said Patsy, “and I have never found it empty.”
The streets were guarded by the Ramonones,--mounted police, polite,
energetic, keeping an order that was wonderful, considering the vast
crowd, and was most of all due to the crowd’s desire that order should
be kept.
It was growing dark, the electric lamps twinkled out of the lavender
mist. Just ahead of us, on the prize-winning car of the parrots, they
were burning red Bengal lights. At the corner of the dark street where
we must turn to reach home, a fine carriage, full of elegant maskers,
passed us. A Pierrot in green satin stood on one step flirting with a
Turkish lady, a contrabandista on the other whispered to an Andaluz. As
we drove by in our modest carriage, the red Bengal lights of the parrots
lit up Don José’s face. From the grand carriage came the cry:
“_Villegas! gloria de la patria!_”
“They are all mad!” said Villegas; “_vamos!_ it’s time to go home.”
Ash Wednesday morning the streets were full of sweepers trying to get
rid of the green, pink and red papers, the trampled débris of the last
three days’ frolic. We met Luz coming out of San Isidro Real. She was
all in black, wearing the mantilla. On her forehead the priest had
traced a cross of ashes. The church was filled with fashionably dressed
men and women, many of whom we had seen the day before at the carnival.
Each came out into the sunlight with the cross of dust and ashes on the
forehead, in token of the day of mourning. In the stable-yard behind the
church we saw the ruins of the second prize winner, the toy soldier
cart. The little sentry box hung in the right place, the stiff green
trees, the dummy soldiers in their smart French uniforms stuck up oddly
from the cart. The merry group of live soldiers, the pretty girls and
saucy boys were scattered; perhaps some of them were in the church. As
we stood watching the wreck of the prize winner, men began to take the
car to pieces and to pull off the remaining decorations.
“_Sic transit gloria mundi_,” said Patsy; “I’m for the Prado and glories
that do not pass so quickly.”
XIII
TOLEDO
Our winter in Madrid wore pleasantly away; we basked in the Sun of
To-day, gave hardly a thought to the Shadow of Yesterday. Fate wove the
thread of our existence into her tapestry of life in the Spanish capital
in the year 1906; a many-toned fabric with touches of gold and silver,
sinister crimson and sombre black. Now that the web is finished and hung
up in the hall of memory, I see that in the earlier part rose color is
the predominating tone.
“It’s as good for a nation as it is for a person, after they have been
in mourning, to come out into the world again and take an interest in
other people’s affairs,” said Patsy. “The Conference, whatever it may do
for Morocco, is being very good for Spain.”
The two absorbing topics of conversation were the Algeciras Conference
and the King’s marriage. From our friends in the diplomatic world we
heard a deal of talk about what was going on at Algeciras, where the
representatives of thirteen Powers were discussing the vexed questions
of the State Bank of Morocco which it was proposed to establish under
European control, the policing of the unhappy country by France and
Spain, the administration of customs, and the various reforms proposed
to the Sultan. On all sides we heard compliments for our representative,
Mr. Henry White, _par excellence_ the peacemaker of the Conference. I
was told by a distinguished diplomat that Mr. White’s exquisite tact and
good feeling “saved the situation more than once.”[3] Besides keeping
the peace, the American delegate put in a good word for the Jews, asking
that they might have religious tolerance in Morocco. His plea was
seconded by Sir Arthur Nicholson, the English delegate, and the Duke of
Almodovar who, ignoring the little detail of the expulsion of the Jews
from Spain, reminded the delegates that his country had an especial
interest in the Hebrews of Morocco, who still spoke the Castilian
language, and were the descendants of Spanish Jews. The English,
seconded by the Americans, made a plea for the gradual abolition of
slavery in Morocco, against the public sale of men and women in the
slave markets of the interior, and for the improvement of the prisons.
It was pleasant to see England and the United States aiding and abetting
each other in all these humane efforts.
The Moroccan delegate, Sid Hach el Mokri, Ancient Inspector of Weights
and Measures at Fez, and his colleague did little but protest against
the reforms the Powers proposed to institute at the expense of Morocco
and under the direction of the Diplomatic Corps at Tangiers. Hach el
Mokri cried out that he was there to see Morocco’s income increased, not
decreased, and that many of the proposed reforms had not been included
in the programme of the Conference. Patsy, who had seen Sid Mokri and
made an excellent photograph of the old man in his white bournous, with
his long white beard and piercing eyes, had a sneaking sympathy for him.
