MURCIA--AUTUMN IN THE PASEO DE CORVERAS
We came back to Murcia, to our headquarters in the Paseo de Corveras, at
the beginning of October. Though the town was so far south, the cold
weather had well begun. In the daytime the sun seemed as fierce as ever,
but the dust that had lain inches deep during the summer was now an
equal depth of semi-liquid mud, and the house, without fireplaces or any
means of creating artificial warmth, had in it a faint though insidious
chill. Save in the hottest weather, stone or cement floors are
comfortless to live with. Marciana, the woman whose services we had
shared with Antonio during Rosa's smallpox, returned to us. She was a
woman of sixty years, bulky in figure, dressed in black of an eternal
mourning, and was mother of the most talented sculptor of Murcia. She
was an illustration of the inter-provincial jealousy of the Spaniard.
She came from Don Quixote's country, La Mancha, and was never weary of
chanting its praises.
"Ah, Señora," she exclaimed, "that is a wonderful land. Corn, oil and
wine in abundance. Dancing and singing in the villages all night long.
And what a wonderful people are those of mi pueblo.[26] My two sisters,
they each weigh at least twice as much as do I. And then we are a
civilized folk there, I can assure you. You saw how they treated it here
when Rosa had the smallpox. No precautions, even though one died of it a
few doors down the street. Now in mi pueblo they stretch sheets in front
of the doors of warning; the necessaries of life are put on to the
doorstep, and the money to pay for them is dropped by the hands of those
who are in the house, and who are not allowed beyond the sheet, into
pans of vinegar, so that they may be purified of the disease. Now that
is real cleanliness."
"But, thanks to God, Señora, Rosa is much better. The spots are
disappearing, she will not be marked, and she has given birth to a son.
It was a most divine birth. Of course it was fear for the son that made
everybody so anxious."
Marciana was a dilatory servant. Nothing was ever ready up to date, and
she invariably drowned all my commissions for the market with a flood of
words. She would wait all the morning in the queue which gathered at the
Government Olive Oil depot, to buy olive oil for me at a few centimos
cheaper than she could buy it from the grocers; and no explanation that
she wasted more of our pay than she gained in cheapness convinced her.
Antonio greeted us with delight, as did Emilio, the guitar maker, whom
we went to visit on the first day of our return. Each, however, was in a
different mood. Antonio, in spite of the joy caused by his new son, who
he said had been born "most preciously," was in a rage. He was in
trouble with the local authorities about his taxes. It appears that
there is a factory tax which does not depend upon the size of the
business, but the mere fact that there is a business. Thus Antonio, with
his three or four girl helpers, was condemned to pay the same sum as a
factory employing a thousand hands.
"It is impossible!" shouted Antonio. "We are thus crushed out of
existence. I may be able to arrange it, but, if I cannot, then it is no
use my going on. All the profits are swallowed up in one gulp. I shall
shut down, and sell up everything."
Emilio, on the other hand, was flushed with unsullied delight. A pompous
man was sitting in his shop with a guitar across his knees. Now and
then he drew from it a flourish of arpeggios, very technical, but rather
meaningless. Emilio stood over him, his eyes sparkling at the guitar,
which appeared to be exquisite in tone and strong in volume.
"Aha! my friends, congratulate me," cried he. "I have surpassed myself.
Permit me, Señor." He took the guitar from the pompous man, and handed
it reverently to Jan. "Try it, only touch it and see what a quality it
has. See how the bass note rings out, and how well-balanced to it is the
treble. I had no more than set the strings out on to it when Don Feliz,
the little maestro whom you know, came in. He played upon it, and so
full was my heart with the perfect tone of it, and with the thought that
I, Emilio Peralta, had made it, that the tears came running down my
face. I wept, Señor, to hear it. All night long I could not sleep for
fear that the tone might alter, as sometimes it does. Sometimes, indeed,
a guitar newly made sounds of no value, but in a few days or weeks even
it may become first rate. But this was good from the beginning, and it
has remained so."
The pompous man took a stately leave of us. Emilio was so excited by his
new achievement that he went on talking:
"One does not come to make guitars like this easily. How many are there
alive in Spain to-day who could do it? Only one, and I am he. Arias is
dead, Raminez also, though I have not seen a Raminez to equal this one.
For I will warrant that there are few better guitars than this in Spain.
Unluckily, it was sold before it was completed, or I would scarcely have
let it go. It was ordered by a colonel in the Army. Play on it, Señor,
but do not play Flamenco, for you must not tap upon the soundboard, or
you will injure the varnish. This is built for Classical."
