IV

We had refused with loathing the offer of those gipsy jades to dance for

us in their noisome purlieu at Triana, but we were not proof against

the chance of seeing some gipsy dancing in a cafe-theater one night in

Seville. The decent place was filled with the “plain people,” who sat

with their hats on at rude tables smoking and drinking coffee from tall

glasses. They were apparently nearly all working-men who had left nearly

all their wives to keep on working at home, though a few of these

also had come. On a small stage four gipsy girls, in unfashionably and

untheatrically decent gowns of white, blue, or red, with flowers in

their hair, sat in a semicircle with one subtle, silent, darkling man

among them. One after another they got up and did the same twisting and

posturing, without dancing, and while one posed and contorted the rest

unenviously joined the spectators in their clapping and their hoarse

cries of “Ole!” It was all perfectly proper except for one high moment

of indecency thrown in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house

its money’s worth. But the real, overflowing compensation came when that

little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet and stormed the

audience with a dance of hands and arms, feet and legs, head, neck,

and the whole body, which Mordkin in his finest frenzy could not have

equaled or approached. Whatever was fiercest and wildest in nature

and boldest in art was there, and now the house went mad with its

hand-clappings and table-hammerings and deep-throated “Oles!”

Another night we went to the academy of the world-renowned Otero and

saw the instruction of Sevillian youth in native dances of the _haute

ecole._ The academy used to be free to a select public, but now the

chosen, who are nearly always people from the hotels, must pay ten

pesetas each for their pleasure, and it is not too much for a pleasure

so innocent and charming. The academy is on the ground floor of the

_maestro’s_ unpretentious house, and in a waiting-room beyond the

shoemaker’s shop which filled the vestibule sat, patient in their black

mantillas, the mothers and nurses of the pupils. These were mostly quite

small children in their every-day clothes, but there were two or three

older girls in the conventional dancing costume which a lady from one of

the hotels had emulated. Everything was very simple and friendly; Otero

found good seats among the _aficionados_ for the guests presented to

him, and then began calling his pupils to the floor of the long, narrow

room with quick commands of “_Venga_!” A piano was tucked away in a

corner, but the dancers kept time now with castanets and now by snapping

their fingers. Two of the oldest girls, who were apparently graduates,

were “differently beautiful” in their darkness and fairness, but

alike picturesquely Spanish in their vivid dresses and the black veils

fluttering from their high combs. A youth in green velvet jacket and

orange trousers, whose wonderful dancing did him credit as Otero’s prize

pupil, took part with them; he had the square-jawed, high-cheek-boned

face of the lower-class Spaniard, and they the oval of all Spanish

women. Here there was no mere posturing and contortioning among the

girls as with the gipsies; they sprang like flames and stamped the floor

with joyous detonations of their slippers. It was their convention to

catch the hat from the head of some young spectator and wear it in a

figure and then toss it back to him. One of them enacted the part of a

_torero_ at a bull-fight, stamping round first in a green satin cloak

which she then waved before a man’s felt hat thrown on the ground to

represent the bull hemmed about with _banderillas_ stuck quivering into

the floor. But the prettiest thing was the dancing of two little girl

pupils, one fair and thin and of an angelic gracefulness, and the other

plump and dark, who was as dramatic as the blond was lyrical. They

accompanied themselves with castanets, and, though the little fatling

toed in and wore a common dress of blue-striped gingham, I am afraid she

won our hearts from her graceful rival. Both were very serious and

gave their whole souls to the dance, but they were not more childishly

earnest than an older girl in black who danced with one of the gaudy

graduates, panting in her anxious zeal and stopping at last with her

image of the Virgin she resembled flung wildly down her back from the

place where it had hung over her heart.

V

We preferred walking home from Senor Otero’s house through the bright,

quiescing street, because in driving there we had met with an adventure

which we did not care to repeat. We were driving most unaggressively

across a small plaza, with a driver and a friend on the box beside him

to help keep us from harm, when a trolley-car came wildly round a corner

at the speed of at least two miles an hour and crossed our track. Our

own speed was such that we could not help striking the trolley in a

collision which was the fault of no one apparently. The front of the

car was severely banged, one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and

our conversation was interrupted. Immediately a crowd assembled from the

earth or the air, but after a single exchange of reproaches between

the two drivers nothing was said by any one. No policeman arrived to

_constater_ the facts, and after the crowd had silently satisfied or

dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it silently dispersed. The car

ambled grumbling off and we drove on with some vague murmurs from our

driver, whose nerves seemed shaken, but who was supported in a somewhat

lurching and devious progress by the caressing arm of the friend on the

seat beside him.

All this was in Seville, where the popular emotions are painted in

travel and romance as volcanic as at Naples, where no one would have

slept the night of our accident and the spectators would be debating it

still. In our own surprise and alarm we partook of the taciturnity of

the witnesses, which I think was rather fine and was much decenter than

any sort of utterance. On our way home we had occasion to practise a

like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed as he stood courting

through the casement of a ground floor. The soft air was full of the

sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open _patios._ Many people

besides ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark

figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than the

invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at some

period of their lives people must make love I do not believe there is a

more inoffensive way of doing it.

