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.
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