Spanish Highways and Byways Part 12

Come, Little Man, step up!

And thou shalt have a taste of wine From G.o.dfather's silver cup."

This rhyming fas.h.i.+on 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 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-p.r.i.c.k 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, or _Noche 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 matinees in the Apolo, Lara, and Zarzuela. Afternoon performances are given only on Sundays and the other Catholic _fiestas_, which last, numerous enough, are well within reach of the Puritan conscience. At these matinees 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 astonis.h.i.+ng. "_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, little arithmeticians 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 matinee 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 furnis.h.i.+ng one another.

In Madrid, too, the sightseeing crowds that gather before the royal palace or at the doors of the _Iglesia del Buen Suceso_, where the Queen Regent, with her "august children," sometimes attends the _Salve_ on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, are thickly peppered 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 as _La Comedia_, where the queen was pa.s.sing 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 the _Plaza 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 famous _toreros_, and help themselves to one another's hats in readiness to salute; but the elegant landau, preceded by an escort of two hors.e.m.e.n, dashes by so swiftly that their long waiting would be rewarded only by the briefest glimpse of bowing 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 Madrilenos resent this impression and insist that his youthful Majesty is "st.u.r.dy 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, G.o.dson 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 Amba.s.sadors, 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 wonders what 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 wonderful _Armeria_ of Madrid, where those plumed and armored kings, on richly caparisoned chargers, whom we have come to know in the paintings of the _Museo 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 the _Plaza 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "JESUS OF THE Pa.s.sION"]

But opposite these stern warriors is a hollow square of boy princes, and of n.o.ble _ninos_ whose visors hide their ident.i.ties in long oblivion. The armor of these childish figures is daintily wrought, with tender touches of ruffs and cuffs, scallops and flutings and rosettes. Often only the upper half of the body is incased in steel, the slender legs playing the dandy in puffed trousers of striped velvet--scarlet, green, and buff--silk hose, and satin slippers.

Little Philip III proudly displays a diminutive round s.h.i.+eld, with a relief of battle scenes in gold. The plate armor of little Philip IV is stamped with lions and castles, eagles and spears. And his little son, Don Baltasar Carlos, bestrides a spirited pony and wears at the back of his helmet a tuft of garnet feathers.

The _Prado_ galleries abound in royal children. This same _infante_, Don Baltasar, is seen here in the foreground of a lonely landscape, with desolate blue hills beyond and driving clouds above. But all the more bright and winsome glows the form of the six-year-old horseman, the gold-fringed, pink sash that crosses his breast streaming out far behind with the speed of his fearless gallop. Supreme among the _Prado_ children, of course, is the little daughter of Philip IV, the central figure of the world-renowned _Las Meninas_. All in vain does her charming maid of honor kneel to her with the golden cup; all in vain does the dwarf tease the drowsy dog. The solemn puss, undiverted, will not stir from her pose nor alter the set of her small features until the artist, standing half disdainfully before his easel, gives the word. She has waited for it now hard upon two hundred and fifty years, but the centuries beat in vain against that inflexible bit of propriety.

Even the royal burial vaults beneath the grim Escorial have in their chill grandeur of marble halls an especial Panteon for babies, princely innocents whose lives are reckoned in months more often than in years. Gold and blue and red brighten their great white sepulchre, and above the altar smiles the Christ Child, with the graven words, "Suffer the children to come unto me." But for Alfonso XIII a sombre sarcophagus waits in the haughtiest and gloomiest of all the Panteons, where only kings, and queens who were mothers of kings, may lie.

It is not royal childhood alone that is dear to this strange, romantic, monstrously inconsistent heart of Spain. The cruelty of Spaniards to horses and donkeys sickens even the roughest Englishman, yet almost every voice softens in speaking to a child, and during my six months in Spanish cities I saw nothing of that street brutality toward the little ones which forces itself upon daily notice in Liverpool and London. Spanish children are too often ill-cared for, but despite the abuses of ignorant motherhood and fatherhood, such vivid, vivacious, bewitching little people as they are! Enter a Spanish schoolroom and see how vehemently the small brown hands are wagged in air, how the black eyes dance and the dimples play, what a stir and bustle, what a young exuberance of energy! They race to the blackboards like colts out at pasture. They laugh at everything, these sons of "the grave Spaniard," and even the teacher will duck his head behind the desk for a half-hidden ecstasy over some dunce's blunder or some rogue's detected trick.