Jan played, and it gave out a sonorous arid clear melody.
"From whom did I learn, Señor? I learned from nobody. My father was a
guitar-maker, but a poor one. He taught me nothing. Indeed, I was
married before the desire came to me to make fine instruments. Then how
I worked, Señor! I had an idea of the perfect guitar in my head; but
between idea and accomplishment what a gap! I could not cross it. Of two
guitars, made equally alike, one would be good, the other useless. When
this happened I would take them to pieces to search for the reason. For
years I have lived in poverty, spoiling good wood which cost me all my
earnings. I have not studied the guitars of others. Always in my head I
carried the idea of the perfect instrument. Slowly I have struggled
towards it. Now I know. But at what a cost have I acquired knowledge!"
Jan touched a chord on the instrument in his hands, and as it throbbed
out its deep responsive note he remembered the saying of Chopin:
"Nothing is more beautiful than a good guitar; save perhaps two."
Emilio promised to send Professor Feliz to us as soon as he came in; and
we walked back to the house through the Murcian mud, which, soaking
through our shoes, made us modify our previous eulogy of the alpagata.
On barrows in the street they were selling the first culled clusters of
dates of the season; we bought both pale and dark varieties, but they
were hard and tasteless. With the dates on the barrows were the orange
fruit of the persimon.
While we had been away at Jijona a cat had taken possession of our house
for the purpose of kittening. How she had got in was a mystery, for the
windows and doors all had been tightly sealed up, but we had discovered
her with her family at the bottom of the packing-cases which had formed
our bed at Verdolay. We had heard strange faint sounds as though of mice
on the evening of our return. The noises, however, did not cease for all
our presence. We had gone to explore; suddenly, a noise like a boxful of
exploding matches had burst up from under our noses, and something black
dashed across the dimly lit room and out through the window. There were
two kittens at the bottom of the narrowest of the packing-cases. We had
moved them to a large box near to the window. That night there had been
a fearful noise of yowling and squeaking. In the morning we found the
kittens back in the box from which we had moved them. The cat was quite
unapproachable. She burst out into a fury of spitting whenever we came
near. Then with one final explosion hurried from the room. These wild
cats were the pest of Murcia. One could leave no window open but they
poured into the house. All food had to be securely shut up, the marks of
their dusty paws were everywhere.
When we returned from Emilio's we found that our presence in the house
had been too much for the cat's nerves. She had disappeared from her box
and the kittens were gone with her.
Don Feliz, the half-blind guitar teacher, came in the evening. He again
said he was an honest man, and that his terms were five pesetas a month.
He was delighted to hear that we both were to be his pupils. Part of his
delight came from the money he would earn; but some of his delight was
due to the fact that he had ousted Blas as Jan's teacher. I do not think
we have met anybody more inappropriately named than Don Feliz. If Mr.
Shandy's theories have any foundation he was cursed from his
christening. He was not a Murciano, but a Castilian, and, in
consequence, depreciated the people he lived amongst and was in turn not
appreciated by them. He lived constantly torn by jealousy of the other
guitar-players in the town.
"Tell me," he exclaimed, "what do you think of the playing of Don
Ambrosio?"
Don Ambrosio was the pompous man we had met in Emilio's shop.
"Technically, excellent, but rather frigid," we said.
"Yes," exclaimed Don Feliz, "that is it. Frigid, yes, frigid! Nor is Don
Timoteo a good player, and as for that Blasito, that gipsy--pah! You
see, he has never learned music. So that, if he does get a good melody
from somebody else, he cannot harmonize it. And his Flamenco is of the
taverns. It is low, common music. Now I play Classical. Have you heard
my piece which represents a battle? How I imitate the mitrailleuse on
the base string? Now that is quite different from anything which that
fellow Blas can play. Of course I regret that you wish to learn
Flamenco. But that which I will teach you will be a classicized
Flamenco. I have made it into music. You see, I have been in a
conservatoire in my youth. That puts me on a different level from all
these other players. So I have made of my Flamenco something more
refined. It is no longer your tavern monstrosity that Blas plays."
Personally we preferred Blas as a player, and the music of Blas as
music. But Don Feliz was somewhat better as a teacher. His conservatoire
had taught him at least the names of the notes. But he was very
irritable. Poor fellow, at twopence a lesson, he had to give a round of
thirty lessons per day to make a bare subsistence. Sometimes he said
that his pupils were so dense that he could teach them but three or four
consecutive notes per day. Once we heard him debating with a possible
client whether it was worth while or no to walk two miles in order to
get three lessons in the same house. Our consciences--concerning
sweating--pricked us and we paid him double fees. In consequence of his
gratitude he came to our house last of all and gave us lessons of four
times the duration of any one else.
