Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  IV

  Suddenly, on the way home to our very English hotel, the air of Ronda seemed charged with English. We were already used to the English of our young guide, which so far as it went, went firmly and courageously after forethought and reflection for each sentence, but we were not quite prepared for the English of two polite youths who lifted their hats as they passed us and said, “Good afternoon.” The general English lasted quite overnight and far into the next day when we found several natives prepared to try it on us in the pretty Alameda, and learned from one, who proved to be the teacher of it in the public school, that there were some twenty boys studying it there: heaven knows why, but the English hotel and its success may have suggested it to them as a means of prosperity. The students seem each prepared to guide strangers through Ronda, but sometimes they fail of strangers. That was the case with the pathetic young hunchback whom we met in Alameda, and who owned that he had guided none that day. In view of this and as a prophylactic against a course of bad luck, I made so bold as to ask if I might venture to repair the loss of the peseta which he would otherwise have earned. He smiled wanly, and then with the countenance of the teacher, he submitted and thanked me in English which I can cordially recommend to strangers knowing no Spanish.

  All this was at the end of another morning when we had set out with the purpose of seeing the rest of Ronda for ourselves. We chose a back street parallel to the great thoroughfare leading to the new bridge, and of a squalor which we might have imagined but had not. The dwellers in the decent-looking houses did not seem to mind the sights and scents of their street, but these revolted us, and we made haste out of it into the avenue where the greater world of Ronda was strolling or standing about, but preferably standing about. In the midst of it, at the entrance of the new bridge we heard ourselves civilly saluted and recognized with some hesitation the donkey’s harness-maker who, in his Sunday dress and with his hat on, was not just the work-day presence we knew. He held by the hand a pretty boy of eleven years, whom he introduced as his second son, self-destined to follow the elder brother to America, and duly take up the profession of teaching in Puerto Rico after experiencing the advantages of the Escuela Mann. His father said that he already knew some English, and he proposed that the boy should go about with us and practise it, and after polite demur and insistence the child came with us, to our great pleasure. He bore himself with fit gravity, in his cap and long linen pinafore as he went before us, and we were personally proud of his fine, long face and his serious eyes, dark and darkened yet more by their long lashes. He knew the way to just such a book store as we wanted, where the lady behind the desk knew him and willingly promised to get me some books in the Andalusian dialect, and send them to our hotel by him at half past twelve. Naturally she did not do so, but he came to report her failure to get them. We had offered to pay him for his trouble, but he forbade us, and when we had overcome his scruple he brought the money back, and we had our trouble over again to make him keep it. To this hour I do not know how we ever brought ourselves to part with him; perhaps it was his promise of coming to America next year that prevailed with us; his brother was returning on a visit and then they were going back together.

  V

  Our search for literature in Ronda was not wholly a failure. At another bookstore, I found one of those local histories which I was always vainly trying for in other Spanish towns, and I can praise the Historia de Ronda par Federico Lozano Gutierrez as well done, and telling all that one would ask to know about that famous city. The author’s picture is on the cover, and with his charming letter dedicating the book to his father goes far to win the reader’s heart. Outside the bookseller’s a blind minstrel was playing the guitar in the care of a small boy who was selling, not singing, the ballads. They celebrated the prowess of Spain in recent wars, and it would not be praising them too highly to say that they seemed such as might have been written by a drum-major. Not that I think less of them for that reason, or that I think I need humble myself greatly to the historian of Ronda for associating their purchase with that of his excellent little book. If I had bought some of the blind minstrel’s almanacs and jest-books I might indeed apologize, but ballads are another thing.

  After we left the bookseller’s, our little guide asked us if we would like to see a church, and we said that we would, and he took us into a white and gold interior, with altar splendors out of proportion to its simplicity, all in the charge of a boy no older than himself, who was presently joined by two other contemporaries. They followed us gravely about, and we felt that it was an even thing between ourselves and the church as objects of interest equally ignored by Baedeker. Then we thought we would go home and proposed going by the Alameda.

  That is a beautiful place, where one may walk a good deal, and drive, rather less, but not sit down much unless indeed one likes being swarmed upon by the beggars who have a just priority of the benches. There seemed at first to be nobody walking in the Alameda except a gentleman pacing to and from the handsome modern house at the first corner, which our guide said was this cavalier’s house. He interested me beyond any reason I could give; he looked as if he might represent the highest society in Ronda, but did not find it an adequate occupation, and might well have interests and ambitions beyond it. I make him my excuses for intruding my print upon him, but I would give untold gold if I had it to know all about such a man in such a city, walking up and down under the embrowning trees and shrinking flowers of its Alameda, on a Sunday morning like that.

