Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good fortune to witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from earthquakes, and on the awful day, dies irae, of the great Lisbon earthquake, during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the Host, when the worshipers were on their knees, there came such a mighty shock in sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that the people started to their feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests ran after them, as soon as the apparent danger was past they led the return of their flock and resumed the interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that the temple was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville had escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should be dramatized in a perpetual observance. Every year now, on the 1st of November, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen moment of the mass, with much more stateliness than in the original event, and lead the people out of one portal, to return with them by another for the conclusion of the ceremonial.

  We waited long for the climax, but at last we almost missed it through the overeagerness of the guide I had chosen out of many that petitioned. He was so politely, so forbearingly insistent in his offer to see that we were vigilantly cared for, that I must have had a heart harder than Peter the Cruel’s to have denied him, and he planted us at the most favorable point for the function in the High Chapel, with instructions which portal to hurry to when the movement began, and took his peseta and went his way. Then, while we confidingly waited, he came rushing back and with a great sweep of his hat wafted us to the door which he had said the procession would go out by, but which he seemed to have learned it would come in by, and we were saved from what had almost been his fatal error. I forgave him the more gladly because I could rejoice in his returning to repair his error, although he had collected his money; and with a heart full of pride in his verification of my theory of the faithful Spanish nature, I gave myself to the shining gorgeousness of the procession that advanced chanting in the blaze of the Sevillian sun. There was every rank of clergy, from the archbishop down, in robes of ceremonial, but I am unable honestly to declare the admiration for their splendor which I would have willingly felt. The ages of faith in which those vestments were designed were apparently not the ages of taste; yet it was the shape of the vestments and not the color which troubled the eye of unfaith, if not of taste. The archbishop in crimson silk, with his train borne by two acolytes, the canons in their purple, the dean in his gold-embroidered robes, and the priests and choristers in their black robes and white surplices richly satisfied it; and if some of the clerics were a little frayed and some of the acolytes were spotted with the droppings of the candles, these were details which one remembered afterward and that did not matter at the time.

  When the procession was housed again, we went off and forgot it in the gardens of the Alcazar. But I must not begin yet on the gardens of the Alcazar. We went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but we did not see them until our second morning in Seville. We gave what was left from the first morning in the cathedral to a random exploration of the streets and places of the city. There was, no doubt, everywhere some touch of the bravery of our square of San Fernando, where the public windows were hung with crimson tapestries and brocades in honor of St. Raphael; but his holiday did not make itself molestively felt in the city’s business or pleasure. Where we could drive we drove, and where we must we walked, and we walked of course through the famous Calle de las Sierpes, because no one drives there. As a rule no woman walks there, and naturally there were many women walking there, under the eyes of the popular cafes and aristocratic clubs which principally abound in Las Sierpes, for it is also the street of the principal shops, though it is not very long and is narrower than many other streets of Seville. It has its name from so commonplace an origin as the sign over a tavern door, with some snakes painted on it; but if the example of sinuosity had been set it by prehistoric serpents, there were scores of other streets which have bettered its instruction. There were streets that crooked away everywhere, not going anywhere, and breaking from time to time into irregular angular spaces with a church or a convent or a nobleman’s house looking into them.

  VI

  The noblemen’s houses often showed a severely simple facade to the square or street, and hid their inner glories with what could have been fancied a haughty reserve if it had not been for the frankness with which they opened their patios to the gaze of the stranger, who, when he did not halt his carriage before them, could enjoy their hospitality from a sidewalk sometimes eighteen inches wide. The passing tram-car might grind him against the tall grilles which were the only barriers to the patios, but otherwise there would be nothing to spoil his enjoyment of those marble floors and tiled walls and fountains potted round with flowering plants. In summer he could have seen the family life there; and people who are of such oriental seclusion otherwise will sometimes even suffer the admiring traveler to come as well as look within. But one who would not press their hospitality so far could reward his forbearance by finding some of the patios too new-looking, with rather a glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron pillars, and their glass roofs which the rain comes through in the winter. The ladies sit and sew there, or talk, if they prefer, and receive their friends, and turn night into day in the fashion of climates where they are so easily convertible. The patio is the place of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the tertulia, and the family nightly meets its next of kin and then its nearer and farther friends there with that Latin regularity which may also be monotony. One patio is often much like another, though none was perhaps of so much public interest as the patio of the lady who loved a bull-fighter and has made her patio a sort of shrine to him. The famous espada perished in his heroic calling, no worse if no better than those who saw him die, and now his bust is in plain view, with a fit inscription recognizing his worth and prowess, and with the heads of some of the bulls he slew.

