“Because, if I’m going to carry through that scheme of mine about motor
traffic, I may have to live on the spot, you see.”
“Oh!” said I. “And what about Colonel O’Donnel’s copper mines? Have you
thought of a means to persuade him it’s his duty to have them worked?”
“In a way, I have,” Dick answered dryly. “An indirect sort of way. What
about our gasoline? Heard anything about it?”
“No. I’m going to find Ropes.”
“Rather a sell for Carmona, if he did order our _bidons_ pricked, to feel
it’s his fault if we’re held up as long as he is.”
“There’s Ropes in the _patio_,” I said. “I’ll go and interview him.”
“What news?” I asked.
“Well, sir, I did what the landlord said last night, and had a try for
moto-naphtha—as they call it here—at the chemist’s.”
“Did they have any?”
“Oh yes, sir, they had some. As much as a pint apiece, in the two shops.
They wanted to sell it by the ounce.”
Dick and I laughed, though my mirth was not care-free. I had visions of
being stuck at this place until Ropes made a journey to Madrid and back,
Carmona’s car slipping away long before we were ready.
“I was afraid it was hopeless to look for petrol here,” I said, striving
for resignation, even though I saw Mariquita going upstairs with two
battered tins of hot water.
“Not yet, sir. A man who heard me asking for moto-naphtha at the
chemist’s, advised me to try the cemetery.”
“The cemetery? You misunderstood the word.”
“No, sir; it _was_ cemetery. And what’s more, he said the Mayor keeps it
there to kill lobsters.”
This statement, delivered somewhat nervously, was received with derision.
“The fellow was stuffing you,” said Dick.
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Then he’s mad,” I insisted. “Fishing for lobsters with moto-naphtha in a
cemetery at Manzanares is a story Baron Munchausen would have thought
twice about before telling.”
“_Langostas_ does mean _langouste_—or lobsters, I suppose, sir?” asked
Ropes.
“Ye—es,” I answered thoughtfully. Then lightning flashed across the
darkness of my mind. “It means locusts as well,” said I. “They use petrol
to kill locusts, and for some reason best known to themselves keep it at
the cemetery. We’ll go, Ropes, and persuade them to sell us more than an
ounce.”
“Right, sir. At once?”
“In a moment,” said I.
Mariquita, empty-handed, was coming downstairs. I waylaid her, under that
portion of the balcony hidden from the window of Lady Vale-Avon’s room.
“Did you deliver the letter?” I asked.
“Yes, señor.”
“To the young lady herself?”
“To herself. But I must tell you what worries me, señor. As I was leaving
the outer room, I heard a sound like a cry of distress, from the inner
room. I looked back, and Her Majesty the mother had gone in. That is all I
know. I could do nothing, whatever had happened, and I felt it would be
well to escape before I could be questioned.”
“What do you think happened?”
“How can I tell, señor? Unless the terrible lady snatched your letter from
the angel.”
“At least, I hope the angel had had time to read it.”
“I do not know, señorito. There was not much time; but she might have been
quick; and if the letter was not long, there is still hope.”
This was poor comfort. All my joyous anticipations dashed, I tried to
think of some way of finding out whether Monica had read my letter, and
whether there were any way of smuggling another to her.
The note had been written in such haste, that I scarcely knew what I had
said. No name had been signed; nevertheless, if Lady Vale-Avon read what I
had written, she would say to herself, “It is not Cristóbal O’Donnel who
says these things, but a more dangerous man.” If she had the letter, she
could show it to Carmona; but, as I thought the matter over, I decided
that it was unlikely she would do this.
Spaniards, especially Spaniards with Moorish blood in their veins, do not
like to think girls they love capable of carrying on secret correspondence
with other men; and I imagined that Lady Vale-Avon was a woman to guess
this. Already Carmona knew that Lady Monica was interested in someone
else, or had a girlish fancy for him, which might or might not have been
frightened away. But his desire for her would not be whetted by the fact
that she was receiving letters from that someone else, perhaps sending
them to him; and it struck me that Lady Vale-Avon would conceal the
correspondence, rather than flaunt it in Carmona’s face. If I were right,
then I was as safe as before from the Duke’s jealousy; but, had Monica
read my letter?
