Part 10

“A man can do one of two things with his life,” Patsy philosophized, “Build it all up into a monument to his own memory, or lay it down in paving stones--or a bridge--for other people to walk over. Which is the best worth while? As if one could choose!” He dropped a stone into the water, and watched the circles spread into larger and larger rings.

We had arrived at Cordova too late to see the Mosque, and had come directly from the station to the bridge to watch the thin current of life and traffic pulsing in and out of the dead alive old town. There is no place like a bridge for gathering impressions of a strange city.

“Hé hé, Macho!” an old muleteer with gold earrings threw a stone at the brown mule, leader of his team, just in time to prevent his running into a donkey that was crossing the bridge in the other direction, laden with paniers full of terra cotta jars. Before the mule train had disappeared, we heard a great clatter and rattling of loose screws and rivets, as an old chaise came lumbering along the white highroad from the direction of Seville, and stopped at the bridge gate. The custom-house officer, dozing on his bench, woke up, and asked the usual tiresome question.

“Have their Graces anything to declare?”

The gentleman Grace, apparently deaf, behaved as if he had neither seen nor heard the officer, and had only stopped to flick a horsefly from his fat white mare. The lady Grace shook her silver curls.

“No, nothing to declare,” she said.

Strapped to the back of the chaise was a cylindrical, horsehair trunk, studded with brass nails.

“What might this contain?” The officer touched the trunk.

“Only our garments; we have been spending a week at the hacienda.”

“Open it, please. How is this, a ham?”

“Our own. The tax was paid when the pig was killed; twelve _pesetas_. It was far too much.”

“That is another matter. You must pay the tax on provisions brought into the city as well.” The officer weighed the ham, and began to make a calculation with pencil and note-book. “There is also to be added the fine for not having declared the ham.”

The lady’s eyes snapped angrily, as she gave the officer a piece of her mind. “You are a miserable loafer! It is to pay salaries to such lazy fellows as you that honest people are robbed of their honest money!”

It was growing late. By the time the ham was settled for, the vivid blue of the western sky had turned soft apple-green. We climbed a crazy stair to the window of the gate, to avoid a drove of cattle driven across the bridge by a _vaquero_ in a brown _capote_. The comfortable smell of kine came in at the window. On the other side of the Guadalquiver, in the golden haze of dust kicked up by those silly, helter-skeltering cows, lay Cordova. Before us rose the great Mosque; in the centre the towering masonry of the Christian Cathedral stood out in bold outline against the distant Sierra. The sun set quietly in the quiet sky; a few minutes after, the whole heaven was aflame with the glorious crimson after-glow; the river ran red; the whole earth shone with the reflection. The sunset was like the death of some great and unsuspected saint, some humble man, the glory of whose life is only known when he has gone and the whole world is filled with the light of the soul that has just passed from it.

“The moon will soon be up,” said Patsy. “Let us wait for it. We are not likely to see sunset and moonrise from Cordova bridge again.”

The custom-house officer made room for us on his wooden bench. As we sat watching the swallows flit back and forth over the river, Patsy told us stories about the great men who had lived at Cordova, and we all made believe we saw them cross the old bridge. A tall military man with a clanking sword passed through the gate.

“There goes Marcellus, the Tribune who conquered Cordova for Rome; our friend the engineer must have come here soon after him; isn’t it a pity we can’t find his name, when such silly ones are remembered?”

“He built a good bridge; does it matter whether he was called Caius or Cassius?”

“Why, yes, it matters to me,” Patsy persisted. “There was another Marcellus who came to Cordova later, in Julius Cæsar’s time. How talent runs in families! Cæsar sent him to rebuild the town after he had half destroyed it for taking Pompey’s side in that old quarrel we boys used to fight over again at school. The Senecas came from here, too; there is a square named for them. You remember the story about Seneca’s wife? When Nero sent word that Seneca must die, both he and his wife opened the veins in their arms. Seneca, who was much older than his wife, died first, whereupon Madam’s women bound up her veins, and she lived several years after. There was talent in that family, too; the father was a writer, and Lucan, the poet, was either a cousin or nephew. Hullo! Look at the folds of that old beggar’s capa; doesn’t it look like a toga? Now remember that cantankerous face of Seneca’s in the bust at the Naples Museum, and if you can’t see Nero’s tutor pottering over that old bridge you’ve no imagination!”