  Our guide led us to the back gate of our hotel garden, where we found ourselves in the company of several other students of English. There was our charming young guide of the day before and there was that sad hunchback already mentioned, and there was their teacher who seemed so few years older and master of so little more English. Together we looked into the valley into which the vision makes its prodigious plunge at Ronda before lifting again over the fertile plain to the amphitheater of its mighty mountains; and there we took leave of that nice boy who would not follow us into our garden because, as he showed us by the sign, it was forbidden to any but guests. He said he was going into the country with his family for the afternoon, and with some difficulty he owned that he expected to play there; it was truly an admission hard to make for a boy of his gravity. We shook hands at parting with him, and with our yesterday’s guide, and with the teacher and with the hunchback; they all offered it in the bond of our common English; and then we felt that we had parted with much, very much of what was sweetest and best in Ronda.

  VI

  The day had been so lovely till now that we said we would stay many days in Ronda, and we loitered in the sun admiring the garden; the young landlady among her flowers said that all the soil had to be brought for it in carts and panniers, and this made us admire its autumn blaze the more. That afternoon we had planned taking our tea on the terrace for the advantage of looking at the sunset light on the mountains, but suddenly great black clouds blotted it out. Then we lost courage; it appeared to us that it would be both brighter and, warmer by the sea and that near Gibraltar we could more effectually prevent our steamer from getting away to New York without us. We called for our bill, and after luncheon the head waiter who brought it said that the large black cat which had just made friends with us always woke him if he slept late in the morning and followed him into the town like a dog when he walked there.

  It was hard to part with a cat like that, but it was hard to part with anything in Ronda. Yet we made the break, and instead of ruining over the precipitous face of the rock where the city stands, as we might have expected, we glided smoothly down the long grade into the storm-swept lowlands sloping to the sea. They grew more fertile as we descended and after we had left a mountain valley where the mist hung grayest and chillest, we suddenly burst into a region of mellow fruitfulness, where the haze was all luminous, and where the oranges hung gold and green upon the trees, and the women brought grapes and peaches and apples to the train. The towns seemed
to welcome us southward and the woods we knew instantly to be of cork trees, with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza under their branches anywhere we chose to look.

  Otherwise, the journey was without those incidents which have so often rendered these pages thrilling. Just before we left Ronda a couple, self-evidently the domestics of a good family, got into our first-class carriage though they had unquestionably only third-class tickets. They had the good family’s dog with them, and after an unintelligible appeal to us and to the young English couple in the other corner, they remained and banished any misgivings they had by cheerful dialogue. The dog coiled himself down at my feet and put his nose close to my ankles, so that without rousing his resentment I could not express in Spanish my indignation at what I felt to be an outrageous intrusion: servants, we all are, but in traveling first class one must draw the line at dogs, I said as much to the English couple, but they silently refused any part in the demonstration. Presently the conductor came out to the window for our fares, and he made the Spanish pair observe that they had third-class tickets and their dog had none. He told them they must get out, but they noted to him the fact that none of us had objected to their company, or their dog’s, and they all remained, referring themselves to us for sympathy when the conductor left. After the next station the same thing happened with little change; the conductor was perhaps firmer and they rather more yielding in their disobedience. Once more after a stop the conductor appeared and told them that when the train halted again, they and their dog must certainly get out. Then something surprising happened: they really got out, and very amiably; perhaps it was the place where they had always meant to get out; but it was a great triumph for the railway company, which owed nothing in the way of countenance to the young English couple; they had done nothing but lunch from their basket and bottle. We ourselves arrived safely soon after nightfall at Algeciras, just in time for dinner in the comfortable mother-hotel whose pretty daughter had made us so much at home in Ronda.

  XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA

  When we walked out on the terrace of our hotel at Algeciras after breakfast, the first morning, we were greeted by the familiar form of the Rock of Gibraltar still advertising, as we had seen it three years before, a well-known American insurance company. It rose beyond five miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every other day for three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at last for New York.

  Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not only because of our Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened ground, with walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses, beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to meet the stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it urged day after day more winningly upon us as the last place where we should feel the charm of Spain unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it beyond the historic clue, for I think the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing that the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the thirteen hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured it and their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and remain so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the inimical English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again, haunted only by “a deep dream of peace” till the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly assisted by an American envoy, made it the scene of their famous conference for settling the Morocco question in. 1906.

