IX

We had expected to go to Granada after a week in Seville, but man is

always proposing beyond his disposing in strange lands as well as at

home, and we were fully a fortnight in the far lovelier capital. In

the mean time we had changed from our rooms in the rear of the hotel to

others in the front, where we entered intimately into the life of the

Plaza San Fernando as far as we might share it from our windows. It was

not very active life; even the cabmen whose neat victorias bordered

the place on three sides were not eager for custom; they invited the

stranger, but they did not urge; there was a continual but not a rapid

passing through the ample oblong; there was a good deal of still life on

the benches where leisure enjoyed the feathery shadow of the palms,

for the sun was apt to be too hot at the hour of noon, though later it

conduced to the slumber which in Spain accompanies the digestion of the

midday meal in all classes. As the afternoon advanced numbers of little

girls came into the plaza and played children’s games which seemed a

translation of games familiar to our own country. One evening a small

boy was playing with them, but after a while he seemed to be found

unequal to the sport; he was ejected from the group and went off

gloomily to grieve apart with his little thumb in his mouth. The sight

of his dignified desolation was insupportable, and we tried what a

copper of the big-dog value would do to comfort him. He took it without

looking up and ran away to the peanut-stand which is always steaming

at the first corner all over Christendom. Late in the evening--in fact,

after the night had fairly fallen--we saw him making his way into a

house fronting on the plaza. He tried at the door with one hand and in

the other he held an unexhausted bag of peanuts. He had wasted no word

of thanks on us, and he did not now. When he got the door open he backed

into the interior still facing us and so fading from our sight and

knowledge.

He had the touch of comedy which makes pathos endurable, but another

incident was wholly pathetic. As we came out of an antiquity shop near

the cathedral one afternoon we found on the elevated footway near the

Gate of Pardon a mother and daughter, both of the same second youth, who

gently and jointly pronounced to us the magical word _encajes._ Rather,

they questioned us with it, and they only suggested, very forbearingly,

that we should come to their house with them to see those laces, which

of course were old laces; their house was quite near. But that one of

us twain who was singly concerned in _encajes_ had fatigued and perhaps

overbought herself at the antiquity shop, and she signified a regret

which they divined too well was dissent. They looked rather than

expressed a keen little disappointment; the mother began a faint

insistence, but the daughter would not suffer it. Here was the pride of

poverty, if not poverty itself, and it was with a pang that we parted

from these mutely appealing ladies. We could not have borne it if we had

not instantly promised ourselves to come the next day and meet them and

go home with them and buy all their _encajes_ that we had money for. We

kept our promise, and we came the next day and the next and every day

we remained in Seville, and lingered so long that we implanted in the

cabmen beside the curbing the inextinguishable belief that we were in

need of a cab; but we never saw those dear ladies again.

These are some of the cruel memories which the happiest travel leaves,

and I gratefully recall that in the case of a custodian of the Columbian

Museum, which adjoins the cathedral, we did not inflict a pang that

rankled in our hearts for long. I gave him a handful of copper coins

which I thought made up a peseta, but his eyes were keener, and a sorrow

gloomed his brow which projected its shadow so darkly over us when we

went into the cathedral for one of our daily looks that we hastened to

return and make up the full peseta with another heap of coppers; a whole

sunburst of smiles illumined his face, and a rainbow of the brightest

colors arched our sky and still arches it whenever we think of that

custodian and his rehabilitated trust in man.

This seems the crevice where I can crowd in the fact that bits of family

wash hung from the rail of the old pulpit in the Court of Oranges beside

the cathedral, and a pumpkin vine lavishly decorated an arcade near a

doorway which perhaps gave into the dwelling of that very custodian. At

the same time I must not fail to urge the reader’s seeing the Columbian

Museum, which is richly interesting and chiefly for those Latin and

Italian authors annotated by the immortal admiral’s own hand. These give

the American a sense of him as the discoverer of our hemisphere which

nothing else could, and insurpassably render the New World credible.

