Part 22

“Ah, that happened at Cadiz? No, I don’t remember. The Cadiz audience is the best in Spain, the most intelligent, the most sympathetic; it has the best knowledge of the art. It is not like the Madrid audience, that must sit in judgment and criticise. The American audience is good, especially the Mexican. Yes, the Americans have a real understanding of the art.”

“Have you ever been wounded?” asked Patsy.

“Often; twice badly. Once I spent three months in bed; that was not amusing, I can tell you. The bull’s horn went through my thigh and wrenched the muscles apart. I recovered though. The wound of the bull’s horn is a good wound; one either recovers from it, or dies quickly.”

“Have you any scholars?” asked Patsy.

“No,” sighed the matador. “My art is one that does not allow of disciples. A man cannot be trained to it if he has not the gift. It is an inspiration, like poetry.” He sighed. “It is five years since I retired. It seems twenty-five.”

He was silent a few minutes, looking down as if distressed; then he brushed back his hair with a spirited gesture and glanced again at the picture.

“Most of us end that way,” he confessed. “I have escaped to become an alderman and interest myself in the hygiene of the city that once criticised me!” Then to Villegas: “It was kind of you to ask me to see Pastora Imperio; I have not seen her since she was a child. Her father used to make my professional clothes. They tell me she is a great dancer.”

Villegas had arranged that Imperio should dance for us at the studio. The others had seen her often and were never tired of talking about her.

“Until I saw Imperio dance,” said Patsy, “it was always a mystery to me why Herod had John the Baptist’s head cut off to satisfy the whim of a dancing girl. Now I quite understand it.”

While they were discussing her, Imperio walked into the studio with her mother, followed by her brother Dionisio and another youth, each carrying a guitar; behind them came attendant nymphs with sisters or mothers, the inevitable chorus that keeps time with hand clapping, foot patting, and encourages the performance with cries of _ollé_, _ollé_, and _andar_.

The two studios had been made miraculously neat and tidy. They smelled of turpentine and beeswax. Gil and Cisera had been at work half the day preparing for the fandango. They had spread two tables in the inner studio where J. worked; one with tea and cake for us, the other with sandwiches, sliced sausages, and manzanilla, a thin, white wine, for the performers.

First we had songs; the curious long-drawn chanted wailing songs of Andalusia that have more of the East than of the West in them. To our ears they were a trifle monotonous but to the Spaniards, to the Andalusians especially they were tremendously moving. Dionisio, a strange-looking youth of eighteen, with odd slate-colored eyes and a lovely smile, threw back his head and wailed out couplet after couplet.

“This I tell to you; to see my mother, I would give the finger from my hand--but the finger I need the most to use.

“My stepmother beat me because I prayed for my mother; my father turned me out of doors. Where can I go to be a little warm?”

There was a shadow walked behind me. It was the spirit of my mother. It said to me, “to give thee life, I gave my life.”

“_Ay de mi!_” cried Imperio and shivered.

“I am in prison on account of a bad woman. Tell the jailer when I am dead not to unbar the door, for even dead, I would not see her.”

“_Virgin!_” sighed Dionisio’s mother.

Imperio repeated the words slowly to me, line by line. I can see her now! her burning green eyes fixed on mine, her face that made all the other faces seem expressionless in comparison. She was at once immortally young and immemorially old. Her face was young, the spirit that looked from those marvellous eyes was immemorially old. The grace of her wild chaste dance is world old and has come down from the ages. I despair of making any one imagine her! Small, lithe, graceful as a young tigress from the jungle, now laughing like a child, now brooding like the world spirit.

When I could not understand what she said she was furious;--I must have had a bad teacher, she herself would teach me Spanish. When she arrived with her mother she was demurely dressed in a pretty white frock like any other young Andaluz. Her short, thick black hair was curiously arranged in curls on either side of her face, held in place by tortoise-shell combs set with turquoises. I gave her a pair of crimson peonies I had bought from the old flower woman at the corner. These evidently decided the color of her dress. After a while she disappeared behind the vast canvas of the Death of the Matador, that takes up the whole end of the studio, and from this improvised dressing room she soon reappeared in a scarlet moreen skirt, and a manton de Manila draped gracefully _a la maya_, about her lithe figure. She had stuck the peonies in the curls on either side of her pale face.

