Cordova seemed to cheer up as much as we at our going. We had
undoubtedly had the better night’s sleep; as often as we woke we found
Cordova awake, walking and talking, and coughing more than the night
before, probably from fresh colds taken in the rain. From time to time
there were church-bells, variously like tin pans and iron pots in
tone, without sonorousness in their noise, or such wild clangor as some
Italian church-bells have. But Cordova had lived through it, and at the
station was lively with the arriving and departing trains. The morning
was not only bright; it was hot, and the place babbled with many voices.
We thought one voice crying “Agua, agua!” was a parrot’s and then we
thought it was a girl’s, but really it was a boy with water for sale in
a stone bottle. He had not a rose, white or red, in his hair, but if he
had been a girl, old or young, he would have had one, white or red. Some
of the elder women wore mantillas, but these wore flowers too, and were
less pleasing than pathetic for it; one very massive matron was less
pleasing and more pathetic than the rest. Peasant women carried bunches
of chickens by the legs, and one had a turkey in a rush bag with a
narrow neck to put its head out of for its greater convenience in
gobbling. At the door of the station a donkey tried to bite a fly on
its back; but even a Spanish donkey cannot do everything. There was no
attempt to cheat us in the weight of our trunks, as there often is in
Italy, and the _mozo_ who put us and our hand-bags into the train was
content with his reasonable fee. As for the pair of Civil Guards who
were to go with us, they were of an insurpassable beauty and propriety,
and we felt it a peculiar honor when one of them got into the
compartment beside ours.
We were to take the mail-train to Seville; and in Spain the _correo_
is next to the Sud-Express, which is the last word in the vocabulary of
Peninsular railroading. Our _correo_ had been up all night on the
way from Madrid, and our compartment had apparently been used as a
bedchamber, with moments of supper-room. It seemed to have been occupied
by a whole family; there were frowsy pillows crushed into the corners of
the seats, and, though a porter caught these away, the cigar stubs,
and the cigarette ashes strewing the rug and fixed in it with various
liquids, as well as some scattering hair-pins, escaped his care. But
when it was dried and aired out by windows opened to the sunny weather,
it was by no means a bad compartment. The broad cushions were certainly
cleaner than the carpet; and it was something--it was a great deal--to
be getting out of Cordova on any terms. Not that Cordova seems at this
distance so bad as it seemed on the ground. If we could have had the
bright Monday of our departure instead of the rainy Sunday of our stay
there we might have wished to stay longer. But as it was the four hours’
run to Seville was delightful, largely because it Was the run from
Cordova.
We were running at once over a gentle ground-swell which rose and sank
in larger billows now and then, and the yellow Guadalquivir followed us
all the way, in a valley that sometimes widened to the blue mountains
always walling the horizon. We had first entered Andalusia after dark,
and the scene had now a novelty little staled by the distant view of
the afternoon before. The olive orchards then seen afar were intimately
realized more and more in their amazing extent. None of the trees looked
so old, so world-old, as certain trees in the careless olive groves of
Italy. They were regularly planted, and most were in a vigorous middle
life; where they were old they were closely pollarded; and there were
young trees, apparently newly set out; there were holes indefinitely
waiting for others. These were often, throughout Andalusia, covered to
their first fork with cones of earth; and we remained in the dramatic
superstition that this was to protect them against the omnivorous hunger
of the goats, till we were told that it was to save their roots from
being loosened by the wind. The orchards filled the level foregrounds
and the hilly backgrounds to the vanishing-points of the mountainous
perspectives; but when I say this I mean the reader to allow for wide
expanses of pasturage, where lordly bulls were hoarding themselves
for the feasts throughout Spain which the bulls of Andalusia are happy
beyond others in supplying. With their devoted families they paraded
the meadows, black against the green, or stood in sharp arrest, the
most characteristic accent of the scene. In the farther rather than
the nearer distance there were towns, very white, very African, keeping
jealously away from the stations, as the custom of most towns is in
Spain, beyond the wheat-lands which disputed the landscape with the
olive orchards.
