Part 14

The house of the Lady of Tangiers is set on the edge of a high cliff. Far, far below, at the foot of the cliff, the waves break into white foam flowers, and the seagulls flit and swoop in restless flight over the emerald sea. House and garden are shut in by a high wall. A man on horseback was waiting in the road outside the gate, surrounded by a horde of beggars and cripples. A pair of white shrouded women stood a little apart, each with a child on her shoulder. The horseman was armed: a pair of pistols and a knife were stuck in his sash, a rifle was slung over his shoulder; at his left side hung a long sword. Man and horse were both of pure Arab breed; there was a certain likeness between them. Both were thin and wiry, with delicate feet, fierce, flashing eyes, thin, quivering nostrils. The man sat impassive as a bronze statue, and gave no sign of having seen our queer cavalcade as we rode up,--Zuleika, the big gray donkey, with me in my ridiculous chair saddle on her back, Ali running beside, and Abdul hanging on to her tail. The horse pricked its dainty ears, whinnied, and turned its head to look at us.

“_Es-salem alekum!_” Health be with you, said Ali, who never allowed himself to be ignored.

“_U alekum es-salem!_” and with you be peace, answered the Arab on the horse.

The sound of footsteps inside the garden caused great excitement among the cripples. The gate was opened and a servant came out leading a beautiful little boy of four or five. At the sight of the boy, a fair child, with brown curls and pretty, gracious manners, a howl arose from the beggars and cripples. They tried to get hold of him, to kiss his hands or touch his garments. The servant and the man on horseback kept them back as best they could. The horseman laid about him with the flat of his sword:

“By the life of the prophet, room there for my lord the prince! _Yalla!_ Go on!”

“I am under thy protection, save me!” cried the oldest beggar; he was rather cleaner than the rest, and was allowed to touch the little foot before the horseman caught up the child, set him before him, put spurs to the horse, and galloped off joyously in a cloud of dust.

“_Al Allah!_” cried the old beggar.

“_Al Allah!_” echoed the cripples, waving their crutches and their maimed stumps after the pretty child.

Ali gave my card and letter of introduction to the servant. I was invited to enter the garden. Ali waited for me in the road outside. Near the house was a little flower bed, with a few homely English flowers; some one had been at work among the marigolds. Outside the door stood a large rocking-horse, a drum and a toy trumpet. I had not long to wait in the reception room, before the Lady of Tangiers appeared. She greeted me heartily.

“Come in,” she said, and led the way to a large comfortable, English drawing-room. I suppose I showed some surprise at finding myself in so thoroughly British an interior, for she said:

“I lead a double life. With the Arabs, I am an Arab; with the Europeans, I am a European. We will have our tea here first,--you will like my tea better than my daughter-in-law’s; then I will take you into the Arab part of the house and introduce you to my son’s wife.”

At the first glance the Lady of Tangiers looked the full-blooded English woman she is by birth. As I talked with her, I felt something Oriental in her expression. You cannot live three parts of your life among an alien race without catching something of the racial look. First, and last, and all the time, I felt her to be a woman of power. The servant who brought the tea said something to her in Arabic.

“Were there many children waiting in the crowd outside the gate?” she asked.

I told her I had seen only two.

“They can wait, or come to-morrow,” she said. “Their mothers have brought them to be vaccinated. When I first came here I once spoke to my husband about a child I thought should be vaccinated, as there was so much small-pox about.”

“How is it done?” he asked.

“I know how it is done,” I said, “and I can do it. That was the beginning. Now I vaccinate hundreds of children every year. That is the sort of missionary work I believe in. There is not the slightest use in sending Christian missionaries to any Mahommedan country, unless they are willing to work without direct religious teaching. Civilize first! Teach the women and the girls to cook and sew, something about the laws of health, and the care of children.”

The Lady of Tangiers is a member of the Church of England, by the way.

I asked about the pretty boy I had met at the gate.