The swallows had all gone to their nests; the soft, fumbling flight of a pair of small bats wove a pattern against the fading sky.

“That portly gentleman on the white mule might well be Hosius, one time Bishop of Cordova. You never heard of him, perhaps, but you must have heard of the Nicene Creed,” Patsy went on. It was evident that we had to listen to all he knew about Cordova.

“The next time you hear that creed repeated, remember Hosius, Bishop here in Cordova for sixty-three years; he presided at the Council of Nicea when the creed was made. That was after he had failed in the task Constantine set him of persuading Arius to give up the Unitarian heresy. Think how often he must have ambled over this old bridge.”

It always has been hard to persuade people to give up the Unitarian heresy! Whenever I hear the Nicene creed, I shall think of Bishop Hosius whom, that night of nights, we saw ride across the old Roman bridge at Cordova on a white mule.

“The one I should like best to have known of all the great men who ever lived at Cordova was the Caliph Abd-er-Rahman. What a man he was! Servant of the compassionate, they called him. That is his Mosque, those are his palms; he planted the great-grandfathers of those trees with his own hand. If you could make Seneca’s toga out of that old beggar’s _capa_, can’t you see Abd-er-Rahman’s bournous in that young fellow’s cloak? He is as dark as an Arab; the red handkerchief knotted round his head under the sombrero makes a decent turban. He has the swagger of a _torrero_. Conqueror of bulls, conqueror of men, where is the difference? Toga, bournous, _capa_,--all three garments are practically the same.”

“What do you suppose Gonsalvo de Cordova, El Gran Capitan wore?”

“A cloak like the rest of them, I fancy. There are a great many things named for him in the city over there: a theatre, a paseo, I don’t know what else. In poetry they call him the Scourge of Islam. When I showed Don Jaime a rather steep bill, he whistled, and said ‘They have made you out the account of _el Gran Capitan_.’ The size of the bills he presented to Ferdinand and Isabel for scourging the infidel is the thing he is best remembered for in Cordova.”

“That’s gossip; history says he really was a great captain,” I protested.

“According to the proverb, it is the blood of the soldier makes the great captain,” said Patsy. “As to history, Martial says;--’Give up frivolous fable and read history!’ He also says, ‘Fool that I was! Why did I not follow the advice I gave Mamura?’ But, truly, isn’t to-day’s gossip, to-morrow’s history?”

“To-morrow’s history will be rheumatism if we stay mooning here any longer,” J. said firmly. “Right about face, homeward, march!”

After dinner, as he sat writing postal cards to be despatched to the four corners of the earth, Patsy made acquaintance, over the inkstand, with the Argentino. He was a tall man with a close-cut, pointed beard that had been gold and would soon be silver, and fiery brown eyes that would always be young.

“So you are an American, too?” I heard him say to Patsy. “Are you from the States?”

“Yes; I took you for a Spaniard.”

“No, I am an American from the Argentine.”

We left Patsy and the stranger plunged in talk. Half an hour later, Patsy brought his new acquaintance to our room.

“It’s raining so hard we can’t go out,” he whispered; “this is the most comfortable place in the house--he is a kind of an American--”

“This is ‘a good Son of the Way,’ that is what the Arabs call a traveller,” said the Argentino, looking at Patsy. “He makes a friend as a sailor makes a sweetheart, between tides, waiting for his ship to sail.”

It was pouring now. Beside the noise of the rain on the roof we heard, every now and then, a strange sobbing sigh.

“Grrr! Isn’t that a creepy noise? If I were not broad awake and looking at you all by electric light, I should believe those were the ghosts of the great men of Cordova lamenting the departed glory of their city.”

“I wish they were,” said the Argentino. “They could tell me just where the old Iberian village stood, when the Phœnicians came punting up the river and discovered it, just as our people poked up the rivers in America, and discovered the Indian pueblos.”

