Sam informed me that the manner in which I hailed the fisherman had made
a great impression on the captain, who lauded me highly. It also made
one on me, because it was the first time I ever spoke to a European _in
Europe_!
Anon we were boarded by an old weather-beaten seadog of a Spanish pilot,
unto whom I felt a great attraction; and greeting him in Malagan Spanish,
such as I had learned from Manuel Gori, as _Hermano_! and offering him
with ceremonious politeness a good cigar, I also drew his regards; all
Spaniards, as I well knew, being extremely fond, beyond all men on earth,
of intimacy with gentlemen. We were delayed for two days at Gibraltar. I
may here remark, by the way, that this voyage of our ship is described in
a book by Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler, entitled "A Year of Consolation
Abroad." She was on board, but never spoke to a soul among the
passengers.
I was never acquainted with Mrs. Butler, as I easily might have been, for
we had some very intimate friends in common; but as a boy I had been
"frightened of her" by certain anecdotes as to her temper, and perhaps
the influence lasted into later years. I have, however, heard her
lecture. She was a very clever woman, and Mr. Henry James, in _Temple
Bar_ for March, 1893, thus does justice to her conversational power:
"Her talk reflected a thousand vanished and present things; but there
were those of her friends for whom its value was, almost before any
other, documentary. The generations move so fast and change so much,
that Mrs. Kemble testified even more than she affected to do, which
was much, to ancient manners and a close chapter of history. Her
conversation swarmed with people and with criticism of people, with
the ghosts of a dead society. She had, in two hemispheres, seen every
one and known every one, had assisted at the social comedy of her age.
Her own habits and traditions were in themselves a survival of an era
less democratic and more mannered. I have no room for enumerations,
which, moreover, would be invidious; but the old London of her
talk--the direction I liked is best to take--was, in particular, a
gallery of portraits. She made Count d'Orsay familiar, she made
Charles Greville present; I thought it wonderful that she could be
anecdotic about Miss Edgeworth. She reanimated the old drawing-rooms,
relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos. The finest comedy of
all, perhaps, was that of her own generous whimsicalities. She was
superbly willing to amuse, and on any terms; and her temper could do
it as well as her wit. If either of these had failed, her
eccentricities were always there. She had more 'habits' than most
people have room in life for, and a theory that to a person of her
disposition they were as necessary as the close meshes of a strait-
waistcoat. If she had not lived by rule (on her showing) she would
have lived infallibly by riot. Her rules and her riots, her
reservations and her concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her
extravagant practice; her drollery, that mocked at her melancholy; her
imagination, that mocked at her drollery; and her wonderful manners,
all her own, that mocked a little at everything: these were part of
the constant freshness which made those who loved her love her so
much. 'If my servants can live with me a week, they can live with me
for ever,' she often said; 'but the first week sometimes kills them.'
A domestic who had been long in her service quitted his foreign home
the instant he heard of her death, and, travelling for thirty hours,
arrived travel-stained and breathless, like a messenger in a romantic
tale, just in time to drop a handful of flowers into her grave."
There came on board of our boat a fruit-dealer, and the old pilot, seeing
that I was about to invest a _real_ in grapes, said, "Let me buy them for
you"; which he did, obtaining half-a-peck of exquisite large grapes of a
beautiful purple colour.
There was a middle-aged lady among the passengers, of whom the least I
can say was, that she had a great many little winning ways of making
herself disagreeable. She imposed frightfully on me while on board,
getting me to mark her trunks for her, and carry them into the hold, &c.
(the sailors disliked her so much that they refused to touch them), and
then cut me dead when on shore. This ancient horror, seeing me with so
many grapes, and learning the price, concluded that if a mere boy like me
could get so many, she, a lady, could for four reals lay in a stock which
would last for life, more or less. So she obtained a bushel-basket,
expecting to get it heaped full; but what was her wrath at only getting
for her silver half-dollar just enough to hide the bottom thereof! Great
was her rage, but rage availed her nought. She did not call old pilots
"Brother," or give them cigars, or talk Malagano politely. She was not
even "half-Spanish," and therefore, as we used to say at college of
certain unpopular people, was "a bad smoke."
We went on shore on Sunday, which in those days always made Gibraltar
literally like a fancy ball. The first person whom I met was a pretty
young lady in full, antique, rich Castilian costume, followed by a
servant bearing her book of devotion. Seeing my gaze of admiration, she
smiled, at which I bowed, and she returned the salute and went her way.
