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VII
THE GEOGRAPHY GENTLEMAN

RAFAEL woke three times that night and put out his hand to his father’s hammock, only to find it empty. Listening intently, he would hear measured steps pacing up and down at the further end of the garden. The third time, he ventured to call, and the steps quickened their beat and came toward him.

“Anything amiss, my son?” asked Don Carlos, stooping over the cot.

“I keep waking up and missing you,” confessed Rafael, half ashamed. “Isn’t it very late?”

“Yes, or very early, as one may like to call it,” answered Don Carlos, looking to the east, where a pearly gleam was already stealing up the sky. “But I will turn in now, if your rest depends on mine. A youngster like you should make but one sleep of it the whole night long, and not lie with eyes as wide open as a rabbit’s.”

The next morning Tia Marta noticed that Don Carlos had a haggard look and that, when he returned from his walk with Rodrigo, his face was grave and anxious.

“The master’s furlough must be nearly up,” she remarked to the cat, with whom she was in the habit of holding long conversations, “or he worries about the new conscription, fearing for the señorito. But it is not our bonny Rodrigo who would draw a lot for the soldiering. He is ever the son of good-luck. And yet – ah, well! well! Each man sneezes as God pleases. As for you and me, Roxa, we will not be troubling the master with questions. Some broths are the worse for stirring.”

When Don Carlos, however, came upon Rafael and Pilarica running races in the garden, his bearing was so gay that they mischievously barred his passage, standing across the walk, hand in hand, and singing:

 
“Potatoes and salt must little folks eat,
While the grown-up people dine
Off marmalade, peanuts and oranges sweet,
With cocoanut milk for wine.
On the ground do we take our seat;
We’re at your feet, we’re at your feet.”
 

As they suited the action to the words, he bent and lightly knocked the black heads together, saying merrily:

“What a pity that nobody wants to spend the day with me in Granada!”

“A whole day!”

“In Granada!”

And the madcaps, wild with glee, flashed about the fragrant garden more swiftly than the swallows, whose chirurrí, chirurrí, chicurrí, Beatriiiiíz, Pilarica mocked so truly that her father could not always tell which was child and which was bird.

“What, what, gentlemen! What, what, what! What, what, ladies! What, what, what! As the old duck quacks when the barnyard gets too lively,” called Grandfather, who was trimming one of the boxwood hedges. Even his physical energies seemed to have been somewhat restored in these three eventful weeks since Don Carlos had come home.

“Save your strength, you little spendthrifts,” bade their father. “It’s a long road to Granada, and a longer road back. And now run to Tia Marta to be made fine.”

“May Shags go with us?” shouted Rafael.

“And Don Quixote, please,” begged Pilarica.

“Not all the way,” replied Don Carlos, “but Grandfather, if he will be so kind, may bring the donkeys to meet us at the Gate of the Pomegranates an hour before sundown.”

“With much pleasure,” assented Grandfather, while the children scampered off to be arrayed in their simple best.

Such a joyous day as it was! They walked down slowly, with frequent rests, in which Don Carlos would tell them still more stories of the Cid, and of Bernardo del Carpio, the valiant knight who loved his father even better than he loved his country.

“And so do I,” said Rafael shyly, and Don Carlos, though he shook his head, pinched the square chin, so like his own, and did not look displeased. But at their next rest he began to tell them what a glorious history their country had, – how the Spanish Peninsula, after the Romans, once masters of the world, had occupied and ruled it for nearly seven centuries, was possessed by the Goths, one of the wild, free races from the north of Europe that poured down upon the sunny southern lands and wrested them from the grasp of Rome, then weakened by luxury and unable to resist.

“But this does not interest Pilarica,” the speaker interrupted himself to say. “There are flowers over yonder, Honey Heart, that you might run and gather.”

“Oh, but I love it!” protested the little girl, all her face aglow. “I can just see the Goths rushing down from the top of the world, and the lazy Romans looking so surprised while their countries are taken away from them.”

“Huh!” snorted Rafael. “I don’t see any such thing. Do be quiet, Pilarica, while my father tells me what happened next.”