Dionisio and the other lad began to play a strange droning, wailing chant; the chorus clapped hands keeping time. Imperio sat watching till she caught the right rhythm, then she sprang to the dance, the castanets on her fingers. What it all meant, I cannot begin to tell. It seemed the primitive expression of the joy, the pain, the mystery of life. As she made “the charm of woven passes,” like Vivian--only Vivian was bad, this child was virginal and pure--the combs dropped out, the short, black hair clung about her face and neck, the color surged to her cheeks; she seemed as one filled with the divine fury of the dance; a pythoness, a Bacchic priestess, might have looked like this. We had seen in Granada, in the Gypsy King’s cave, somewhat similar dances given by very old women and little girls of ten or eleven. These were as the past and the future. Imperio made the dance part of a glowing, splendid, breathless present. Life called to life, the life blood in our veins danced in time with those wonderful gestures of arms, of feet, of the whole perfect body of the creature. I believe she drew power from us, that it was all give and take. She gave us youth and the dance, the dance which is the natural expression of the lust of life; and we gave her the elixir of our sympathy. Suddenly she stopped and broke forth into song--singing a long panegyric of Seville:--

“_Ay Sevillia, la poblacíon mas hermosa del mundo emtiero, la ciudad que yo amo mas que mi madre._”

Ah Seville town the most delightful in the entire world, city that I love better than my mother.

The flexibility of her body was unbelievable. I can see now the little, little hands held over her wild head, the fingers snapping rhythmically, for the castanets were soon thrown away and her fingers themselves marked the measure to which she danced; the impatient tapping of the feet, the wild leaps in air when she seemed to grow taller, to tower above us and her own original self, and finally the abandon of her last pose, the final attitude; the head thrown back, the red lips parted, the gasping breath coming from between the small perfect teeth, the left arm down, the right arm thrown above her head, her whole body quivering with the ecstacy of the dance--it was worth coming to Spain--just to see one of Pastora Imperio’s poses!

“I have never seen dance any gel as Imperio,” Jaime exclaimed. “More gracious, great spirit in her _figure_ (he meant face) always smiling!”

“There’s something half dramatic, half religious about this,” said Patsy--“like David’s dancing before the Ark or like the Pyrric dance, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Don Jaime agreed, “I have not seen La Davide, nor the other dancer, La Pyrrique, you speak of. In Spain the dance is according to the region; in Madrid, the madrileña, in Seville the sevilliana, in La Mancha the manchego, and so on. The base of all our Spanish dances is oriental; this is rather correct, any lady may see it. Imperio dances with the entirety of the corpe. The French dance with toes, feet, and legs only.”

“Who taught you to dance?” I asked Imperio, “your mother, was it not?”

“Nobody!” she exclaimed proudly. “I have danced since I was eight years old.”

“She see her mother dance every day since she were born. She imitate her dancing as her walking, but do not know--each of them have their own manner.”

“That dance is as old as Eve,” said the Argentino, “Imperio adds the sum of her own personality to it, and it is new again.”

“Will Imperio dance to-night?” I asked.

“Always at the Kürsaal after middlenight,” said the Don. “How a pity you cannot go Missis. There are some French and English performers would not please ladies.”

“Ask her to tell you about her doll,” said Villegas; “her mother says that she still plays with it on rainy days when she has to stay at home.”

“Don’t you think Imperio dances better in the studio than in the Kürsaal?” Patsy asked.

“_Claro!_” the mother smiled and agreed with him.

“_Natural_,” said Villegas, “we are all _Sevilliani_, born in the same parish, baptised from the same font in the cathedral. When I first came to Madrid--to copy Velasquez--I was just sixteen years old then--Imperiou’s mother was the first dancer in Spain. How is it? Have you forgotten the dance you gave before Queen Isabel at the palace?”