But their high spirits never make them unmindful of those courtesies of life in which they have been so carefully trained. There is an old-fas.h.i.+oned exaggeration about their set phrases of politeness. Just as the casual caller kisses the lady's feet, in words, and she reciprocates by a verbal kissing of his hand, so the school children respond to the roll call with a glib: "Your servant, sir." Ask a well-bred boy his name, and he rattles back, "Jesus Herrera y La-Chica, at the service of G.o.d and yourself." They learn these amenities of speech with their first lispings. I was much taken aback one day in Seville by a child of eighteen months. Not in the least expecting this infant, whose rosy face was bashfully snuggled into his young aunt's neck, to understand, I said to her, "What a fine little fellow!" Whereupon Master Roly-poly suddenly sat up straight on her arm, ducked his head in my direction, and gravely enunciated, "_Es favor que Usted me hace_"--"It is a compliment you pay me." I could hardly recover from the shock in time to make the stereotyped rejoinder, "_No es favor, es justicia_"--"No compliment, but the truth." To this Don Chubbykins sweetly returned, "_Mil gracias_"--"A thousand thanks," and I closed this uncanny dialogue with the due response, "_No las merece_"--"It does not merit them."

Servants, neighbors, pa.s.sers-by, beggars, all prompt the children in these s.h.i.+bboleths of good manners, adorning the precept with example.

"Would you like to go with us to the picture gallery this afternoon?"

I once asked a laddie of artistic tastes at a boarding-house table.

"_Si, senora_," he replied, whereupon several of the boarders, greatly scandalized, hastened to remind him, but in the gentlest of tones, of the essential addition, "_con mucho gusto_" to which we were bound to reply, "The pleasure will be ours." The girls, even more than the boys, are bred in these formal fas.h.i.+ons of intercourse. Every morning they ask if you have rested well, and express grief or gratification, according to your response. In Mrs. Gulick's school, mere midgets of six and eight, returning from cla.s.s, will not close the doors of their rooms if you are in sight, though perhaps seated at a reading table in the farther end of the corridor, lest they should appear inhospitable.

On our return from Italica, a thirsty child of seven, heated to exhaustion with the sun and fun of that Andalusian picnic, refused to touch the anise-seed water which some good Samaritan had handed up to the dusty carriage, until the gla.s.s had been offered to every one else, driver included, leaving, in the sequel, little enough for her.

On our midnight return from the _Feria_, this same _nina_ of gentle memory, staggering and half crying with sleepiness, would nevertheless not precede any of her elders in entering the home door. "After you,"

she sobbed, with hardly voice enough to add, "And may you all rest well!" "The same to you," chorussed the adults, trooping by, and her faint murmur followed, "Many thanks."

"Shall I give you this fan when I go away," I asked her once, "or would you rather have it now to take to the party?" She wanted it then and there, but what she answered was, "I shall be best pleased to take it when you like best to give it."

You must beware of saying to a little Spanish maid, "What a beautiful rosebud in your hair!" Instantly the hand is busy with the pins. "It is at your disposal." You hastily protest, "A thousand thanks, but no, no, no! It is very well placed where it is." Off comes the flower, notwithstanding, and is fastened into your belt. For when the elder sister has insisted on giving you (until the next ball) those dancing slippers which you so rashly admired, and the sister's _novio_ went home the night before without his cloak, because you had approved its colors (although he sent his man around for it before breakfast), what can the children do but follow suit? Even their form of "Now I Lay Me"

is touched with their quaint politeness:--

"Jesus, Joseph, Mary, Your little servant keep, While, with your kind permission, I lay me down to sleep."

The precocity of Spanish children is a recognized fact. An educational expert, a Frenchman who holds a chair in an English university, a.s.sured us that beyond a doubt Spanish children, for the first dozen years of life, develop more rapidly than any other children of Europe.

Yet, although these clever little Spaniards are so punctiliously taught to put the pleasure of others before their own, they are treated with universal indulgence. Soldiers lining the curbstones on occasion of a royal progress will let the children press in beside them and cling to their valorous legs, until the military array seems variegated with a Kindergarten. My farewell glimpse of Toledo, on Corpus Christi Day, makes a pretty picture in memory. The red-robed cardinal, who had come to the station to take his train, was fairly stormed by all the children within sight, clamoring for his blessing.

In vain the attendant priests tried to scatter the throng, and ladies of high degree, planting their chairs in a circle about the prelate, acted as a laughing body-guard. It was all of no avail. The little people danced up and down with eagerness, dodged under arms, and slipped between elbows. They knelt upon the cardinal's very feet, rapturously kissing his red-gloved hand and clasping to their pinafores and blouses the sacred trinkets he distributed. And he, patting the bobbing black pates, wherever he could get a chance, smiled on the little ones and forbade them not.

