We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were
especially going to see the gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes
with that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable.
Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward visit
the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were possible I would
willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty
squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I will try eventually
to be just, and I must even now advise the reader to visit the tile
potteries there. If he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of
one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly
and vainly struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was
beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of manner;
his classically regular face was as swarthy as the darkest mulatto’s,
but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the sense of his fine decency
with me when we drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled
round the corner of the street into the gipsy quarter, and made it my
prophylactic against the human noisomeness which instantly beset our
course. Let no Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing
sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those persistent
savages have even the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to
the interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally and
physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, and treated
with insecticides and put away in mothballs. Our own settled order
of things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks and it smells,
especially in Spain, when you get down to its lower levels; but it does
not assail the senses with such rank offense as smites them in the gipsy
quarter with sights and sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well
as nose, were all stenches.
Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged
children running beside us and after us and screaming, “Minny, niooney,
_ money!”_ in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against the
door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and fat, sat on the
thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes; younger women ranged the
sidewalks and offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, and
some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a green waist, with
both white and red flowers in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the
road a troop of children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented
a hapless ass colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could
persuade our cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street
in reserve which made us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled
the river, and into the center of it every manner of offal had been cast
from the beginning of time to reek and fester and juicily ripen and rot
in unspeakable corruption. It was such a thoroughfare as Dante might
have imagined in his Hell, if people in his time had minded such
horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it was worse than
infernal, it was medieval, and that we were driving in such putrid
foulness as the gilded carriages of kings and queens and the prancing
steeds and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through
whenever they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I
scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent waterside,
and then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of the Guadalquivir,
painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp steamers.
After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its children never left
except to do a little fortune-telling and mule and donkey trading, eked
out with theft in the country round, any show of honest industry looked
wholesome and kind. I rejoiced almost as much in the machinery as in the
men who were loading the steamers; even the huge casks of olives, which
were working from the salt-water poured into them and frothing at the
bung in great white sponges of spume, might have been examples of toil
by which those noisome vagabonds could well have profited. But now we
had come to see another sort of leisure--the famous leisure of fortune
and fashion driving in the Delicias, but perhaps never quite fulfilling
the traveler’s fond ideal of it. We came many times to the Delicias
in hope of it, with decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last
without entire fruition. For our first visit we could not have had a
fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening from a streak of sunset
beyond Triana, and we arrived in appropriate circumstance, round the
immense circle of the bull-ring and past the palace which the Duc de
Montpensier has given the church for a theological seminary, with long
stretches of beautiful gardens. Then we were in the famous Paseo, a
drive with footways on each side, and on one side dusky groves widening
to the river. The paths were lit with gleaming statues, and among
the palms and the eucalyptuses were orange trees full of their golden
globes, which we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were of
that bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, not because they
are in accord with the acrid nature of man there, but that they may be
wrought into marmalade. On the other hand stretched less formal woods,
with fields for such polite athletics as tennis, which the example of
the beloved young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant
favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was
badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is
expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of dust and every
evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to
soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, and that evening
we had it mostly to ourselves, though there were two or three carriages
with ladies in hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted and
courageously walking, while their carriages followed. A magnate of some
sort was shut alone in a brougham, in the care of footman and coachman
with deeply silver-banded hats; there were a few military and civil
riders, and there was distinctly a young man in a dog-cart with a groom,
keeping abreast the landau of three ladies in mantillas, with whom he
was improving what seemed a chance acquaintance. Along the course the
public park gave way at times to the grounds of private villas; before
one of these a boy did what he could for us by playing ball with a
priest. At other points there were booths with chairs and tables, where
I am sure interesting parties of people would have been sitting if they
could have expected us to pass.