"We were nearing Seville. I felt the eager throbbing of my
heart. Seville had ever been for me the symbol of light, the
city of love and joy."--VALDES: _La Hermana San Sulpicio_.
One of the wise sayings of Andalusia runs, "Do not squeeze the orange
till the juice is bitter." And so we said good-by to Granada before we
were ready to go, and persuaded ourselves, in defiance of maps and
time-tables, that our shortest route to Seville led by Ronda. The
weather did its very best to dampen our enthusiasm for this wildest of
crag aeries, equally famed for romantic beauty of outlook and
salubrity of air. Men live long in Ronda, unless, indeed, they hit
against a bullet while practising their hereditary trade of
_contrabandista_. They have a saying that octogenarians there are only
chickens, but one should not believe all that they say in Ronda. Did
we not clamber, slipping on wet stones, down a precipitous path to
peer, from under dripping umbrellas, at what our guide declared was an
old Roman bridge? "It doesn't look old and it doesn't look Roman," was
the artist's dubious comment, but our highly recommended conductor, a
Gib, as the English-Spanish natives of Gibraltar Rock are called,
assured us that it was built in the days of Julius Caesar, but had been
wonderfully well preserved. We eyed him thoughtfully, bearing in mind
that he had already pointed out the statue of a long-dead poet as a
living politician; but we meekly continued through the lashing rain to
follow his long footsteps over the breakneck ways of that natural
fortress where race after race has left its autograph. The Roman
columns of the church make the Arab cupolas look young, and put the
Gothic choir altogether out of countenance. A bright-shawled peasant
woman, who we fondly hoped might be a smuggler's wife, drew us
delicious water from a Roman well in a Moorish patio, where a mediaeval
king of gentle memory used to drink his wine from cups wrought of the
skulls of those enemies whom he had beheaded with his own sword. But
not all this, and more, could efface our doubts of that Roman bridge,
which, indeed, we found, on a belated perusal of our guide-books, had
been erected by a Malaga architect in the last century.
The street rabble of Ronda was the rudest and fiercest we encountered
anywhere in Spain. Several times our guide wheeled suddenly to
confront some gypsyish lad, creeping up behind us with stone all ready
to throw, and when, at a glint of sunset through the stormy clouds, we
tried to slip out unattended to the neighboring _alameda_, with its
far-sweeping prospect of folded mountain ranges and its vertical view
of gorge and rushing river, the children actually hounded us back to
the hotel. Their leader was a scrofulous boy, with one cheek eaten
away, who had been taught to press his face so closely upon strangers
that, in fear of his open sore, they would hastily give money to keep
him back. He was a merry scamp and got a world of sport out of his
sickening business, laughing at the top of his voice to see himself
"avoided like the sun."
Although the tempest had lulled by evening, Ronda, still inhospitable,
would not let us sleep. All up and down the window-grated street
sounded, from midnight to morning, a tinkling of guitars. It was,
forsooth, St. Joseph's Day, and every Don Jose, every Dona Josefa,
every little Pepe, every pretty Pepita, must be saluted by a serenade.
All Andalusians are musical, taking much pleasure, moreover, in one of
their own bits of philosophy, "The poorest player has his uses, for he
can at least drive the rats out of the house." Rats or no, we left
Ronda by the morning train.
Our carriage was crowded with several Spaniards and a "Jew-Gib," who,
without saying "_oxte ni moxte_," assumed full charge of us and our
belongings for the journey. This unceremonious but really helpful
escort put every one of his fellow-travellers through a sharp
catechism as to birthplace, business, destination, and the like. Our
turn came first of all. "You are English?" "We speak English." "Ha!"
He fell into our own vernacular. "Came about three thousand miles to
Spain?" "Across the channel." He chuckled with prompt appreciation of
the situation and mendaciously translated to the carriage at large,
"The ladies are distinguished Londoners, on their way to visit
relatives in Seville," whereat the Andalusians smiled sleepily upon us
and asked permission to smoke. We consented cheerfully, as our Spanish
sisters had taught us that we should. "I like it," one pallid senora
had said on an earlier trip. "It makes me sick, yes, but men ought to
be men."
We were journeying toward the very palace of the sun, with gray ranks
of olive trees standing guard on either hand. "And posted among them,
like white doves, could be seen now and again a few mills where the
bitter olive is wont to pour its juice." Orange plantations and hedges
of the bluish aloe, fig trees, palms, and all manner of strange,
tropical flowers gladdened our approach to Seville. And when, at last,
we saw from afar the world-praised Giralda, the Moorish bell-tower of
the cathedral, soaring pink into a purple sky, we felt as if we were
really arrived in fairyland.
Our friendly Gib put his tall figure between us and the howling press
of swarthy porters and cab-drivers, scolded, expostulated, threatened,
picked out his men, beat down their prices, called up a policeman to
witness the bargain and take the number of our cab, raised his hat,
and vanished into grateful memory.