The grave, fat, middle-aged woman said she remembered something of the dance.

“Well, show us how it went.”

“Yes, little mama,” said Imperio kindly, “show us how you danced before the Queen.”

The old dancer rose with a curious action springing with one step from her chair to the first position of the dance. Then with a noble solemnity she danced the same dances, only not with the same spirit as Imperio; that would have been incongruous. She danced with the most magnificent and splendid dignity as became the mother of a family. Patsy was right, so might David have danced before the Ark. Little saucy Imperio sat by and encouraged.

“_Viva tu madre, ollé ollé!_” she cried, clapping her little hands.

Dionisio nodded kindly to his mother, looking at her with eyes that were her very own. The gentle mother, so long relegated to the second place, danced and rejoiced in the tardy attention and applause of the company.

“Isn’t it time for refreshments?” asked Patsy. “They all look as if they needed something to eat.” We adjourned to the inner studio where the dancers and musicians fell upon the good things with the appetite of demigods and heros. Imperio seeing that I was not eating anything, came across the room holding between a small thumb and finger a thin slice of sausage which she offered me, which I made out to eat.

Don Jaime seemed in a dream, he had felt the dance deeply; Patsy tapped on the shoulder. “Wake up,” he said, “have you forgotten where you are?”

“It is like the lotus,” sighed the Don, “it make you forget all the world.”

Imperio had changed her dress again; the fandango, the very best _fiesta_ of all we saw in Spain, was over.

“Show us my portrait, Maestro,” she said, pointing to a veiled picture on an easel.

Villegas threw back the curtain and showed us a second Imperio standing with one hand raised above her head, one held behind her back, a red matador hat upon her short curls, the emerald fire in her eyes. Patsy stared at the picture, then at Imperio, once more a demure child in a white frock as she was when she came into the studio, save for an added touch of color in her cheeks.

“To the life!” cried Patsy.

Villegas rubbed his fingers over the canvas; “It needs a little scraping down,” he said, “a little repainting, the color is too thick. It is like her, yes? _Quien sabé!_ She is different from the

rest. When she falls in love and marries she will be like the others. You have seen, I have tried to paint the first dancer of Spain in her flower.” Then he went with the dancers to the door.

“Villegas says,” Patsy quoted him, “‘that an artist should leave behind him a true picture of his own time; that he should be like a phonograph, preserving the character of his own period to posterity. The matador and the dancing girl are two of the most characteristic figures of the Spain of his day; he has painted both supremely well: he seems to be doing the thing he set out to do!’”

* * * * *

All too soon after the _fiesta_ came the day we had fixed to leave Madrid. Not till then did I realize the strength of the spell Spain had laid upon me. We were going to Rome--even that could not console me--for the spell of Spain, so dark, so noble, so tremendous, is not to be shaken off once you have yielded to it.

The promise the child made so lightly, “to see Spain, and tell the other children what it is like,” has yet to be kept. I did not begin to see Spain, I have told but a halting story of what I did see. It was enough to make me love Spain, to love the Spaniards. They are more like us Anglo-Saxons than any people I have lived among. Villegas says, “In every one of us Spaniards there is a Sancho Panza, and a Don Quixote.” That is as true of us as it is of them.

Several of our friends came to the station to see us off as is the pleasant custom of a land where people are rich, because they have time to be kind. Lucia, hospitable to the last, came followed by Gil carrying a great net basket with a roast capon, some _torrones_, and a bottle of Valdepeñas. Engracia, the lovely soft-eyed, willful beauty of Madrid, brought us chocolates from Paris, a characteristic gift, for she is a true Cosmopolitan: _mi paisano_, Robert Mason Winthrop, Secretary of the American Legation, who had been endlessly kind and added in a thousand ways to the interest of our life in Madrid, brought a bunch of wonderful Spanish carnations.

Don Jaime and Patsy were both more cast down at parting than either wished the other to realize.

“Come and see us in America, Don,” said Patsy, “We will give you the time of your life.”

