She lays down the scarf reluctantly, saying, "Five?"
But the outraged mercer snorts scornfully, "Eight is my last word! Go
to!"
She moves away, thinking how well that scarf would look in the Apollo
Gardens, and casts over her shoulder a Parthian glance and bid, "Six!"
"Take it! It is madness, but I cannot waste my time in bargaining."
Both congratulate themselves on the operation. He would have taken five,
and she would have given seven. How trade would suffer if we had windows
in our breasts!
The first days of November are consecrated to all the saints, and to the
souls of all the blessed dead. They are observed in Spain with great
solemnity; but as the cemeteries are generally of the dreariest
character, bare, bleak, and most forbidding under the ashy sky of the
late autumn, the days are deprived of that exquisite sentiment that
pervades them in countries where the graves of the dead are beautiful.
There is nothing more touching than these offerings of memory you see
every year in Mont Parnasse and Pere-la-Chaise. Apart from all beliefs,
there is a mysterious influence for good exerted upon the living by the
memory of the beloved dead. On all hearts not utterly corrupt, the
thoughts that come by the graves of the departed fall like dew from
heaven, and quicken into life purer and higher resolves.
In Spain, where there is nothing but desolation in graveyards, the
churches are crowded instead, and the bereaved survivors commend to God
their departed friends and their own stricken hearts in the dim and
perfumed aisles of temples made with hands. A taint of gloom thus rests
upon the recollection and the prayer, far different from the consolation
that comes with the free air and the sunshine, and the infinite blue
vault, where Nature conspires with revelation to comfort and cherish and
console.
Christmas apparently comes in Spain on no other mission than that
referred to in the old English couplet, "bringing good cheer." The
Spaniards are the most frugal of people, but during the days that
precede their Noche Buena, their Good Night, they seem to be given up as
completely to cares of the commissariat as the most eupeptic of Germans.
Swarms of turkeys are driven in from the surrounding country, and taken
about the streets by their rustic herdsmen, making the roads gay with
their scarlet wattles, and waking rural memories by their vociferous
gobbling. The great market-place of the season is the Plaza Mayor. The
ever-fruitful provinces of the South are laid under contribution, and
the result is a wasteful show of tropical luxuriance that seems most
incongruous under the wintry sky. There are mountains of oranges and
dates, brown hillocks of nuts of every kind, store of every product of
this versatile soil. The air is filled with nutty and fruity fragrance.
Under the ancient arcades are the stalls of the butchers, rich with the
mutton of Castile, the hams of Estremadura, and the hero-nourishing
bull-beef of Andalusian pastures.
At night the town is given up to harmless racket. Nowhere has the
tradition of the Latin Saturnalia been fitted with less change into the
Christian calendar. Men, women, and children of the proletariat - the
unemancipated slaves of necessity - go out this night to cheat their
misery with noisy frolic. The owner of a tambourine is the equal of a
peer; the proprietor of a guitar is the captain of his hundred. They
troop through the dim city with discordant revel and song. They have
little idea of music. Every one sings and sings ill. Every one dances,
without grace or measure. Their music is a modulated howl of the East.
Their dancing is the savage leaping of barbarians. There is no lack of
couplets, religious, political, or amatory. I heard one ragged woman
with a brown baby at her breast go shrieking through the Street of the
Magdalen, -
"This is the eve of Christmas,
No sleep from now till morn,
The Virgin is in travail,
At twelve will the child be born!"
Behind her stumped a crippled beggar, who croaked in a voice rough with
frost and aguardiente his deep disillusion and distrust of the great: -
"This is the eve of Christmas,
But what is that to me?
We are ruled by thieves and robbers,
As it was and will always be."
Next comes a shouting band of the youth of Spain, strapping boys with
bushy locks, crisp and black almost to blueness, and gay young girls
with flexible forms and dark Arab eyes that shine with a phosphorescent
light in the shadows. They troop on with clacking castinets. The
challenge of the mozos rings out on the frosty air, -
"This is the eve of Christmas,
Let us drink and love our fill!"
And the saucy antiphon of girlish voices responds, -
"A man may be bearded and gray,
But a woman can fool him still!"
The Christmas and New-Year's holidays continue for a fortnight, ending
with the Epiphany. On the eve of the Day of the Kings a curious farce is
performed by bands of the lowest orders of the people, which
demonstrates the apparently endless naivete of their class. In every
coterie of water-carriers, or mozos de cordel, there will be one found
innocent enough to believe that the Magi are coming to Madrid that
night, and that a proper respect to their rank requires that they must
be met at the city gate. To perceive the coming of their feet, beautiful
upon the mountains, a ladder is necessary, and the poor victim of the
comedy is loaded with this indispensable "property." He is dragged by
his gay companions, who never tire of the exquisite wit of their jest,
from one gate to another, until suspicion supplants faith in the mind of
the neophyte, and the farce is over.
In the burgher society of Castile this night is devoted to a very
different ceremony.