After he had gone, we were still playing, when Marciana came in with
some parcels.
"Aha!" she cried. "That is a jota. It is the music of mi pueblo. La
jota, La jota."
She put down the parcels; spread out her arms and with a balance and
elegance extraordinary in one so bulky began to dance. After twenty
bars, however, she stopped.
"Ei," she sighed, "how sad it is that one grows old. How sad that youth
passes all too quickly!"
That night a terrific thunderstorm broke over the valley. The thunder
crashed, the lightning flared and the rain came down as though pouring
from a gigantic hose. In the middle of all the noise we heard a strange
sound.
"Wah! wah! wah! Squeak! Squeak!"
The cat had come back; but with only one kitten. The next morning we
stayed in the house. From the windows we could mark the change which
autumn had brought over the Paseo de Corveras. The dust was no longer
blown along the road, which was now a still river of liquid mud. The
town dust-cart, a donkey with panniers, no longer promenaded the street;
no longer did we hear the cheerful blasphemy of the dust-boy who,
stooping to gather up some refuse, found that his dust-cart had
impatiently trotted on. In its place were the exhortations of the
pig-drivers, who urged hordes of monstrous black pigs through the mud.
Some of the porkers were, however, so heavy on their feet that they had
to be brought in carts. The squealing of them filled the morning air.
The fruit merchants, also with panniered donkeys, no longer called out
"Melacotones, peras!" but "Uvas! Uvas!"[27] and a man wandered about
with a huge basket of snails. The maize fields in front of the house
were cut and stacked, and in the fields queens of Sheba were dragging
the primitive ploughs, while men behind them beat to powder the lumps of
baked earth which were turned up. Instead of the almost dead silence
which greeted the strengthening sun, people moved about all day;
parasols had given place to flirting fans. The country girls wore
bunches of flowers in their hair, some even put one tall blossom
sticking upright from the _coiffure_, where it nodded and bowed with the
movements of the wearer. In the fruit garden the lemons had quite
fallen, but the oranges were beginning to become a livid yellow on one
side of the bush, while the dates had passed from a pale to a deep
golden hue.
I went about with Luis exploring balconies for views, and finally
decided upon a view of Murcia from the tall campanile of the Cathedral.
When I got back I found that the cat once more had decamped, taking the
kitten with her. The second kitten had been lost. In the afternoon Luis
came in. He brought an invitation from some friends for me to play the
piano at their house on Saturday evening. That evening Don Feliz
exclaimed:
"I have an old guitar. It is a unique instrument, none other like it has
ever been seen in Spain. I bought it, at a bargain, for thirty pesetas;
but I would sell it to a friend for the same money. Now you, Señor, have
no guitar of your own. This is a veritable instrument for a museum. Come
and see it on Sunday morning. I will show you the way."
We dined at Elias', as was our custom, and trudged back through the mud.
On the darkened stairs of our house we heard a wailing and almost
tumbled over the spitting cat, which had brought back the kitten once
more. We gathered up the kitten and, followed at some distance by the
suspicious cat, put it back into the packing-case.
All this while we were rather short of electric lights in our house.
Antonio had borrowed most of the light-bulbs to decorate a shrine which
he had erected in one of the churches. The candle which the righteous
once offered up to God is going out of fashion. Nowadays, instead of
burning so many feet of bees-wax, one turns on so many volts. Lamb has
drawn a picture of two priests disputing as to which should offer up a
blessing, with a final compromise that neither should do so; and the
disappointment of the defrauded God. To-day he could go further, he
could depict the deity being forced to go to the factory chimney for the
scent of his burnt sacrifice. A Spanish writer, Pio Baroja, in a novel
proposes a society called the "Extra-Rapid to Heaven Assurance
Society." The insurer pays in a sum, and on his death hundreds of
gramophones are turned on chanting prayers for his speedy deliverance
from purgatory. "God," says the author, "is so far away, that he will
not notice the substitution." This is, of course, a satire on the modern
habit of replacing candles by electric lights, but the satire is no more
absurd than the actuality.
