Spanish Highways and Byways Part 28

"_Bueno_, senorita. At what you please."

It takes a Spaniard to depict a throng of Spanish ladies,--"fiery carnations or starry jasmine in their hair, cheeks like blush roses, eyes black or blue, with lashes quivering like b.u.t.terflies; cherry lips, a glance as fickle as the light nod of a flower in the wind, and smiles that reveal teeth like pearls; the all-pervading fan with its wordless telegraphy in a thousand colors." In such a throng one sees not only the typical "eyes of midnight," but those "emerald eyes"

which Cervantes knew, and veritable pansy-colored eyes dancing with more than pansy mischief. But the voices! In curious contrast to the tones of Spanish men, soft, coaxing, caressing, the voices of the women are too often high and harsh, suggesting, in moments of excitement, the scream of the Andalusian parrot. "O Jesus, what a fetching hat! The feather, the feather, see, see, see, _see_ the feather! Mary Most Pure, but it must have cost four or five _pesetas_!

Ah, my G.o.d, don't I wish it were mine!" The speaker who gets the lead in a chattering knot of Spanish women is a prodigy not only of volubility, but of general muscular action. She keeps time to her shrill music with hands, fan, elbows, shoulders, eyebrows, knees. She dashes her sentences with inarticulate whirs and whistles, and countless pious interjections: _Gracias a Dios! Santa Maria! O Dios mio!_ The others, out-screamed and out-gesticulated, clutch at her, shriek at her, fly at her, and still, by some mysterious genius, maintain courtesy, grace, and dignity through it all. Yet it is true that the vulgar-rich variety is especially obnoxious among Spaniards.

An overdressed Spanish woman is frightfully overdressed, her voice is maddening, her gusts of mirth and anger are painfully uncontrolled.

This, however, is the exception, and refinement the rule.

The legendary Spanish lady is forever sitting at a barred window, or leaning from a balcony, coquetting with a fan and dropping arch responses to the "caramel phrases" of her guitar-tinkling cavalier.

"You're always saying you'd die for me.

I doubt it nevertheless; But prove it true by dying, And then I'll answer yes."

For, loving as they are, Spanish sweethearts take naturally to teasing. "When he calls me his b.u.t.terfly, I call him my Elephant. Then his eyes are like black fire, for he is ashamed to be so big, but in a twinkling I can make him smile again." The scorn of these dainty creatures for the graces of the ruling s.e.x is not altogether affected.

I shall not forget the expression with which a Sevillian belle, an exquisite dancer, watched her _novio_ as, red and perspiring, he flung his stout legs valiantly through the mazes of the _jota_. "Men are uglier than ever when they are dancing, aren't they?" she remarked to me with all the serenity in the world. And a bewitching maiden in Madrid, as I pa.s.sed some favorable comment upon the photographs of her two brothers, gave a deprecatory shrug. "Handsome? _Ca!_" (Which is _no_ many times intensified.) "But they are not so ugly, either,--_for men_."

The style of compliment addressed by _caballeros_ to senoritas is not like "the quality of mercy," but very much strained indeed. "Your eyes are two runaway stars, that would rather s.h.i.+ne in your face than in heaven, but your heart is harder than the columns of Solomon's temple.

Your father was a confectioner and rubbed your lips with honey-cakes."

Little Consuelo, or Lagrimas, or Milagros, or Dolores, or Peligros laughs it off, "Ah, now you are throwing flowers."

The _coplas_ of the wooer below the balcony are usually sentimental.

"By night I go to the patio, And my tears in the fountain fall, To think that I love you so much, And you love me not at all."

"Sweetheart, little Sweetheart!

Love, my Love!

I can't see thy eyes For the lashes above.

Eyes black as midnight, Lashes black as grief!

O, my heart is thirsty As a summer leaf."

"If I could but be buried In the dimple of your chin, I would wish, Dear, that dying Might at once begin."

"If thou wilt be a white dove, I will be a blue.

We'll put our bills together And coo, coo, coo."

Sometimes the sentiment is relieved by a realistic touch.

"Very anxious is the flea, Caught between finger and thumb.

More anxious I, on watch for thee, Lest thou shouldst not come."

And occasionally the lover, flouted overmuch, retorts in kind.

"Don't blame me that eyes are wet, For I only pay my debt.

I've taught you to cry and fret, But first you taught me to forget."

"I'll not have you, Little Torment, I don't want you, Little Witch.

Let your mother light four candles And stand you in a niche."

