to the other we never met wagon, carriage, or beast of burden, it came
like a surprise to find the streets crowded with all sorts of
interesting vehicles. The heavy traffic is carried in big, picturesque
carts drawn by bulls, oxen, donkeys, and mules. The cattle are
magnificent, especially the bulls, who answer easily to the goad. The
backs of these draft animals are shaven in patterns, the work of gypsy
_esquiladores_. In the cold weather a blanket covers the shaven part,
its limits outlined by a neatly cut border. A monogram, a coat-of-arms,
even a sentence describing the owner’s virtues, is sometimes shaven on
the rump. The yoke is bound to the horns of the cattle, as you see it in
the old Greek vase pictures; the beasts pull with the head, all the
weight and strain coming on the neck. This has a fine pictorial effect,
but is far harder on the creatures than yoking at the shoulders.
An ox cart, with a cruel load of stone, drawn by two patient,
cream-colored bulls, lumbered along on archaic solid wheels that
shrieked for axle grease. The bulls, strong, beautiful, worthy to draw
the car of Dionysius, moved their heads restlessly from side to side. As
the cart jounced over a loose cobble, their poor noses trembled with
pain. A street porter stood waiting till the cart had passed to cross
the road. He carried a heavy load on his back, secured by a strap
fastened round the forehead; he trembled, too, and seemed, like the
bulls, to be working at great disadvantage.
Pemberton shook his whip at the bulls. “Cowards,” he cried, “failures,
outcasts of the ring; too timid or too kind to fight,--unworthy the
short, merry life of the fighting bull, good for nothing but work!”
A blue cart with ochre stripes creaked by, behind a tandem of four mules
led by a white donkey, all jingling with little bells, the harnesses gay
with red tags, tassels, and brass nailheads.
“_Firmé, firmé macho!_” The muleteer, a jolly young chap with a proper
“going to the fair” look to match his team, cracked his long whip over
their heads. A dog tied to the bridle of a tiny donkey, almost hidden by
his load of cabbages, cleverly piloted the ass through the crowd; the
owner, a stalwart woman laden with vegetables, followed at a distance.
“And some people say animals can’t reason!” Pemberton exclaimed. “That
dog has got more sense than many men I know. The woman is Costanza,
Isidro’s wife, who brings us our vegetables every day; that boy tagging
behind is Concepcion’s godson.”
We were now close to the Feria, and the way was crowded with _feriantes_
and cattle.
There was a sense of joyous life in the air. Everybody was in holiday
humor, as if the sun had dried all tears, driven away blues and vapors,
if such exist in golden Seville.
“During the three days of the _Feria_,” Pemberton explained, “Seville is
deserted; life centres here, in the Prado San Sebastian; trade,
business, society are bodily transported from city to fair ground. It’s
really a democratic festival; a great annual outing for all classes. The
morning is the time to see the business end; the evening, the social.
We’ll begin with the market, where the animals are bought and sold.”
At the mule mart business was brisk, handsome carriage mules as well as
pack mules changing hands at good prices. To know what a carnation or a
mule can be, you must go to Spain, where both grow larger and handsomer
than anywhere else. There is a legend of a mule belonging to the first
Don Carlos, over fifteen hands high. Theoretically, the mule has the
privilege of drawing the royal carriages. Though Don Alfonzo prefers an
automobile, the little children of the late Princess of the Asturias
take their airing every day behind a spanking four-in-hand of swift,
black mules.
Up and down the middle of the Prado San Sebastian rode the jockeys,
showing off their horses. A tall, black stallion, with red nostrils,
curvetted past. The man on his back--he rode like a centaur, man and
beast seeming one piece--had a familiar look; where had we seen that
ruddy face, those handsome legs, that striped blanket before? The
fretting stallion jostled a white horse ridden by a weather-beaten old
trader.
