the palace which Peter the Cruel built himself and made so ugly with harsh brown stucco ornament that it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic frescos exaggerated from the Italian, and very coa.r.s.e and rank.

It was this savage prince who invented much of the Alcazar in the soft Moorish taste; but in those hideous galleries he let his terrible nature loose, though as for that some say he was no crueler than certain other Spanish kings of that period. This is the notion of my unadvertised _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ and perhaps we ought to think of him leniently as Peter the Ferocious. He was kind to some people and was popularly known as the Justiciary; he especially liked the Moors and Jews, who were gratefully glad, poor things, of being liked by any one under the new Christian rule. But he certainly killed several of his half-brothers, and notably he killed his half-brother Don Fadrique in the Alcazar. That is, if he had no hand in the butchery himself he had him killed after luring him to Seville for the tournaments and forgiving him for all their mutual injuries with every caressing circ.u.mstance. One reads that after the king has kissed him he sits down again to his game of backgammon and Don Fadrique goes into the next room to Maria do Padilla, the lovely and gentle lady whom Don Pedro has married as much as he can with a wedded wife shut up in Toledo. She sits there in terror with her damsels and tries with looks and signs to make Don Fadrique aware of his danger. But he imagines no harm till the king and his companions, with their daggers drawn, come to the curtains, which the king parts, commanding, "Seize the Master of Santiago!" Don Fadrique tries to draw his sword, and then he turns and flies through the halls of the Alcazar, where he finds every door bolted and barred. The king's men are at his heels, and at last one of them fells him with a blow of his mace. The king goes back with a face of sympathy to Maria, who has fallen to the floor.

The treacherous keeping is all rather in the taste of the Italian Renaissance, but the murder itself is more Roman, as the Spanish atrocities and amus.e.m.e.nts are apt to be. Murray says it was in the beautiful Hall of the Amba.s.sadors that Don Fadrique was killed, but the other manuals are not so specific. Wherever it was, there is a blood-stain in the pavement which our Granadan guide failed to show us, possibly from a patriotic pique that there are no blood-stains in the Alhambra with personal a.s.sociations. I cannot say that much is to be made of the vaulted tunnel where poor Maria de Padilla used to bathe, probably not much comforted by the courtiers afterward drinking the water from the tank; she must have thought the compliment rather nasty, and no doubt it was paid her to please Don Pedro.

We found it pleasanter going and coming through the corridor leading to the gardens from the public court. This was kept at the outer end by an "old rancid Christian" smoking incessant cigarettes and not explicitly refusing to sell us picture postals after taking our entrance fee; the other end was held by a young, blond, sickly-looking girl, who made us take small nosegays at our own price and whom it became a game to see if we could escape. I have left saying to the last that the king and queen of Spain have a residence in the Alcazar, and that when they come in the early spring they do not mind corning to it through that plebeian quadrangle. I should not mind it myself if I could go back there next spring.

IV

We had refused with loathing the offer of those gipsy jades to dance for us in their noisome purlieu at Triana, but we were not proof against the chance of seeing some gipsy dancing in a cafe-theater one night in Seville. The decent place was filled with the "plain people," who sat with their hats on at rude tables smoking and drinking coffee from tall gla.s.ses. They were apparently nearly all working-men who had left nearly all their wives to keep on working at home, though a few of these also had come. On a small stage four gipsy girls, in unfas.h.i.+onably and untheatrically decent gowns of white, blue, or red, with flowers in their hair, sat in a semicircle with one subtle, silent, darkling man among them. One after another they got up and did the same twisting and posturing, without dancing, and while one posed and contorted the rest unenviously joined the spectators in their clapping and their hoa.r.s.e cries of "Ole!" It was all perfectly proper except for one high moment of indecency thrown in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house its money's worth. But the real, overflowing compensation came when that little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet and stormed the audience with a dance of hands and arms, feet and legs, head, neck, and the whole body, which Mordkin in his finest frenzy could not have equaled or approached. Whatever was fiercest and wildest in nature and boldest in art was there, and now the house went mad with its hand-clappings and table-hammerings and deep-throated "Oles!"