Alongside of the bridge was a tall shrine built into the side of the
house and lit up thus at night with electric light. The image was
covered with a large sheet of plate glass, and I said that it was a
sculptured figure. Jan, on the other hand, insisted that it was a
painting. We had an argument about it and on the next day returned to
verify together. It was, in fact, a painting. But at night, returning
from Elias', we looked up at the shrine by chance, and stopped,
astonished. If it was a painting it was most realistic. We looked more
closely. The more we examined it, the more did it seem sculptured. Then
the explanation dawned on us. It was sculptured, but during the daytime
a painted curtain was drawn down in front of it.
At luncheon next day we were disturbed by a hullabaloo from the attic.
The wretched cat had taken her kitten up there, to look for peace from
those meddlesome humans. That night we were awakened again by terrible
noises from under our bed. The cat was still wandering like a lost soul
looking for peace. Daily the kitten appeared and disappeared with
exasperating irregularity. At last, however, we managed to tame the cat
so that we were able to stroke her. Then the animal burst out into the
strangest of noises, like a small badly oiled circular saw. It was
purring. From that moment it took possession of the house. All its
shyness vanished. It tucked up its sleeves and turned out of the house
any other feline intruder.
One afternoon we were awakened from our siesta by a furious cat fight
underneath the bed. The black cat and a ginger-coloured female were
locked in combat, and making a noise like a hundred siphons. The battle
continued across the sitting-room, the ginger cat giving ground. Finally
she retreated to the balcony, where there was for a while armed
neutrality, both singing war songs quite Spanish in their intervals.
Then the black cat sprang. Ginger backed to avoid the rush, but backed
too far. She toppled over into the street, fell with a thud on to the
mud pavement, gathered herself together and with a scream of
disappointed fury dashed through the nearest open door. To our amazement
all the occupants of the house, a young man, an old woman, a girl of
seventeen and one of six hurried into the street, their eyes wide open
with terror.
"What is the matter?" we shouted to them.
"A cat with rabies has just rushed into our house," they cried in
answer.
The fear of rabies is very prevalent, and with reason. One does not pat
stray dogs in Spain, nor does one make advances to unknown cats. Any
animal which can bite is under suspicion. It is lucky, indeed, that
fleas can't get rabies.
One Saturday I began sketching in the Cathedral campanile. The ascent of
the tower was not by means of steps but by sloping lanes which travelled
all round the inner walls. I had chosen my view from the belfry. On each
side of me were small bells, and as each in turn clanged out the half or
quarter hour according to size I stopped my ears. Suddenly there was a
deafening crash. Before I realized what had happened I had fallen from
my seat, the easel had gone spinning ... almost fainting from the shock,
I looked about me. Over my head an enormous clapper was swinging.
Unconsciously, I had seated myself almost inside one of the biggest
bells in the south of Spain, and it had rung. The clapper again swung
itself with force against the side of the bell, and in spite of my
protecting hands the sound burst through my head. For ten minutes
afterwards my hand was shaking too violently to allow me to paint.
The view from the tower was exquisite. Immediately below me were the
blue glazed cupolas and the arabesques of the cathedral facade on which
little stone saints gazed out over the town. Then came a large square
centred on a circular garden of flowers--edged on one side by the pink
front of the Archbishop's palace, many windowed. From the end of the
square narrow sunless streets led into the town, which gradually became
a patchwork of flat roofs on which smaller buildings were erected. The
huge square block of red brick of the Reina Victoria Hotel stood out
over the sinuous river, on the banks of which stood the red pepper mills
and beyond which showed the huertas stretching out to the mountains.
Red, ochre, yellow and green were the chief colour notes, while blue and
purple shadows gave relief and solidity to the whole.
In the evening I played the piano at the house of Luis' friends. Here
was a typical Spanish bourgeois interior. Every resting-place was
crowded with cheap bric-à-brac. The chairs were draped with velvet and
silk hangings and antimacassars; the walls hung with enormous
photographic enlargements, from the decorating of which Flores made some
of his living. Card-racks covering the interspaces of the walls were
filled with coloured picture postcards.
"We have brought you here," said Flores, "because it is just opposite to
the Circulo des Varios Artes.[28] The pianist of the Arts Club is very
conceited. We want to take him down, by showing him that a Señora can
play better than he does."
[Illustration]
I was rather annoyed; but could not draw back. So I put my best into the
music. Grieg (pronounced by them Hriech) seems to suit the Spanish
temperament: so I played The Wedding March, Papillion and the Carnival.
There was a pause. Then faintly as a retort, from the Circulo des
Varios Artes, came the easiest of Grieg's "lyrical pieces" played
carefully by the maestro. As if he would say, "I too can play Grieg."
