Part 8

They went up at once, the Americans and the Englishman as curious to see the crowd as the bull-fight. As the box was Catalina’s she had no difficulty to persuade the Villénas to occupy the front seats; she sat just behind with Captain Over, and in the obscure depths of the rear Mr. Moulton felt himself to be blest indeed.

“It seems incredible that they bring children here,” he said, as his untiring gaze roved over the rapidly filling amphitheatre. “No wonder they are callous when they are grown; but I’ll not believe they can see such a sight unmoved at their tender years. I shall watch them with great interest.”

It would be half an hour before the entertainment began, but only the boxes were reserved; long before the signal nearly every seat was occupied, from the vulnerable lower row up to the light Moorish arcade through which the sky looked even bluer than above. It was a various and picturesque sight to foreign eyes. Scarcely a woman wore a hat. There were many mantillas, of a texture and pattern so fine there could be no doubt of the breeding of the owners. A few wore the black rebosa, but by far the greater number were bareheaded, their hair very smooth, and ornamented with high combs, flowers, or pins. There were enough handsome Spanish shawls on the shoulders of the women this fiery day to have furnished a bazaar—brilliant blue shawls heavily embroidered and fringed with white, black shawls, white shawls, red shawls, all of silk, all embroidered and fringed. And it was already a thirsty crowd. Venders were forcing their way between the seats, selling water out of jugs and wine out of skins, and even here the water made a wider appeal than the wine. It was anything but a cruel sea of faces, hard though the Spanish type may be. Many a group of women had their heads together, gossiping, no doubt, while the men waited in stolid expectation of the treat in store, signalled to brighter eyes, or discussed the chances of the day and the talents of the espadas who would do the bulls to death.

“They all now take the sacrament,” the señora informed Catalina, who translated for the benefit of the two men. “Last night they confessed and fasted, and their wives pray until the fight is over.”

Mr. Moulton snorted, then reminded himself that he was pleasuring, and ordered his critical faculty into the depths of its shop.

“By Jove!” said Over.

“Somebody you know?” asked Catalina. “Heavens, what a caricature!”

“She is a ripping nice woman, and a countrywoman of your own—a Mrs. Lawrence Rothe, of New York. I met her about in London. Remember, now, she told me she was coming to Spain. She’s a bit made up, but what of that? So many are, you know. You should see London at the fag end of the season.”

“A bit!” Catalina lifted her nose with young intolerance. “Her hair looks like a geranium-bed. Is that her son? He is rather good-looking.”

“That is her husband; they have been married several years. He’s quite a decent chap—keen on horses—he looks older than he is—thirty—I fancy. Still, I’m rather sorry for him.”

“I should think so. She must be fifty.”

“That is severe of you. She’s probably getting on to forty-five—not more. I’m told she was a ripping fine woman five years ago, but she has had a lot of trouble—all her children refuse to speak to her, and she got a divorce to marry Rothe. She’s really very jolly. If you will excuse me a minute I’ll go and speak to her.”

The woman, who was adjusting herself at some pains in the next box but one, was extremely tall and thin, and her blazing locks, admirably coiffée as they were above her broken but still handsome face, excited the comment of others than Catalina. She had sacrificed her face to her figure and had reached that definite age when women dye their hair with henna. But even forty is an age when the entire absence of flesh makes a woman look not youthful but like an old maid; and scarlet hair, that would harden a young face, is a search-light above every hollow and patch of manufactured surface. In the case of Mrs. Rothe, however, so distinct was the air of good breeding with which she carried her expensive charms, so proud, yet retiring, her manner, and so perfect her taste in dress, that she ran no risk of being mistaken for a cocotte. She was stamped deeply and delicately with the brand of the New York woman of fashion, the difference between whom—the same may be said of the small groups of her kind in other great American cities—and the average “stylish” American is as marked in its way as the difference between the Parisian and the French provincial; indeed, the juxtaposition is even more unfortunate, for the Frenchwoman of the provinces is frankly dowdy, and hence escapes looking cheap. Even Catalina, in a moment, felt her unwilling admiration creeping forth to the subtle charm of perfect poise and grooming, the firm yet tactful suggestion of a race apart in a bulk of eighty millions of mere Americans.