“After all, the world will be a tame place when there are telephones and
electric cars everywhere,” he said. “If Morocco does not want to be
civilized our way, or any other way, why should she be?” The Powers are
cutting and carving the revenues, the commerce, the future of that
unfortunate country as if they were masters of the situation. They are a
long way from it! Before France gets the little Germany means to let her
have, she must pay dear for it, even if England stands by to see fair
play.
I had a sudden vision of the garden in Tangiers and the strange old man
who had talked with me of Moroccan affairs. I seemed to hear his
brooding voice utter, as if in prophecy, “Keep your ear to the ground;
the end of Islam is not yet!”
Our Spanish friends were naturally even more interested in Don Alfonzo’s
affairs than in those of the Sultan of Morocco. It was wonderful how the
courtship of one pair of lovers made a whole nation in love with life!
There was a delicate thrill of expectation in the air. Spain drank deep
of the three great cordials, youth, hope and love, forgot the old pain
in the new rapture. Every detail of the King’s wooing was eagerly
discussed. The news that the Princess Ena had been received into the
Church of Rome and renounced the errors of the Protestant faith was a
“world event.” Her decision to take the names, Victoria Eugenie, gave
great satisfaction. It was rumored that the Empress Eugenie had given
her a wedding present of a million _pesetas_, and would make the future
Queen of Spain her heir. Older people recalled the poor young Prince
Imperial’s early attachment to Princess Beatrice, Princess Ena’s mother.
“The Empress was a Spaniard,” Candalaria reminded me; “a Montijo of
Malaga. My parents knew the family. It is quite natural she should wish
her money to come back to Spain. My father was at the funeral of her
son, the Prince Imperial. He saw the great English Queen, Victoria, and
her daughter, Princess Beatrice, when they drove over to Chiselhurst to
lay a golden laurel wreath on the coffin of the young Prince Napoleon
IV, as they called him, killed in the Zulu war, fighting for the
English.”
We had all become so absorbed in the pleasant social life of Madrid, so
taken up with current matters of public and private interest, that the
many journeys we had planned were put off and put off. Had it not been
for a chance question of Patsy’s, we might never even have seen Toledo,
we were living--except for those golden hours in the Prado--so
completely in To-day. One brilliant March afternoon Don Jaime greeted me
at the door of the Museum with his cheery “Good day, Missis.” The Don
liked to go with us to the Prado; he was interested in Patsy’s art
education and, if neither Villegas nor Don Luis were present, would hold
forth on the merits of the pictures.
“Good afternoon, Don,” said Patsy; “what’s the news?”
“There are very few news. You receive some lollipops?” The Don’s
intercourse with English-speaking people, broken off when he left
school, led him to suppose that to be happy they must be continually fed
with lollipops.
“Nuns of Concepcion Convent has secret of preparing those sweets, same
like Benedictines’ liquor secret.”
Knowing his poverty, I was troubled by the little presents he was
forever making one or other of us, of which Patsy’s lollipops were an
example.
“It’s his way of keeping his end up,” Patsy maintained. “The Don expects
to die rich, to leave his family rolling in money. He has an invention
for a flying machine half worked out. On his paternal _heredad_--a piece
of waste land in the Sierra Rondina--there’s a rich iron mine, and a
spring of sparkling mineral water, better, he says, than apollinaris.
The joke of it all is, I believe what he says is perfectly true. He will
never ‘realize’ on spring or mine, though perhaps Candalaria’s eleven
may!”
“You look festive this morning, Don; where did that sporty rose come
from?” Patsy asked. The Don always had a flower in his buttonhole,
though he often had not a dollar in his pocket.
“It is monthly roses,” said the Don, settling the bud in his coat; “they
give every moon. Let us now to the parlor of the great Velasquez.”
We always began with the Velasquez room, studying some one picture, and
passing the rest in review. Don Jaime professed great admiration
for the portrait of the Fool of Coria, one of the _hombres de
placer_--literally, men of pleasure--of the court. The fool is seated on
a stone, with a gourd on either side; his hands rest idly on his knee.
It is a wonderfully pathetic picture, with a heartache in it for those
who have some knowledge of those weakest of our brothers, the
feeble-minded.
“How dreary Philip’s court must have been,” sighed Patsy, “if that
pitiful creature could add to its gaiety.”