On the alert as her mother would be now, I should find it more difficult
than ever to communicate with the girl. Yet I could not bear to leave
Manzanares in fear of a misunderstanding.
Nothing more could be done at the moment, however; and I hurried Ropes off
that we might finish our errand and get back by the time that Monica was
down.
It appeared that the man who had volunteered information about
moto-naphtha was waiting to act as guide. He was still at the chemist’s,
and from there led us to the Casa Consistorial. At the Casa Consistorial
were two policemen in the hall, warming themselves over a hole in the
ground, where glowed charcoal embers. But the Mayor had not arrived.
Without him nothing could be arranged. Besides, even if he were present
and willing to consent, the key of the cemetery was with the _cura_, who
might be anywhere.
Off we dashed to the _cura’s_ house, and just in time. Five minutes later,
and we might have had to wait hours for him. But there he was, a
delightful, white-haired old man, who would be charmed to open the
cemetery for our worships, since it was not to bury us; but he could make
no move in that direction without the honourable concurrence of the Mayor.
Back, then, we bustled to the Casa Consistorial, with the sensation of
shuttlecocks, played between battledores at cross purposes.
But at last the second battledore was ready to send us in the right
direction. The Mayor, a young man, who looked like a lawyer in tall hat
and frock-coat, was as polite as only a Spaniard can be. He put himself,
and his house, and Manzanares at our service. It was something like being
given the freedom of London; and what was more to the point than anything
else, he offered us as much moto-naphtha as the town possessed, at any
price we pleased to pay.
The question was, how much did the town possess; a single quart, or a
hundred gallons? The Mayor himself was not sure, so we rattled off in an
ancient “simón” to the cemetery to find out; and luckily were able to
carry away all we were likely to need for the next two days, while leaving
some for the locusts. But between the Casa Consistorial, the house of the
_cura_, the distant cemetery, and the drive back to our stable-garage, it
had taken us nearly three hours to achieve our end. Then there was a
little lingering with the car, to make sure that all was well and no more
tricks had been played; and the walk back to the _fonda_ exhausted the
last of my patience. I had not expected to be gone more than an hour, and
I had been gone three. Meanwhile, I said to myself, almost anything might
have happened. My idea had been to get back by the time that Monica was
dressed, and now, for all I could tell, she might have gone.
Dick laughed at this suggestion, for, said he, Carmona’s chauffeur was not
a worker of miracles except, perhaps, on other men’s cars; and he could
not have got his master’s in order and ready to start. His arguments were
reasonable; nevertheless, like many other plausible deductions, they were
wrong; for the first news we heard at the hotel was that the grey
automobile had left nearly an hour before. The chauffeur, it seemed, had
been up all night working, and had had assistance in the early morning at
a machine-shop. The injuries had been patched up, and the car was expected
to get on either to Andujar, or Linares if a certain bridge had been
finished.
After all, this was not as bad as if we had made no promise to the
Duchess. We were bound not to lie in wait for, or closely follow, her
son’s car; and had it not been for the “luck of the Dream-Book,” Carmona
and his party would have been far away last night when we arrived at
Manzanares. Had I not been tortured by doubts about the fate of my letter,
I might have been philosopher enough to say: “Patience, until Seville!”
As it was, patience was the last virtue I could cultivate; and for what
remained of that day, I was unable to find the smallest pleasure in
motoring.
Again we were on the highroad between Madrid and Seville; yet the waving
ruts and ridges of hardened mud were sprinkled with a green glaze of
grass, as if in treacherous attempt at concealment. Dust curled behind us
like smoke, creeping under the tarpaulin that covered our luggage on the
roof, and into our suit-cases, powdering our clothing like fine white
sugar.