On Sunday morning we set off with Don Feliz to see the old guitar.
"It is in the house of my novia,[29] whom I shall be delighted to
introduce to you."
We were amazed. Until that moment we had imagined Don Feliz to be quite
an old man, but looking closely at him one could see that he might be
within the limit of thirty to forty years. On this second visit to
Murcia the people were not so strongly affected by my appearance in the
streets. For my part I no longer wore a hat, but carried a parasol; I
had exchanged my ordinary dress for an ex-munition overall, which people
said was _muy elegante_. But we penetrated into a new part of the town,
then was some staring and some pointing. I mentioned this casually to
Don Feliz.
"Do not fear," he exclaimed, "you are safe with me. I have a terrible
reputation in these parts. I am known as a bad man. If I get into a
rage, my anger is terrible to see ... terrible. The children slink away
in the street at my coming."
This was not the estimate we had formed of him, from his encounter with
Blas in Emilio's shop. Poor Don Feliz, like so many others he had formed
a dream self which contained most of the qualities in which he was
lacking. I fear that only his illusive self was terrible, and that none
but dream children ever shrank at his passing. The house of his novia
bore on its weather-beaten front the arms of some bygone hidalgo; now it
was an apartment house. We clambered up staircases of black wood, into
one of the few dark-coloured interiors we have seen in Spain. The guitar
was of a strange form and with a scrolled head, the curve of its shape
having some of the beauty to be found in negro sculpture. Jan seized the
bargain, and carried it home.
No sooner had he the guitar in the house than he tuned it, and crashing
his finger-nails across it, struck out a rasped chord. He quickly
followed it with a shout of dismay. From out of one of the big holes had
crept a startled bug.
After my experience with the church bell I could sympathize with the
insect, weeping perhaps "walrus tears" upon its death-bed. But the
problem of how one could disinfect a guitar was worrying. The case had
no cracks for vermin-harbouring, so we shut up the instrument; and after
some indecision Jan decided to trust to luck and leave it alone.
On Sunday night we gave a party to Emilio, his wife, the little
Professor and other afficianados of the guitar. We played to them
selections of genuine classical music, Bach, Beethoven, Handel on the
gramophone. Don Feliz sat by himself in a corner, his head in the air,
tapping his foot to the metre.
"All that, all that I have heard before," he said.
Emilio listened with delight on his rugged face. Every few minutes he
whispered to his wife:
"Shut up talking. This is worth listening to."
Then we tried an experiment. We had just received from El Señor a plate
of Stravinsky's "Oiseau du Feu." We put it on to the machine. The
audience kept an intense silence.
"But that is marvellous!" they exclaimed as soon as the record was over.
"Play it once more, Señor."
"Señor," said one of Emilio's friends, "what can I do for you? Have you
any milk--no?"
He ran downstairs and out of the house. In ten minutes he came back,
thrust a milk-can into Jan's hands.
"There!" he exclaimed. "And if you want any more cow's milk, come to me.
I keep a milk-shop, you know." Then he went on more seriously: "But you
are indeed lucky to have bought that old guitar of Don Feliz. He would
never sell it to me. I have offered a hundred pesetas for it; and there
are others who have offered more."
This left us with a problem in psychology to work out for the next few
days. Why had Don Feliz sold Jan the guitar?
We put the question to Luis.
"Oh," he answered, "probably Don Feliz found the Señor Juan
sympathetic."
But this did not satisfy us. Don Feliz had made much of the fact that we
were leaving the country: that we were going far away. At last we worked
it out thus.
Don Feliz had bought his novia a laud. He was short of money to pay for
it. This, however, would not have been enough reason in itself, but he
was also jealous of the other players in the town, and by selling the
guitar definitely to Jan he would first allay the temptation that he
might sell it locally. He put the price low, because he knew we were
badly off; but some of the wrench of parting with the instrument--of
which he was very proud--was eased by knowing that it was going to be
taken to the grand cities of London and Paris, where its uniqueness
would be valued. But we think he would have died of starvation rather
than allow one of his local rivals to possess his old guitar.
When I was not sketching in the campanile, Jan and I went to the cafés
and drew the people sitting about us. This gave delight to the waiters.
One morning while we were at one of the café's facing the river Blas
came up. He passed over the fact that we had quarrelled, and that Jan
had dropped him for Don Feliz.
"Draw me!" said Blas.