“_Perdone Vd. amigo mio!_” said the young _chalan_, lifting his gray
felt sombrero. Then we recognized the Sibyl’s friend, the bridegroom of
Ronda.
“_No es nada amigo_,” answered the man on the white, as politely; the
exhibition of good manners was as fine as the horsemanship.
“I will give you twelve thousand _reales_ for the black,” said a
gentleman in a cloak, to the man from Ronda.
“_Caballero_, if I could only afford to make you a gift! Try him, he has
the perfect _paso Castellano_!”
“Twelve thousand, not a _real_ more.”
“_Antes muerto que cansado!_” (He’d die sooner than tire.)
“Twelve thousand, not another maravedi.” The bargain was finally struck,
_chalan_ and _caballero_ going off together to bind it.
“The pace of these Andalusian horses,” Pemberton pointed out, “is easy
as a rocking-chair; there is nothing like it. It comes from their
galloping with the fore feet and trotting with the hind. Arabian blood?
Ah! there is the mystery of the Cordova breed. Where did they get it? De
Soto took out a lot of the stock to America; they ran wild on the
western plains: our bronchos are their descendants. Though the build has
changed, you recognize the family traits in the American mustang.”
The white, a beautiful fiery creature, with floss-silk mane hanging to
his knees, a tail that would have swept the ground had it not been
knotted up, Patsy was convinced must be an Arabian.
“He looks it,” Pemberton “allowed.” “The Arab horse, unfortunately, is
not what it once was; it has been spoiled--by what, do you think? The
Mauser rifle! In the old days a Bedouin’s safety depended on his horse’s
speed; to outride his enemy and the reach of his enemy’s spear was his
prime need. Then it was a matter of life and death to keep up the breed.
The old order changeth, even in the desert. Now, the Bedouins are armed
with rifles; no horse can travel as fast as a rifle bullet flies; the
Bedouin grows careless, his horse deteriorates. In England, where
they’re all mad, there’s one man mad, or sane enough, to put his heart
and his money into trying to save the noble race from extinction, the
sort of a thing only a poet like Wilfred Blunt would try to do.”
“_Tres, ocho, todos_,” from behind a gypsy tent came the staccato cry of
the _morra_ players. Two men faced each other, throwing out the hand
with a quick movement, each crying at the same moment his guess of the
total number of fingers shown; a dangerous old game, ending, too often,
in a fight.
There was great animation in the pig market; the prices were the
highest in years; the demand for sucking pigs was larger than the
supply. A magnificent old Mother Grunt, with a litter of black piglets
snuggling about her, wore the blue ribbon of the prize winner round her
fat neck. The owner, a well-dressed young farmer, stood beside the
likely family.
“May I have a photograph of the pig?” I asked.
“The honor is great,” said the farmer, “but the photographer lives far
from here, and to-morrow I put the earth between us.”
“How foolish thou art!” explained a shrewd old farmer, carrying a white
lamb in his arms. “It is the little black box of the stranger lady that
makes the picture.” They all struck attitudes, the kodak snapped, I set
the film for the next shot; the farmer wished to look into the kodak
where he thought he could see the photograph of the prize pig. The
matter was explained to him, and the offer made to send him a photograph
when the film should be developed. J. handed him his pencil and
note-book, and asked him to write his name and address.
“_Ojalá_, if I only knew how to write!” he sighed. “It is greatly to be
lamented. I should value a portrait of my sow; she is without
peradventure the finest I have raised. I shall not meet her again, for I
have sold her to a _labrador_ of Jimena.”
“Tell me your name; I will write it in this book, where it will not be
forgotten.”
“I call myself Basilio, name of baptism, Miquel; name of father----”
“That is not necessary; from what town?”
“Pueblo of birth, Escacena del Campo, Provincia de Huelva.”
Finding us interested in live stock, Miquel showed his other animals,
and led the way to the roped-in corral, where a bunch of his sheep stood
hanging their patient heads, as if shy to find themselves so much
admired. The merinos were superb, with fine, silvery fleeces; the horns
of the old wether might have inspired the Ionic order! The mere rumor of
such splendid creatures would account for the cruise of the Argonauts.