Despite the good springs and deep cushions of the car, Pilar’s light body
danced up and down, as Dick said, like a bit of American popcorn over a
hot fire; and our two guests, who had thought themselves motor
enthusiasts, did not respond ardently to Dick’s forced praises of the
sport.
How glorious, said he (every other word emphasized with a bump), how
glorious not to be bound down to the fixed and inconvenient hours of
trains. To stop where and when you like; to start on again when you
choose; never to have your view of the choicest bit of scenery blotted out
in a tunnel; to be grimed by no railway smoke; always to feel your face
fanned by a fresh breeze, tingling with ozone; to read—if you had the
seeing eye—the whole life of the country in writing on the road; the
tracks of heavy carts; the delicate prints of donkey’s feet, trotting to
market laden with wine or fruit; the tracing of diligence wheels, or
old-fashioned carriages on their way to a bull-fight; the footmarks of
peasants economically carrying their shoes over their shoulders; the
clover-like imprint of sheeps’ little hoofs, and goats’; the pads of
shepherd dogs. To flash through kinematographic glimpses of vineland and
oliveland, and graceful blue mountain shapes; to see strange villages of
whose existence you would never know when plodding along by train; to fly
from one living reminder of Don Quixote to another, as we were doing
to-day (had we not seen the inn where he was knighted?)—Bang! Never before
can I remember hailing with delight the pistol-like report which can mean
but one thing; the bursting of a tyre. But I was enchanted that Dick’s
eloquence should be interrupted.
We had jolted through wine-making Valdepeñas, where the red juice of the
grape seems to spout from a grey valley of stones; we had passed, in the
quaint market-place, the posada which Don Quixote knew; we had bounced
through Santa Cruz de Mudela, with its fine old fifteenth century church,
and had seen its famous and gaily coloured garters exposed for sale in the
shops; and now we were far from towns or villages, out in the country.
Luckily, everybody was ready for lunch, and Pilar and the Cherub had had
the forethought to order things which would not have occurred to Dick or
me. Not far away, on the crest of a hill-billow, stood a road-mender’s
house, with an outside, adobe oven like a huge beehive. We crawled to it,
travelling on the collapsed tyre, and were served by a delightful brown
family; served as if we had been the King and his suite who had lunched
(so said the brown family) on that spot a few weeks ago. Out came the
chairs which the King and his friends had sat in, plates and glasses from
which the King and his friends had drunk; and the simple people derived a
childlike pleasure from dwelling on the episode.
As before, the news of our presence seemed to flash through the air and
bring, in the same mysterious way, an audience out of empty space. Pilar
said that the people who came were in reality wild birds, seen by our
sophisticated eyes in the form of human beings; and as if they had been
wild birds, we coaxed them, till they trusted us and fed with us, drinking
from our wineskin the blood of the Spanish grape, almost innocent of
alcohol. The soft Spanish language, as it fell from their lips, was rich
as the taste of that Spanish wine on the tongue, and stirred in my heart a
pride of kinsmanship.
While we others lunched, Ropes jacked up the Gloria and changed the inner
tube, pausing now and then to munch a sandwich or swallow a draught of
wine with an unruffled air characteristic of him. When the road-mender
mentioned that four _bandidos_ had been captured in the morning by the
civil guard, on the road along which we had passed, his expression did not
change by the twitching of a muscle. Indeed, he looked equal to disposing
of half a dozen brigands without the aid of a single guardia civile.
After forty minutes by the wayside, we set off to penetrate farther into
that melancholy country which Cervantes loved, and almost at once were in
the Venta de Cordeñas, that wide and stony waste where Don Quixote rode to
do his penance. The gayest spirits must have been dashed by the gloom of
the knight’s self-imposed prison, and mine were not improved. I had a
disquieting impression that Monica’s voice, calling an appeal, came
echoing from the mountain walls.