By the sort of echo notable in life’s experience we had a reverberation

of the orange-flower perfume of that night in the orange-flower honey at

breakfast next morning. We lived to learn that our own bees gather

the same honey from the orange flowers of Florida; but at the time we

believed that only the bees of Seville did it, and I still doubt whether

anywhere in America the morning wakes to anything like the long, rich,

sad calls of the Sevillian street hucksters. It is true that you do not

get this plaintive music without the accompanying note of the hucksters’

donkeys, which, if they were better advised, would not close with the

sort of inefficient sifflication which they now use in spoiling an

otherwise most noble, most leonine roar. But when were donkeys of any

sort ever well advised in all respects? Those of Seville, where donkeys

abound, were otherwise of the superior intelligence which throughout

Spain leaves the horse and even the mule far behind, and constitutes the

donkeys, far beyond the idle and useless dogs, the friends of man. They

indefinitely outnumber the dogs, and the cats are of course nowhere

in the count. Yet I would not misprize the cats of Seville, which

apparently have their money price. We stopped to admire a beautiful

white one, on our way to see the market one day, praising it as

intelligibly as we could, and the owner caught it up, when we had passed

and ran after us, and offered to sell it to us.

That might have been because it was near the market where we experienced

almost the only mercantile zeal we had known in Spain. Women with ropes

and garlands of onions round their necks invited us to buy, and we had

hopeful advances from the stalls of salads and fruits, where there was

a brave and beautiful show of lettuces and endives, grapes, medlars, and

heaps of melons, but no oranges; I do not know why, though there were

shining masses of red peppers and green, peppers, and vast earthen bowls

with yellow peas soaking in them. The flowers were every gay autumnal

sort, especially dahlias, sometimes made into stiff bouquets, perhaps

for church offerings. There were mounds of chestnuts, four or five feet

high and wide; and these flowers and fruits filled the interior of the

market, while the stalls for the flesh and fish were on the outside.

There seemed more sellers than buyers; here and there were ladies

buying, but it is said that the mistresses commonly send their maids for

the daily provision.

Ordinarily I should say you could not go amiss for your profit and

pleasure in Seville, but there are certain imperative objects of

interest like the Casa de Pilatos which you really have to do. Strangely

enough, it is very well worth doing, for, though it is even more

factitiously Moorish than the Alcazar, it is of almost as great beauty

and of greater dignity. Gardens, galleries, staircases, statues,

paintings, all are interesting, with a mingled air of care and neglect

which is peculiarly charming, though perhaps the keener sensibilities,

the morbider nerves may suffer from the glare and hardness of the tiling

which render the place so wonderful and so exquisite. One must complain

of something, and I complain of the tiling; I do not mind the house

being supposed like the house of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem.

It belongs to the Duke of Medina-Celi, who no more comes to it from

Madrid than the Duke of Alva comes to his house, which I somehow

perversely preferred. For one thing, the Alva palace has eleven

_patios,_ all far more forgotten than the four in the House of Pilate,

and I could fully glut my love of _patios_ without seeing half of them.

Besides, it was in the charge of a typical Spanish family: a lean,

leathery, sallow father, a fat, immovable mother, and a tall, silent

daughter. The girl showed us darkly about the dreary place, with its

fountains and orange trees and palms, its damp, Moresque, moldy

walls, its damp, moldy, beautiful wooden ceilings, and its damp, moldy

staircase leading to the family rooms overhead, which we could not see.

The family stays for a little time only in the spring and fall, but if

ever they stay so late as we had come the sunlight lying so soft and

warm in the _patio_ and the garden out of it must have made them as

sorry to leave it as we were.

I am not sure but I valued the House of Alva somewhat for the chance my

visit to it gave me of seeing a Sevillian tenement-house such as I had

hoped I might see. One hears that such houses are very scrupulously

kept by the janitors who compel the tenants to a cleanliness not perhaps

always their nature. At any rate, this one, just across the way from

the Alva House, was of a surprising neatness. It was built three stories

high, with galleries looking into an open court and doors giving from

these into the several tenements. As fortune, which does not continually

smile on travel, would have it that morning, two ladies of the house

were having a vivid difference of opinion on an upper gallery. Or at

least one was, for the other remained almost as silent as the spectators

who grouped themselves about her or put their heads out of the windows

to see, as well as hear, what it was about. I wish I knew and I would

tell the reader. The injured party, and I am sure she must have been

deeply injured, showered her enemy with reproaches, and each time when

she had emptied the vials of her wrath with much shaking of her hands in

the wrong-doer’s face she went away a few yards and filled them up again

and then returned for a fresh discharge. It was perfectly like a scene

of Goldoni and like many a passage of real life in his native city, and

I was rapt in it across fifty years to the Venice I used to know. But

the difference in Seville was that there was actively only one combatant

in the strife, and the witnesses took no more part in it than the

passive resistant.