Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  The Latin conception of a theater is of something rather more barnlike than ours, but this theater was of a sufficiently handsome presence, and when we had been carried into it by the physical pressure exerted upon us by the crowd at the entrance we found its vastness already thronged. The seats in the orchestra were mostly taken; the gallery under the roof was loud with the impatience for the play which the auditors there testified by cries and whistlings and stampings until the curtain lifted; the tiers of boxes rising all round the theater were filled with family parties. The fathers and mothers sat in front with the children between them of all ages down to babies in their nurses’ arms. These made themselves perfectly at home, in one case reaching over the edge of the box and clawing the hair of a gentleman standing below and openly enjoying the joke. The friendly equality of the prevailing spirit was expressed in the presence of the family servants at the back of the family boxes, from which the latest fashions showed themselves here and there, as well as the belated local versions of them. In the orchestra the men had promptly lighted their cigars and the air was blue with smoke. Friends found one another, to their joyful amaze, not having met since morning; and especially young girls were enraptured to recognize young men; one girl shook hands twice with a young man, and gurgled with laughter as long as he stood near her.

  As a lifelong lover of the drama and a boyish friend of Granadan romance, I ought to have cared more for the play than the people who had come to it, but I did not. The play was unintentionally amusing enough; but after listening for two hours to the monotonous cadences of the speeches which the persons of it recited to one another, while the ladies of the Moorish world took as public a part in its events as if they had been so many American Christians, we came away. We had already enjoyed the first entr’acte, when the men all rose and went out, or lighted fresh cigars and went to talk with the Paris hats and plumes or the Spanish mantillas and high combs in the boxes. The curtain had scarcely fallen when the author of the play was called before it and applauded by the generous, the madly generous, spectators. He stood bowing and bowing on tiptoe, as if the wings of his rapture lifted him to them and would presently fly away with him. He could not drink deep enough of the delicious draught, put brimming to his lips, and the divine intoxication must have lasted him through the night, for after breakfast the next morning I met him in our common corridor at the hotel smiling to himself, and when I could not forbear smiling in return he smiled more; he beamed, he glowed upon me as if I were a crowded house still cheering him to the echo. It was a beautiful moment and I realized even better than the afternoon before what it was to be a young poet and a young Spanish poet, and to have had a first play given for the first time in the city of Granada, where the morning papers glowed with praise so ardent that the print all but smoked with it. We were alone in the corridor where we met, and our eyes confessed us kindred spirits, and I hope he understood me better than if I had taken him in my arms and kissed him on both cheeks.

  I really had no time for that; I was on my way down-stairs to witness the farewell scene between the leading lady and the large group of young Granadans who had come up to see her off. When she came out to the carriage with her husband, by a delicate refinement of homage they cheered him, and left him to deliver their devotion to her, which she acknowledged only with a smile. But not so the leading lady’s lady’s-maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our omnibus window to the assembled upper servants of the hotel. She put her head out and said in a voice hoarse with excitement and good-fellowship, “Adios, hombres!” (“Good-by, men!”), and vanished with us from their applausive presence.

  With us, I say, for we, too, were leaving Granada in rain which was snow on the Sierra and so cold that we might well have seemed leaving Greenland. The brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash of the running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with us the moonlight night of our coming, now felt their anxious way down in the dismal drizzle of that last morning, and brought us at last to the plaza before the station. It was a wide puddle where I thought our craft should have floundered, but it made its way to the door, and left us dry shod within and glad to be quitting the city of my young dreams.

  XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA

  The rain that pelted sharply into the puddle before the station at Granada was snow on the Sierra, and the snow that fell farther and farther down the mountainsides resolved itself over the Vega into a fog as white and almost as cold. Half-way across the storied and fabled plain the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and then we saw by day, as we had already seen by night, how the Vega was plentifully dotted with white cottages amid breadths of wheat-land where the peasants were plowing. Here and there were fields of Indian corn, and in a certain place there was a small vineyard; in one of the middle distances there spread a forest of Lombardy poplars, yellow as gold, and there was abundance of this autumn coloring in the landscape, which grew lonelier as we began to mount from the level. Olives, of course, abounded, and there were oak woods and clumps of wild cherry trees. The towns were far from the stations, which we reached at the rate of perhaps two miles an hour as we approached the top of the hills; and we might have got out and walked without fear of being left behind by our train, which made long stops, as if to get its breath for another climb. Before this the sole companion of our journey, whom we decided to be a landed proprietor coming out in his riding-gear to inspect his possessions, had left us, but at the first station after our descent began other passengers got in, with a captain of Civil Guards among them, very loquacious and very courteous, and much deferred to by the rest of us. At Bobadilla, where again we had tea with hot goat’s milk in it, we changed cars, and from that on we had the company of a Rock-Scorpion pair whose name was beautifully Italian and whose speech was beautifully English, as the speech of those born at Gibraltar should rightfully be.

