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.
VIII
I wish now that I had known them well enough to ask them what they
candidly thought of the city of which I felt the witchery under the
dying day I have left celebrating for the moment in order to speak of
them. It seems to me at this distance of time and space that I did not
duly reflect that in places it was a city which smelled very badly and
was almost as dirty as New York in others, and very ill paved. The worst
places are in the older quarters, where the streets are very crooked and
very narrow, so narrow that the tram-car can barely scrape through them.
They are old enough to be streets belonging to the Moorish city, like
many streets in Cordova and Seville, but no fond inquiry of our guides
could identify this lane or that alley as of Moorish origin. There is
indeed a group of picturesque shops clearly faked to look Moorish, which
the lover of that period may pin his faith to, and for a moment I did
so, but upon second thought I unpinned it.
We visited this plated fragment of the old Moorish capital when we
descended from our hotel with a new guide to see the great, the
stupendous cathedral, where the Catholic kings lie triumphantly entombed
in the heart of their conquest. It is altogether unlike the other
Spanish cathedrals of my knowledge; for though the cathedral of
Valladolid is of Renaissance architecture in its austere simplicity, it
is somehow even less like that of Granada than the Gothic fanes of
Burgos or Toledo or Seville. All the detail at Granada is classicistic,
but the whole is often of Gothic effect, especially in the mass of those
clustered Corinthian columns that lift its domes aloof on their
prodigious bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York
Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors
of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one
bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's
fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that
gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the
music of stringed instruments and the shrill voices of choir-boys
pierced the spaces here and there, but no more filled them than the
immemorable plastic and pictorial facts: than a certain very lively
bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like George Washington; or than
a St. Jerome in the Desert, outwrinkling age, with his lion curled
cozily up in his mantle; or than the colossal busts of Adam and Eve and
the praying figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, richly gilded in the
exquisite temple forming the high altar; or than the St. James on
horseback, with his horse's hoof planted on the throat of a Moor; or
than the Blessed Virgins in jeweled crowns and stomachers and brocaded
skirts; or than that unsparing decapitation of John the Baptist bloodily
falling forward with his severed gullet thrusting at the spectator.
Nothing has ever been too terrible in life for Spanish art to represent;
it is as ruthlessly veracious as Russian literature; and of all the
painters and sculptors who have portrayed the story of Christianity as a
tale of torture and slaughter, the Spaniards seem to have studied it
closest from the fact; perhaps because for centuries the Inquisition
lavished the fact upon them.
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