THE day passed. I had adventures of the road, but none of consequence.
I slept well among the rocks, waked, ate the bit of bread I had with me,
and fell again to walking.
Mountains were now withdrawing to the distant horizon where they stood
around, a mighty and beautiful wall. I was coming down into the plain of
Granada, that once had been a garden. Now, north, south, east, west,
it lay war-trampled. Old owners were dead, men and women, or were
_mudexares_, vassals, or were fled, men and women, all who could flee,
to their kindred in Africa. Or they yet cowered, men and women, in the
broken garden, awaiting individual disaster. The Kingdom of Granada had
sins, and the Kingdom of Castile, and the Kingdom of Leon. The Moor was
stained, and the Spaniard, the Moslem and the Christian and the Jew. Who
had stains the least or the most God knew--and it was a poor inquiry.
Seek the virtues and bind them with love, each in each!
If the mountain road had been largely solitary, it was not so of this
road. There were folk enough in the wide Vega of Granada. Clearly, as
though the one party had been dressed in black and the other in red,
they divided into vanquished and victor. Bit by bit, now through years,
all these towns and villages, all these fertile fields and bosky places,
rich and singing, had left the hand of the Moor for the hand of the
Spaniard.
In all this part of his old kingdom the Moor lay low in defeat. In had
swarmed the Christian and with the Christian the Jew, though now the Jew
must leave. The city of Granada was not yet surrendered, and the Queen
and King held all soldiery that they might at Santa Fe, built as it were
in a night before Granada walls. Yet there seemed at large bands enough,
licentious and loud, the scum of soldiery. Ere I reached the village
that I now saw before me I had met two such bands, I wondered, and then
wondered at my own wonder.
The chief house of the village was become an inn. Two long tables stood
in the patio where no fountain now flowed nor orange trees grew nor
birds sang in corners nor fine awning kept away the glare. Twenty of
these wild and base fighting men crowded one table, eating and drinking,
clamorous and spouting oaths. At the other table sat together at an end
three men whom by a number of tokens might be robbers of the mountains.
They sat quiet, indifferent to the noise, talking low among themselves
in a tongue of their own, kin enough to the soldiery not to fear them.
The opposite end of the long table was given to a group to which I now
joined myself. Here sat two Franciscan friars, and a man who seemed a
lawyer; and one who had the air of the sea and turned out to be master
of a Levantine; and a brisk, talkative, important person, a Catalan, and
as it presently appeared alcalde once of a so-so village; and a young,
unhealthy-looking man in black with an open book beside him; and a
strange fellow whose Spanish was imperfect.
I sat down near the friars, crossed myself, and cut a piece of
bread from the loaf before me. The innkeeper and his wife, a gaunt,
extraordinarily tall woman, served, running from table to table. The
place was all heat and noise. Presently the soldiers, ending their meal,
got up with clamor and surged from the court to their waiting horses.
After them ran the innkeeper, appealing for pay. Denials, expostulation,
anger and beseeching reached the ears of the patio, then the sound
of horses going down stony ways. “O God of the poor!” cried the gaunt
woman. “How are we robbed!”
“Why are they not before Granada?” demanded the lawyer and alertly
provided the answer to his own question. “Take locusts and give them
leave to eat, being careful to say, ‘This fellow’s fields only!’ But the
locusts have wings and their nature is to eat!”
The mountain robbers, if robbers they were, dined quietly, the gaunt
woman promptly and painstakingly serving them. They were going to pay, I
was sure, though it might not be this noon.
The two friars seemed, quiet, simple men, dining as dumbly as if
they sat in Saint Francis’s refectory. The sometime alcalde and the
shipmaster were the talkers, the student sitting as though he were in
the desert, eating bread and cheese and onions and looking on his book.
The lawyer watched all, talked to make them talk, then came in and
settled matters. The alcalde was the politician, knowing the affairs
of the world and speaking familiarly of the King and the Queen and the
Marquis of Cadiz.
The shipmaster said, “This time last year I was in London, and I saw
their King. His name is Henry. King Henry the Seventh, and a good
carrier of his kingship!”
“That for him!” said the alcalde. “Let him stay in his foggy island! But
Spain is too small for King Ferdinand.” “All kings find their lands too
small,” said the lawyer.
The shipmaster spoke again. “The King of Portugal’s ship sails ahead of
ours in that matter. He’s stuck his banner in the new islands, Maderia
and the Hawk Islands and where not! I was talking in Cadiz with one who
was with Bartholomew Diaz when he turned Africa and named it Good Hope.
Which is to say, King John has Good Hope of seeing Portugal swell.
Portugal! Well, I say, ‘Why not Spain’?”
The student looked up from his book. “It is a great Age!” he said and
returned to his reading.
When we had finished dinner, we paid the tall, gaunt woman and leaving
the robbers, if robbers they were, still at table, went out into
the street. Here the friars, the alcalde and the lawyer moved in the
direction of the small, staring white and ruined mosque that was to be
transformed into the church of San Jago the Deliverer. That was the one
thing of which the friars had spoken. A long bench ran by inn wall and
here the shipmaster took his seat and began to discourse with those
already there. Book under arm, the student moved dreamily down the
opposite lane. Juan Lepe walked away alone.
Through the remainder of this day he had now company and adventure
without, now solitude and adventure within. That night he spent in a
ruined tower where young trees grew and an owl was his comrade and he
read the face of a glorious moon. Dawn. He bathed in a stream that ran
by the mound of the tower and ate a piece of bread from his wallet and
took the road.
The sun mounted above the trees. A man upon a mule came up behind me and
was passing. “There is a stone wedged in his shoe,” I said. The rider
drew rein and I lifted the creature’s foreleg and took out the pebble.