  I

  It was quite dark at Ronda when our omnibus drove into the gardened grounds of one of those admirable inns which an English company is building in Spain, and put us down at the door of the office, where a typical English manageress and her assistant appointed us pleasant rooms and had fires kindled in them while we dined. There were already fires in the pleasant reading-room, which did not diffuse a heat too great for health but imparted to the eye a sense of warmth such as we had experienced nowhere else in Spain. Over all was spread a quiet and quieting British influence; outside of the office the nature of the service was Spanish, but the character of it was English; the Spanish waiters spoke English, and they looked English in dress and manner; superficially the chambermaid was as English as one could have found her in the United Kingdom, but at heart you could see she was as absolutely and instinctively a Spanish camerera as any in a hotel of Madrid or Seville. In the atmosphere of insularity the few Spanish guests were scarcely distinguishable from Anglo-Saxons, though a group of magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by the duenna-like correctness of their mother, looked with their exaggerated hair and eyes like Spanish ladies made up for English parts in a play.

  We had our breakfast in the reading-room where all the rest were breakfasting and trying not to see that they were keeping one another from the fire. It was very cold, for Ronda is high in the mountains which hem it round and tower far above it. We had already had our first glimpse of their summits from our own windows, but it was from the terrace outside the reading-room that we felt their grandeur most after we had drunk our coffee: we could scarcely have borne it before. In their presence, we could not realize at once that Ronda itself was a mountain, a mere mighty mass of rock, cleft in twain, with chasmal depths where we saw pygmy men and mules creeping out upon the valley that stretched upward to the foot of the Sierra. Why there should ever have been a town built there in the prehistoric beginning, except that the rock was so impossible to take, and why it should have therefore been taken by that series of invaders who pervaded all Spain — by the Phoenicians, by the Carthaginians, by the Romans, by the Goths, by the Moors, by the
Christians, and after many centuries by the French, and finally by the Spaniards again — it would not be easy to say. Among its many conquerors, the Moors left their impress upon it, though here as often as elsewhere in Spain their impress is sometimes merely a decoration of earlier Roman work. There remains a Roman bridge which the Moors did not make over into the likeness of their architecture, but built a bridge of their own which also remains and may be seen from the magnificent structure with which the Spaniards have arched the abyss where the river rushes writhing and foaming through the gorge three hundred feet below. There on the steps that lead from the brink, the eye of pity may still see the files of Christian captives bringing water up to their Moslem masters; but as one cannot help them now, even by the wildest throe, it is as well to give a vain regret to the architect of the Spanish bridge, who fell to his death from its parapet, and then push on to the market hard by.

  II

  You have probably come to see that market because you have read in your guide-books that the region round about Ronda is one of the richest in Spain for grapes and peaches and medlars and melons and other fruits whose names melt in the mouth. If you do not find in the market the abundance you expect of its picturesqueness you must blame the lateness of the season, and go visit the bull-ring, one of the most famous in the world, for Ronda is not less noted for its toreros and aficionados than for its vineyards and orchards. But here again the season will have been before you with the glory of those corridas which you have still hoped not to witness but to turn from as an example to the natives before the first horse is disemboweled or the first bull slain, or even the first banderillero tossed over the barrier.

  The bull-ring seemed fast shut to the public when we approached it, but we found ourselves smilingly welcomed to the interior by the kindly mother in charge. She made us free of the whole vast place, where eight thousand people could witness in perfect comfort the dying agonies of beasts and men, but especially she showed us the chamber over the gate, full of bullfighting properties: the pikes, the little barbed pennons, the long sword by which the bull suffers and dies, as well as the cumbrous saddles and bridles and spears for the unhappy horses and their riders. She was especially compassionate of the horses, and she had apparently no pleasure in any of the cruel things, though she was not critical of the sport. The King of Spain is president of the Ronda bull-fighting association, and she took us into the royal box, which is the worthier to be seen because under it the bulls are shunted and shouted into the ring from the pen where they have been kept in the dark. Before we escaped her husband sold us some very vivid postal cards representing the sport; so that with the help of a large black cat holding the center of the ring, we felt that we had seen as much of a bull-fight as we could reasonably wish.

  We were seeing the wonders of the city in the guidance of a charming boy whom we had found in wait for us at the gate of the hotel garden when we came out. He offered his services in the best English he had, and he had enough of it to match my Spanish word for word throughout the morning. He led us from the bull-ring to the church known to few visitors, I believe, where the last male descendant of Montezuma lies entombed, under a fit inscription, and then through the Plaza past the college of Montezuma, probably named for this heir of the Aztec empire. I do not know why the poor prince should have come to die in Ronda, but there are many things in Ronda which I could not explain: especially why a certain fruit is sold by an old woman on the bridge. Its berries are threaded on a straw and look like the most luscious strawberries but taste like turpentine, though they may be avoided under the name of madrones. But on no account would I have the reader avoid the Church of Santa Maria Mayor. It is so dark within that he will not see the finely carved choir seats without the help of matches, or the pictures at all; but it is worth realizing, as one presently may, that the hither part of the church is a tolerably perfect mosque of Moorish architecture, through which you must pass to the Renaissance temple of the Christian faith.

