As Long As Our
Train Paused, No Electrifying Spark Kindled Them To A Show Of Emotion;
But It Would Have Been Interesting To See What Happened After We Left
Them Behind; They Could Not Have Kept Their Attitude Of Mutual
Indifference Much Longer.
These peasants, like the Spaniards everywhere,
were of an intelligent and sagacious look; they only wanted a chance,
one must think, to be a leading race.
They have sometimes an anxiety of
appeal in their apathy, as if they would like to know more than they do.
There was some livelier thronging at the station where the train stopped
for luncheon, but secure with the pretty rush-basket which the head
waiter at our hotel, so much better than the hotel, had furnished us at
starting, we kept to our car; and there presently we were joined by a
young couple who were unmistakably a new married couple. The man was of
a rich brown, and the woman of a dead white with dead black hair. They
both might have been better-looking than they were, but apparently not
better otherwise, for at Seville the groom helped us out of the car with
our hand-bags.
I do not know what polite offers from him had already brought out the
thanks in which our speech bewrayed us; but at our outlandish accents
they at once became easier. They became frankly at home with themselves,
and talked in their Andalusian patter with no fear of being understood.
I might, indeed, have been far apter in Spanish without understanding
their talk, for when printed the Andalusian dialect varies as far from
the Castilian as, say, the Venetian varies from the Tuscan, and when
spoken, more. It may then be reduced almost wholly to vowel sounds, and
from the lips of some speakers it is really no more consonantal than if
it came from the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft _c_ or the
_z,_ as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the _s_ instead, as
the readerwill find amusingly noted in the Sevillian chapters of _The
Sister of San Sulpice,_ which are the most charming chapters of that
most charming novel. At the stations there were sometimes girls and
sometimes boys with water for sale from stone bottles, who walked by the
cars crying it; and there were bits of bright garden, or there were
flowers in pots. There were also poor little human flowers, or call them
weeds, if you will, that suddenly sprang up beside our windows, and
moved their petals in pitiful prayer for alms. They always sprang up on
the off side of the train, so that the trainmen could not see them, but
I hope no trainman in Spain would have had the heart to molest them. As
a matter of taste in vegetation, however, we preferred an occasional
effect of mixed orange and pomegranate trees, with their perennial green
and their autumnal red. We were, in fact, so spoiled by the profusion of
these little human flowers, or weeds, that we even liked the change to
the dried stalk of an old man, flowering at top into a flat basket of
pale-pink shrimps.
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