As handsome in their way were the small, brown sheep, with black faces
and adorable, close-curled, black horns. While Miquel and J. exchanged
views on sheep, a seedy, shabby gentleman in shiny clothes and a frayed
shirt joined us. He took off his hat with a flourish, and made me a deep
bow.
“Missis, I am Renaldo Lopez, ex-ofeecial de marina,” he said, in a bass
voice, deep as a lion’s. “I offré my service to accompany and visit
monuments; gib Spanish lessons (spik vero Castellano, no Andalusian) in
pupils resident or in professor home, prices moderates.” He recited the
words as if repeating a lesson. I thanked him, accepted his card, and
turned back to handsome Miquel, who was explaining to J. that besides
raising the best wool in the province, he was not behind the rest of the
world in the matter of wheat; he would dare say his was the best grown
within a hundred leagues. If we passed near Escacena del Campo we must
stop at his farm. He could show us the sister of the prize pig, whose
photograph we _would_ remember to send? The poor, shabby-genteel
ex-ofeecial de marina, could not believe that Miquel, grower of the best
wheat, raiser of the fattest pigs and the finest sheep in the province
was more interesting to us than he was! Though he could not read or
write, Miquel could carry on civilization’s two great basic
industries--provide for the clothing and the feeding of man, and do it
well! The professor of Castilian clung to us until an appointment was
made for a lesson, then he departed, and we wandered off to the
refreshment stands.
A group of handsome girls were gathered round a huge cauldron outside a
neat booth, from which floated a delicious odor of fried cakes.
“Who’s hungry?”
“Everybody!”
“Soledad!” A tall girl in a clean, print dress, a scarlet shawl pinned
across her shoulders, a geranium in her coarse black hair, answered
Pemberton’s call.
“Serve _buñuelos_ for all.”
I asked Pemberton why he had used the second person instead of the
third, in speaking to Soledad--what a name! It means solitude.
“It is the custom. The poorest Spaniard addresses the richest gypsy as
‘thou,’ on the ground that the Gitano is the inferior race. These people
are _buñoleras_; they travel all over Spain from fair to fair, frying
these _buñuelos_, a sort of sublimated fritter, their specialty. No one
else has the art. I know this family; the women are a good sort; the
men,--lazy rascals! Last summer they stole two of my sheep; lassooed
them, lifted them clean out of the fold. I traced them to their camp.
What do you suppose I found? Instead of my white sheep, two black sheep;
they had the stuff all ready, and clapped the creatures in; by the time
I got there they were already dyed.”
An elderly woman, vigorous, bronzed, with the bold, unwinking eyes of
the Romany, stood beside the cauldron making mysterious passes with a
long spoon. Soledad waited by her side with a hot dish, and in a
twinkling a pile of golden bubbles was before us, light, dry, exquisite
as only fritters fried in pure olive oil can be.
“Fried air, with a trifle of pastry around it,
[Illustration: BULL-FIGHTERS.]
[Illustration: SPANISH GIPSIES.]
is not exactly filling at the price,” said Pemberton; “let us try some
of those _bocas de la isla_, another specialty of the _Feria_.” The
_bocas_ are a sort of shell fish of peculiar shape, tasting rather like
a shrimp. Soledad, watching us cautiously taste them, said to reassure
us:
“But--they are the most exquisite--what a flavor! They are the claws of
lobsters that have been torn off and thrown back into the sea, where
they turn into _bocas_!”
“Cocoanuts, dates, _torrones_ of Alicante!” a bright-eyed Levantine,
smelling trade, hurried up to us. We bought a handful of large dark
Tetuan dates, a green cocoanut, a long thin bottle of attar of roses,
and--a _torrone_--a paste of blended honey and almonds, that should be
reserved for saints, since none others can be good enough to deserve it!