Mrs. Rothe was talking to Over with a great show of animation, and her companion—a virile, good-looking young man, evidently college-bred—had greeted the Englishman with an enthusiasm suspicious in the travelling husband.

“She is going to Granada next week,” whispered Over, significantly, as he took his seat once more beside Catalina. “I have asked if I may take you to call on her to-morrow.”

“Yes,” said Catalina, absently. The president of the occasion, the mayor of Toledo, had entered his box; the mounted police, in crimson and gold, to the sudden rush of martial music, were careering about the arena driving the stragglers to their seats. A moment later came the Paseo de la Cuadrilla, the procession of all the bull-fighters across the arena to the foot of the president’s box—the espadas and their understudies, the banderilleros, the picadores and chulos, all gorgeous in the gold-embroidered short clothes and brocades of old Spain. None of them looked young, in spite of picturesque finery and pigtails, and their smoothly shaven faces may best be described by the expressive Americanism “tough”; but between bull-fights they do not live the lives of model citizens, and may be younger than they look; certainly their calling demands the agility and unbrittle brain-cells of youth.

The president, who received them standing, bowed with much ceremony and then cast a key into the arena. It unlocked one of the dark cells, or toriles, adjoining the arena, where the first of the angry bulls was bellowing for light and space and dinner.

The picadores, with one exception, retired, this hero of the first engagement taking his stand by the door whence all had emerged. The espadas, banderilleros, and others of lower estate, scattered at safe distances from the door of the toril, near which stood a chulo to direct the attention of the bull to the picador, lest he fly first at the unmounted men and disappoint the spectators of their whet of blood.

But the bull might have been rehearsed for his part. As the door of his toril was cautiously opened he flew straight at the blindfolded horse without a side glance or a roar; and not waiting for the teasing prod of the picador’s pike, he bored his horns into the luckless animal’s side and dragged out his entrails.

Catalina closed her eyes and turned her back—she felt horribly faint—then looked at Mr. Moulton. He also had turned his back, and his profile was green. Nevertheless, he had the presence of mind to observe a small boy of seven or eight years, whom he had singled out for psychological investigation. The boy looked bored.

“The worst is past for the moment,” said Over to Catalina, and under cover of her mantilla he took her hand. “They will take the poor brute out, and the rest is pure sport.” And Catalina, in a tensity of emotion, held fast to his hand during the rest of the performance, quite unconscious of the act.

The bull, meanwhile, had dashed for the glittering figures in the middle of the arena, his red horns looking as if they would rip the earth did they encounter nothing more inviting. Then came the graceful, agile antics of the banderilleros. After the chulos, with their flirting capes, had tormented and bewildered the bull for a few moments, first one banderillero and then another received him in full charge, leaping aside as he lowered his horns to gore, and thrust the barbed darts, flaunting with colored ribbons, into the back of his neck. One man leaped clear over the bull, planting his darts in his flight. The next went over the wall of the arena into the narrow passage below the front row of seats, the bull in full tilt after him, but diverted by a chulo before he reached the wall.

It was true sport, and Catalina had forgotten her horror and was leaning forward with interest, when she gave a sharp cry and dug her nails into Over’s hand. The picador, instead of retiring with his stricken horse, had leisurely ridden down the arena to see the sport, and there he sat serenely, the bright entrails of the poor brute upholding him hanging to the ground. But only for a moment. A young horse could have stood no more, and the old hack reserved for the sacrifice by an economical people suddenly sank and expired without a shiver. He had not uttered a sound as the bull ripped him open, but he had started and quivered mightily; he had been dying ever since, and collapsed in an instant.