At the same time they somehow bring a lump of pity and piety into the

throat at the thought of the things he did and suffered. They bring him

from history and make him at home in the beholder’s heart, and there

seems a mystical significance in the fact that the volume most abounding

in marginalia should be _Seneca’s Prophecies._

The frequent passing of men as well as women and children through our

Plaza San Fernando and the prevalence of men asleep on the benches; the

immense majority of boys everywhere; the moralized _abattoir_ outside

the walls where the humanity dormant at the bull-feast wakes to hide

every detail of slaughter for the market; a large family of cats basking

at their ease in a sunny doorway; trains of milch goats with wicker

muzzles, led by a milch cow from door to door through the streets; the

sudden solemn beauty of the high altar in the cathedral, seen by chance

on a brilliant day; the bright, inspiriting air of Seville; a glorious

glimpse of the Giralda coming home from a drive; the figure of a girl

outlined in a lofty window; a middle-aged Finnish pair trying to give

themselves in murmured talk to the colored stucco of the Hall of the

Ambassadors in what seems their wedding journey; two artists working

near with sketches tilted against the wall; a large American lady who

arrives one forenoon in traveling dress and goes out after luncheon in

a mantilla with a fan and high comb; another American lady who appears

after dinner in the costume of a Spanish dancing-girl; the fact that

there is no Spanish butter and that the only good butter comes from

France and the passable butter from Denmark; the soft long veils of

pink cloud that trail themselves in the sky across our Plaza, and then

dissolve in the silvery radiance of the gibbous moon; the yellowish-red

electric Brush lights swinging from palm to palm as in the decoration

of some vast ballroom; a second drive through Triana, and a failure to

reach the church we set out for; the droves of brown pigs and flocks of

brown sheep; the goatherds unloading olive boughs in the fields for

the goats to browse; a dirty, kind, peaceful village, with an English

factory in it, and a mansion of galvanized iron with an automobile

before it; a pink villa on a hillside and a family group on the shoulder

of a high-walled garden; a girl looking down from the wall, and a young

man resting his hand on the masonry and looking up at her; the good

faces of the people, men and women; boys wrestling and frolicking in the

village streets; the wide dust-heap of a road, full of sudden holes; the

heat of the sun in the first November week after touches of cold; the

tram-cars that wander from one side of the city street to the other, and

then barely miss scraping the house walls; in our drive home from our

failure for that church, men with trains of oxen plowing and showing

against the round red rayless sun; a stretch of the river with the

crimson-hulled steamers, and a distant sail-boat seen across the fields;

the gray moon that burnishes itself and rides bright and high for our

return; people in balconies, and the air full of golden dust shot

with bluish electric lights; here is a handful of suggestions from my

note-book which each and every one would expand into a chapter or a

small volume under the intensive culture which the reader may well have

come to dread. But I fling them all down here for him to do what he

likes with, and turn to speak at more length of the University, or,

rather the University Church, which I would not have any reader of mine

fail to visit.

X

With my desire to find likeness rather than difference in strange

peoples, I was glad to have two of the students loitering in the _patio_

play just such a trick on a carter at the gate as school-boys might play

in our own land. While his back was turned they took his whip and hid it

and duly triumphed in his mystification and dismay. We did not wait

for the catastrophe, but by the politeness of another student found

the booth of the custodian, who showed us to the library. A noise

of recitation from the windows looking into the _patio_ followed us

up-stairs; but maturer students were reading at tables in the hushed

library, and at a large central table a circle of grave authorities

of some sort were smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One,

who seemed chief among them, rose and bowed us into the freedom of the

place, and again rose and bowed when we went out. We did not stay long,

for a library is of the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the

books or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There are eighty

thousand volumes in that library, but we had to come away without

examining half of them. The church was more appreciable, and its value

was enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff old sacristan to

unlock it. We found it rich in a most wonderful _retablo_ carved in wood

and painted. Besides the excellent pictures at the high altar, there

are two portrait brasses which were meant to be recumbent, but which are

stood up against the wall, perhaps to their surprise, without loss of

impressiveness. Most notable of all is the mural tomb of Pedro Enriquez

de Ribera and his wife: he who built the Casa de Pilatos, and as he had

visited the Holy Land was naturally fabled to have copied it from the

House of Pilate. Now, as if still continuing his travels, he reposes

with his wife in a sort of double-decker monument, where the Evil One

would have them suggest to the beholder the notion of passengers in the

upper and lower berths of a Pullman sleeper.

