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.
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