Luncheon over, we took leave of Soledad, and made our way to one of the
humbler streets of the _Feria_ in search of side shows. There was a
choice of attractions, all of them decent. In one tent we saw a tame
gorilla and a fat woman; in another a troupe of trained fleas shown off
by an Italian. An air from Rigoletto, played by an orchestrion with
drums, horns and cymbals drew a crowd of rustics. From a large tent came
the twang of a guitar, the crack of castanets. A group of saucy gypsy
lasses laid violent hands upon us Gorgios, whose palms, whether or no,
they were bound to read.
“Brazen hussies,” said Pemberton good-naturedly, buying them off; “a cut
below those others, but virtuous,--who doubts it may get a knife thrust
in the back!”
Outside the last and poorest amusement tent, we found Patsy’s
mountebanks. An old carpet was spread on the ground before the tent
door; the woman in a spangled, maroon velvet robe, a gilt filet in her
faded hair, beat the big drum. The raven, with the aid of the little
girl and a pack of cards, was ready to tell fortunes. The man in pink
tights balanced cleverly on a rolling ball: the boy stood with
outstretched arms, first on the father’s shoulders, and then climbed
dizzily to his head. The turn ended in a clever somersault.
“_Ollé, ollé!_” the crowd encouraged.
“_Que te hace trabajar?_” cried the mountebank, the clown’s strident
voice is the same the world over, “_Que te hace trabajar?_” (What makes
you work?)
“_El hambre!_” (hunger), answered the pinched child.
“_Tiene razon!_” (he is right), laughed Miquel, the farmer. The crowd
applauded; a few coppers rattled in the girl’s tambourine.
We came upon Patsy, lost since morning, outside a booth of primitive
farming tools. The sickles, the rakes, the spades, shaped properly like
spades in a pack of cards, even the hoes, had a certain rustic beauty
that woke the Adam in every boy that passed, and made his fingers itch
to handle them. Patsy balanced a mighty scythe knowingly, as one who has
known the trick of mowing.
“That is just what I want for my picture of ‘Time and the Woman,’” said
J.; he looked with longing at the scythe.
“Of course, it is the very thing,” said Patsy; “it has a lot of
character. It doesn’t look as if it had been turned out by a machine
with a thousand others. Listen to this bell!” He tinkled the clapper of
a beaten-copper sheep bell. “What a silver note! One wouldn’t mind being
wakened by this, when the cows go to pasture at daylight!”
“These juggets,” Pemberton led the way to a booth where coarse glazed
pottery was displayed, “are nice in color, aren’t they?”
“The green and yellow bowls are just the thing to put about the Cornish
place for the birds to drink and take their baths from,” said Patsy.
“Let us have a lot sent home with the scythe and the bell. How you feel
the Moorish influence in the design,--you can’t get away from _that_,
can you? You might as well try to subtract the Norman from the English,
as to subtract the Moor from the Spaniard; you come across him every
moment, in the manners, in the language--all the words beginning with
_al_ are Moorish; in the dress,--the mantilla is the survival of the
_yashmak_; in the sense of color and design, that flat, blue dish is a
thing of beauty and absolutely Moorish in spirit.”
“I can’t enthuse about it any more than I could about the Alhambra, the
Alcazar, or anything else that recalls the presence of those brutes in
Spain,” interrupted a small, keen-eyed man who had been listening to the
talk.
Patsy was the first to recover his speech.
“That is a new point of view and very interesting,” he said. “Does all
Oriental art affect you so, or only Moorish?”
The little gentleman answered with another question: “You are
Protestants?”
We could not deny the fact. The stranger sighed impatiently. “Ah well,
that explains many things! No traveler who is not a Catholic can
understand or appreciate Spain.”
“You can enjoy a lot you don’t understand.” Patsy stood to his guns.