The rider made search for a bit of money. I said that the deed was
short and easy and needed no payment, whereupon he put up the coin and
regarded me out of his fine blue eyes. He was quite fair, a young man
still, and dressed after a manner of his own in garments not at all new
but with a beauty of fashioning and putting on. He and his mule looked a
corner out of a great painting. And I had no sooner thought that than
he said, “I see in you, friend, a face and figure for my ‘Draught of
Fishes.’ And by Saint Christopher, there is water over yonder and just
the landscape!” He leaned from the saddle and spoke persuasively, “Come
from the road a bit down to the water and let me draw you! You are not
dressed like the kin of Midas! I will give you the price of dinner.”
As he talked he drew out of a richly worked bag a book of paper and
pencils. I thought, “This beard and the clothes of Juan Lepe. He can
hardly make it so that any may recognize.” It was resting time and the
man attracted. I agreed, if he would take no more than an hour.
“The drawing, no!--Bent far over, gathering the net strongly--Andrew or
Mark perhaps, since, traditionally, John must have youth.”
He had continued to study me all this time, and now we left the road and
moved over the plain to the stream that here widened into a pool fringed
with rushes and a few twisted trees. An ancient, half-sunken
boat drowsing under the bank he hailed again in the name of Saint
Christopher. Dismounting, he fastened his mule to a willow and proceeded
to place me, then himself found a root of a tree, and taking out his
knife fell to sharpening pencil. This done, he rested book against knee
and began to draw.
Having made his figure in one posture he rose and showed me another and
drew his fisherman so. Then he demonstrated a third way and drew again.
Now he was silent, working hard, and now he dropped his hand, threw
back his head and talked. He himself made a picture, paly gold of locks,
subtle and quick of face, plastered against a blue shield with a willow
wreath going around.
I stood so or so, drawing hard upon the net with the fishes. Then at
his command I approached more nearly, and he drew full face and
three-quarter and profile. It was between these accomplishings that he
talked more intimately.
“Seamen go to Italy,” he said. “Were you ever in Milan? But that is
inland.”
I answered that I had been from Genoa to Milan.
“It is not likely that you saw a great painter there Messer Leonardo?”
It happened that I had done this, and moreover had seen him at work and
heard him put right thought into most right words. I was so tired
of lying that after a moment I said that I had seen and heard Messer
Leonardo.
“Did you see the statue?”
“The first time I saw him he was at work upon it. The next time he
was painting in the church of Santa Maria. The third time he sat in a
garden, sipped wine and talked.”
“I hold you,” he said, “to be a fortunate fisherman! Just as this fisher
I am painting, and whether it is Andrew or Mark, I do not yet know, was
a most fortunate fisherman!” He ended meditatively, “Though whoever it
is, probably he was crucified or beheaded or burned.”
I felt a certain shiver of premonition. The day that had been warm and
bright turned in a flash ashy and chill. Then it swung back to its first
fair seeming, or not to its first, but to a deeper, brighter yet. The
Fisherman by Galilee was fortunate. Whoever perceived truth and beauty
was fortunate, fortunate now and forever!
We came back to Messer Leonardo. “I spent six months at the court in
Milan,” said the fair man. “I painted the Duke and the Duchess and two
great courtiers. Messer Leonardo was away. He returned, and I visited
him and found a master. Since that time I study light and shadow and
small things and seek out inner action.”
He worked in silence, then again began to speak of painters, Italian and
Spanish. He asked me if I had seen such and such pictures in Seville.
“Yes. They are good.”
“Do you know Monsalvat?”
I said that I had climbed there one day. “I dream a painting!” he said,
“The Quest of the Grail. Now I see it running over the four walls of a
church, and now I see it all packed into one man who rides. Then again
it has seemed to me truer to have it in a man and woman who walk, or
perhaps even are seated. What do you think?”
I was thinking of Isabel who died in my arms twenty years ago. “I would
have it man and woman,” I said. “Unless, like Messer Leonardo, you can
put both in one.”
He sat still, his mind working, while in a fair inner land Isabel and I
moved together; then in a meditative quiet he finished his drawing. He
himself was admirable, fine gold and bronze, sapphire-eyed, with a face
where streams of visions moved the muscles, and all against the blue and
the willow tree.
At last he put away pencil, and at his gesture I came from the boat and
the reeds. I looked at what he had drawn, and then he shut book and, the
mule following us, we moved back to the road.
“My dear fisherman,” he said, “you are trudging afoot and your dress
exhibits poverty. Painters may paint Jove descending in showers of
golden pesos and yet have few pesos in purse. I have at present ten. I
should like to share them with you who have done me various good turns
to-day.”
I said that he was generous but that he had done me good turns. Moreover
I was not utterly without coin, and certainly the hour had paid for
itself. So he mounted his mule and wished me good fortune, and I wished
him good fortune.
“Are you going to Santa Fe?”
“Yes. I have a friend in the camp.”
“I go there to paint her Highness the Queen for his Highness the King.
Perhaps we shall meet again. I am Manuel Rodriguez.”
“I guessed that,” I answered, “an hour ago! Be so good, great painter,
as not to remember me. It will serve me better.”
The light played again over his face. “_The Disguised Hidalgo_.
Excellent pictures come to me like that, in a great warm light, and
excellent names for pictures.--Very good. In a way, so to speak, I shall
completely forget you!”
Two on horseback, a churchman and a knight, with servants following,
came around a bend of the dusty road and recognizing Manuel Rodriguez,
called to him by name. Away he rode upon his mule, keeping company with
them. The dozen in their train followed, raising as they went by such a
dust cloud that presently all became like figures upon worn arras. They
rode toward Santa Fe, and I followed on foot.