Of course, there was nothing in it, except superstitious nonsense of which
I ought to be ashamed; yet I could not shut my ears to her voice, which
seemed to cry the words her fingers once had written: “Don’t desert me!
Don’t leave me alone!”
Always the echo followed, as the car mounted higher on the slopes of the
Sierra Morena, and such glories of Spain opened out before our eyes as we
had not seen yet, even in the splendid Gorge of Pancorbo.
Crest above crest, great chains of mountains cut the smooth sapphire of
the sky; and as we serpentined into their closer grasp, each loop of the
Alpine road gave a new and more fantastic combination of rock and stream.
The car was boring into a gorge of astounding sublimity, a hammer-stroke
of Vulcan which had cleft the mountain and left behind chips of copper, of
gold, of silver, and a rich sprinkling of precious gems.
As the god’s hammer fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of
form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures
as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in his childhood.
Even the calm countenance of Ropes was transfigured by this burst of
splendour. “Makes you forget that roads can be bad, and tyres go wrong,
doesn’t it, sir?” he said to me. “I could drive through places like these,
day and night on end, without food or drink, never knowing if I was done
up.”
And praise from a chauffeur is praise indeed!
We were in the defile of Despeñaperros, the most terrific and, at the same
time, the noblest gorge of Spain; and I should have known it from stories
told by my father, who had once fought with _bandoleros_ upon this very
road. Down into the river that tossed up white plumes of foam far below,
he had flung one man, while another fired shot after shot from his
carbine, screened behind a rock on the opposite side of the ravine,
scarcely a biscuit-throw away.
Long before, too, history had been made in this mountain passage whose
walls had rung with wilder sounds than the screaming of our siren. The
rival battle-cries of Moor and Spaniard had echoed among the rocks, and
Christian blood and pagan had mingled in the white spume of the river.
I thought of these things, as I looked down into the silent depths of the
gulf, and saw the sparkling veins of granite, and purple masses of slate
gleam with volcanic life and colour. But still I heard the haunting echo
of Monica’s voice, in the solitude through which she must lately have
passed, perhaps leaving some message, if I could only know.
Was it merely a fantastic twist of my nerves, or was her spirit calling,
trying to make itself heard and understood?
It was Pilar who broke the spell by a sudden clapping of her hands.
“Andalucía! dear Andalucía!” she cried; and each one of us, subdued and
silenced by the majesty of the scene, started as if waking from sleep.
She was pointing at a stone obelisk, looking at which her father smiled
and raised his hat.
“No more cold,” said he; “no more winds to nip our noses. Here’s the
dividing line between the north countries and the country of the sun.”
Then, as if the obelisk had been the finger of some genie invoking a magic
change, an enchantment blurred the stem features of the landscape. It was
as though the fierce face of an angry giant had been transformed into that
of a beautiful, laughing woman with the sun in her eyes.
The defile opened when we had slipped past a half-hidden mountain hamlet
or two; widened into a valley bright with colour as the jewels on the
spread tail of a peacock; and boat-like, the car rode an undulating sea of
green and azure and gold, that scintillated as if a spray of diamonds were
tossed into air with the speed of our going.
At Santa Elena we were in a Spain I had not seen. At La Carolina we burst
into a world fair and fertile as the Garden of Eden; and I remembered the
Moorish legend that Heaven is built on the blue that hangs over Andalucía.
Hedges of aloe brandished zincen swords and darts; cacti sprawled and
leered along the roadside; set in the vivid green of ripening grain, olive
groves seemed carved from jade; or the bare rosy shoulders of sloping
hillsides turned by contrast their pale tints to tarnished silver. Vines
with young gold leaves trailed the purple earth; avenues of acacias
dripped perfumes; and as the sun leaned towards the west, the quivering
pink light on violet mountains gave to Andalucía the vivid, almost violent
colouring one sees in sensational posters.
Each girl we passed wore a bright flower shining star-like through the
black cloud of her hair. The men had discarded the fur-trimmed Louis XI
caps for the broad-brimmed, grey sombreros de Cordoba, and the horses or
mules were harnessed with gay splashes of red and blue colour, and bobbing
tassels.