Catalina cowered behind her fan. “I wish I had not come!” she gasped into Over’s ear. Mr. Moulton was in need of consolement himself. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I had never been to a bull-fight, and you told me you were an old hand at it.”

“That was only child’s play. And all the accounts of bull-fights I have ever read gave me the impression that the brutality was quite lost in the picturesqueness. This is hideously business-like.”

“That expresses it. And there is no enthusiasm as yet, because there has not been enough blood. It will take two more mangled horses to rouse them. Do you want to go?”

“After this act. I’d never sit through another; but I’ll see this through.”

The bull, the blood streaming from the wounds in his neck where the banderillas still quivered, plunged or darted about the arena, striving to reach his tormentors; but, charge with the swiftness of the wind as he might, the leaping banderilleros either planted their darts or as dexterously plucked them out.

Suddenly the president rose and made a signal. The chulos and banderilleros enticed the bull to the right of the arena, and then the espada of the first engagement, hitherto posing for the admiration of the spectators, brought forth his sword and red muleta, and, walking with a sort of jaunty solemnity to the foot of the president’s box, dedicated the death of the bull to the functionary whose honor it was to preside over this Corridas de Toros. He then walked over to the bull and waved the red cloth before his eyes.

In descriptions of bull-fights, especially when the espada is the hero of the tale, this final episode is always pictured as one of great excitement and involving a terrible risk. As a matter of fact, it is deferred until the bull is nearly exhausted. He has some fight left in him, it is true, and an inexperienced espada might easily be tossed. But those that oftener meet with death in the bull-ring are the banderilleros, who plant their darts as the bull charges. The legs of the picadores are padded, and they are always close enough to the wall to leap over if the bull brings the horse down.

Nothing could be tamer than the final scene in the first act of to-day’s continuous performance. The espada danced about the bull for a few minutes, waving his red rag, and then, as the brute stood at bay with his head down, looking far more weary than belligerent, he stepped lightly to one side and drove his sword through the neck in the direction of the heart, a very neat and decent operation.

The bull did not drop at once, and there was no applause. He stood as if lost in thought for a few moments, and the espada was forgotten; he had failed. Then the bull turned, wavered, sank slowly to earth. Another door flew open and in rushed a team of four mules abreast, jingling with gala bells. The bull was dragged out at their tails, and his trail of blood covered with fresh sand.

Catalina rose and bent over her duenna. “We will go now, señora,” she said. “But you will remain, of course. I shall be well taken care of.”

The Señora Villéna looked up with polite amazement. “You go? Are you ill, dear señorita? It has only begun. There are many more bulls to kill.”

“I have had enough to last me for the rest of my life. Hasta luego.”

It was not at every bull-fight that the señora sat in a box, and she settled back in her conspicuous seat thankful that the very bourgeois Señor Moulton had accompanied her singular charge.

As they were leaving the box Catalina saw that another picador had entered and stood precisely as his predecessor had done, with the profile of his blindfolded horse towards the door of the toril. Fascinated, she stood rooted to the spot, some deep, savage lust slowly awakening. Again the door of the toril was cautiously opened; again a bull, as if he had been rehearsed for the part, rushed straight at the helpless horse and buried his horns in his side. Catalina fancied she could hear the rip of the hide. But this bull was more powerful than the other. He lifted horse and rider on his horns, and the picador, amid the belated enthusiasm of the multitude, leaped like a monkey over the wall as the torn horse was tossed and fell cracking to the ground.

“Well,” said Over, “have you had enough? They say, you know, that the horror soon passes and the fascination grows.”

“I am glad to know it was not my Indian blood. I can now understand the fascination, but I shall never come again, all the same.”

“We are none of us so far from savagery—Miss Shore, Mrs. Rothe.”