“_Claro_,” said Don Jaime, “but, _Canastos!_ It is a most fine portrait.
Look again, you will see in the face the idiotness of that man.”
_Canastos_, baskets, was the Don’s favorite oath; it was the only
exclamation of impatience either he or Candalaria had ever heard their
mother use. That morning the Don insisted on our looking more carefully
at Ribera’s pictures than suited Patsy. The Don himself felt little
sympathy with them, but, as a Spaniard, it was his duty to interest us
in all the well-known painters of the Spanish school. Ribera--we knew
him better by his Italian nickname, Spagnoletto, little Spaniard--the
Don said, painted for the Church. He was in no sense a court painter,
was probably prejudiced against all court people on account of Don John
of Austria’s unhandsome treatment of his daughter in their unfortunate
love affair. The Church at that time was under the sway of the
Inquisition, where we must lay the blame, if the Ribera room was, as
Patsy insisted, a little like the chamber of horrors.
“This painter,” said Don Jaime, “lived in one epoca of inquisition and
hell influences. In all his paintings are seen foreheads full of
wrinkles for pain, eyes terrified by the fear, and naked flesh teared,
or sullen martyrs, saints and gloomy friars.”
“Why couldn’t he always paint like that?” said Patsy, pausing before a
fine poetic Magdalen. “The drawing is as good, the modelling as
astonishing, the color as rich as in those morbid cruel pictures. The
mission of art is to inspire, not to terrify; you can never make me like
Ribera, Don.”
The Don himself was more depressed than any of us by what he had seen.
He mopped his bald ivory poll with his silk handkerchief--it was scented
with orris--and sighed as we left the room:
“Everything it is so truthful, so to make fear, that everybody feel a
relief, a joy of living, when he is gone from that parlor.”
“Now let’s go and play with the Venetians, as a reward of merit,” said
Patsy. “I have not seen those lovely Titians for a week.” Patsy’s
beloved Venetians can be studied better in the Prado than anywhere
outside of Venice. The Don, filled with a sudden access of zeal for the
Spanish school, would not let us go until we had given some time to the
work of El Greco.
“Here are seven paintings of the lifes of saints by El Greco,” he said.
“Every one so thin and transparent and of so greenish tones that they
looks more than saints, like spirits who took the human form,
notwithstanding they keep their impalpables. The intelligent people say
that in this consist the worth of this painter, because he translated on
the cloth the _asceticismo_ of his _epoca_.”
“You will never convince me that Greco is one of the world’s great
painters, however important he may have been to the development of the
Spanish school,” said Patsy. “A man who paints people eight feet high,
who makes his angels goblins, his saints lunatics, is not sane; and
without sanity there can be no great art.”
“You must go to Toledo,” said Don Luis, who had joined us, “before you
can judge El Greco. You see his sacred pictures at a great disadvantage
in a museum. They need the dim religious light of the churches or
monasteries, for which they were painted. Only the portraits look well
here; those, you must admit, are among the great portraits of the
world.”
Patsy was not quite ready to agree to this yet, Don Jaime meanwhile
acknowledged that fashion in art is as capricious as it is in dress;
perhaps the people who have made El Greco the fashion, not to say the
rage of the moment, claimed too much for him. In spite of this, like Don
Luis, Jaime considered El Greco among the first of portrait painters.
“Speaking of fashion in dress,” said Patsy, stopping before an anonymous
portrait of a lady in a yellow turban, “at what period did they wear
that extraordinary headgear?”
“It must have been in the time of King Wamba,” laughed Don Luis, as much
as to say, “before the flood.”
The name of King Wamba was like the kiss of the faithful hound on the
cheek of the enchanted prince. Patsy awoke from the enchantment of
To-day and remembered Yesterday, remembered Wamba and Wamba’s capital,
Toledo, remembered that all the records of that wonderful life of many
yesterdays we call history was waiting for him to read, not three hours
away from Madrid.
“I would not go to Toledo for the sake of El Greco,” Patsy declared,
“but for King Wamba’s sake, and to buy a Toledo blade, I would go twice
as far!”
