I Rejoiced Almost As Much In The Machinery As In The
Men Who Were Loading The Steamers; Even The Huge
Casks of olives, which
were working from the salt-water poured into them and frothing at the
bung in great
White sponges of spume, might have been examples of toil
by which those noisome vagabonds could well have profited. But now we
had come to see another sort of leisure - the famous leisure of fortune
and fashion driving in the Delicias, but perhaps never quite fulfilling
the traveler's fond ideal of it. We came many times to the Delicias in
hope of it, with decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last
without entire fruition. For our first visit we could not have had a
fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening from a streak of sunset
beyond Triana, and we arrived in appropriate circumstance, round the
immense circle of the bull-ring and past the palace which the Duc de
Montpensier has given the church for a theological seminary, with long
stretches of beautiful gardens. Then we were in the famous Paseo, a
drive with footways on each side, and on one side dusky groves widening
to the river. The paths were lit with gleaming statues, and among the
palms and the eucalyptuses were orange trees full of their golden
globes, which we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were of
that bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, not because they are
in accord with the acrid nature of man there, but that they may be
wrought into marmalade. On the other hand stretched less formal woods,
with fields for such polite athletics as tennis, which the example of
the beloved young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant
favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was
badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is
expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of dust and every
evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to
soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, and that evening
we had it mostly to ourselves, though there were two or three carriages
with ladies in hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted and
courageously walking, while their carriages followed. A magnate of some
sort was shut alone in a brougham, in the care of footman and coachman
with deeply silver-banded hats; there were a few military and civil
riders, and there was distinctly a young man in a dog-cart with a groom,
keeping abreast the landau of three ladies in mantillas, with whom he
was improving what seemed a chance acquaintance. Along the course the
public park gave way at times to the grounds of private villas; before
one of these a boy did what he could for us by playing ball with a
priest. At other points there were booths with chairs and tables, where
I am sure interesting parties of people would have been sitting if they
could have expected us to pass.
VIII
The reader, pampered by the brilliant excitements of our American
promenades, may think this spectacle of the gay world of Seville dull;
but he ought to have been with us a colder, redder, and sadder evening
when we had the Delicias still more to ourselves. Afterward the Delicias
seemed to cheer up, and the place was fairly frequented on a holiday,
which we had not suspected was one till our cabman convinced us from his
tariff that we must pay him double, because you must always do that in
Seville on holidays. By this time we knew that most of the Sevillian
rank and riches had gone to Madrid for the winter, and we were the more
surprised by some evident show of them in the private turnouts where by
far most of the turnouts were public. But in Spain a carriage is a
carriage, and the Sevillian cabs are really very proper and sometimes
even handsome, and we felt that our own did no discredit to the
Delicias. Many of the holiday-makers were walking, and there were
actually women on foot in hats and hobble-skirts without being openly
mocked. On the evening of our last resort to the Delicias it was quite
thronged far into the twilight, after a lemon sunset that continued to
tinge the east with pink and violet. There were hundreds of carriages,
fully half of them private, with coachmen and footmen in livery. With
them it seemed to be the rule to stop in the circle at a turning-point a
mile off and watch the going and coming. It was a serious spectacle, but
not solemn, and it had its reliefs, its high-lights. It was always
pleasant to see three Spanish ladies on a carriage seat, the middle one
protruding because of their common bulk, and oftener in umbrella-wide
hats with towering plumes than in the charming mantilla. There were no
top-hats or other formality in the men's dress; some of them were on
horseback, and there were two women riding.
Suddenly, as if it had come up out of the ground, I perceived a tram-car
keeping abreast of the riding and walking and driving, and through all I
was agreeably aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing donkeys
on Jhe bridle-path next the tram. I confess that they interested me more
than my social equals and superiors; I should have liked to talk with
those fathers and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on the cruppers
of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially to know what passed
in the mind of one dear little girl who sat before her father with her
bare brown legs tucked into the pockets of the pannier.
X
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS
It is always a question how much or little we had better know about the
history of a strange country when seeing it.
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