  Under that clement sky the elements do not waste the works of man as elsewhere, and many of the houses of Seville are said to be such as the Moors built there. We did not know them from the Christian houses; but there are no longer any mosques, while in our wanderings we had the pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they are still in the keeping of their sisterhoods and brotherhoods, remain monuments of the medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to secular uses, attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution and reform. It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the Street of the Love of God, and are then startled by the pagan presence of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the titular demigod. Statues and pillars are alike antique, and give you a moment of the Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of an unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which the Roman Forum used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is shady, but I do not remember the trees — only those glorious columns climbing the summer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and proclaiming the imperishable memory of the republic that conquered and the empire that ruled the world, and have never loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly from the grass-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and in this other Iberian land we were always meeting the witnesses of the grandeur which no change short of some universal sea change can wholly sweep from the earth. Before it Goth and Arab shrink, with all their works, into the local and provisional; Rome remains for all time imperial and universal.

  To descend from this high-horsed reflection, as I must, I have to record that there did not seem to be so many small boys in Seville as in the Castillian capitals we had visited; in the very home of the bull-feast we did not see one mimic corrida given by the torreros of the future. Not even in the suburb of Triana, where the small boys again consolingly superabounded, was the great national gam
e played among the wheels and hoofs of the dusty streets to which we crossed the Guadalquivir that afternoon. To be sure, we were so taken with other things that a boyish bull-feast might have rioted unnoticed under our horses’ very feet, especially on the long bridge which gives you the far upward and downward stretch of the river, so simple and quiet and empty above, so busy and noisy and thronged with shipping below. I suppose there are lovelier rivers than that — we ourselves are known to brag of our Pharpar and Abana — but I cannot think of anything more nobly beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace in her bed, where she has had so many bad dreams of Carthaginian and Roman and Gothic and Arab and Norman invasion. Now her waters redden, for the time at least, only from the scarlet hulls of the tramp steamers lying in long succession beside the shore where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fashion of Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers; and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose from the midst of them. It was built in the last century of the Moorish dominion to mark the last point to which the gardens of the Moorish palace of the Alcazar could stretch, but they were long ago obliterated behind it; and though it was so recent, no doubt it would have had its pathos if I could ever have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem power in Spain. As it was, I found the tramp steamers more moving, and it was these that my eye preferably sought whenever I crossed the Triana bridge.

  VII

  We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were especially going to see the gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes with that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable. Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward visit the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were possible I would willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I will try eventually to be just, and I must even now advise the reader to visit the tile potteries there. If he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly and vainly struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of manner; his classically regular face was as swarthy as the darkest mulatto’s, but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the sense of his fine decency with me when we drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled round the corner of the street into the gipsy quarter, and made it my prophylactic against the human noisomeness which instantly beset our course. Let no Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those persistent savages have even the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to the interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally and physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, and treated with insecticides and put away in mothballs. Our own settled order of things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks and it smells, especially in Spain, when you get down to its lower levels; but it does not assail the senses with such rank offense as smites them in the gipsy quarter with sights and sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well as nose, were all stenches.

  Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged children running beside us and after us and screaming, “Minny, niooney, money!” in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against the door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and fat, sat on the thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes; younger women ranged the sidewalks and offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, and some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a green waist, with both white and red flowers in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the road a troop of children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented a hapless ass colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could persuade our cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street in reserve which made us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled the river, and into the center of it every manner of offal had been cast from the beginning of time to reek and fester and juicily ripen and rot in unspeakable corruption. It was such a thoroughfare as Dante might have imagined in his Hell, if people in his time had minded such horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it was worse than infernal, it was medieval, and that we were driving in such putrid foulness as the gilded carriages of kings and queens and the prancing steeds and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through whenever they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent waterside, and then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of the Guadalquivir, painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp steamers.