“You miss the history, lose the background of the tapestry,” the
stranger went on testily. “I am tired of this fool talk about Moorish
art; the Mosque of Cordova spoiled by being turned into a Christian
church, and all the rest of it. Rubbish! I say it was a good thing to
do!” His eyes shone, his cheeks burned, he held up a hand enforcing
attention. “Listen to what I tell you,--Hell is not too hot, nor
eternity too long to punish the sins of the Moors against the Christians
of Spain.”
“Do you know where you are standing?” Pemberton struck the earth with
his heel as he said it. “This is the old _quemadero_, the burning-ground
of the Inquisition. On this spot two thousand persons, many of them
Moors, were tortured and burned alive in one year. Is there any circle
in your Inferno for the Grand Inquisitors?”
“What is the use of remembering such disagreeable things? They are much
better forgotten!” cried the stranger, irritably. “I took you for
persons of more sense!” and he went off in a huff.
“I wish he had liked us better, I liked him so much,” murmured Patsy.
“It’s the first rule of travel, isn’t it?--talk with people you would
not be likely to know at home, and learn their creeds.”
“The second rule,” said Pemberton, “is, visit different epochs as well
as different countries. I have visited in the Middle Ages, the Dark
Ages, the Ages of Stone and of Iron; only the Golden Age I have not
found. Seville comes nearest to it! Follow the old trade routes, go
where the bagmen go, make friends with traders and drummers. The gods of
Greece came into Rome in the chapman’s pack. Avoid, on your life, the
smug hotels, the tourist tickets that make the great pleasure route of
the world so comfortable, so safe, so dull. Take the checker and chance
of travel. There is as much adventure left in the world as is good for a
man, if he will take a risk or two!”
“The third rule is, buy no thing; spend all your money on impressions;
they will be good as new when mementos are lost, stolen, or in the dust
bin!”
“The fourth rule,” said J., “is go slow. Yesterday three hundred
tourists saw Seville in four hours. They were driven all over the place
in batches, each man and woman of them tagged with the card of the hotel
where they were billeted to dine. The _Liberal_ said this morning that
it was better to be four hundred years behind the world than to be in
such a hurry. I am not sure the _Liberal_ is not right.”
That afternoon, Concepcion called for us in a smart two-seated cart
drawn by fawn-colored mules with silken ears, varnished hoofs, and
jingling bells. It was “up to her,” Pemberton said, to show us the
social end of the _Feria_.
“_Estoy vestida de maya!_” she cried gleefully; “does it please them?”
“How well dressed she is, a preciosity!” Patsy’s vocabulary was growing.
To be _vestida de maya_ means to wear the lovely old Andalusian costume,
still good form for _Feria_ and bull-fights. Concepcion wore a yellow
crape _manton de Manilla_ (the fringe was ten inches long) embroidered
with butterflies and roses; a white, blond lace mantilla, gold satin
skirt with overdress of black net and chenille dots, lace mittens and
tiny gold shoes. She carried the sort of fan collectors outside of Spain
keep in a glass case,--the sticks of delicately carved mother-of-pearl;
the painting, charming, eighteenth century miniature work. The artist
had represented the two serious affairs in woman’s life:
religion,--illustrated by a scene from sacred history, Jerusalem with
David standing before Saul; and love-making,--illustrated by an Arcadian
vale, where a patched and powdered shepherdess and a silk-stockinged
shepherd looked fondly at each other.
Concepcion took us first to the Parque Maria Luisa, once royal property;
now a people’s pleasure ground, more garden than park, with thickets of
camelias, white, red, and pink, and wildernesses of roses climbing over
rustic arbors, hiding dead trees, or blooming sedately in well-trimmed
beds. We would have lingered in this paradise among the palms and orange
trees--from an ilex grove the long, trilling cadence of a nightingale
gave warning that the evening service of song was beginning--but
Concepcion objected that there was nobody there, and gave the order: “To
Las Delicias.”