Of all the Spanish cities that I saw, Seville was the most charming,

not for those attributive blandishments of the song and dance which the

tourist is supposed to find it, but which we quite failed of, but for

the simpler and less conventional amiabilities which she was so rich

in. I have tried to hint at these, but really one must go to Seville for

them and let them happen as they will. Many happened in our hotel where

we liked everybody, from the kindly, most capable Catalonian head waiter

to the fine-headed little Napoleonic-looking waiter who had identified

us at San Sebastian as Americans, because we spoke “quicklier” than the

English, and who ran to us when we came into the hotel and shook hands

with its as if we were his oldest and dearest friends. There was a Swiss

concierge who could not be bought for money, and the manager was the

mirror of managers. Fancy the landlord of the Waldorf-Astoria, or the

St. Regis, coming out on the sidewalk and beating down a taxicabman

from a charge of fifteen pesetas to six for a certain drive! It is not

thinkable, and yet the like of it happened to xis in Seville from our

manager. It was not his fault, when our rear apartment became a little

too chill, and we took a parlor in the front and came back on the first

day hoping to find it stored full of the afternoon sun’s warmth, but

found that the _camerera_ had opened the windows and closed the shutters

in our absence so that our parlor was of a frigidity which no glitter of

the electric light could temper. The halls and public rooms were chill

in anticipation and remembrance of any cold outside, but in otir parlor

there was a hole for the sort of stove which we saw in the reading-room,

twice as large as an average teakettle, with a pipe as big around as

the average rain-pipe. I am sure this apparatus would have heated us

admirably, but the weather grew milder and milder and we never had

occasion to make the successful experiment. Meanwhile the moral

atmosphere of the hotel was of a blandness which would have gone far to

content us with any meteorological perversity. When we left it we were

on those human terms with every one who ruled or served in it which one

never attains in an American hotel, and rarely in an English one.

At noon on the 4th of November the sun was really hot in our plaza; but

we were instructed that before the winter was over there would be cold

enough, not of great frosty severity, of course, but nasty and hard to

bear in the summer conditions which prevail through the year. I wish I

could tell how the people live then in their beautiful, cool houses, but

I do not know, and I do not know how they live at any season except from

the scantiest hearsay. The women remain at home except when they go

to church or to drive in the Delicias--that is to say, the women of

society, of the nobility. There is no society in our sense among people

of the middle classes; the men when they are not at business are at the

cafe; the women when they are not at mass are at home. That is what we

were told, and yet at a moving-picture show we saw many women of the

middle as well as the lower classes. The frequent holidays afford them

an outlet, and indoors they constantly see their friends and kindred at

their _tertulias._

The land is in large holdings which are managed by the factors or agents

of the noble proprietors. These, when they are not at Madrid, are to be

found at their clubs, where their business men bring them papers to be

signed, often unread. This sounds a little romantic, and perhaps it is

not true. Some gentlemen take a great interest in the bull-feasts and

breed the bulls and cultivate the bull-fighters; what other esthetic

interests they have I do not know. All classes are said to be of an

Oriental philosophy of life; they hold that the English striving and

running to and fro and seeing strange countries comes in the end to

the same thing as sitting still; and why should they bother? There is

something in that, but one may sit still too much; the Spanish ladies,

as I many times heard, do overdo it. Not only they do not walk abroad;

they do not walk at home; everything is carried to and from them; they

do not lift hand or foot. The consequence is that they have very small

hands and feet; Gautier, who seems to have grown tired when he reached

Seville, and has comparatively little to say of it, says that a child

may hold a Sevillian lady’s foot in its hand; he does not say he saw it

done. What is true is that no child could begin to clasp with both hands

the waist of an average Sevillian lady. But here again the rule has

its exceptions and will probably have more. Not only is the English

queen-consort stimulating the Andalusian girls to play tennis by her

example when she comes to Seville, but it has somehow become the fashion

for ladies of all ages to leave their carriages in the Delicias and walk

up and down; we saw at least a dozen doing it.