“Tell them what you were telling me,” said Patsy. “He has been here ever so long, and has ferreted out a lot of interesting things about Cordova.”

“There is not much to tell that you don’t know. The old game of civilization is going on in the world to-day just as it was then. You have only to cross the Straits of Gibraltar, and go over to Morocco and up into the Atlas Mountains to find a Kabyl village very like the primitive Iberian pueblo the Greeks and Phœnicians found here. The French may be a little quicker about civilizing Morocco than the Phœnicians and Greeks were in civilizing the Peninsula, though I doubt it.”

“You said,” Patsy insisted, “that you had seen some things in a museum that gave you a pretty clear idea of how they lived in Cordova, when it belonged to Carthage.”

“I saw some recent finds made in a mound not far from here,” said the Argentino. “A bust which they call the Lady of Elche that has something of the early Greek feeling. After seeing these things and reading all I could lay hands on about them, I came to the conclusion that Cordova must have been a pretty civilized place under the Republic of Carthage. The people had gold and silver vessels,--the Greeks have a story that the anchors of their galleys were gold. They certainly had ivory combs, for I have seen them, and Greek vases and Celtic pottery--geometric raised patterns and all--and coins stamped with a winged horse. Then we know all about their wool, what fine cloth they made, and that famous scarlet dye of the kermes that ran the Tyrian purple so hard in the markets of the East.”

“Those markets of the East another republic hankers to supply,” Patsy put in.

“Take up the white man’s burden and put it on the back Of every yaller nigger and kick him when he’s slack. They’ve got to wear our cotton, they’ve got to drink our gin, And pay our missionaries to save their souls from sin.”

He threw open the window and leaned out.

“It has stopped raining. My wig! do you smell the flowers? I can make out jasmine, acacia, and mignonette. Spanish flowers seem to grow with their perfume already triple distilled.”

“They are the most fragrant in the world,” said the Argentino. “Don’t sleep with your windows open, if you are afraid of headache! Now you want to go to bed, this Son of the Way and I will say good night to you.”

A few minutes later Patsy’s laugh, a whiff of the Argentino’s cigarette, some broken fragments of their talk floated in at the window, as they walked up and down in the garden outside.

“The original inhabitants of Spain--what they call the Iberians--” said the Argentino.

“Where did they come from?” Patsy interrupted.

“Nobody knows; they weren’t Aryans. In the Neolithic Age a very dark race, with long heads, and thick curling hair inhabited the whole Peninsula--”

“I do not propose going back to the beginning of time to-night;” said J. as he shut the window. “That boy’s thirst for information--easily acquired--will get us into trouble yet. Don Jaime comes to-morrow. How will he and this new friend get along?”

I had already asked myself that question.

* * * * *

“Did the norias keep you awake?” Patsy asked at breakfast the next morning. “What we heard last night was not the sighs of ghosts, but the noise of the pumping machines that supply the houses with water!”

Our rooms looked into a walled garden, with flower-beds framed in geometrical designs, surrounded by nice thick box borders. There was a superb syringa in full bloom that looked like ivory and smelt like honey. The jasmines were trained against the wall. The roses were glorious. In an outer court, where the poultry lived, a patriarchal fig-tree shaded a row of old-fashioned wooden beehives. Under a pergola covered by grape-vines stood a tiny house no bigger than a sentry-box; in the house sat Vicente. His voice waked us each morning with a fierce but tremulous cry:

“_Andar_, Morisco!”

Close to the sentry-box was the noria. Morisco, a tall mule hitched to a pole, and blindfolded so that he should not grow dizzy, walked round and round in a circle, faithfully pumping the water, while Vicente alternately slept and exhorted him to “go!” The red-haired waiter told us Vicente’s story. In his youth he had been head gardener on a Grandee’s estate. For twenty years he had been attached to the hotel. He was now ninety-five years old. A few months before his wife had died, at the age of one hundred. Until then, Vicente had lived at home. Now that there is nobody to cook and wash for him, the proprietor gives him a room in the hotel, his food, his clothes, a little money for cigarettes; for his companion, Morisco.

