Meanwhile our shining hotel had begun to thrill with something besides
the cold which nightly pierced it from the snowy Sierra. This was the
excitement pending from an event promised the next day, which was the
production of a drama in verse, of peculiar and intense interest for
Granada, where the scene of it was laid in the Alhambra at one of the
highest moments of its history, and the persons were some of those
dearest to its romance. Not only the company to perform it (of course
the first company in Spain) had been in the hotel overnight, and the
ladies of it had gleamed and gloomed through the cold corridors, but the
poet had been conspicuous at dinner, with his wife, young and beautiful
and blond, and powdered so white that her blondness was of quite a
violet cast. There was not so much a question of whether we should
take tickets as whether we could get them, but for this the powerful
influence of our guide availed, and he got tickets providentially given
up in the morning for a price so exorbitant I should be ashamed to
confess it. They were for the afternoon performance, and at three
o’clock we went with the rest of the gay and great world of Granada to
the principal theater.
The Latin conception of a theater is of something rather more barnlike
than ours, but this theater was of a sufficiently handsome presence, and
when we had been carried into it by the physical pressure exerted upon
us by the crowd at the entrance we found its vastness already thronged.
The seats in the orchestra were mostly taken; the gallery under the
roof was loud with the impatience for the play which the auditors
there testified by cries and whistlings and stampings until the curtain
lifted; the tiers of boxes rising all round the theater were filled with
family parties. The fathers and mothers sat in front with the children
between them of all ages down to babies in their nurses’ arms. These
made themselves perfectly at home, in one case reaching over the edge
of the box and clawing the hair of a gentleman standing below and openly
enjoying the joke. The friendly equality of the prevailing spirit was
expressed in the presence of the family servants at the back of the
family boxes, from which the latest fashions showed themselves here and
there, as well as the belated local versions of them. In the orchestra
the men had promptly lighted their cigars and the air was blue with
smoke. Friends found one another, to their joyful amaze, not having met
since morning; and especially young girls were enraptured to recognize
young men; one girl shook hands twice with a young man, and gurgled with
laughter as long as he stood near her.
As a lifelong lover of the drama and a boyish friend of Granadan
romance, I ought to have cared more for the play than the people who had
come to it, but I did not. The play was unintentionally amusing enough;
but after listening for two hours to the monotonous cadences of the
speeches which the persons of it recited to one another, while the
ladies of the Moorish world took as public a part in its events as if
they had been so many American Christians, we came away. We had already
enjoyed the first entr’acte, when the men all rose and went out, or
lighted fresh cigars and went to talk with the Paris hats and plumes
or the Spanish mantillas and high combs in the boxes. The curtain had
scarcely fallen when the author of the play was called before it and
applauded by the generous, the madly generous, spectators. He stood
bowing and bowing on tiptoe, as if the wings of his rapture lifted him
to them and would presently fly away with him. He could not drink deep
enough of the delicious draught, put brimming to his lips, and the
divine intoxication must have lasted him through the night, for after
breakfast the next morning I met him in our common corridor at the hotel
smiling to himself, and when I could not forbear smiling in return he
smiled more; he beamed, he glowed upon me as if I were a crowded house
still cheering him to the echo. It was a beautiful moment and I realized
even better than the afternoon before what it was to be a young poet and
a young Spanish poet, and to have had a first play given for the first
time in the city of Granada, where the morning papers glowed with praise
so ardent that the print all but smoked with it. We were alone in the
corridor where we met, and our eyes confessed us kindred spirits, and
I hope he understood me better than if I had taken him in my arms and
kissed him on both cheeks.
I really had no time for that; I was on my way down-stairs to witness
the farewell scene between the leading lady and the large group of
young Granadans who had come up to see her off. When she came out to
the carriage with her husband, by a delicate refinement of homage they
cheered him, and left him to deliver their devotion to her, which
she acknowledged only with a smile. But not so the leading lady’s
lady’s-maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our omnibus window
to the assembled upper servants of the hotel. She put her head out and
said in a voice hoarse with excitement and good-fellowship, _“Adios,
hombres!”_ (“Good-by, men!”), and vanished with us from their applausive
presence.
With us, I say, for we, too, were leaving Granada in rain which was
snow on the Sierra and so cold that we might well have seemed leaving
Greenland. The brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash of
the running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with us the moonlight
night of our coming, now felt their anxious way down in the dismal
drizzle of that last morning, and brought us at last to the plaza before
the station. It was a wide puddle where I thought our craft should have
floundered, but it made its way to the door, and left us dry shod within
and glad to be quitting the city of my young dreams.