I think that it was while I was still in this high satisfaction that
we went a drive in the promenade, which in all Spanish cities is the
Alameda, except Seville, where it so deservedly is the Delicias. It was
in every way a contrast to the road we had come from the Cartuja: an
avenue of gardened paths and embowered driveways, where we hoped to join
the rank and fashion of Granada in their afternoon’s outing. But there
was only one carriage besides our own with people in it, who looked no
greater world than ourselves, and a little girl riding with her groom.
On one hand were pretty villas, new-looking and neat, which I heard
could sometimes be taken for the summer at rents so low that I am glad
I have forgotten the exact figures lest the reader should doubt my word.
Nothing but the fact that the winter was then hanging over us from the
Sierras prevented my taking one of them for the summer that had passed,
the Granadan summer being notoriously the most delightful in the world.
On the other hand stretched the wonderful Vega, which covers so many
acres in history and romance, and there, so near that we look down into
them at times were “the silvery windings of the Xenil,” which glides
through so many descriptive passages of Irving’s page; only now, on
account of recent rain, its windings were rather coppery.
At the hotel on the terrace under our balcony we found on our return
a party of Spanish ladies and gentlemen taking tea, or whatever drink
stood for it in their custom: no doubt chocolate; but it was at least
the afternoon-tea hour. The women’s clothes were just from Paris, and
the men’s from London, but their customs, I suppose, were national;
the women sat on one side of the table and talked across it to the men,
while they ate and drank, and then each sex grouped itself apart and
talked to its kind, the women in those hardened vowels of a dialect from
which the Andalusians for conversational purposes have eliminated all
consonants. The sun was setting red and rayless, with a play of many
lights and tints, over the landscape up to the snow-line on the Sierra.
The town lay a stretch of gray roofs and white walls, intermixed with
yellow poplars and black cypresses, and misted over with smoke from the
chimneys of the sugar factories. The mountains stood flat against the
sky, purple with wide stretches of brown, and dark, slanting furrows.
The light became lemon-yellow before nightfall, and then a dull crimson
under pale violet.
The twitter of the Spanish women was overborne at times by the voices
of an American party whose presence I was rather proud of as another
American. They were all young men, and they were making an educational
tour of the world in the charge of a professor who saw to it that
they learned as much of its languages and history and civilization as
possible on the way. They ranged in their years from about fifteen to
twenty and even more, and they were preparing for college, or doing what
they could to repair the loss of university training before they took
up the work of life. It seemed to me a charming notion, and charming the
seriousness with which they were fulfilling it. They were not so serious
in everything as to miss any incidental pleasure; they had a large table
to themselves in our Barmecide banquet-hall, where they seemed always
to be having a good time, and where once they celebrated the birthday
of one of them with a gaiety which would have penetrated, if anything
could, the shining chill of the hostelry. In the evening we heard them
in the billiard-room below lifting their voices in the lays of our
college muse, and waking to ecstasy the living piano in the strains of
our national ragtime. They were never intrusively cheerful; one might
remain, in spite of them, as dispirited as the place would have one; but
as far as the _genius loci_ would let me, I liked them; and so far as
I made their acquaintance I thought that they were very intelligently
carrying out the enterprise imagined for them.