We had talked of Linares, the lead-mining town, as a halting-place for the
night, as we were pledged not to track down the Lecomte; and on the
outskirts of Bailen, as twilight fell, the Gloria was brought to a sudden
stop in the midst of a pulsating crowd, that we might ask the way.
If we aroused their curiosity, they piqued us to the same emotion, for
most of the men, and there were hundreds, not only wore upon their legs a
kind of divided pinafore, but carried on their backs an apparatus which
would have excited wonder in any other than this fairy country.
The machine reminded me at first glance of a fire-extinguisher; then of
some appliance used by miners to hold a supply of oxygen. One part of me
wished to know what the instrument was; the other preferred to remain in
ignorance, lest the explanation should prove too commonplace. But Waring
had all my curiosity, and none of my scruples; so he asked a question with
a gesture more intelligible than his Spanish; and just as I had feared,
the weird union of reservoirs and nozzles was no more than a contrivance
for spraying vines to protect them from phylloxera.
As always, we brought the fascinations of the Cherub to bear upon the
crowd, as one trains the latest gun upon the enemy; and his crooning
brought out facts which made Dick think it high time he got things into
shape, and his motor service to running. It seemed that once upon a time a
good road had been made from Bailen to Linares, but the road was crossed
by a river; and when the masonry supports for a bridge had been built, it
turned out that girders had been forgotten. Somehow, it was nobody’s place
to jog anybody else’s memory, and there the matter had ended, so long ago
that grass and flowers had sprouted among the futile stones.
It appeared the most natural thing in the world to the people of Bailen,
who were accustomed to ford the river, when they wanted to cross, with
horses; but though the weather had been dry for the last few days, the
recent torrents which had fallen in the mountains, still swelled the
volume of water to such a height that it might “put out the fire in the
automobile.”
I was glad to hear this, because if it would put out our fire, it would
put out Carmona’s; and as he was prudent in matters concerning his car, he
would probably have stopped at Andujar; thus fate would again bring me
near to Monica, despite our promise.
The main reason for going to Linares was because the Cherub believed there
was a fair hotel, built to accommodate Englishmen collected for the
lead-mining; therefore it was without regret that we turned the Gloria to
follow the _carretera_ to Cordoba.
Our advisers ran after us with a warning to avoid the rough cobbles of
Bailen by taking the _ronda_ which skirts the town on its left. So slowly,
in dusk that blossomed blue as the myrtle flower, we passed round outside
the town, regained the high road, leaping at speed into a world of wide,
silvery spaces and mystery of violet hollows, diving into the deep valley
of the swollen river, and rejoicing in a hard surface of good macadam for
fifteen miles or more.
Thus we arrived at Andujar, the lights of our great acetylene lamps (lit
before the sky turned from opal to amethyst) prying into dark doorways and
windows as Röntgen rays pry through flesh to bone.
In the white glare, pretty girls in doorways looked like actresses in a
costume play, waiting in the wings to “go on.” But no yells of a stage mob
ever were so realistic as those of the unrehearsed band who howled over my
poor Gloria as she deposited her passengers at the _fonda_; and Ropes and
I pushed her through a wall of human beings to a stable-garage, where her
flywheel gushed a protest of fiery sparks on the high stone step of
entrance.
The _fonda_ was passable; but Carmona and his party were not there;
neither were they anywhere else in Andujar, as we made it our business to
discover; and we guessed that the grey car must after all have ventured to
Linares.
As it had vanished, we were free to start when we chose next morning. So
we chose an early hour, flying over good roads through a land embroidered
with the scarlet of poppies, the blue of gentian, the pink of clover, and
gold of buttercups, stitched in with the silver of little running streams.
“ ‘Give us bread and give us bulls,’ is the cry of this country,” said the
Cherub, greeting with joyous glances each feature of his loved Andalucia.