Six weeks in Seville! And six weeks in a Seville home, where evening
after evening the gay youth of Andalusia laughed and sang, danced and
rattled the castanets, and cast about our wondering Western souls
strange witcheries from which we shall never more go free. It was all
as Oriental as a dream. The Sultana of the South lifted her gleaming
coronet of domes and pinnacles above such a kingdom of idle, delicious
mirth as has permanently unfitted us for considering it important to
do our duty. Our hereditary bits of Plymouth Rock were melted up in
that fervent heat. Right or wrong? "Where there is music, there can be
no harm." True or false?
"In this world, my masters,
There's neither truth nor lie,
But all things take the color
Of the glass before the eye."
Only six weeks, and yet we shall ever go homesick for Seville, for her
palm trees and orange gardens, her narrow streets like lanes of
shadow, her tiled and statued patios, with caged birds singing answer
to the ripple of the fountain, the musical midnight cry of her
_serenos_, "her black and burning eyes like beacons in the dark," her
sighing serenaders, "lyrical mosquitoes," outside the grated window or
beneath the balcony, her fragrances of rose and jessamine, her poetic
sense of values. A homeless Andalusian, dinnerless and in rags, strums
on his guitar, a necessity which he would not dream of selling for
such a mere luxury as bread, and is happy. There is always sun to
sleep in. There are always piquant faces and gliding forms to gaze
after. What more does a mortal want? Exquisite Seville! No wonder that
her exiled sons still sing, after years of "comfortable living" in
foreign cities:--
"When I am missing, hunt me down
In Andalusia's purple light,
Where all the beauties are so brown,
And all the wits so bright."
Yet the old Arabian enchantment casts a glamour which the Anglo-Saxon
vision dimly recognizes as such and faintly strives against. To the
clear survey all is not charm. Grace, mirth, and music, on the one
hand, are offset by ignorance, suffering, and vice on the other. Many
evil things were told us, and some ugly things we saw, but to look on
Andalusia is to love her, even while realizing that to live with her
would put that love to a very stringent test.
The lordly Guadalquivir, for instance, so fair to see from the
picture-making summit of the Giralda, as he lingers through his
blooming Paradise, forgetful of the ocean, is not altogether goodly.
"Ay, ay, the black and stinging flies he breeds
To plague the decent body of mankind!"
The Andalusian leisure was a perpetual delight to us. A typical
Seville shop reaches far along the street front, with many open doors,
and a counter running the full length. Here ladies sit in pairs and
groups, never singly, to cheapen fans and mantillas, while the smiling
salesmen, cigarette in hand, shrug and gesticulate and give back
banter for banter as gayly as if it were all a holiday frolic. Scraps
of the graceful bargaining would float to our ears.
"Is the quality good?"
"As good as God's blessing."
Among the tempting wares of Seville are Albacete knives, with gorgeous
handles of inlaid ebony, tortoise, or ivory. The peasant women of
Andalusia so resent the charge of carrying these knives in their
garters that the Seville gamin dodges offence by asking them in an
unnecessarily loud voice if they carry garters in their knives. The
irascible dames do not stand upon fine points of rhetoric, however,
and when the small boy has delivered his shot, he does well to take to
his heels. We once saw one of these sturdy women, while a line of
soldiers, bristling with steel, was holding a street, seize a gallant
son of Mars by the shoulder and swing him, amid the laughter of his
comrades, out of her path as if he were a cabbage. Nobody knew how to
stop her, and she trudged serenely on, her broad back to those
helpless bayonets, down the forbidden way.
The beggars of Seville are gentler than those of Ronda and Granada,
but hardly less numerous. Mendicant figures are thick as Guadalquivir
mosquitoes in my memory of Andalusia. Some of those pitiful children
will haunt me till I die. There was a forlorn urchin, with filmy,
frightful eyes, to be seen in all weathers crouching on one side of
the road leading up to the Alhambra, so dull and dreary a little
fellow that he hardly grasped the coppers when they were thrust into
his weakly groping hands, and hardly stayed his monotonous formula of
entreaty for his other monotonous formula of thanks. There was an
idiot child in Seville--a mere lump of deformity--that would rush out
upon the startled stranger with an inarticulate, fierce little yell,
clutching at charity with a tiny, twisted claw. He seemed the very
incarnation of childish woe and wrong. Almost every hand dived into
pocket for him, and he was probably worth far more to his proprietors
than his rival on the street, a crafty little girl, with the most
lustrous eyes that painter ever dreamed. They were not blue nor gray,
but a living light in which both those colors had been melted.