Whatever flirting and intriguing goes on, the public sees nothing of

it. In the street there is no gleam of sheep’s-eying or any manner of

indecorum. The women look sensible and good, and I should say the same

of the men; the stranger’s experience must have been more unfortunate

than mine if he has had any unkindness from them. One heard that Spanish

women do not smoke, unless they are _cigarreras_ and work in the large

tobacco factory, where the “Carmen” tradition has given place to the

mother-of-a-family type, with her baby on the floor beside her. Even

these may prefer not to set the baby a bad example and have her grow

up and smoke like those English and American women. The strength of

the Church is, of course, in the women’s faith, and its strength is

unquestionable, if not quite unquestioned. In Seville, as I have said,

there are two Spanish Protestant churches, and their worship, is not

molested. Society does not receive their members; but we heard that with

most Spanish people Protestantism is a puzzle rather than offense. They

know we are not Jews, but Christians; yet we are not Catholics; and

what, then, are we? With the Protestants, as with the Catholics, there

is always religious marriage. There is civil marriage for all, but

without the religious rite the pair are not well seen by either sect.

It is said that the editor of the ablest paper in Madrid, which

publishes a local edition at Seville, is a Protestant. The queen mother

is extremely clerical, though one of the wisest and best women who ever

ruled; the king and queen consort are as liberal as possible, and the

king is notoriously a democrat, with a dash of Haroun al Rashid, he

likes to take his governmental subordinates unawares, and a story is

told of his dropping in at the post-office on a late visit to Seville,

and asking for the chief. He was out, and so were all the subordinate

officials down to the lowest, whom the king found at his work. The

others have since been diligent at theirs. The story is characteristic

of the king, if not of the post-office people.

Political freedom is almost grotesquely unrestricted. In our American

republic we should scarcely tolerate a party in favor of a monarchy,

but in the Spanish monarchy a republican party is recognized and

represented. It holds public meetings and counts among its members many

able and distinguished men, such as the novelist Perez Galdos, one of

the most brilliant novelists not only in Spain but in Europe. With this

unbounded liberty in Andalusia, it is said that the Spaniards of the

north are still more radical.

Though the climate is most favorable for consumptives, the habits of the

people are so unwholesome that tuberculosis prevails, and there are

two or three deaths a day from it in Seville. There is no avoidance of

tuberculous suspects; they cough, and the men spit everywhere in the

streets and on the floors and carpets of the clubs. The women suffer

for want of fresh air, though now with the example of the English queen

before them and the young girls who used to lie abed till noon getting

up early ta play tennis, it will be different. Their mothers and aunts

still drive to the Delicias to prove that they have carriages, but when

there they alight and walk up and down by their doctor’s advice.

I only know that during our fortnight in Seville I suffered no wound to

a sensibility which has been kept in full repair for literary, if not

for humanitarian purposes. The climate was as kind as the people. It is

notorious that in summer the heat is that of a furnace, but even then it

is bearable because it is a dry heat, like that of our indoor furnaces.

The 5th of November was our last day, and then it was too hot for

comfort in the sun, but one is willing to find the November sun too hot;

it is an agreeable solecism; and I only wish that we could have found

the sun too hot during the next three days in Granada. If the 5th of

November had been worse for heat than it was it must still remain dear

in our memory, because in the afternoon we met once more these Chilians

of our hearts whom we had met in San Sebastian and Burgos and Valladolid

and Madrid. We knew we should meet them in Seville and were not the

least surprised. They were as glad and gay as ever, and in our common

polyglot they possessed us of the fact that they had just completed

the eastern hemicycle of their Peninsular tour. They were latest from

Malaga, and now they were going northward. It was our last meeting, but

better friends I could not hope to meet again, whether in the Old

World or the New, or that Other World which we hope will somehow be the

summation of all that is best in both.