“That was my little grandson, Muli Hassan, going out for his afternoon’s airing. All those people hanging about were waiting to see him start. To them he is not only a noble, but a sacred person. My husband was of a great family. He was descended from the Prophet,--but I am of the oldest family in the world; I am of the Adam and Eve connection!” Her eyes danced as she said it. “In certain respects, my grandchildren are brought up English fashion, as my children were. When my oldest boy was perhaps twelve days old, my mother, who had come out from England to be with me, thought that it might please my husband’s old nurse to see the baby have his bath; so she called her into my room. My husband was asleep in a neighboring room. Suddenly he was waked by the old nurse, she was past eighty, shaking him by the arm--usually she would not have dared to disturb him--and crying:

“Come, come quickly! The Christians are murdering your son, they are drowning him!”

My husband hurried to my room. “What does this mean?” he cried out. When he found out what it meant, he threw himself down on the divan and laughed till he cried.

When we had finished our tea, my hostess took me into the part of the house where her son’s wife, the mother of Muli Hassan, lives. As she was receiving native visitors in the reception room, the Lady of Tangiers showed me into the bedroom; a large, handsome, airy room with windows opening seawards, and comfortable brass beds. We had not been there long,--I had not had time to take in half the beauty of the outlook from those windows,--when I heard behind me the soft patter of bare feet on the tiled floor, and the daughter-in-law was at my side. She was a pretty woman, with a refined, intelligent face, who received me with a charming Oriental reverence. The nails of her hands and feet were reddened with henna, otherwise she was not painted. She wore a pretty, simple, green tissue robe, with a robe of dotted muslin over it.

“May thy day be white as milk,” was her first greeting. Then, “How is thy health?”

“She is sorry she cannot speak your language,” said the Lady of Tangiers, “you must not think her an uneducated person on that account. She reads and writes Arabic beautifully.”

The young woman was in mourning for a relative: she would wear it for forty days, she told me. Her mourning consisted of not wearing silk or jewels,--the most sensible mourning I ever heard of. She was so fair, except for her melting eyes and coal-black eyebrows, that in European dress she might easily have passed for an Italian. As the other guests were waiting for the daughter-in-law, our visit to her was short.

“_Yalla bina_,” now let us go, said the elder woman.

“To Allah’s protection,” said the mother of Muli Hassan.

We returned to the English drawing-room, where I stayed as long, perhaps longer, than good manners allowed, while the Lady of Tangiers told me things that I hope she will some day tell the world. While I was listening, entranced, there came the sound of a childish voice crying “Grandmama!” The little Prince Muli Hassan had come back from his ride. I had stayed an unconscionable time, and my visit, the most interesting episode in all those interesting Moroccan days, had to come to an end!

While in Tangiers our party was much broken up. J. and Patsy made several riding trips with Israel, leaving me to potter about the Socco with Ali, or to prowl with Mme. Hortense in the bazaars, where I bought a long, salmon colored cloth gabardine with wide sleeves and fascinating silk buttons and loops; and a fine _sulham_ like the one the Arab gentleman wore. Both are men’s garments, though they pass muster very well, on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar, for a woman’s.

Our greatest pleasure we all enjoy together,--a dinner at one of the foreign villas on the heights. It was nearly dark when I mounted Zuleika and rode under the stars and a thin crescent moon to our friend’s house. All the company except ourselves belonged to the diplomatic circle. They were as agreeable, well dressed, and well bred as such people are the world over. The dinner was excellent, the talk, for me, of absorbing interest. After dinner, as we were sitting talking together in the pretty drawing-room, admiring the Arabic curios our host had collected, we heard, faintly first, then gradually growing louder, the sound of a shepherd’s pipe, like the flute in Tristan and Isolde.

“I thought you might like to hear a little Arab music,” said our host, leading the way to an open-air concert room. In the corner made by two sides of his house, rugs were spread upon the ground, lanterns hung among the rose covered walls, and six native musicians squatted on the ground. Their instruments were a lute, a tambourine, a reban,--two-stringed fiddle--and the shepherd’s pipe. The leader was a handsome dark man with dreamy eyes, and the face of an enthusiast. He threw back his head and began a song that was like a wail; the others joined in from time to time like a chorus.

“They are singing,” said the host, “the Lament for Granada!”