“Though I would like to take another climate,” said the Don, “I have not the _dinero fresco_, fresh money as you say. I have not the habitude to spend very mooch to voyage; I could not justificate the emprize at present.”

“Where is Villegas?” asked J.

“There he comes,” said little Don Luis, the Valencian, “bearing the flowers of San José.”

Villegas was hurrying along the platform with a great sheaf of annunciation lilies in his arms.

“_Adios, adios_,” we cried from the window as the train began to move.

“No, no!” came a cordial chorus from the platform.

“_Hasta otra vista._”

* * * * *

_BOOKS BY MAUD HOWE_

ROMA BEATA

_Letters from the Eternal City_

_With illustrations from drawings by John Elliott and from photographs. 8vo. Cloth, gilt top in box, $2.50 net_

No aspect of the Roman kaleidoscope escaped her notice, and for the Pope and peasant her comprehension and sympathies were alike quick and ready.--_Boston Herald._

This is a clever book, and an engaging one. The author has observed Italians and Italian life with an intelligence no less sympathetic than acute. By temperament as well as by training she was fitted to appreciate the glamour of Italy--that embodied romance of nature, art, and history. In these sketches, marked by humor, discrimination, and womanly grace and gentleness, she does much to draw the reader under the spell which she herself has felt so deeply.--_New York Tribune._

Sparkles with humor and runs over with unique and entertaining experiences such as could not possibly fall to the lot of the ordinary tourist. A dozen illustrations, from Mr. Elliott’s drawings and from photographs, add a decorative touch to this tempting volume.--_Dial_, Chicago.

TWO IN ITALY

_With six full-page illustrations from drawings by John Elliott. Crown 8vo. Cloth, gilt top in box, $2.00 net_

A book of delightful rambling sketches of Italian life. There is hardly another American so capable of interpreting Italian life and character.--_Chicago Tribune._

The stories are full of humor and color, picturesque bits of real life, touched by a skilful hand.--_Philadelphia Telegraph._

Not since the publication of Howell’s “Venetian Days” have we had books by an American so full of Italian sunshine and so soft with Italian atmosphere as are the writings of Mrs. Elliott.--_Chicago Interior._

LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., _Publishers_, BOSTON

FOOTNOTES:

[1] James Freeman Clarke’s “Seven Great Religions.”

[2] The other day a Moroccan embassy to the German Emperor asked for his help against the too drastic rule of Morocco’s new masters, the French, on the strength of that old kinship. Blood is thicker than water. The blue eyes of William of Hohenzollern may have looked with something akin to sympathy into the blue eyes of the Berber hillmen when he went hunting among them on his famous shooting trip to Morocco, the beginning of so much diplomatic palaver!

[3] (Mr. White’s good offices eventually won a public expression of gratitude from the head of the German Government.)

[4] The Crown Prince of Portugal and his father, Don Carlos the King, were killed in the winter of 1908. The dreadful murder was curiously glossed over by the newspapers as a “political crime,” and outside of Portugal at least has apparently been quickly forgotten. The boy was a sweet-faced youth with charming manners. I cannot think of him without remembering the superstition that “whom the gods love die young.” As I look back at those fabulous fêtes in the light of the dreadful double regicide, there seems something curiously suggestive and characteristic in the representatives sent by the different monarchs to the King of Spain’s wedding. It must be an openly accepted fact that there is great risk in attending such a celebration. The Kaiser thriftily sent his uncle, the Czar sent another uncle, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, all sent old men, uncles or cousins of the sovereign, whose lives were not particularly valuable. England (so like England) sent the King’s only son; Sweden sent the heir to the throne, and Portugal, unsuspicious, trustful in the character of its solid, serious, law-abiding people, sent the heir to the throne. The countries that have suffered most from the assassins of Anarchy--Austria, Russia, and Italy--risked only a small counter on the dreadful hazard.

[5] The picture is owned by Miss Dorothy Whitney of New York.

End of Project Gutenberg's Sun and Shadow in Spain, by Maud Howe Elliott