As we entered the garden, Vicente awoke with a start, lighted a cigarette, and jerked the mule’s bridle.

“_Andar_, Morisco!” The patient mule, who had worked while Vicente slept, trod his weary round a little faster, the clatter of his hoofs mingling with the droning creak, creak of the noria.

A brown girl passed from the outer court, where she had been taking down the washing, half hidden by the pile of linen in her arms.

“_Hé, hé!_ _Basta aqua_, Vicente!” she cried, and went into the hot laundry with her linen.

“_Muy bien_, Rafaela.” Vicente sneezed, relighted his cigarette, with trembling hands unharnessed Morisco, and toddled off with him to the stable. In a few moments the old man came back, and pottered about the garden, making his tour of inspection. Nothing escaped his wise old eyes. He crushed a snail that was devouring a velvety pansy, nipped off an overblown peony, stripped the buds and foliage so ruthlessly from a fine red carnation that I had to ask him the reason.

“This work should have been done in September, but I was not here then. We shall have poor carnations this year.” From the look of them--they were only just coming into bloom--they would have taken a prize anywhere out of Spain.

“The carnation plant has need of cleanliness like a person. What I take off is its misery. See, these are nothing but leaves; they do no good, they only take the strength. These are children; there are too many of them! Sacrifice these three little buds, and in fourteen days this large one will make a carnation so big.” He joined his palsied hands at the finger tips to show me the size. He had thrown some of the “misery” carelessly on the ground, some he had laid carefully in a pile.

“Those I threw away are nothing but leaves and children. These others are little plants, you see the difference? I shall plant all these; not one must be lost. It is so late many will not grow, but I shall get some good ones. Very soon they will throw out roots, then I shall transplant them; next season they will bear. The carnation is only good for three years; the second season is the best. See, this is an old plant. We will help it to give its last flowers. They will be small, but of a good variety.” He stirred the earth about the roots, and mixed with it a trowelful of rich loam.

“One might almost live in a place where they grow such flowers!” J. began.

“No, one might not!” cried Patsy.

“Vicente has been a famous gardener in his day!” the waiter had said it more than once. That explains why the pear trees were so well pruned, the oranges so healthy, why the carnations of Cordova still bloom in my memory. A peacock strutted down the brick path, hopped on the wall of the noria, spread the glory of his tail, turned his proud head to show the sapphire sheen of his neck, and gave his strange cry, “mahor mahor.”

The laundry window was open. We could see Rafaela’s pretty head bent over her ironing, and catch the words she sang:

_Contrabandista es mi padre,_ _contrabandista es mi hermano,_ _contrabandista ha de ser_ _aquel á quien dé mi mano._

Contrabandista is my father, Contrabandista is my brother; Contrabandista he must be To whom I give my hand.

“The trouble with Cordova is, it is dead and not buried,” said Patsy. “It may comfort you to know it was the first town in Europe to have paved streets. I believe they never have been repaved since.” We were picking our way over the abominable pavement of the Plazuela de Seneca. A little farther on, near the Seven Corners, is a large house with carved stone façade, handsome iron gratings, and something distinguished about it that caught our attention. It stands in a deserted plaza where the grass grows between the paving stones. For five minutes we had met nobody, not even a cat or dog. We peeped into the patio. There was no living thing there except a fountain and a tame quail asleep in a cage.

“The palace of the Sleeping Beauty!” murmured Patsy. We went round behind the house to explore. The frowsy little street at the back was fragrant with a smell of new baked bread that made us hungry. Through a half-closed gate we saw a courtyard full of beggars. An inner door opened, and the lady of the silver curls whom we had first seen on Cordova Bridge came out followed by two servants carrying baskets filled with bread. The beggars formed in line and shuffled past the lady, who gave a loaf to each and received a blessing in return.

“Bread is given out at this house every Saturday,” said a little gentleman in a black stock, who was passing. “Last year, when there was a death in the family, they gave alms for nine days. The _pordioseros_ have no better friend in all Cordova than the mistress of this house.”