Such an event had never happened to me before in all my life. I accepted
it philosophically as one of a new order of things into which I was
destined to enter. Then I saw men from every part of Spain in quaint
dresses, Castilians in cloaks, Andalusians in the jaunty _majo_ rig,
Gallegos, Moors from the Barbary coast, many Greeks, old Jews in
gabardines, Scotch Highland soldiers, and endless more--_concursus
splendidus_--_non possum non mirari_.
I felt myself very happy and very much at home in all this. I strolled
about the streets talking Spanish to everybody. Then I met with a
smuggler, who asked me if I wanted to buy cigars. I did. In New York my
uncle George had given me a box of five hundred excellent Havanas, and
these had lasted me exactly twenty days. I had smoked the last twenty-
five on the last day. So I went and bought at a low enough figure a box
of the worst cigars I had ever met with. But youth can smoke
anything--except deceit.
Entrance to the galleries was strictly forbidden in those days, but an
incorruptible British sergeant, for an incorruptible dollar or two,
showed us over them. There was, too, a remarkable man, a ship-chandler
named Felipe, to whom I was introduced. Felipe spoke twenty-four
languages. He boarded every ship and knew everybody. Gibraltar was then
a vast head-quarters of social evils, or blessings, and Felipe, who was a
perfect Hercules, mentioned incidentally that he had had a new _maja_, or
_moza_, or _muger_, or _puta_, every night for twenty years! which was
confirmed by common report. It was a firm principle with him to always
_change_. This extraordinary fact made me reflect deeply on it as a
_psychological_ phenomenon. This far surpassed anything I had ever heard
at Princeton. Then this and that great English dignitary was pointed out
to me--black eyes ogled me--everybody was polite, for I had a touch of
the Spanish manner which I had observed in the ex-Capitan-General and
others whom I had known in Philadelphia; and, in short, I saw more that
was picturesque and congenial in that one day than I had ever beheld in
all my life before. I had got into "my plate."
From Gibraltar our ship sailed on to Marseilles. The coasts were full of
old ruins, which I sketched. We lay off Malaga for a day, but I could
not go ashore, much as I longed to. At Marseilles, Sam and the captain
and I went to a very good hotel.
Now it had happened that on the voyage before a certain French lady--the
captain said she was a Baroness--having fallen in love with the said
captain, had secreted herself on board the vessel, greatly to his horror,
and reappeared when out at sea. Therefore, as soon as we arrived at
Marseilles, the injured husband came raging on board and tried to shoot
the captain, which made a great _scandal_. And, moved by this example,
the coloured cook of our vessel, who had a wife, shot the head-waiter on
the same day, being also instigated by jealousy. Sam Godfrey chaffed the
captain for setting a bad moral example to the niggers--which was all
quite a change from Princeton. Life was beginning to be lively.
There had come over on the vessel with us, in the cabin, a droll
character, an actor in a Philadelphia theatre, who had promptly found a
lodging in a kind of maritime boarding-house. Getting into some
difficulty, as he could not speak French he came in a great hurry to beg
me to go with him to his _pension_ to act as interpreter, which I did. I
found at once that it was a Spanish house, and the resort of smugglers.
The landlady was a very pretty black-eyed woman, who played the guitar,
and sang Spanish songs, and brought out Spanish wine, and was
marvellously polite to me, to my astonishment, not unmingled with
innocent gratitude.
There I was at home. At Princeton I had learned to play the guitar, and
from Manuel Gori, who had during all his boyhood been familiar with low
life and smugglers, I had learned many songs and some slang. And so,
with a crowd of dark, fierce, astonished faces round me of men eagerly
listening, I sang a smuggler's song--
"Yo que soy contrabandista,
Y campo a me rispeto,
A todos mi desafio,
Quien me compra hilo negro?
Ay jaleo!
Muchachas jaleo!
Quien me compra hilo negro!"
Great was the amazement and thundering the applause from my auditors. Let
the reader imagine a nun of fourteen years asked to sing, and bursting
out with "Go it while you're young!" Then I sang the _Tragala_, which
coincided with the political views of my friends. But my grand _coup_
was in reserve. I had learned from Borrow's "Gypsies in Spain" a long
string of Gitano or Gypsy verses, such as--
"El eray guillabela,
El eray obusno;
Que avella romanella,
No avella obusno!"
"Loud sang the _gorgio_ to his fair,
And thus his ditty ran:--
'Oh, may the Gypsy maiden come,
And not the Gypsy man!'"