The affection lavished on children in the household circle is often poetic and pa.s.sionate. I observed one day a brusque young fellow of twenty-four, whom we had thought rather a hard, catch-penny sort of person, suddenly gather a four-year-old nephew to his heart and cover the dimpled face with kisses, while the look in his own black eyes was the look of a St. Anthony. I stood once in a crowded cathedral and lost all sense of the service in contemplation of an ugly manikin, with coa.r.s.e features and receding forehead, who held a frail baby boy tight against his breast. This was a blue-eyed, fair-haired wean, with a serious, far-away expression, and from time to time, attracted by the gilt of the ceiling, he raised a tiny pink fore-finger and pointed upward, while the father's animal face, never turned away from the child, became transfigured with love and wors.h.i.+p. He took the baby out, when it had fallen asleep upon his shoulder, and it was good to see that dense throng open and make a lane for him, every man, however brutal or frivolous his aspect, being careful not to jostle the drooping, golden head.

But Spanish children, so caressed and so adored, are nevertheless modest in their bearing, and fall shyly back before a stranger. I remember a beaming grandfather displaying to us two blus.h.i.+ng little men, bidding them open their eyes wide that we might contrast colors, turn back to back that we might measure heights, and in various ways put their small selves on show, all which they did in mute obedience, but at the word of release flew together, flung their arms about each other's necks, rolled under the nearest table, and curled up into the least possible bunch of bashful agony.

The pictures, frescos, and carvings of Spanish churches often reflect the looks of Spanish childhood. The Holy Family gives a wide range of opportunity, especially in the ministering cherubs. There is a crucifix in one of the twenty-two aisle chapels of Toledo cathedral, where three broken-hearted mites of angels, just three crying babies, are piteously striving to draw out the nails from the Sufferer's hands and feet. Many of the saint-groups admit of child figures, too, as the St. Christopher, which almost invariably appears as a colossal nave painting, "the Goliath of frescos."

It would be strange, indeed, if children were not beloved in the country of Murillo. Spain has let the most of his beggar-boy pictures go to foreign collections, but she has cherished his Holy Families and cherub-peopled Annunciations. Such ecstatic rogues as those Andalusian cherubs are! Their restless ringlets catch azure shadows from the Virgin's mantle; they perch tiptoe on the edges of her crescent moon; they hold up a mirror to her glory and peep over the frame to see themselves; they pelt St. Francis with roses; they play bo-beep from behind the fleecy folds of cloud; they try all manner of aerial gymnastics. But a charm transcending even theirs dwells in those baby Christs that almost spring from the Madonna's arms to ours, in those boy Christs that touch all boyhood with divinity. The son of the Jewish carpenter, happy in his father's workshop with bird and dog; the shepherd lad whose earnest eyes look toward his waiting flock; the lovely playmates, radiant with innocent beauty, who bend together above the water of life--from these alone might Catholic Spain have learned the sacredness of childhood. But Spain first showed Murillo the vision that he rendered back to her.

XIII

THE YOLK OF THE SPANISH EGG

"From Madrid to Heaven, and in Heaven a little window for looking back to Madrid."--_Popular Saying._

Few foreigners can understand the sentiment of Spaniards for their capital. Madrid is the crown city of Spain, not by manifest destiny, but by decree of Philip II, who, as his nature was, better loved the harsh Castilian steppe, baked by summer suns and chilled by treacherous winds, than the romantic sierras and gracious river valleys where earlier royal seats had been established. If in Madrid the desert blossoms like the rose, it is a leafless rose, for the city has no suburbs. It lacks both the charm of environment so potent in Granada and Seville and the charm of ancient story, which these share with those other bygone courts--Toledo, Valladolid, Valencia, Saragossa. It is not a vital organ of modern European civilization, like artistic Paris or strenuous London. And yet it is more cosmopolitan, and hence less distinctively Spanish than other cities of the Peninsula. It is devoted to the bull-fight and the lottery, abounds in beggars and prost.i.tutes, does not take naturally to commerce, and is sadly behindhand with popular education. Yet Madrilenos cannot be persuaded that the skies behold its equal, and even over the Anglo-Saxon stranger its fascination gradually steals.

In the first place, the mirth of the home life beguiles the serious foreigner. Spanish households have a pleasantness quite their own. All the natural vivacity and kindliness of the people find free play at home, where servants sing and children prattle, ladies chatter and gentlemen jest, all in an atmosphere of ease, leisure, and spontaneous sociability. The father is not preoccupied with business, the mother has never dreamed of belonging to a woman's club, the children have little taste for reading, and few books to read. So talking is the order of the day, and, Sancho Panza! how they talk! Lingering half the morning over the _desayuno_ of thick, cinnamon-flavored chocolate, into which are dipped strips of bread, two-thirds of the afternoon over the _almuerzo_, a substantial repast of meat and vegetables, fruit and _dulces_, and all the evening over the _comida_, where soup and the national dish of _puchero_ are added to the noontide bill of fare, they chatter, chatter, chatter, like the teeth of Harry Gill.