The average Spaniard is well satisfied with his senora as she is. He did her extravagant homage as a suitor, he treats her with kindly indulgence as a husband, but he expects of her a life utterly bounded by the _casa_. "What is a woman?" we heard one say. "A bottle of wine." And those few words tell the story why, with all their charm, home-love, and piety, the Spanish women have not availed to keep the social life of the Peninsula sound and sweet.

"But to admire them as our gallants do, 'Oh, what an eye she hath! Oh, dainty hand!

Rare foot and leg!' and leave the mind respectless, This is a plague that in both men and women Makes such pollution of our earthly being."

The life of the convent is attractive to girls of mystic temperament, like the _Maria_ of Valdes, but many of these lively daughters of the sun regard it with frank disfavor. One of the songs found in the mouths of little girls all over the Peninsula is amusingly expressive of the childish aversion to so dull a destiny.

"I wanted to be married To a sprightly barber-lad, But my parents wished to put me In the convent dim and sad.

"One afternoon of summer They walked me out in state, And as we turned a corner, I saw the convent gate.

"Out poured all the solemn nuns In black from toe to chin, Each with a lighted candle, And made me enter in.

"The file was like a funeral; The door shut out the day; They sat me on a marble stool And cut my hair away.

"The pendants from my ears they took, And the ring I loved to wear, But the hardest loss of all to brook Was my mat of raven hair.

"If I run out to the garden And pluck the roses red, I have to kneel in church until Twice twenty prayers are said.

"If I steal up to the tower And clang the convent bell, The holy Abbess utters words I do not choose to tell.

"My parents, O my parents, Unkindly have you done, For I was never meant to be A dismal little nun."

I came but slightly in contact with Spanish nuns. Among the figures that stand out clear in memory are a kindly old sister, at Seville, in the _Hospital de la Caridad_, who paused midway in her exhibition of the famous Murillos there to wipe her eyes and grieve that we were Protestants, and an austere, beautiful woman in _La Cuna_, or Foundling Asylum of Seville, who caressed a crying baby with the pa.s.sionate tenderness of motherhood denied. The merriest Spanish _hermana_ of our acquaintance we encountered on the French side of the Pyrenees. At Anglet, halfway between Biarritz and Bayonne, is the Convent of the Bernardines, Silent Sisters. The visitor sees them only from a distance, robed in white flannel, with large white crosses gleaming on the back of their hooded capes. These, too, were originally white, and the hoods so deep that not even the profile of the features could be seen; but the French Government, disturbed by the excessive death-rate in this order, recently had the audacity to interfere and give summary orders that the hoods be cut away, so that the healthful suns.h.i.+ne might visit those pale faces. The mandate was obeyed, but, perhaps in sign of mournful protest, the new hoods and capes are black as night. These women Trappists may recite their prayers aloud, as they work in field or garden, or over their embroidery frames, but they speak for human hearing only once a year, when their closest family friends may visit them and listen through a grating to what their disused voices may yet be able to utter. From all other contact with the world they are s.h.i.+elded by an outpost guard of a few of the Servants of Mary, an industrious, self-supporting sisterhood, whose own convent, half a mile away, is a refuge for unwedded mothers and a home for unfathered children. Hither the pitying sisters brought, a few days before our visit, a wild-eyed girl whom they had found lying on one of the sea rocks, waiting for the rising tide to cover her and her shame together. The chief treasure of this nunnery, one regrets to add, is the polished skull of Mary Magdalene.

That one of the Servants of Mary who showed us over the Trappist convent was a bright-eyed Spanish dame of many winters, as natural a chatterbox as ever gossiped with the neighbors in the sun. Her glee in this little opportunity for conversation was enough to wring the heart of any lover of old ladies. She walked as slowly as possible and detained us on every conceivable pretext, reaching up on her rheumatic tiptoes to pluck us red and white camellias, and pointing out, with a lingering garrulity, the hardness of the cots in the bare, cold little cells, the narrowness of the benches in the austere chapel, and, in the cheerless dining room, the floor of deep sand, in which the Bernardines kneel throughout their Friday dinner of bread and water.

Longest of all, she kept us in the cemetery, all spick and span, with close-set rows of nameless graves, each with a cross shaped upon it in white seash.e.l.ls. The dear old soul, in her coa.r.s.e blue gown, with tidy white kerchief and neatly darned black hood and veil, showed us the grave of her own sister, adding, proudly, that her four remaining sisters were all cloistered in various convents of Spain.

"All six of us nuns," she said, "but my brother--no! He has the dowries of us all and lives the life of the world. Just think! I have two nephews in Toledo. I have never seen them. My sister's grave is pretty, is it not? They let me put flowers there. Oh, there are many families in Spain like ours, where all the daughters are put into convents. Spain is a very religious country. The sons? Not so often.