When anybody says Tangiers to me suddenly, _this_ is what I see! The Arab musicians sitting cross-legged on the ground under the stars, and the thin crescent moon. I hear the high wail of the Moorish pipe, the throb of the drum struck by the hand, the voices of the Moorish minstrels mourning for the Moors’ lost paradise, singing the Lament for Granada.

X

MADRID

“Señora, this is my mother,” said Pedra the Vestal, who took care of our sitting-room fire.

“I am glad to make your acquaintance,” said Pedra’s mother; she shook my hand heartily, and looked at me with keen, kind eyes. “In regard to the washing, I will call for it on Mondays and bring it back on Fridays. If mending is required, there will be an additional price.”

“Where do you wash the clothes?”

She was astonished at the question. “In the river, where else?”

“And where do you hang them out to dry?”

“On the river bank, near the palace of the King.”

When Pedra the Vestal knelt on the hearth blowing the bellows, she looked more than ever like a Tanagra figurine. She built up the fire with odd little chunks of dark red wood that give out a strange perfume of the forest, and burn as slowly as soft coal.

“What sort of wood is that?” I asked.

“Who knows? The wood of a tree,” Pedra looked over her shoulder with the flashing smile that made everything she said pass for wit.

“I know; it is ilex,” said her mother. “In Segovia I used to gather it on the mountain. Here it costs too much, we burn charcoal.”

“Is Madrid dearer than Segovia?”

“Madrid is the dearest place in the world, and the coldest.” She wrapped her faded plaid shawl about her shoulders. There had been a slight snow flurry that morning; it was proper Christmas weather, but Pedra and her mother took it as seriously as we take a blizzard. Pedra was straight as a lance, hard as marble, built of stuff that wears well, judging from her mother. The elder woman was not one of those mothers who serve as a dreadful warning of what a daughter may become, if she had lost youth and freshness; she had kept her health and strength, a fiery spirit, a tough fibre.

The next time she came in to mend the fire, Pedra’s bright eyes were dull and red. It took only a little coaxing to find out her trouble.

“My mother brought bad news,” she said. “My brother has married a girl who is not worthy of him. Though we are poor, Señora, our family is an old one; there is none more respected in Segovia. After all the sacrifices we made for Juan to keep on the little shop that was my father’s,--to marry beneath him, it was unworthy, it was ignoble!” The tears came to her eyes again. Here was Castilian pride, indeed.

We had come to Madrid meaning to keep house for six months or more. We soon found that a furnished apartment at a moderate price in Madrid is as rare as a roc’s egg. We spent several days driving up and down the streets of the quarter where we wished to live, looking up at the houses. A large sheet of blank paper hung at the end of a window or balcony means unfurnished apartments to let, in the middle, furnished. We could find nothing available. It seemed as if we must give up our plan of passing the winter in Madrid. Then came the great invitation. Our old friends Don José and Doña Lucia Villegas asked us to share their large comfortable home. When we found they really wished us to accept this unparalleled hospitality, J. and I moved over to their delightful apartment, and Don Jaime found a modest hotel for Patsy.

The Villegas’ house is opposite the handsome new National Museum on the Paseo Recoletos, a wide avenue laid out in the grand style of the Champs Elysées.

Madrid is a modern capital; at first it seemed as if we had left picturesque Spain behind us and come to a modern European city, a little like Paris, a little like Brussels, and not at all like the Spain we knew. Then, as we began to learn our way about the city, we found that beside the new Madrid, with its splendid boulevards, its conventional new houses and cafés, its air of prosperous business, there was an old Madrid, full of quaint corners and picturesque buildings.

The palace of the King stands at the edge of this old Madrid, boldly planted on the high land above the river, where the old Moorish Alcazar once stood, a magnificent situation for a royal palace. The façade fronts and dominates the city; the rear looks out on vast stretches of royal demesne.

“This looks more as a palace should look than any I ever saw,” said Patsy. We had driven over one sharp clear morning to see Guard-mounting. “All grand and white and shining. The sort of a palace where lovely princesses with golden hair always live in poetry,--sometimes even in history.”