Four lines of carriages moved at a foot pace up and down the wide
_paseo_. Groups of horsemen, officers and civilians picked their way
through the throng. The promenades on either side were crowded with
pedestrians. The defile of beauty was dazzling; the _señoritas_ were all
smiles and animation, using their eyes to deadly purpose; in Andalusia
flirtation is not a lost, even a decadent art. Patsy, wounded on every
side, groaned aloud, “I wish I was a Turk, I wish I was the Sultan of
Turkey!”
“In his heart, every man is a Turk!”
“Starts so,--some learn that the best of all is to come home from a
flower show, and find the single rose in the flower-pot on the
window-sill, sweeter than all the rest.”
So they gossipped in the carriage, while the mouse-colored mules fretted
at the slow pace!
The west end, the fashionable quarter of the toy city of the _Feria_,
has neat toy streets, dainty _casetas_ like dolls’ houses, cafés, and
clubs. From Conception’s account, it would seem that the Alcalde had
merely waved his wand, and from the bare ground of the old _quemadero_
the fairy city had sprung complete.
“You hire your _caseta_ for the week,” Pemberton explained, “and send
out what furniture you need from your town house.” As it grew dark,
garlands of many-colored lights festooned the way; firefly lamps
twinkled among the shrubbery, lanterns like great, illuminated fruits
bloomed out from the dark trees; it seemed that we were wandering in
Aladdin’s palace. Between the Moorish arches of the Circole de
Labradores we caught a glimpse of a pretty ball-room, where a crowd of
waltzers swayed to the music of the Thousand and One Nights. Outside a
private _caseta_ painted like a Japanese tea house, Patsy halted and
stood immovable, till, as one by one the crowd moved on, we edged our
way to the front. The _caseta_ was open to the street. Across a tiny
verandah we saw the charming interior. An elderly, bald gentleman sat at
a piano playing the letter air from La Perichole. In a corner a group of
ladies talked together; a little girl in white came and hung over the
piano, watching the musician’s fingers.
A tall young officer with a roving blue eye and gold hair lying in crisp
little curls on an ivory forehead, stood leaning against the wall,
talking with a small, dark youth with a hawk nose, and black,
impenetrable eyes where the fire smouldered but did not flash.
“That good-looking boy is Martin O’Shea,” said Pemberton; “Irish--need
you ask? The family has been settled here a hundred, perhaps three
hundred years; his eye has not lost the Celtic light, or his tongue the
edge. The other is Benamiel, Moorish descent, of course; they’re both
dangling after a certain girl, a friend of Concepcion’s. Oh! that is
part of the fascination of this wonderful, aloof, old Spain; you can
trace the races here so clearly; somehow the strains don’t seem to have
become so blurred, so mixed, as in most parts of Europe.”
The two young men cast impatient looks at a curtained door at the back.
“_Pronto_,” the signal came from the inner room. The music changed to a
throbbing _seguidilla_, the curtain trembled, and out tripped two pretty
girls _vestida de maya_.
“Do you see who it is?” whispered Patsy.
The taller was Luz, the other could only be her sister. Their castanets
clicked, almost as naturally as fingers snap, as they took the first
pose of the dance. One foot advanced, the other behind supporting the
weight of the body; the right arm raised, the left extended, just as you
see it in the dancing faun of Herculaneum. O’Shea took down a guitar
from the peg where it hung, and swept the chords with that curious
ringing touch of the Spaniard; Benamiel marked time by beating with his
feet, clapping with his hands. The dance began. It was very graceful,
above all very expressive, that was the great quality; it seemed the
natural, spontaneous expression of those two lovely young creatures’ joy
in life, of their super-abundant vitality, of the young blood coursing
through their veins. Though every posture, each bold advance and timid
retreat was old as Egypt, the dance had all the beautiful freshness of a
primitive art.
“_Viva la gracia!_” The cry came from a man in the crowd, Miquel, the
farmer of Huelva.