I Could Not Honestly Say That The Stations Or The People About Them Were
More Interesting Than In La Mancha.
But at one place, where some
gentlemen in linen jackets dismounted with their guns, a group of men
with
Dogs leashed in pairs and saddle-horses behind them, took me with
the sense of something peculiarly native where everything was so native.
They were slim, narrow-hipped young fellows, tight-jerkined,
loose-trousered, with a sort of divided apron of leather facing the leg
and coming to the ankle; and all were of a most masterly Velasquez
coloring and drawing. As they stood smoking motionlessly, letting the
smoke drift from their nostrils, they seemed somehow of the same make
with the slouching hounds, and they leaned forward together, giving the
hunters no visible or audible greeting, but questioning their will with
one quality of gaze. The hunters moved toward them, but not as if they
belonged together, or expected any sort of demonstration from the men,
dogs, and horses that were of course there to meet them. 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. He gave us our first sight of sea-fruit, when we had
got, without knowing it, to Seville Junction. There was, oddly enough,
no other fruit for sale there; but there was a very agreeable-looking
booth at the end of the platform placarded with signs of Puerto Rico
coffee, cognac, and other drinks; and outside of it there were
wash-basins and clean towels. I do not know how an old woman with a
blind daughter made herself effective in the crowd, which did not seem
much preoccupied with the opportunities of ablution and refection at
that booth; but perhaps she begged with her blind daughter's help while
the crowd was busy in assorting itself for Cadiz and Seville and Malaga
and Cordova and other musically syllabled mothers of history and
romance.
II
A few miles and a few minutes more and we were in the embrace of the
loveliest of them, which was at first the clutch on the octroi. But the
octroi at Seville is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who
looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded eighteen-sixties,
eased us - not very swiftly, but softly - through the local customs, and
then we drove neither so swiftly nor so softly to the hotel, where we
had decided we would have rooms on the _patio._ We had still to learn
that if there is a _patio_ in a Spanish hotel you cannot have rooms in
it, because they are either in repair or they are occupied. In the
present case they were occupied; but we could have rooms over the
street, which were the same as in the _patio,_ and which were perfectly
quiet, as we could perceive from the trolley-cars grinding and squealing
under their windows.
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