On the right of the palace is the noble Plaza de Armas, where, besides the guards pacing up and down their beat, there was a continual coming and going of all sorts and conditions of men. In a sheltered corner, under the very palace windows, two boys were playing at marbles. This was all in keeping with what we had seen and heard of the democratic character of the people. At one end of the Plaza, the long narrow arches of the peristyle frame a stupendous view. Behind the palace runs the river Manzanares; beyond lies the royal park of the Casa de Campo, with its masses of green trees, broken here and there by the glint of a lake, or the spire of one of poor Isabel Second’s expiatory chapels. Beyond the park, the bare plains of Castile sweep grandly to the north, rising to the stern snow-capped range of the Sierra Guaderrama.

It was all dearly familiar, because Velasquez has painted that blue-gray landscape, that silver light sometimes hardening to steel, those snow mountains, not once, but many, many times, as the background of his pictures.

“The Manzanares is not much of a stream compared to the Guadalquiver,” said Patsy. “That must be the bridge the Frenchman meant, when he advised the King of Spain either to sell his bridge, or to buy a river!” He pointed to a big handsome bridge, curiously out of proportion to the size of the meagre river.

Not far from the palace, along the river bank, was a gorgeous, tremulous, swaying mass of color,--scarlet, blue, orange, every tint of the rainbow.

“That,” said Patsy, “looks like the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Those might be the fluttering pennons of Leon and Castile, Navarre and Aragon.”

“Don’t look too closely, or you will lose the illusion. That is the drying ground, where Pedra’s mother and the other washerwomen of Madrid hang out their clothes.”

“Standards of heroes, standards of heroines, what’s the odds? They _are_ heroines. I stood and watched them yesterday, their petticoats kilted up to their knees, rubbing and scrubbing and singing at their work.”

A young American artist painted an admirable picture of the drying ground with its many-colored garments not long ago. He worked in summer, close to the river when the water was low, and caught a fever that put an end to all his painting!

Fronting the palace is the large oval Plaza del Oriente, with a good equestrian statue of Philip IV, surrounded by a circle of quaint marble statues of Visigothic and Spanish kings and queens, from Berenguela to Isabel the Catholic.

“We know Philip IV better than all the rest of them put together!” Patsy exclaimed, as we walked round the royal group. “Thanks to the genius for making a likeness of that young man shown by Velasquez, whom he engaged as his _valet de chambre_ at a salary of eleven dollars a month. Philip young, thin and cadaverous, Philip old, fat and blowsy; I know his face as well as I know my own. People who want to be remembered by posterity should be very polite to the painters and sculptors--even to the writers--of their day. Strange they don’t realize it!”

Madrid was gay with Christmas bustle; streets and shops were crowded; Pedra was busy with the presents that poured into the house for Lucia and Villegas. From Granada came a cask of oil, from Malaga a small barrel of grapes, from Jerez a cask of olorosa, from Tangiers a box of oranges, from Seville a flagon of cologne, the finest in the world,--it smells of fresh orange blossoms.

One morning, a few days before Christmas, I heard a strange hob-gobbling noise outside in the passage. I opened my door; there was Pedra, flushed and out of breath with the effort, trying to get two large speckled turkeys up the terrace stairs.

“_Miré_,” she said, “observe these fine birds, Señora, a present from the country. I shall mix a dish of corn meal and hot water for them, that will be the food of luxury, fattening besides. Poor animals! they shall live well until Cisera wrings their necks.”

Cisera, the Tuscan cook, followed the procession up the terrace stairs, and felt the larger turkey.

“In a week,” she said, “he will be fit to kill, perhaps sooner.”

When the turkeys had been fed with the food of luxury, Pedra showed me another gift that had just come for Villegas. “Don José will like this more than all the rest, you will see!” she said.

Villegas is the Director of the Prado Museum. What Pedra called the best present was a “testimonial,” with his photograph and a complimentary address signed by all the employees of the Prado. He gave the dreadful thing with its impossible plush frame the place of honor, and hung it up himself in the hall.

Cisera killed the larger turkey, and stuffed it with pistacchio nuts for the Christmas eve dinner-party. As we were all sitting together, waiting for the last guest to arrive, Gil, the melancholy Gallegan man-servant, threw open the door and announced:

“The Bohemian Gentleman.”