Sometimes, when there is a conscription, many young men become priests to escape military service but it is the women who are most devout in Spain."

And after the rustic gate was shut on the sleeping-place of the Bernardines, scarcely more silent and more dead beneath the sod than above it, she still detained us with whispered hints of distinguished Spanish ladies among those ghostly, far-off figures that, pitchfork or pruning knife in hand, would fall instantly upon their knees at the ringing of the frequent bell for prayers. Spanish ladies, too, had given this French convent many of its most costly treasures. We said good-by to our guide near an elaborate shrine of the Madonna, which a bereaved Spanish mother had erected with the graven request that the nuns pray for the soul of her beloved dead.

"Even we Servants of Mary are not allowed to talk much here," said in parting this most sociable of saints, clinging to us with a toil-roughened, brown old hand. "It is a holy life, but quiet--very quiet. I have been here forty-four years this winter. My name is Sister Solitude."

The nun whom I knew best was an exquisite little sister just back from Manila. During several months I went to her, in a Paris convent, twice or three times a week, for Spanish lessons. The reception room in which I used to await her coming shone not as with soap and water, but as with the very essence of purity. The whiteness of the long, fine curtains had something celestial about it. The only book in sight, a bundle of well-worn leaves bound in crimson plush and placed with precision in the centre of the gleaming mahogany table, was a volume of cla.s.sic French sermons,--the first two being on Demons, and the next on Penance. Further than this I never read; for very punctually the slight figure, in violet skirt and bodice, with a white cross embroidered upon the breast, swept softly down the hall. A heavy purple cord and a large-beaded rosary depended from the waist. In conversation she often raised her hand to press her ring, sign of her sacred espousals, to her lips. Her type of face I often afterward saw in Spain, but never again so perfect. Her complexion was the richest southern brown, the eyes brightening in excitement to vivid, flas.h.i.+ng black. The eyebrows, luxuriant even to heaviness, were nevertheless delicately outlined, and the straight line of the white band emphasized their graceful arch. The nose was ma.s.sive for a woman's face, and there was a slight shading of hair upon the upper lip. The mouth and chin, though so daintily moulded, were strong. Not the meek, religious droop of the eyelids could mask the fire, vigor, vitality, intensity, that lay stored like so much electricity behind the tranquil convent look.

We would go for the lesson to a severe little chamber, whose only ornament was a crucifix of olive wood fastened against the wall. Then how those velvet eyes would glow and sparkle in the eagerness of rus.h.i.+ng speech! The little sister loved to tell of her Manila experience, almost a welcome break, I fancied, in the monotonous peace of cloister life. All that Sunday morning, when the battle was on, the nuns maintained their customary services, hearing above their prayers and chants and the solemn diapason of the organ, the boom, boom, boom of our wicked American cannon. For, according to this naive historian, Catholic Spain, best beloved of Our Lady among the nations of the earth, had labored long in the Philippines to Christianize the heathen, when suddenly, in the midst of those pious labors with which she was too preoccupied to think of fitting out men-of-war and drilling gunners, a pirate fleet bore down upon her and overthrew at once the Spanish banner and the Holy Cross. Tears sparkled through flame as the _hermanita_ told of her beautiful convent home, now half demolished. The sisters did not abandon it until six weeks after the battle, but as the nunnery stood outside the city walls, their superior judged it no safe abode for Spanish ladies, and ordered them away. The French consul arranged for their transport to Hongkong on a dirty little vessel, where they had to stay on deck, the twenty-seven of them, during their week's voyage, suffering from lack of proper shelter and especially from thirst, the water supply running short the second day out. But all this was joy of martyrdom.

"Is not Hongkong a very strange city?" I asked. "Did it seem to you more like Manila than like Paris and Madrid?"

The little sister's voice was touched with prompt rebuke.

"You speak after the fas.h.i.+on of the world. All cities look alike to us. Ours is the life of the convent. It matters nothing where the convent stands."

Stimulated by reproof, I waxed impertinent. "Not even if it stands within range of the guns? Now, truly, truly, were you not the least bit frightened that morning of the battle?"

The sunny southern smile was a fleeting one, and left a reminiscent shadow in the eyes.

"Frightened? Oh, no! There were no guns between us and Paradise. From early dawn we heard the firing, and hour after hour we knelt before the altar and prayed to the Mother of G.o.d to comfort the souls of the brave men who were dying for _la patria_; but we were not frightened."