So our trip to Toledo--one of the best of our Spanish adventures--came
about. We cancelled all engagements, gave up seats for the opera, and
the very next day started with little Don Luis for Toledo. The train
took us past a small hillock, on which stands a church marking the exact
geographical centre of Spain. Toledo is a walled town, built, like Rome,
on seven hills. It stands high above the plain, surrounded on three
sides by the Tagus, a rushing yellow river (Martial says its sands are
of gold) that girdles the city, and keeps the _vega_ around it a lovely
green oasis in the arid Castilian plain. The road from the station
passes through a rocky gorge and leads to the imposing bridge of
Alcantara. From here the view of the stern fortress city is superb. We
drove round the walls (Wamba’s walls) and saw the towers, the splendid
gates, with the portcullis in more than one still perfect; and finally
climbed the height, to the commanding ruin of the Alcazar.
The hill of the Alcazar dominates Toledo, as the Acropolis dominates
Athens. The Alcazar is an immense square building, with four towers
surmounted by pointed roofs. Time, the supreme colorist, has laid on his
matchless glazes of sun and shadow; the darker parts are rich saffron,
the lightest, mellow gold. Seen from the distance, it is a broad
imposing mass, simple, strong, overpowering all other architectural
features of the city by its size and its situation. When you enter the
splendid ruin, and stand in the patio with its fine double arcade of
Corinthian columns, you are reminded of the courtyard of the Farnese
palace in Rome, designed by Michaelangelo.
“If we could know the history of this old ruin,” said Patsy, “we should
know the history of Toledo. Here, where we stand, on the very highest
point of this granite rock, the Romans built their _castellum_. From its
ruins rose the Visigoths’ citadel, and, still later, the Moors’ Alcazar!
The word means the palace of Cæsar: that shows the Moors did not forget!
Kaiser means Cæsar, too; how many other things did the great Julius give
his name to? I wonder. Think of the people who have lived between these
four walls, and have looked out upon this glorious view! The Cid,
Ferdinand and Isabel, Charles V and Philip II, just to mention a few
stars.”
As in some families the youngest child who can speak “asks the
blessing,” it fell to Patsy, youngest and most ardent of the party, to
impart all inevitable information. The plan worked well, in spite of
J.’s occasional restive “Use your eyes!” It was never necessary to tell
_him_ what to look at.
“That,” said Patsy, map in hand, pointing to the lower levels of the
town, “is the Bridge of Alcantara, literally the bridge of the bridge.”
The great bridge leaps boldly across the river, supported by one large
and one small arch. There
[Illustration: TOLEDO BY MOONLIGHT.]
is a rugged watch-tower on the Toledo side; the tower that for so many
centuries stood opposite has disappeared.
“The Bridge of San Martin is on the other side of the town. When you
cross it, please cry out, ‘My eye, Betty Martin,’--Yankee for _mihi
Beato Martino_, to me blessed Martin, an old crusading war cry heard in
Toledo before. The walls of Wamba extend from the Bridge of Alcantara to
the Bridge of San Martin. The river runs round three sides of the city;
the walls on the fourth make it impregnable.”
“We may as well have Wamba’s story now; we shall have to hear it some
time,” sighed J. “I want to sketch the bridge from here. Fire away,
boy!” Patsy, loaded and primed with information, fired.
“There isn’t much to tell! I always liked Wamba because, for a long
time, I confused him with Wamba, son of Witless the Jester, in Ivanhoe,”
Patsy confessed.
“That’s the way he always begins his longest yarns,” J. groaned.
According to Patsy’s yarn, this real Wamba was the last of the great
Gothic kings, who, in spite of the tricks of his enemies, the churchmen,
has left his mark on Toledo and on Spain. Wamba was an old soldier who
lived just at the time when the Gothic power was on the wane, and Rome,
for a second time, was becoming mistress of Spain. When the Gothic
nobles elected him King, Wamba at first refused the throne. Then they
gave him his choice of death or kingship, and he was finally forced to
accept. He taught his people what they had almost forgotten, ‘to fight
the good fight’; in his time there was a last flicker of the old Gothic
spirit. But Wamba was too free and independent to suit the churchmen,
and they contrived to give him a sleeping draught that threw him into so
deep a trance that his followers thought the King was dead. He was
prepared for burial, as is still the fashion for great personages, as if
he had been a monk, and a tonsure was shaved on his head. When he came
to himself, the churchmen maintained that a man who had worn the dress
and the tonsure of a monk could never again reign as King. So, having
reigned against his will, wisely and too well, he was forced to abdicate
against his will, and retire to a monastery where he ended his days.
Staunch old fellow that he was, the Church was too strong for him, as it
has been for most political reformers from that day to this.