  I think this is my whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras, and until I come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of history. I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city again from the Christians, after twenty-five years, and demolished it, for I prefer to remember it as it has been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series of red-tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping them. It is a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who live in agreeable little houses, with patios open to the passer, and with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring, enviously closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas and the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane trees dropping round them in the still air.

  The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next our hotel, but with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and faced by summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, “The Picnic Restaurant,” and “The Cabin Tea Room,” where no doubt there is something to be had beside sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, with the Spanish custom-house which their passengers must pass through and have their packages and persons searched for contraband. One heard of wild caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties which were sometimes made to pass the prime cost of the goods in Gibraltar. I myself only carried in books which after the first few declarations were recognized as of no imaginable value and passed with a genial tolerance, as a sort of joke, by officers whom I saw feeling the persons of their fellow-Spaniards unsparingly over.

  We had, if anything, less business really in Algeciras than in Gibraltar, but we went into the town nearly every afternoon, and wantonly bought things. By this means we proved that the Andalusian shopmen had not the proud phlegm of the Castilians across their counters. In the principal dry-goods store two salesmen rivaled each other in showing us politeness, and sent home our small purchases as promptly as if we had done them a favor in buying. We were indeed the wonder of our fellow-customers who were not buying; but our pride was brought down in the little shop where the proprietress was too much concerned in cooking her dinner (it smelled delicious) to mind our wish for a very cheap green vase, inestimably Spanish after we got it home. However, in another shop where the lady was ironing her week’s wash on the counter, a lady friend who was making her an afternoon call got such a vase down for us and transacted the negotiation out of pure good will for both parties to it.

  Parallel with the railway was a channel where small fishing-craft lay, and where a leisurely dredging-machine was stirring up the depths in a stench so dire that I wonder we do not smell it across the Atlantic. Over this channel a bridge led into the town, and offered the convenient support of its parapet to the crowd of spectators who wished to inhale that powerful odor at their ease, and who hung there throughout the working-day; the working-day of the dredging-machine, that is. The population was so much absorbed in this that when we first crossed into the town, we found no beggar children even, though there were a few blind beggarmen, but so few that a boy who had one of them in charge was obliged to leave off smelling the river and run and hunt him up for us. Other boys were busy in street-sweeping and b-r-r-r-r-ing to the donkeys that carried off the sweepings in panniers; and in the fine large plaza before the principal church of Algeciras there was a boy who had plainly nothing but mischief to do, though he did not molest us farther than to ask in English, “Want to see the cathedral?” Then he went his way swiftly and we went into the church, which we found very whitewashed and very Moorish in architecture, but very Spanish in the Blessed Virgins on most of the altars, dressed in brocades and jewels
. A sacristan was brushing and dusting the place, but he did not bother us, and we went freely about among the tall candles standing on the floor as well as on the altars, and bearing each a placard attached with black ribbon, and dedicated in black letters on silver “To the Repose of This or That” one among the dead.

  The meaning was evident enough, but we sought something further of the druggist at the corner, who did his best for us in such English as he had. It was not quite the English of Ronda; but he praised his grammar while he owned that his vocabulary was in decay from want of practise. In fact, he well-nigh committed us to the purchase of one of those votive candles, which he understood we wished to buy; he all but sent to the sacristan to get one. There were several onlookers, as there always are in Latin pharmacies, and there was a sad young mother waiting for medicine with a sick baby in her arms. The druggist said it had fever of the stomach; he seemed proud of the fact, and some talk passed between him and the bystanders which related to it. We asked if he had any of the quince jelly which we had learned to like in Seville, but he could only refer us to the confectioner’s on the other corner. Here was not indeed quince jelly, but we compromised on quince cheese, as the English call it; and we bought several boxes of it to take to America, which I am sorry to say moulded before our voyage began, and had to be thrown away. Near this confectioner’s was a booth where boiled sweet-potatoes were sold, with oranges and joints of sugar-cane, and, spitted on straws, that terrible fruit of the strawberry tree which we had tasted at Honda without wishing to taste it ever again. Yet there was a boy boldly buying several straws of it and chancing the intoxication which over-indulgence in it is said to cause. Whether the excitement of these events was too great or not, we found ourselves suddenly unwilling, if not unable, to walk back to our hotel, and we took a cab of the three standing in the plaza. One was without a horse, another without a driver, but the third had both, as in some sort of riddle, and we had no sooner taken it than a horse was put into the first and a driver ran out and got on the box of the second, as if that was the answer to the riddle.