  Near by is the Casa de Mondragon which he should as little miss if he has any pleasure in houses with two patios perching on the gardened brink of a precipice and overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys in the whole world, with donkey-trains climbing up from it over the face of the cliff. The garden is as charming as red geraniums and blue cabbages can make a garden, and the house is fascinatingly quaint and unutterably Spanish, with the inner patio furnished in bright-colored cushions and wicker chairs, and looked into by a brown wooden gallery. A stately lemon-colored elderly woman followed us silently about, and the whole place was pervaded by a smell that was impossible at the time and now seems incredible.

  III

  I here hesitate before a little adventure which I would not make too much of nor yet minify: it seems to me so gentle and winning. I had long meant to buy a donkey, and I thought I could make no fitter beginning to this end than by buying a donkey’s head-stall in the country where donkeys are more respected and more brilliantly accoutred than anywhere else in the whole earth. When I ventured to suggest my notion, or call it dream, to our young guide, he instantly imagined it in its full beauty, and he led us directly to a shop in the principal street which for the richness and variety of the coloring in its display might have been a florist’s shop. Donkeys’ trappings in brilliant yellow, vermillion, and magenta hung from the walls, and head-stalls, gorgeously woven and embroidered, dangled from the roof. Among them and under them the donkeys’ harness-maker sat at his work, a short, brown, handsome man with eyes that seemed the more prominent because of his close-shaven head. We chose a headstall of such splendor that no heart could have resisted it, and while he sewed to it the twine muzzle which Spanish donkeys wear on their noses for the protection of the public, our guide expatiated upon us, and said, among other things to our credit, that we were from America and were going to take the head-stall back with us.

  The harness-maker lifted his head alertly. “Where, in America?” and we answered for ourselves, “From New York.”

  Then the harness-maker rose and went to an inner doorway and called through it something that brought out a comely, motherly woman as alert as himself. She verified our statement for herself, and having paved the way firmly for her next question she asked, “Do you know the Escuela Mann?”

  As well as our surprise would let us, we said that we knew the Mann School, both where and what it was.

  She waited with a sort of rapturous patience before saying, “My son, our eldest son, was educated at the Escuela Mann, to be a teacher, and now he is a professor in the Commercial College in Puerto Rico.”

  If our joint interest in this did not satisfy her expectation I for my part can never forgive myself; certainly I tried to put as much passion into my interest as I could, when she added that his education at the Escuela Mann was without cost to him. By this time, in fact, I was so proud of the Escuela Mann that I could not forbear proclaiming that a member of my own family, no less than the father of the grandson for whose potential donkey I was buying that headstall, was one of the architects of the Escuela Mann building.

  She now vanished within, and when she came out she brought her daughter, a gentle young girl who sat down and smiled upon us through the rest of the interview. She brought also an armful of books, the Spanish-English Ollendorff which her son had used in studying our language, his dictionary, and the copy-book where he had written his exercises, with two photographs of him, not yet too Americanized; and she showed us not only how correctly but how beautifully his exercises were done. If I did not admire these enough, again I cannot forgive myself, but she seemed satisfied with what I did, and she talked on about him, not too loquaciously, but lovingly and lovably as a mother should, and proudly as the mother of such a boy should, though without vainglory; I have forgotten to say that she had a certain distinction of face, and was appropriately dressed in black. By this time we felt that a head-stall for such a donkey as I was going to buy was not enough to get of such people, and I added a piece of embroidered
leather such as goes in Spain on the front of a donkey’s saddle; if we could not use it so, in final defect of the donkey, we could put it on a veranda chair. The saddler gave it at so low a price that we perceived he must have tacitly abated something from the visual demand, and when we did not try to beat him down, his wife went again into that inner room and came out with an iron-holder of scarlet flannel backed with canvas, and fringed with magenta, and richly inwrought with a Moorish design, in white, yellow, green, and purple. I say Moorish, because one must say something, but if it was a pattern of her own invention the gift was the more precious when she bestowed it on the sister of one of the architects of the Escuela Mann. That led to more conversation about the Escuela Mann, and about the graduate of it who was now a professor in Puerto Rico, and we all grew such friends, and so proud of one another, and of the country so wide open to the talents without cost to them, that when I asked her if she would not sometime be going to America, her husband answered almost fiercely in his determination, “I am going when I have learned English!” and to prove that this was no idle boast, he pronounced some words of our language at random, but very well. We parted in a glow of reciprocal esteem and I still think of that quarter-hour as one of my happiest; and whatever others may say, I say that to have done such a favor to one Spanish family as the Escuela Mann had been the means of our nation doing this one was a greater thing than to have taken Cuba from Spain and bought the Philippines when we had seized them already and had led the Filipinos to believe that we meant to give their islands to them.