“It sounds like a beef sandwich,” Dick reflected aloud; but Pilar
reproached him for flippancy. “You mustn’t make jokes about bread in
Andalucia!” she exclaimed. “And it’s called a sin ever to throw away a
crumb. Because it’s the gift of Heaven, if you drop a bit you must pick it
up and apologize by kissing it.”
“Why not eat it instead?” asked Dick.
“You can do that afterwards. And if bread’s made with holes in it, you
must stand the holey side up, because the spirit of God enters through the
holes to bless you.”
“I thought only olives were sacred in Andalucia,” said Dick, staring away
over enormous tracts of the silver-grey trees growing out of copper soil,
waving as far as the eye could follow, to the floating line of ethereal
blue mountains.
“They’re sacred, too,” assented Pilar. “Did you know, in the old days they
used to be sold only for gold, gold carried on mule back in great bags,
and exchanged on the spot, for the trees—so many for so much? We have
olives at our place, and they’re gathered in such a nice old-fashioned
way; papa doesn’t care for new ways, even if they make a little more
money. It’s pretty to watch. I should like you to see it, only—Señor
Waring doesn’t like old-fashioned things.”
“I like making the ‘little more money,’ I’m afraid,” Dick confessed.
“Sometimes I like money too—when I want to buy anything. At other times I
don’t care. Lately I’ve been saving up. I’ve got one thousand nine hundred
pesetas.”
“Good gracious!” laughed Dick, “are you going to buy a bull-farm with such
a gigantic sum?”
“Funny you should have said that. I’m going to buy one bull. He’s the only
possession of the Duke of Carmona’s that I want, and I want him so much
that I’ve sacrificed oh,—I can’t remember how many Paris hats, and shoes,
and silk petticoats, and pretty dresses to get him, with _all_ my own
money! The worst of it is, he’ll _never_ know about the hats and things.”
Dick was looking interested now.
“What in the name of goodness will you do with him when you get him?” he
inquired.
“Save him,” said the girl.
“From what?”
“From the bull-ring. Oh, he’s a _toro bravo_, is Vivillo, a heart of gold.
Not the most famous _torero_ in Spain shall pierce it. I’ve loved him for
four years, since he was a baby at his mother’s side, and Rafael Calmenare
used to take me to visit him; loved him better even than Corcito, and all
this time I’ve been saving up to buy him before he’s of the age for a
_corrida_. Now I’ve enough, or nearly, and there aren’t many weeks to
waste, for soon he’ll be five; and already he has the strength and courage
of three bulls, my Vivillo! I long to see him again—long for the day when
I can put my arms round his great neck, and say, ‘Hermanito, you’re
mine!’ ”
“Your arms round his neck!” gasped Dick. “A fighting bull! You’re joking.
Say you mean an Irish bull, and put me out of misery.”
“He’s a true Spanish grandee of a bull, and my arms have been round his
neck often,” said Pilarcita.
“Then he can’t be very fierce.”
“He can be terrible. He has nearly killed two men—strangers who teased
him, so he meant no harm, poor darling! and they daren’t let any except
black horses come near him. No Muira bull is more savage than he if he’s
roused. You know, the Duke of Carmona’s bulls are as celebrated as the
Muiras themselves. But Vivillo has always loved me, and one or two
others—me best, though—and he’ll eat out of my hand, the great brown
velvet beast, like a kitten.”
“How long since he’s seen you?” asked Dick.
“Six weeks.”
“I wouldn’t trust his memory.”
“I trust it as I would my brother’s. You shall see me petting him.”
“Great Scott! you won’t let her risk her life with this wild beast, will
you, Colonel O’Donnel?” Dick cried out.
But the Cherub smiled his placid smile.
“Don Cipriano calls her Una, because she can tame wild beasts,” said he.
Dick’s face became almost too expressive. If he did not want Pilar’s eyes
to read his every emotion, I thought he would be wiser to put on his
motor-mask.