As the last beggar hobbled from the court, a carriage drawn by a pair of sleek mules drove out, with two ladies and a gentleman. Just then Don Jaime came round the corner in search of us; he bowed to the ladies.

“Who are your friends?” Patsy demanded.

“The old it is Duquesa B. It is no longer young, but conserved very good, eh? Her daughter it is appelled Rafaela. Was Queen of Beauty at the _Yuego Florales_. To the elected poet she gave the prize, a natural rose.”

“He means that they have a Contest of Poets every year here,” said Patsy. “A theme is given out, a jury appointed, then the poems just stream in from all over the province. From what the Don says, this old dustheap of a Cordova wakes up a little at fair time. What luck that we saw the Beauty!”

“Did you see who was sitting opposite her?” asked J. “It was O’Shea.”

“He’s easily consoled for Trinidad.” In spite of Patsy’s natural jealousy, that meeting with O’Shea was a comfort to us all. It seemed to bring us out of musty, dusty Cordova’s dead past, and link us with dear, living Seville. In the cool of the afternoon, the streets woke up a little; there were more carriages than one would have supposed possible in the Paseo of El Gran Capitan.

That evening we went to the theatre. The performance began at half-past eight. The price of box was five pesetas for each play. There were four different pieces, each lasting about an hour. The advantage of the system is, you can drop into a theatre early or late, and are not obliged to pay for more of the performance than you see. The first play, about a _contrabandista_ and his sweetheart, a _cigarrera_, was full of gunshots and morality, and highly applauded, though the acting was mediocre. Patsy, who discovered several pretty girls in the audience, asked the Don if the women of Northern Spain were as charming as in the South.

“Not all women in Andalusia is beautifool,” the Don admitted, “but _all_ is gracious; the young gels have a naturality. The Madrileñas, it is affective their manniers for to speak, it is different from the Andaluz!”

J. and I were satisfied with two plays. Patsy and Don Jaime stayed for the last, an operetta.

“I like him better the music, it is the end representation,” said the Don.

The next day Pasty had a great deal to tell us about Cordova. “There are about twenty of the old aristocratic families who still live here,” he said. “There is literally nothing for the young men to do but loaf about the Club of Friendship, where, Don Jaime says, half the nobility of the province have been ruined by gambling. Some people he knows have had to sell their silver. They had a complete silver service, tureen, vegetable dishes, plates, platters, all the rest of it, for every day. They only used their English porcelain for best; now they have to use it every day. The same people had solid silver basins and pitchers, and dozens of those stunning old repoussé silver trays and platters they used to make here. You see the Don knows Cordova well; he can tell you more about it in an hour than you could get out of books in a year.”

The Don twirled his mustache and ran his fingers through his hair. “I have a custom to come to Cordoba every winter,” he admitted. “At that season all families is at their coontry place in the hills for the shootings. In the _coto_ of my friend it is no luxury, all comfort. The ladies go very simple, put a handkerchief over the head, or an old hat; the children is dressed very plain, like the poor.”

“Is the sport good?” asked Patsy.

“In my youth it was more plenty the black beasts (wild boar). Now is much deer, hares, rabbits, partridges.”

“Do you care about shooting?” I asked. The Don never walked a step, if he could avoid it, and got up at two in the afternoon. I could not think of him in the light of a sportsman.

“It is the preferred sport of all Spanishes men as of the English,” he answered. “The ladies like the coontry very mooch; some of them kill the game. We have large fires of great tree troonks, no small pieces of woods like in the city. In the evening it is very sociable; we gather at one house or another; there is singing and dancing. Ah, yes, the most pleasant life is in the coontry. If the guests come far, they spend the night. It is all so simply, no like England. One large room for all the ladies; one for all the gentlemen.”

I asked the Don if they stayed in their country places in summer.

“No, in the spring they return to Cordoba. The hot is very strong; here the houses is prepared for the hot. All people sit out in the court. In soomer, they go to take another climate. The Sierra is not good for the health, it is very humid.”