The result was that one by one all the richest gipsies of the town came
and posed to me at the café tables. This was, in fact, the gipsies'
café. They were on the whole a handsome set of men, very intelligent and
shrewd in expression and of prosperous appearance. Most of these carried
the indefinable touch which makes an internationalism amongst those who
are interested in beasts of burden. They are reputed to be expert cattle
and horse thieves, and are still to some extent despised by the
Spaniard. But our first impressions were not unfavourable.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The autumn seemed to be a period of fiesta. We had luckily just missed
the great fiesta of Murcia which culminates with a huge procession out
to Fuen Santa in the mountains. But often we were awakened at three in
the morning by a series of alarming reports and explosions in the
street outside. There was a large church at the end of the Paseo de
Corveras, and it seemed as though guns were going off all around the
walls. The first time we heard this we sprang to our windows, for we
had heard something of the quarrelsome nature of the Murcians.
But the explosions were up in the air. Rocket after rocket soared up
into the air and exploded with a loud crash, then large zigzag crackers
were thrown down into the street. Grumbling at the noise, we went back
to bed. Next day we found out that it was a fiesta, the rockets sent up
by the priests; and often after that we were awakened in the dead of
night by these almost Chinese religious ceremonies.
We had heard much of the quarrelsome nature of the huertanos. Luis and
Flores had both told us tales of quarrels amongst the cultivators. Both
at Verdolay and in Murcia we had seen small bands of young men wandering
about at eventide with guitars and songs. They were hunting for trouble,
and if they should meet another band, then a fight ensued, ending with
broken instruments and possibly a stab or two.
One afternoon Jan was walking homewards from Emilio's, where he had been
buying guitar-strings. He was close to the Paseo de Corveras, when a
young man rushed round a corner and cannoned hard into him. Jan stumbled
and to save himself clutched the man by the coat. It was a corner around
which youths were accustomed to lark, and Jan, believing this to be a
piece of horse-play, decided, while yet stumbling and clutching, that
the horse-play was too rough. So dragging at the blouse of the man, who
struggled to escape, Jan exhorted him to come back and to explain
himself. While he was still holding on to the man, a crowd burst around
the corner and flung itself on to the presumed joker. Jan's head was in
a whirl. One man leapt fiercely on to the joker's back, wrenched his
arms behind him and grasped him. The struggling crowd swayed to and fro
and suddenly lurched sideways through the door of a tobacconist's shop.
Two women in the shop began to shriek at the upper pitch of their
voices.
The turmoil quietened. A furious talk began in the shop. The young man
who had pinioned the joker, trying to explain, loosened his grip to use
his hands conversationally. At once the joker leapt for freedom. He ran,
panting like a dog, out of the shop, the crowd bellowing, amid
screaming, at his heels. The man was chased into an ironmonger's, where
he took refuge behind the counter. The crowd blocked up the doorway.
Jan, who had joined the crowd in dismayed curiosity, then began to pick
up detached words: "Asesino, Asesino ... asesinato."
"Good Lord!" said Jan to himself. "I don't want to get mixed up in a
murder trial."
As he turned away, two gendarmes, with the ridiculous schoolgirl hats on
their heads, led the murderer away.
During this time I had been at home. A sudden outburst of noise dragged
me to the window. Down the street, a man was running. He went in a queer
way, holding himself between the legs with his hands, and sometimes
stumbling, sometimes leaping as one does in dreams of pursuit. Carts
were driven furiously after him. He was shouting out in a voice, full of
surprise and of anger. After a moment I made out the words:
"Catch the man who has murdered me! Catch the villain who has killed
me!"
He stumbled once more and fell. Men jumped from the carts, lifted him
into one, and drove him away.
I ran downstairs. Antonio's gaunt mother-in-law was standing in the
doorway.
"It is an assassination," she said. "I doubt that the poor man will
live. He was stabbed in a ticklish part."
"I wonder where Jan is," I said to myself; and at that moment saw him
coming along the sidewalk. I ran to him. "Jan," I cried, "a man has been
murdered."
"I know," he answered; "I unwittingly caught the murderer."
The Paseo de Corveras must have more than its fair percentage of fat old
women. They all stood on their doorsteps talking in awed tones of the
tragedy. Then with a ludicrous unanimity each pushed her skirts between
her legs with a dramatic hand and holding herself so that she plainly
illustrated her meaning exclaimed,
"Ei! el pobre! Y en un sitio tan delicado."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 26: My village.]
[Footnote 27: "Peaches, Pears!" but "Grapes! Grapes!"]
[Footnote 28: The Arts Club of Murcia.]
[Footnote 29: Betrothed.]