The Manager (If That Was The Quality Of The Patient
And Amiable Old Official Who Received Us) Seemed Surprised To
See the
cars there, perhaps because they were so inaudible; but he said we could
have rooms in the annex,
Fronting on the adjoining plaza and siding on
an inoffensive avenue where there were absolutely no cars. The
interior, climbing to a lofty roof by a succession of galleries, was
hushed by four silent senoras, all in black, and seated in mute ceremony
around a table in chairs from which their little feet scarcely touched
the marble pavement. Their quiet confirmed the manager's assurance of a
pervading tranquillity, and though the only bath in the annex was
confessedly on the ground floor, and we were to be two floors above, the
affair was very simple: the chambermaid would always show us where the
bath was.
With misgiving, lost in a sense of our helplessness, we tried to think
that the avenue under us was then quieting down with the waning day; and
certainly it was not so noisy as the plaza, which, resounded with the
whips and quips of the cabmen, and gave no signs of quiescence.
Otherwise the annex was very pleasant, and we took the rooms shown us,
hoping the best and fearing the worst. Our fears were wiser than our
hopes, but we did not know this, and we went as gaily as we could for
tea in the _patio_ of our hotel, where a fountain typically trickled
amidst its water-plants and a noiseless Englishman at his separate table
almost restored our lost faith in a world not wholly racket. A young
Spaniard and two young Spanish girls helped out the illusion with their
gentle movements and their muted gutturals, and we looked forward to
dinner with fond expectation. To tell the truth, the dinner, when we
came back to it, was not very good, or at least not very winning, and
the next night it was no better, though the head waiter had then, made
us so much favor with himself as to promise us a side-table for the rest
of our stay. He was a very friendly head waiter, and the dining-room was
a long glare of the encaustic tiling which all Seville seems lined with,
and of every Moorish motive in the decoration. Besides, there was a
young Scotch girl, very interestingly pale and delicate of face, at one
of the tables, and at another a Spanish girl with the most wonderful
fire-red hair, and there were several miracles of the beautiful obesity
which abounds in Spain.
When we returned to the annex it did seem, for the short time we kept
our windows shut, that the manager had spoken true, and we promised
ourselves a tranquil night, which, after our two nights in Cordova, we
needed if we did not merit. But we had counted without the spread of
popular education in Spain. Under our windows, just across the way,
there proved to be a school of the "Royal Society of Friends of their
Country," as the Spanish inscription in its front proclaimed; and at
dusk its pupils, children and young people of both sexes, began
clamoring for knowledge at its doors. About ten o'clock they burst from
them again with joyous exultation in their acquirements; then, shortly
after, every manner of vehicle began to pass, especially heavy market
wagons overladen and drawn by horses swarming with bells. Their
succession left scarcely a moment of the night unstunned; but if ever a
moment seemed to be escaping, there was a maniacal bell in a church near
by that clashed out: "Hello! Here's a bit of silence; let's knock it on
the head!"
We went promptly the next day to the gentle old manager and told him
that he had been deceived in thinking he had given us rooms on a quiet
street, and appealed to his invention for something, for anything,
different. His invention had probably never been put to such stress
before, and he showed us an excess of impossible apartments, which we
subjected to a consideration worthy of the greatest promise in them. Our
search ended in a suite of rooms on the top floor, where we could have
the range of a flat roof outside if we wanted; but as the private family
living next door kept hens, led by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we
were sorrowfully forced to forego our peculiar advantage. Peculiar we
then thought it, though we learned afterward that poultry-farming was
not uncommon on the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling
how we might have prospered if we had taken those rooms and stocked our
roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes. At the moment, however, we
thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the
manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience,
and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.
Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic
chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was
so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock
in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already. Her zeal
made the hot water she brought for the baths really hot, _"Caliente,
caliente,"_ and her voice would have quieted the street under our
windows if music could have soothed it. At a friendly word she grew
trustful, and told us how it was hard, hard for poor people in Seville;
how she had three dollars a month and her husband four; and how they had
to toil for it. When we could not help telling her, cruelly enough, what
they singly and jointly earn in New York, she praised rather than
coveted the happier chance impossible to them. They would like to go,
but they could not go! She was gay with it all, and after we had left
the hotel and come back for the shawl which had been forgotten, she ran
for it, shouting with laughter, as if we must see it the great joke she
did; and she took the reward offered with the self-respect never wanting
to the Spanish poor.
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