They were in the passage behind the boxes, and Mrs. Rothe, who was pallid with disgust and delighted to express herself to a sympathetic woman—her young husband had sulkily torn himself from the ring—walked out with Catalina anathematizing the Spanish race. As they emerged, Mr. Moulton, green and very silent, disappeared. When he returned he was still pale, but normal once more, and after a speech of five minutes’ duration, in which, ignoring the finer flowers of his working vocabulary, he consigned Spain to eternal perdition—Catalina had driven off with Mrs. Rothe—he was quite restored, and celebrated his recovery by a long pull at a wine-skin.

“I believe I am quite demoralized,” he said, cheerfully; and then, in company with Over and young Rothe—whose wife had amiably bade him stay—he returned to the ring.

XVII

“I saw that horse standing in the middle of the arena every time my mind was off guard!” said Catalina. “I woke up suddenly in the night with the hideous vision painted on the dark. I thought it was a judgment on me for going—that I should be haunted by it for the rest of my life. I believe it was Velasquez that banished it, but now I see it only at intervals.”

“Perhaps,” said Over, “we were wiser in going back. Our savagery was glutted and the imagination blunted. I was never so bored in my life as at the end of two hours of it, and I haven’t thought of it since.”

They were down in the crypt of the Escorial, in the Pantheon de los Reyes. Mrs. Rothe had offered to chaperon Catalina, and after two days of sight-seeing in Toledo had returned to Madrid to prepare for the trip south. She had seen the Escorial, and Catalina had come out alone with Over to the grim mass of masonry growing out of the Guadarrama Mountains, which from a distance looks like a phantom casino for dead pleasures. They had wandered over it leisurely, lingering in the cell, with its scant leather furniture, where Philip II. in his monastic arrogance had received the ambassadors of Europe, and peering through the little window of the inner cell upon the same sight that had held his dying gaze as he lay where they, as a great concession, were permitted to stand—a high-mass in the chapel beyond. Then they had descended the fifty-nine steps into the black-and-gold vault where lies the dust of Charles V. and his successors to the throne of Spain, together with the queens who reigned, or mothered kings.

It is an octagonal apartment, with eight rows of niches, the kings on the right of the altar opposite the entrance, the queens on the left. Every sarcophagus, wrought in precisely the same elaborate pattern, is of black marble heavily encrusted with gold. The handful of dust that once was chief of the Holy Roman Empire is in the sarcophagus on a level with the top of the altar, and below him is Philip II. There is none of the picturesque confusion, the vagaries of different epochs, nor the lingering scent of death of the Kaisergruft in Vienna. It might have been built yesterday, but it has the sombre richness, the lofty dignity of Spain itself.

There were only two empty niches, and the guide informed his patrons that they awaited the young king and the late Queen Isabella.

“Where is she now?” asked Catalina. “Why is she not here?”

“Oh, she must remain in the Pudridero for ten years,” said the guide, indifferently. “It is the custom. For some it is only five years, but she was very fat.”

Thus was explained the purity of the atmosphere.

They ascended thirty-four of the steps and wandered through that white marble quarry, so brilliant, so new, so cheerful, where lie the lesser dead of the House of Spain. There are rows and rows and rows of them. In one octagonal, snow-white mass, exactly resembling a huge wedding-cake, the dust of many children has been put away, and the gay coat of arms embellishing it seems cut there to cheer the little ones in their last sleep. Many of the glistening sarcophagi are as yet without inscription, awaiting, no doubt, time and the Pudridero.

Above, in the Sacristia and Ante-Sacristia, they were shown the magnificent vestments and altar-cloths with which the uneasy Isabella, as age waxed and time waned, propitiated Church and saints. And what she had been was discreetly forgotten; she had descended into the Pudridero fortified with the odor of sanctity.

They dismissed the guide and walked down the foot-path to the lower town. For a time they preserved the tranquil silence which is so pleasant an episode in friendship; for although this friendship was barely three weeks old, they had enjoyed so much in common, and companioned each other through so many annoyances, quarrelled and made up so often, discovered so many points of sympathy and disagreement, they had come to take their intimate association as a matter of course, while still their mutual interest deepened.

