The Fathers And Mothers Sat In Front With The Children
Between Them Of All Ages Down To Babies In Their Nurses' Arms.
These
made themselves perfectly at home, in one case reaching over the edge of
the box and clawing the hair of a gentleman standing below and openly
enjoying the joke.
The friendly equality of the prevailing spirit was
expressed in the presence of the family servants at the back of the
family boxes, from which the latest fashions showed themselves here and
there, as well as the belated local versions of them. In the orchestra
the men had promptly lighted their cigars and the air was blue with
smoke. Friends found one another, to their joyful amaze, not having met
since morning; and especially young girls were enraptured to recognize
young men; one girl shook hands twice with a young man, and gurgled with
laughter as long as he stood near her.
As a lifelong lover of the drama and a boyish friend of Granadan
romance, I ought to have cared more for the play than the people who had
come to it, but I did not. The play was unintentionally amusing enough;
but after listening for two hours to the monotonous cadences of the
speeches which the persons of it recited to one another, while the
ladies of the Moorish world took as public a part in its events as if
they had been so many American Christians, we came away. We had already
enjoyed the first entr'acte, when the men all rose and went out, or
lighted fresh cigars and went to talk with the Paris hats and plumes or
the Spanish mantillas and high combs in the boxes. The curtain had
scarcely fallen when the author of the play was called before it and
applauded by the generous, the madly generous, spectators. He stood
bowing and bowing on tiptoe, as if the wings of his rapture lifted him
to them and would presently fly away with him. He could not drink deep
enough of the delicious draught, put brimming to his lips, and the
divine intoxication must have lasted him through the night, for after
breakfast the next morning I met him in our common corridor at the hotel
smiling to himself, and when I could not forbear smiling in return he
smiled more; he beamed, he glowed upon me as if I were a crowded house
still cheering him to the echo. It was a beautiful moment and I realized
even better than the afternoon before what it was to be a young poet and
a young Spanish poet, and to have had a first play given for the first
time in the city of Granada, where the morning papers glowed with praise
so ardent that the print all but smoked with it. We were alone in the
corridor where we met, and our eyes confessed us kindred spirits, and I
hope he understood me better than if I had taken him in my arms and
kissed him on both cheeks.
I really had no time for that; I was on my way down-stairs to witness
the farewell scene between the leading lady and the large group of young
Granadans who had come up to see her off. When she came out to the
carriage with her husband, by a delicate refinement of homage they
cheered him, and left him to deliver their devotion to her, which she
acknowledged only with a smile. But not so the leading lady's
lady's-maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our omnibus window
to the assembled upper servants of the hotel. She put her head out and
said in a voice hoarse with excitement and good-fellowship, _"Adios,
hombres!"_ ("Good-by, men!"), and vanished with us from their applausive
presence.
With us, I say, for we, too, were leaving Granada in rain which was snow
on the Sierra and so cold that we might well have seemed leaving
Greenland. The brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash of the
running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with us the moonlight
night of our coming, now felt their anxious way down in the dismal
drizzle of that last morning, and brought us at last to the plaza before
the station. It was a wide puddle where I thought our craft should have
floundered, but it made its way to the door, and left us dry shod within
and glad to be quitting the city of my young dreams.
XII
THE SURPRISES OF RONDA
The rain that pelted sharply into the puddle before the station at
Granada was snow on the Sierra, and the snow that fell farther and
farther down the mountainsides resolved itself over the Vega into a fog
as white and almost as cold. Half-way across the storied and fabled
plain the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and then we saw by day, as we
had already seen by night, how the Vega was plentifully dotted with
white cottages amid breadths of wheat-land where the peasants were
plowing. Here and there were fields of Indian corn, and in a certain
place there was a small vineyard; in one of the middle distances there
spread a forest of Lombardy poplars, yellow as gold, and there was
abundance of this autumn coloring in the landscape, which grew lonelier
as we began to mount from the level. Olives, of course, abounded, and
there were oak woods and clumps of wild cherry trees. The towns were far
from the stations, which we reached at the rate of perhaps two miles an
hour as we approached the top of the hills; and we might have got out
and walked without fear of being left behind by our train, which made
long stops, as if to get its breath for another climb. Before this the
sole companion of our journey, whom we decided to be a landed proprietor
coming out in his riding-gear to inspect his possessions, had left us,
but at the first station after our descent began other passengers got
in, with a captain of Civil Guards among them, very loquacious and very
courteous, and much deferred to by the rest of us.
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