A big blond man with dancing blue eyes and a ruffled shirt came in, followed by Pedra, carrying in her upraised hands a tray with two enormous hams (she looked like the picture of Titian’s daughter with the fruit).

“A good Christmas!” the Bohemian made Lucia a grand bow. “I have brought you a pair of hams from Prague!”

“The best hams in the world,” Villegas patted one of them. “I was afraid you had forgotten this year!”

“They should be good; the pigs were raised on

my father’s farm, and, I was assured, were fed on nothing but milk.”

Before the turkey made its appearance, Villegas had discovered that among his guests were people of seven nationalities, and that four languages were being spoken at the table.

“This,” he said, “is the Tower of Babel.” The name stuck for as long at least as that hospitable house was our home.

“What,” I asked Don Jaime who sat beside me, “is the Bohemian gentleman’s name?”

“Of baptism or of family?”

“Both, particularly of family.”

“Ah!” the Don relapsed into Spanish, “nobody can pronounce it; it begins with a cough and ends with a sneeze. He is called Don Carlos the Bohemian, because he comes from Bohemia. He copies royal portraits in the Prado for the Archduke Eugenio of Austria; no one has made such copies of Velasquez since Villegas left off painting them!” The Bohemian saw we were speaking of him, for he looked over at us.

“This lady, whose name I did not catch,” he said, “is an American?”

“Oh, no!” cried little Serafita, who gives music lessons to the Infanta; “she is English, Yankee, from New York.” In Madrid, American means South American, unless the contrary is stated.

I asked Serafita, a sparkling Andaluz with a drop of Hebrew blood in her veins, if many of her pupils worked seriously. “Only a few,” she said, “more give up their music when they marry. It is the same with their other studies. The women I know drop their reading and studies when they leave school. If one cannot talk with them about the fashions or the last ball, they have nothing to say. You North American women can speak on every subject. Our women are not less clever, but our men do not wish us to be improved, for they know that we are naturally more intelligent than they themselves, and if our minds were cultivated they believe we would not be content always to stay at home.”

Villegas had lately sat for his photograph, and as Lucia wished opinions on the likeness, the photographs were handed round the table. When they came to Don Jaime he counted them, and told me that there were twelve, and all alike, adding with a sigh that if there were only twelve Villegases, all alike, and he could dine with all of them, he could then be sure of twelve such dinners a year!

Before Villegas came to Madrid, and took Don Jaime under his wing, the Don often had no dinner--so he confided to Patsy. One does not exactly dine when one spends two cents a day for food. “Under such circumstances,” the Don said, “it is best to invest all your money in bread of the day before; it costs less than fresh bread, and goes farther.”

While we were still at table, there came a tremendous ringing at the door-bell. There was a lull in the conversation as Gil opened the front door. “A message and a box from the bedchamber of the King for Don José!” cried a loud voice in the hall outside.

“Put down the box. Don José is dining,” Gil replied firmly.

“Give him the message then as I give it to thee. Here are the pantaloons of his Majesty the King. They must be returned by the fifteenth of the month, when his Majesty wishes to wear them.”

We looked at each other in astonishment.

“I am painting the King’s portrait,” said Villegas; “as he is not very fond of posing they have sent me the clothes to work from before the next sitting.”

“The Infanta’s wedding is on the eighteenth,” said Lucia; “perhaps they are wanted for that. Be sure nothing happens to them at the studio.”

It was nearly twelve when the Bohemian, the first to make the move, rose to go. They keep late hours in Madrid, even later than in Paris. Don Carlos was reproved for breaking up the party so early.

“I promised,” he said by way of excuse, “to be at the Countess Q’s for midnight mass.”

“I should not have thought that _misa del gallo_--cockcrow mass was exactly in your line!” said Don Jaime. “You grow devout with years!”

“Ah, well--I know the music will be good, they will give selections from Carmen. Besides, I promised I would stay and help them out with the supper and dance after the mass.”

Just then Gil brought in a curiously shaped old bottle covered with dust and cobwebs.