Over stole a glance at his companion as she looked aside into the gardens. She had restored the short skirt to favor, but to gratify Mrs. Rothe, who was shocked that so much beauty should go to waste, she had bought a gray silk blouse and a soft gray hat. Still she looked more like the aggressive Catalina to whom he had grown accustomed before the brief, distracting interval of the mantilla. He was well again after these three weeks of almost open-air life, much heat, and uninterrupted freedom, and carried his tall, thin figure with military erectness, while his keen eyes seemed always laughing and there was a tinge of color in his dark face. He now not only looked the handsome, highly bred, intelligent Englishman who might have had an Italian or Spanish ancestor, but his magnetism was alive again, and the observant Catalina noticed that women stared at him and occasionally lay in wait.

The hotel in Madrid where they were all stopping was full of travellers and of deputies, many of whose wives were handsome, and dressed like women who looked to life to furnish them with much amusement. Catalina speculated and occasionally flew into a rage; for this trip in Spain he was all hers, if she never saw him again, and she was ready to spit fire upon possible rivals.

She was not in her most amiable mood to-day. The hotel was on the Puerta del Sol, the noisiest plaza in Europe. If the throngs that haunt it ever go to bed they must get up again at once, and Catalina, whose rest was broken, wondered how Spain had ever acquired the reputation for indolence. Moreover, it was quite true that the horrors of the bull-ring had haunted her almost to the point of obsession, and as she was too philosophical to wish the done undone, she took refuge in wrath against herself for not meeting the inevitable with her usual stolidity. She prided herself greatly upon her Oriental serenity, and looked upon her temper as a mere annex, which, no doubt, would be absorbed in time.

She turned suddenly with a little frown.

“There’s an end to our travelling third. I broached the subject last night, and Mrs. Rothe looked as if I were stark mad. She has no snobbish scruples, but I suppose the poor thing has never been uncomfortable in her life. She asked me politely if I could not afford to go in the luxe that runs between here and Granada once a week, and, of course, I had to admit that I could. But I hate it. Couldn’t we go third and meet her there?”

“I am afraid we have no good excuse—and it would take nearly two days by the slow trains. I rather think you should be thankful for the solution of Mrs. Rothe.”

“You need not preach. I am. But when I come back to Europe I’m going to pretend to be a widow and travel by myself.”

“Are you so in love with liberty?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, I have always thought highly of it myself,” he said, lightly. “How do you like Mrs. Rothe, on the whole? Don’t you find her a good sort, in spite of her foibles?”

“Follies, I should call them. Yes, I like her, if only because she has taught me that a person may be foolish and yet be wise; decorate herself like a cocotte and yet be a lady; violate half the rules one has been brought up on and yet be more estimable than the wholly virtuous—Cousin Miranda, for instance.”

“Those would be dangerous deductions for some girls, but you have a ripping strong head. You ought to be as grateful for that as for your beauty.”

“I wish you’d stop preaching.”

“I never preached in my life,” he said, indignantly. “I was merely thinking aloud—uttering an obvious fact. I might add that I wish your temper was in the same class with your good looks and common-sense.”

“Well, it isn’t. Do you approve of second marriages?”

“Never given a thought to the subject. If ever I married it would not be with the divorce court among the future possibilities.”

“I was not thinking of divorce—although Mrs. Rothe, in a way, suggested the question. But I wonder how it feels to be married to a second man, especially if you were in love with the first—and most youthful marriages are for love. I picked up an old volume of Hawthorne the other day and came across the phrase, apropos of a second marriage, ‘the dislocation of the heart’s principles.’ You never forget a phrase like that. And I have been wondering.”

“One is so different at twenty-five and thirty-five. It is almost like being reborn. And so many youthful marriages result in disillusion and disappointment you can hardly blame the victims for taking another try at it. There is such a thing as sacrificing too much, and I fancy Mrs. Rothe has. Still, there is something magnificent in the big gambler, and Mrs. Rothe must have more courage than weakness to stake all on one throw.”