Still, as of old, Spaniards are temperate in food and drink. "It's as rare to see a Spaniard a drunkard as a German sober," wrote Middleton three centuries ago. They use more water than wine, and although they have a grand appet.i.te for sweets, they take them in comparatively simple forms. The national lack of enterprise is conspicuous even here, for dearly as the Spaniard dotes on chocolate and sugar, Madrid does not make her own chocolate creams, but imports them from Paris to sell, when they are too hard to eat, at a price too high to pay.

But smoking and talking are indulgences which Madrilenos carry to excess. Lounging on the balcony, a gayly painted case of paper cigarettes at hand, they will pa.s.s hours in bantering their wives, whom they wors.h.i.+p much as they wors.h.i.+p the images of Mary, delighting to dress them in fine clothes and glittering trinkets, and expecting in return, it is said, their pardon for a mult.i.tude of sins. And when my lord saunters forth to "rest" in one of the iron chairs that line the promenades, or in a cafe window, or at an open-air table before one of the frequent stalls of cooling beverages, the women of the house flock together in some airy corner, st.i.tching away on their endless embroideries, and receiving, with "a million kisses" and a chorus of shrill welcomes, the mantilla-veiled ladies who come to call.

If the afternoon is frying hot, it is just possible that the gallivanting don will bethink himself to send home a tray of _horchata_, a snowy, chilly, puckery refreshment, eaten by aid of wafers in the form of little tubes that look and taste much like wrapping paper. This treat gives fresh animation to the emulous tongues. The slightest neighborhood incident, as recounted in such a group, takes on a poetic vividness and a dramatic intensity, and when it is all told over again at the dinner-table, excitement waxes so high that long after the dishes and cloth have been removed the family may still be found seated around the board, flas.h.i.+ng a thousand lights of suggestion and surmise on that dull bit of scandal. The husband cannot cease from discussion long enough to read the evening paper, nor the wife to send the little ones to bed, and midnight may find the three generations, from grandfather to four-year-old, still talking with might and main.

Accustomed guests come at once to the dining room, ready to contribute their share to the lively clash of voices, or to take part in one of the characteristic games of a Spanish family circle, as lottery. In this favorite pastime, victory, including a goodly handful of coppers, falls to him whose checked and numbered square of pasteboard is most quickly filled with beans. These are placed on the squares called by the bag-holder, who draws numbers haphazard from his sibylline sack.

When the small hours come in, the company may adjourn to the sala for dancing and music, but conversation under cover of these gushes on more impetuously than ever--the Castilian art of arts.

One of the chief graces of the _tertulias_ consists in their informality--their frank simplicity. Even on a saint day--a day consecrated to the saint whose name some member of the family bears--while all the nearer friends drop in for congratulation, with perhaps a gift of flowers, in case of a lady, or sweetmeats for a child, the _tertulia_ requires no further exercise of hospitality than an open door and a feast of words. There is more blithesomeness, for _hay santo en casa_ (there is a saint in the house), but no more parade, with its preliminary fret and fuss.

The streets of Madrid, too, have a curious fascination. In the morning hours there is the picturesque confusion of the market. The donkeys are unladen here, there, and everywhere, and the sidewalks and squares promptly dotted over with bright little heaps of delicious Toledo cherries, Valencian apricots, Murcian lemons, and all the greens of the season. The peasant women, squatted among their lettuces and cuc.u.mbers, seem much more interested in gossiping with their neighbors than in securing customers. Babies tumble about, crus.h.i.+ng the pinks and roses, and cabmen good-naturedly pick their way as best they can among these various vegetable and human obstacles. Venders of books, too, like to pave the street with rows of open volumes, whose pages are soon dimmed with dust, and artisans, especially cobblers, set up their benches just outside their doors, and add the click of their hammers to the general din.

In the early afternoon the shady side of the street is lined with the outstretched forms of workingmen, taking the indispensable siesta.

Some rest their black pates on arm or folded jacket or bag of tools, but plenty of bronzed laborers slumber peacefully all p.r.o.ne on the hot paving, with not so much as a cabbage leaf for a pillow. Beggars lie along the stone benches of the _paseos_ and parks, cabmen sleep on their cabs, porters over their thresholds, and I once turned away from a church I had come far to visit, not having the hardihood to waken the verger, who, keys in hand, was snoring like an organ, sprawled across half a dozen granite steps.

As the cool of evening approaches, the overcrowded houses of the poor pour forth entire families into the street, where supper is cooked and eaten, and all manner of domestic operations carried on. Before every door is at least one black-eyed baby, in a little wooden cage something like a churn, with rim running under the armpits, so that the child, safe from straying or falling, may be left to his own devices. As darkness deepens, out come the stars and the _serenos_.