  After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its children never left except to do a little fortune-telling and mule and donkey trading, eked out with theft in the country round, any show of honest industry looked wholesome and kind. I rejoiced almost as much in the machinery as in the men who were loading the steamers; even the huge casks of olives, which were working from the salt-water poured into them and frothing at the bung in great white sponges of spume, might have been examples of toil by which those noisome vagabonds could well have profited. But now we had come to see another sort of leisure — the famous leisure of fortune and fashion driving in the Delicias, but perhaps never quite fulfilling the traveler’s fond ideal of it. We came many times to the Delicias in hope of it, with decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last without entire fruition. For our first visit we could not have had a fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening from a streak of sunset beyond Triana, and we arrived in appropriate circumstance, round the immense circle of the bull-ring and past the palace which the Duc de Montpensier has given the church for a theological seminary, with long stretches of beautiful gardens. Then we were in the famous Paseo, a drive with footways on each side, and on one side dusky groves widening to the river. The paths were lit with gleaming statues, and among the palms and the eucalyptuses were orange trees full of their golden globes, which we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were of that bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, not because they are in accord with the acrid nature of man there, but that they may be wrought into marmalade. On the other hand stretched less formal woods, with fields for such polite athletics as tennis, which the example of the beloved young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of dust and every evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, and that evening we had it mostly to ourselves, though there were two or three carriages with ladies in hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted and courageously walking, while their carriages followed. A magnate of some sort was shut alone in a brougham, in the care of footman and coachman with deeply silver-banded hats; there were a few military and civil riders, and there was distinctly a young man in a dog-cart with a groom, keeping abreast the landau of three ladies in mantillas, with whom he was improving what seemed a chance acquaintance. Along the course the public park gave way at times to the grounds of private villas; before one of these a boy did what he could for us by playing ball with a priest. At other points there were booths with chairs and tables, where I am sure interesting parties of people would have been sitting if they could have expected us to pass.

  VIII

  The reader, pampered by the brilliant excitements of our American promenades, may think this spectacle of the gay world of Seville dull; but he ought to have been with us a colder, redder, and sadder evening when we had the Delicias still more to ourselves. Afterward the Delicias seemed to cheer up, and the place was fairly frequented on a holiday, which we had not su
spected was one till our cabman convinced us from his tariff that we must pay him double, because you must always do that in Seville on holidays. By this time we knew that most of the Sevillian rank and riches had gone to Madrid for the winter, and we were the more surprised by some evident show of them in the private turnouts where by far most of the turnouts were public. But in Spain a carriage is a carriage, and the Sevillian cabs are really very proper and sometimes even handsome, and we felt that our own did no discredit to the Delicias. Many of the holiday-makers were walking, and there were actually women on foot in hats and hobble-skirts without being openly mocked. On the evening of our last resort to the Delicias it was quite thronged far into the twilight, after a lemon sunset that continued to tinge the east with pink and violet. There were hundreds of carriages, fully half of them private, with coachmen and footmen in livery. With them it seemed to be the rule to stop in the circle at a turning-point a mile off and watch the going and coming. It was a serious spectacle, but not solemn, and it had its reliefs, its high-lights. It was always pleasant to see three Spanish ladies on a carriage seat, the middle one protruding because of their common bulk, and oftener in umbrella-wide hats with towering plumes than in the charming mantilla. There were no top-hats or other formality in the men’s dress; some of them were on horseback, and there were two women riding.

  Suddenly, as if it had come up out of the ground, I perceived a tram-car keeping abreast of the riding and walking and driving, and through all I was agreeably aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing donkeys on the bridle-path next the tram. I confess that they interested me more than my social equals and superiors; I should have liked to talk with those fathers and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on the cruppers of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially to know what passed in the mind of one dear little girl who sat before her father with her bare brown legs tucked into the pockets of the pannier.