The economists, who say so firmly that "nothing should ever be given
to mendicant children," can hardly have had the experience of seeing
Murillo's own cherubs, their wings hidden under the dirt, fluttering
about the car windows at Andalusian stations. I have it still on my
conscience that I occasionally gave away my comrade's share of our
luncheon as well as my own. She was too young and too polite to
reproach me, but too hungry to be comforted by the assurance that I
reproached myself. Sometimes a foreign traveller, very sure of his
Spanish, would attempt remonstrance with these small nuisances. I
remember one kindly Teuton in particular. Commerce had claimed him for
its own, but the predestined German professor shone out of his mild
blue eyes. A ragamuffin had mounted the car steps to beg at the
window, and Mein Herr delivered him such a lecture that the youngster
clung to his perch, fascinated with astonishment at the novel
doctrine, until the train was in alarmingly swift motion.
[Illustration: THE ALHAMBRA. HALL OF JUSTICE]
"This is a very bad habit of thine. I told thee so a month ago."
"Me, sir?"
"Thee, boy. When I passed over this road last, thou wert begging at
the windows, to my shame if not to thine. Tut, tut! Go thy ways. Look
for work, work, work."
"Work, sir?"
"Work, boy. And when thou hast found it, love it, and do it with a
will. Learn to read and write. Wash thy face and change thy customs,
and when thou art richer than I, then will I give thee a _peseta_."
Mendicancy is bred of ignorance, and in the seventeen and a half
millions that make up the population of Spain, more than twelve
millions do not read nor write.
Seville sight-seeing is no brief matter. You must climb the Giralda,
walk in the parks, view the yellowed fragments of the ancient city
wall, visit the tobacco factory, shop in _Las Sierpes_, buy pottery in
Triana, see the gypsy dances in the cafes, attend the Thursday
rag-fair, do reverence to the Columbus manuscripts in the _Biblioteca
Columbina_, look up the haunts of Don Juan, Figaro, Pedro the Cruel,
and explore the curious "House of Pilate," which, tradition says, was
built by a pilgrim noble after the Jerusalem pattern. You must lose
your heart to the Alcazar, the Alhambra of Seville, a storied palace
embowered in fountain-freshened gardens of palm and magnolia, oranges
and cypresses, rose and myrtle, with shadowy arcades leading to marble
baths and arabesqued pavilions. You must follow Murillo from gallery
to gallery, from church to church, above all, from the _Hospital de la
Caridad_, where hang six of his greatest compositions, to the _Museo
Provincial_, where over a score of the Master's sacred works, lovely
Virgins, longing saints, deep-eyed Christ-Childs, rain their sweet
influence. And first, last, and always, there is the cathedral. We had
been stunned at Burgos, blind to all save the Moorish features of
Cordova, almost untouched by the cold splendors of Granada, but to
Seville, as later to Toledo, we surrendered utterly. Beauty, mystery,
sublimity--these are Seville cathedral. Five centuries have gone to
the rearing and enriching of those solemn aisles and awful choir. The
colossal structure, second in size only to St. Peter's, is a majesty
before which Luther himself might well have trembled. Within a Spanish
cathedral one begins to understand the mighty hold of Roman
Catholicism on Spain. "I love," says Alarcon, whose jest and earnest
are as closely twined as fibres of the same heart, "the clouds of
incense which rise to the cupola of the Catholic temple, amid the
harmonies of the holy organ. (For this I am not a Protestant.)" And
elsewhere, writing of his childhood, he speaks of receiving in the
cathedral of Guadix all his first impressions of artistic
beauty,--beauty of architecture, music, painting, processional
splendors, tissue of gold and silver, cunning embroideries and
jewel-work, his first sense, in short, of poetry. And all these
impressions were inextricably blent with his first yearnings of holy
aspiration, his first passion of mystical devotion. But not even
Seville cathedral could win over our full sympathy. Too heavy were the
faces of the priests who "sang the gori gori," too selfish that wigged
and jointed doll, "Our Lady of Kings," with her sixty gorgeous
mantles, a few of which would have clothed all the poor of Andalusia.
Who shall draw the line between faith and superstition?
But let not the tourist suppose he can escape his tyrant Baedeker even
at the top of the Giralda. There are excursions that must be taken to
points of interest outside the city. Most imperative of all is the
trip to the ruined Roman amphitheatre of Italica, guarded by the
mighty names of Scipio Africanus, Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius. Off
we start, a dozen strong, in a great, open carriage, all the
women-folk with fans and veils and with flowers in the hair. We rattle
past the cathedral, over the bridge to Triana and out into the
sweet-breathed country, passing many a picturesque group on the
road,--these two peasants, for example, with their yellow-handled
knives thrust into scarlet girdles, tossing dice under a fig tree. Our
meditations among the crumbling blocks of that savage play-house would
perhaps interest the reader less than our luncheon. Such Andalusian
dainties as we swallowed,--cold soups like melted salads, home-made
fig marmalade, cinnamon pastes of which the gypsies know the secret,
and sugared chestnuts overflowed by a marvellous syrup wherein could
be detected flavors of lemon peel, orange peel, and a medley of
spices! In that scene of ancient bloodshed, of the lion's wrath and
the martyr's anguish, we ate, drank, and were merry, but our banquet
tasted of ghosts.