Our Delight As Children,
Loving Fun Too Well, Was When We Had A Guest Of This Humble
Description At The Supper-Table.
Settling down in our places at the
long table laden with good things, a stern admonitory glance from our
father would let us into the secret of the new guest's status - his
unsuitability to his surroundings.
It was great fun to watch him
furtively and listen to his blundering conversational efforts, but we
knew that the least sound of a titter on our part would have been an
unpardonable offence. The poor and more uncouth, or ridiculous, from
our childish point of view, they appeared, the more anxious my mother
would be to put them at their ease. And she would sometimes say to us
afterwards that she could not laugh with us because she remembered the
poor fellow probably had a mother somewhere in a distant country who
was perhaps thinking of him at the very time he was at the table with
us, and hoping and praying that in his wanderings he would meet with
some who would be kind to him.
I remember many of these chance guests, and will give a particular
account of one - the guest and the evening we passed in his company - as
this survives with a peculiar freshness in my memory, and it was also
a cherished recollection of my mother's.
I was then nine or ten years old, and our guest was a young Spanish
gentleman, singularly handsome, with a most engaging expression and
manner. He was on a journey from Buenos Ayres to a part in our
province some sixty or seventy leagues further south, and after asking
permission to pass the night at our house, he explained that he had
only one horse, as he liked that way of travelling rather than the
native way of driving a _tropilla_ before him, going at a furious
gallop from dawn to dark, and changing horses every three or four
leagues. Having but one horse, he had to go in a leisurely way with
many rests, and he liked to call at many houses every day just to talk
with the people.
After supper, during which he charmed us with his conversation and
pure Castilian, which was like music as he spoke it, we formed a
circle before a wood fire in the dining-room and made him take the
middle seat. For he had confessed that he performed on the guitar, and
we all wanted to sit where we could see as well as listen. He tuned
the instrument in a leisurely way, pausing often to continue the
conversation with my parents, until at last, seeing how eager we all
were, he began to play, and his music and style were strange to us,
for he had no jigging tunes with fantastic flights and flourishes so
much affected by our native guitarists. It was beautiful but serious
music.
Then came another long pause and he talked again, and said the pieces
he had been playing were composed by his chief favourite, Sara sate.
He said that Sara sate had been one of the most famous guitarists in
Spain, and had composed a good deal of music for the guitar before he
had given it up for the violin. As a violinist he would win a European
reputation, but in Spain they were sorry that he had abandoned the
national instrument.
All he said was interesting, but we wanted more and more of his music,
and he played less and less and at longer intervals, and at last he
put the guitar down, and turning to my parents, said with a smile that
he begged to be excused - that he could play no more for thinking. He
owed it to them, he said, to tell them what he was thinking about;
they would then know how much they had done for his pleasure that
evening and how he appreciated it. He was, he continued, one of a
large family, very united, all living with their parents at home; and
in winter, which was cold in his part of Spain, their happiest time
was in the evening when they would gather before a big fire of oak
logs in their _solar_ and pass the time with books and conversation
and a little music and singing. Naturally, since he had left his
country years ago, the thought of that time and those evenings had
occasionally been in his mind - a passing thought and memory. On this
evening it had come in a different way, less like a memory than a
revival of the past, so that as he sat there among us, he was a boy
back in Spain once more, sitting by the fire with his brothers and
sisters and parents. With that feeling in him he could not go on
playing. And he thought it most strange that such an experience should
have come to him for the first time in that place out on that great
naked pampa, sparsely inhabited, where life was so rough, so
primitive.
And while he talked we all listened - how eagerly! - drinking in his
words, especially my mother, her eyes bright with the moisture rising
in them; and she often afterwards recalled that evening guest, who was
seen no more by us but had left an enduring image in our hearts.
This is a picture of my mother as she appeared to all who knew her. In
my individual case there was more, a secret bond of union between us,
since she best understood my feeling for Nature and sense of beauty,
and recognized that in this I was nearest to her. Thus, besides and
above the love of mother and son, we had a spiritual kinship, and this
was so much to me that everything beautiful in sight or sound that
affected me came associated with her to my mind. I have found this
feeling most perfectly expressed in some lines to the Snowdrop by our
lost poet, Dolmen.
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