II

A few miles and a few minutes more and we were in the embrace of the

loveliest of them, which was at first the clutch on the octroi. But the

octroi at Seville is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who

looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded eighteen-sixties,

eased us--not very swiftly, but softly--through the local customs, and

then we drove neither so swiftly nor so softly to the hotel, where we

had decided we would have rooms on the _patio._ We had still to learn

that if there is a _patio_ in a Spanish hotel you cannot have rooms

in it, because they are either in repair or they are occupied. In

the present case they were occupied; but we could have rooms over the

street, which were the same as in the _patio,_ and which were perfectly

quiet, as we could perceive from the trolley-cars grinding and squealing

under their windows. The manager (if that was the quality of the patient

and amiable old official who received us) seemed surprised to see the

cars there, perhaps because they were so inaudible; but he said we could

have rooms in the annex, fronting on the adjoining plaza and siding on

an inoffensive avenue where there were absolutely no cars. The interior,

climbing to a lofty roof by a succession of galleries, was hushed by

four silent senoras, all in black, and seated in mute ceremony around a

table in chairs from which their little feet scarcely touched the marble

pavement. Their quiet confirmed the manager’s assurance of a pervading

tranquillity, and though the only bath in the annex was confessedly on

the ground floor, and we were to be two floors above, the affair was

very simple: the chambermaid would always show us where the bath was.

With misgiving, lost in a sense of our helplessness, we tried to think

that the avenue under us was then quieting down with the waning day; and

certainly it was not so noisy as the plaza, which, resounded with

the whips and quips of the cabmen, and gave no signs of quiescence.

Otherwise the annex was very pleasant, and we took the rooms shown us,

hoping the best and fearing the worst. Our fears were wiser than our

hopes, but we did not know this, and we went as gaily as we could for

tea in the _patio_ of our hotel, where a fountain typically trickled

amidst its water-plants and a noiseless Englishman at his separate table

almost restored our lost faith in a world not wholly racket. A young

Spaniard and two young Spanish girls helped out the illusion with their

gentle movements and their muted gutturals, and we looked forward to

dinner with fond expectation. To tell the truth, the dinner, when we

came back to it, was not very good, or at least not very winning, and

the next night it was no better, though the head waiter had then, made

us so much favor with himself as to promise us a side-table for the rest

of our stay. He was a very friendly head waiter, and the dining-room was

a long glare of the encaustic tiling which all Seville seems lined with,

and of every Moorish motive in the decoration. Besides, there was a

young Scotch girl, very interestingly pale and delicate of face, at one

of the tables, and at another a Spanish girl with the most wonderful

fire-red hair, and there were several miracles of the beautiful obesity

which abounds in Spain.

When we returned to the annex it did seem, for the short time we kept

our windows shut, that the manager had spoken true, and we promised

ourselves a tranquil night, which, after our two nights in Cordova, we

needed if we did not merit. But we had counted without the spread of

popular education in Spain. Under our windows, just across the way,

there proved to be a school of the “Royal Society of Friends of their

Country,” as the Spanish inscription in its front proclaimed; and

at dusk its pupils, children and young people of both sexes, began

clamoring for knowledge at its doors. About ten o’clock they burst from

them again with joyous exultation in their acquirements; then, shortly

after, every manner of vehicle began to pass, especially heavy market

wagons overladen and drawn by horses swarming with bells. Their

succession left scarcely a moment of the night unstunned; but if ever a

moment seemed to be escaping, there was a maniacal bell in a church near

by that clashed out: “Hello! Here’s a bit of silence; let’s knock it on

the head!”

We went promptly the next day to the gentle old manager and told him

that he had been deceived in thinking he had given us rooms on a quiet

street, and appealed to his invention for something, for anything,

different. His invention had probably never been put to such stress

before, and he showed us an excess of impossible apartments, which we

subjected to a consideration worthy of the greatest promise in them. Our

search ended in a suite of rooms on the top floor, where we could have

the range of a flat roof outside if we wanted; but as the private family

living next door kept hens, led by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we

were sorrowfully forced to forego our peculiar advantage. Peculiar we

then thought it, though we learned afterward that poultry-farming was

not uncommon on the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling

how we might have prospered if we had taken those rooms and stocked

our roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes. At the moment, however,

we thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the

manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience,

and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.

Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic

chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was

so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock

in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already. Her zeal

made the hot water she brought for the baths really hot, _“Caliente,

caliente,”_ and her voice would have quieted the street under our

windows if music could have soothed it. At a friendly word she grew

trustful, and told us how it was hard, hard for poor people in Seville;

how she had three dollars a month and her husband four; and how they had

to toil for it. When we could not help telling her, cruelly enough,

what they singly and jointly earn in New York, she praised rather than

coveted the happier chance impossible to them. They would like to go,

but they could not go! She was gay with it all, and after we had left

the hotel and come back for the shawl which had been forgotten, she ran

for it, shouting with laughter, as if we must see it the great joke she

did; and she took the reward offered with the self-respect never wanting

to the Spanish poor. Very likely if I ransacked my memory I might find

instances of their abusing those advantages over the stranger which

Providence puts in the reach of the native everywhere; but on the spur

of the moment, I do not recall any. In Spain, where a woman earns three

dollars a month, as in America where she earns thirty, the poor seem to

abound in the comparative virtues which the rich demand in return for

the chances of Heaven which they abandon to them. There were few of

those rendering us service there whom we would not willingly have

brought away with us; but very likely we should have found they had the

defects of their qualities.

When we definitely turned our backs on the potential poultry-farm

offered us at our hotel, we found ourselves in as good housing at

another, overlooking the length and breadth of the stately Plaza San

Fernando, with its parallelogram of tall palms, under a full moon

swimming in a cloudless heaven by night and by day. By day, of course,

we did not see it, but the sun was visibly there, rather blazing hot,

even in mid-October, and showing more distinctly than the moon the

beautiful tower of the Giralda from the waist up, and the shoulder of

the great cathedral, besides features of other noble, though less noble,

edifices. Our plaza was so full of romantic suggestion that I am rather

glad now I had no association with it. I am sure I could not have borne

at the time to know, as I have only now learned by recurring to my

Baedeker, that in the old Franciscan cloister once there had stood the

equestrian statue of the Comendador who dismounts and comes unbidden to

the supper of Don Giovanni in the opera. That was a statue which, seen

in my far youth, haunted my nightmares for many a year, and I am sure it

would have kept me from sleep in the conditions, now so perfect, of our

new housing if I had known, about it.