The Visigoths laid hold upon our imagination at Toledo as the Romans had
at Italica, and the Moors at Cordova. Those fair northmen came to Spain
when Rome had grown old and feeble, her iron hand relaxed. The Romans
had come as conquerors, carrying the eagles through Spain. They marched
rapidly; twenty miles a day was their average. They smote Spain--Iberia
they called it--hard, and left their imperishable mark upon her. The
coming of the Visigoths was more a vast migration than a conquest. They
moved slowly, wandered rather than marched, encumbered with women and
children, flocks and herds. They wandered over Europe, crossed the
Pyrenees and settled the Peninsula. The impress they have left on Spain
is as different from the Roman as their coming differed from the
triumphal progress of the Romans.
“It is not so easy to find traces of the Visigoths in Spain as of the
Roman or the Moor,” little Don Luis had assured us.
“That is a pity,” was Patsy’s answer, “for the Visigoths were the nicest
people who ever came to Spain!”
They have not left so strong a mark on things material as Roman or Arab;
they seem never to have held the land as firmly. Was it because they
brought their wives with them, and neglected the dark-eyed Iberian
women, skillful, like the dancing girls of Gades, in the dance with the
castanets? To find traces of the Gothic occupation do not look for vast
ruins of temple, circus, aqueduct or bridge. A few capitals in the
Mosque of Cordova, the bas-relief of a hunting scene in the Museum, the
city walls and the ruins of the palace of Wamba at Toledo--we saw little
else to remind us of the Gothic rule in Spain, as far as material things
go. The crown of King Swinthila at Madrid was the most impressive relic
of the Visigoths we saw. It is of gold, surrounded by rosettes of pearls
and sapphires, in a delicate red paste cloisonné setting.
The Visigoths’ legacy to Spain was immaterial and immortal. Search for
traces of the blue-eyed northmen, and you will find ideals that still
survive in the Spaniards’ deep inborn sense of the equality of all men
(at least of all Spaniards), and in the Spanish woman’s honesty. The
Visigoths treated their wives as their equals, expected them to do their
share of fighting the enemy and of providing food for the family, gave
them control of their own property, and a right to half the common
household stock. They only obeyed their King so long as they approved of
him. “King shalt thou be as long as thou dost right. If thou dost not
right, no King shalt thou be.”
The influence of this immortal spiritual gift, these ideals of the
independence of the individual and the equality of the wife with the
husband, survive to-day in the temper of the modern Spaniard. I found
them in Pedra’s mother, Antonina, the washerwoman who so frankly shook
hands with me on our first meeting; in the fact that in Spain to-day no
man may leave more than half his fortune away from his wife; that the
Grandee is free to wear his hat in the presence of the King, his wife to
sit in the presence of the Queen. The legacy of the Goth survives in the
ideals and the virtues of the race. The Spaniard has the virtues of the
north as well as the ideals; he is truthful, honest, clean and, above
all, he is independent.
The sketches were nearly done; we all had settled into silence, and
worked, or dreamed half the morning away, looking out across that green
_vega_ or down at the old Moorish mills, far below in the Tagus, until
Patsy, whose sketch was finished first, declared he could not live
another hour unless he was possessor of a Toledo blade. Wandering in
search of one, down into the lower part of the town, we soon lost
ourselves in a labyrinth of narrow winding streets with high Oriental
looking houses. At every corner we were brought to a standstill by some
picturesque doorway, church or tower. These straight curving lanes, with
scarcely one open square or space, must make Toledo a comfortable summer
city. One has but to pass July in the modern quarter of Rome to know the
folly of laying out a southern city with wide avenues and open squares,
because they have proved comfortable and suitable for Paris or London.
Every town has to reckon either with heat or cold as its chief enemy.
Where heat is the more to be feared, as in Toledo or Rome, narrow
streets with tall houses, where the shadows lie cool, are the best.
“Do you believe,” asked Patsy, “that I shall find a blade ‘with so fine
a temper that it can be curled up like the mainspring of a watch?’”
Don Luis would not promise, but he guided us to the shop where we could
buy the best wares for our money. The dealer welcomed us and invited us
to examine his stock of swords, daggers, _cuchillos_, long pointed
knives, _navajas_, clasp knives, and _puñalicos_, little deadly knives
worn in the garter: one bore the motto, “I serve a lady.”