One of these towns lay white at the base of a hill topped by a yellow
Moorish castle against the blue sky, like a subject waiting for its
painter and conscious of its wonderful adaptation to water-color. The
railroad-banks were hedged with Spanish bayonet, and in places with
cactus grown into trees, all knees and elbows, and of a diabolical
uncouthness. The air was fresh and springlike, and under the bright
sun, which we had already felt hot, men were plowing the gray fields
for wheat. Other men were beginning their noonday lunch, which, with the
long nap to follow, would last till three o’clock, and perhaps be rashly
accounted to them for sloth by the industrious tourist who did not know
that their work had begun at dawn and would not end till dusk. Indolence
may be a vice of the towns in Spain, but there is no loafing in the
country, if I may believe the conclusions of my note-book. The fields
often looked barren enough, and large spaces of their surface were
covered by a sort of ground palm, as it seemed to be, though whether it
was really a ground palm or not I know no more than I know the name or
nature of the wild flower which looked an autumn crocus, and which with
other wild flowers fringed the whole course of the train. There was
especially a small yellow flower, star-shaped, which we afterward
learned was called Todos Santos, from its custom of blooming at All
Saints, and which washed the sward in the childlike enthusiasm of
buttercups. A fine white narcissus abounded, and clumps of a mauve
flower which swung its tiny bells over the sward washed by the Todos
Santos. There were other flowers, which did what they could to brighten
our way, all clinging to the notion of summer, which the weather
continued to flatter throughout our fortnight in Seville.
I could not honestly say that the stations or the people about them
were more interesting than in La Mancha. But at one place, where some
gentlemen in linen jackets dismounted with their guns, a group of men
with dogs leashed in pairs and saddle-horses behind them, took me with
the sense of something peculiarly native where everything was so
native. They were slim, narrow-hipped young fellows, tight-jerkined,
loose-trousered, with a sort of divided apron of leather facing the
leg and coming to the ankle; and all were of a most masterly Velasquez
coloring and drawing. As they stood smoking motionlessly, letting the
smoke drift from their nostrils, they seemed somehow of the same make
with the slouching hounds, and they leaned forward together, giving the
hunters no visible or audible greeting, but questioning their will with
one quality of gaze. The hunters moved toward them, but not as if they
belonged together, or expected any sort of demonstration from the men,
dogs, and horses that were of course there to meet them. As long as our
train paused, no electrifying spark kindled them to a show of emotion;
but it would have been interesting to see what happened after we
left them behind; they could not have kept their attitude of mutual
indifference much longer. These peasants, like the Spaniards everywhere,
were of an intelligent and sagacious look; they only wanted a chance,
one must think, to be a leading race. They have sometimes an anxiety of
appeal in their apathy, as if they would like to know more than they do.
There was some livelier thronging at the station where the train stopped
for luncheon, but secure with the pretty rush-basket which the head
waiter at our hotel, so much better than the hotel, had furnished us at
starting, we kept to our car; and there presently we were joined by a
young couple who were unmistakably a new married couple. The man was of
a rich brown, and the woman of a dead white with dead black hair. They
both might have been better-looking than they were, but apparently not
better otherwise, for at Seville the groom helped us out of the car with
our hand-bags.
I do not know what polite offers from him had already brought out the
thanks in which our speech bewrayed us; but at our outlandish accents
they at once became easier. They became frankly at home with themselves,
and talked in their Andalusian patter with no fear of being understood.
I might, indeed, have been far apter in Spanish without understanding
their talk, for when printed the Andalusian dialect varies as far from
the Castilian as, say, the Venetian varies from the Tuscan, and when
spoken, more. It may then be reduced almost wholly to vowel sounds, and
from the lips of some speakers it is really no more consonantal than if
it came from the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft _c_ or the
_z,_ as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the _s_ instead, as
the reader will find amusingly noted in the Sevillian chapters of _The
Sister of San Sulpice,_ which are the most charming chapters of that
most charming novel. At the stations there were sometimes girls and
sometimes boys with water for sale from stone bottles, who walked by
the cars crying it; and there were bits of bright garden, or there were
flowers in pots. There were also poor little human flowers, or call
them weeds, if you will, that suddenly sprang up beside our windows, and
moved their petals in pitiful prayer for alms. They always sprang up on
the off side of the train, so that the trainmen could not see them, but
I hope no trainman in Spain would have had the heart to molest them.
As a matter of taste in vegetation, however, we preferred an occasional
effect of mixed orange and pomegranate trees, with their perennial green
and their autumnal red. We were, in fact, so spoiled by the profusion of
these little human flowers, or weeds, that we even liked the change to
the dried stalk of an old man, flowering at top into a flat basket of
pale-pink shrimps. He gave us our first sight of sea-fruit, when we had
got, without knowing it, to Seville Junction. There was, oddly enough,
no other fruit for sale there; but there was a very agreeable-looking
booth at the end of the platform placarded with signs of Puerto
Rico coffee, cognac, and other drinks; and outside of it there were
wash-basins and clean towels. I do not know how an old woman with a
blind daughter made herself effective in the crowd, which did not seem
much preoccupied with the opportunities of ablution and refection at
that booth; but perhaps she begged with her blind daughter’s help while
the crowd was busy in assorting itself for Cadiz and Seville and
Malaga and Cordova and other musically syllabled mothers of history and
romance.