Another night we went to the academy of the world-renowned Otero and saw the instruction of Sevillian youth in native dances of the _haute ecole._ The academy used to be free to a select public, but now the chosen, who are nearly always people from the hotels, must pay ten pesetas each for their pleasure, and it is not too much for a pleasure so innocent and charming. The academy is on the ground floor of the _maestro's_ unpretentious house, and in a waiting-room beyond the shoemaker's shop which filled the vestibule sat, patient in their black mantillas, the mothers and nurses of the pupils. These were mostly quite small children in their every-day clothes, but there were two or three older girls in the conventional dancing costume which a lady from one of the hotels had emulated. Everything was very simple and friendly; Otero found good seats among the _aficionados_ for the guests presented to him, and then began calling his pupils to the floor of the long, narrow room with quick commands of "_Venga_!" A piano was tucked away in a corner, but the dancers kept time now with castanets and now by snapping their fingers. Two of the oldest girls, who were apparently graduates, were "differently beautiful" in their darkness and fairness, but alike picturesquely Spanish in their vivid dresses and the black veils fluttering from their high combs. A youth in green velvet jacket and orange trousers, whose wonderful dancing did him credit as Otero's prize pupil, took part with them; he had the square-jawed, high-cheek-boned face of the lower-cla.s.s Spaniard, and they the oval of all Spanish women. Here there was no mere posturing and contortioning among the girls as with the gipsies; they sprang like flames and stamped the floor with joyous detonations of their slippers. It was their convention to catch the hat from the head of some young spectator and wear it in a figure and then toss it back to him. One of them enacted the part of a _torero_ at a bull-fight, stamping round first in a green satin cloak which she then waved before a man's felt hat thrown on the ground to represent the bull hemmed about with _banderillas_ stuck quivering into the floor. But the prettiest thing was the dancing of two little girl pupils, one fair and thin and of an angelic gracefulness, and the other plump and dark, who was as dramatic as the blond was lyrical. They accompanied themselves with castanets, and, though the little fatling toed in and wore a common dress of blue-striped gingham, I am afraid she won our hearts from her graceful rival. Both were very serious and gave their whole souls to the dance, but they were not more childishly earnest than an older girl in black who danced with one of the gaudy graduates, panting in her anxious zeal and stopping at last with her image of the Virgin she resembled flung wildly down her back from the place where it had hung over her heart.

V

We preferred walking home from Senor Otero's house through the bright, quiescing street, because in driving there we had met with an adventure which we did not care to repeat. We were driving most unaggressively across a small plaza, with a driver and a friend on the box beside him to help keep us from harm, when a trolley-car came wildly round a corner at the speed of at least two miles an hour and crossed our track. Our own speed was such that we could not help striking the trolley in a collision which was the fault of no one apparently. The front of the car was severely banged, one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and our conversation was interrupted. Immediately a crowd a.s.sembled from the earth or the air, but after a single exchange of reproaches between the two drivers nothing was said by any one. No policeman arrived to _constater_ the facts, and after the crowd had silently satisfied or dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it silently dispersed. The car ambled grumbling off and we drove on with some vague murmurs from our driver, whose nerves seemed shaken, but who was supported in a somewhat lurching and devious progress by the caressing arm of the friend on the seat beside him.

All this was in Seville, where the popular emotions are painted in travel and romance as volcanic as at Naples, where no one would have slept the night of our accident and the spectators would be debating it still. In our own surprise and alarm we partook of the taciturnity of the witnesses, which I think was rather fine and was much decenter than any sort of utterance. On our way home we had occasion to practise a like forbearance toward the lover whom we pa.s.sed as he stood courting through the cas.e.m.e.nt of a ground floor. The soft air was full of the sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open _patios._ Many people besides ourselves were pa.s.sing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than the invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at some period of their lives people must make love I do not believe there is a more inoffensive way of doing it.