“Something more than two centuries of Gothic rule, which was Christian rule, happened next,” continued Don Carlos, “and then the Moors, followers of the false prophet Mohammed, swarmed over from Africa and drove the Christians back and back, till even stout little Galicia, which made a stubborn resistance up in its far corner, was conquered. It was feared that the Mohammedans would pass the Pyrenees, that majestic mountain range which shuts off our Peninsula from the rest of Europe, and overrun all Christendom, and it is the supreme service of Spain to civilization, her crowning honor and her holiest pride, that in this crisis of destiny she saved Europe from the Moslems. Against that dark tide of invasion, checked by the mountain bar, she flung the fighting force of all her chivalry, and little by little, century by century, the armies of the Cross forced the armies of the Crescent southward, drenching all the way with blood, until at last, at last, under our great wedded sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moors were driven out even from their last stronghold in the Peninsula, from Granada, and sent flying back across the Straits.”

In the fervor of his feeling, Don Carlos had risen and swept off his hat, as if in the presence of that august Spain whose heroic past he was relating. Pilarica’s slender arms were extended to help in pushing out the Moors. Rafael, breathing hard, was the first to speak.

“Oh-h! I am so glad to be a Spaniard.”

“And well you may be,” said Don Carlos, holding out his hand to Pilarica for resuming the walk. “Not only does Europe owe, perhaps, her very existence as a Christian continent to Spain, but it was through the faith and practical support of Queen Isabella that the Italian adventurer, Columbus, was enabled to cross the vast, unknown Atlantic and discover America.”

“Are not Europe and America very grateful to us?” asked Pilarica, as she tripped along by her father’s side, taking three steps to his one.

“Of course they are,” Rafael took it upon himself to answer. “Isn’t that a silly question, father? But Pilarica is only a girl.”

“Queen Isabella, who did such wonderful things for Spain and the world, was only a girl once,” remarked Pilarica.

Rafael pretended not to hear.

Their father brought them first to the stately cathedral of Granada. Here, in the Royal Chapel, all three stood silent for a moment above the dim vault where rest in peace the ashes of Ferdinand and Isabella. Then he took them to the magnificent promenade, the Alameda, along whose sides tower rows of giant trees that throw an emerald arch across the avenue. Here fountains were playing, roses, myrtles and jessamines were in rich bloom, and there were dazzling glimpses of the snow-robed Sierra Nevada. But when the little feet began to lag under the noontide heat, Don Carlos led the children to a neighboring square and, pausing before one of the tallest houses, reached his arm through the iron bars of the outer door and twitched a bell-chain that was looped within.

“Who comes?” called a voice from above, as in the old times of warfare between Christian and Moor.

“Peace,” answered Don Carlos, and in a moment both doors swung wide.

A little old man came hurrying across the marble court to meet them. His head was covered by a close-fitting red silk cap, his eyes were two black twinkles, and his face was yellow as an orange.

“It’s the Geography Gentleman,” whispered Rafael to Pilarica, while their host was greeting Don Carlos. “I met him once when I was walking with Rodrigo and he gave me macaroons.”

“And you have brought your cherubs, as I begged you,” twittered the Geography Gentleman, pecking at Pilarica’s cheeks. “And how are you called, my sweeting?”

“Maria Pilar Catalina Isabel Teresa Mariana Moreto y Hernandez, at the service of God and yourself,” responded the child, demurely kissing the clawlike hand and smiling trustfully into the queer yellow face so near her own.

“Aha! So our Lady of the Pillar has you under her protection, and Catalina is for your mother, whom I knew before she was as tall as you are now – ah, white pearl among the souls in Paradise! – and the other names?”

“Are for the great queen whose tomb I have just taken her to see and for her sponsors in baptism,” explained Don Carlos.

“Good, good! And this is Rafael, an old friend of mine, though so young. Aha, ha, ha! And now you children are wondering why I keep my cap on in the house, and that, too, when it is honored by the presence of a little ladybird. It is not because I am such a good Spaniard that I must always wear the red with the yellow; not that, not that. It is because I am bald, like St. Peter. Did you never hear it said that a silent man is as badly off for words as St. Peter for hair? I will teach you a verse about him:

 
“St. Peter was so bald,
Mosquitoes bit his skin,
Till his mother said: ‘Put on your cap,
Poor little Peterkin.’
 

“But you are hot; you are tired; you are well-nigh slain by that enemy, the sun. Come and rest! Come and rest! The house is yours. All that it holds is yours. Come and rest!”

It seemed to the awed children that their house held a great deal, as they followed the Geography Gentleman, to whom their father had offered his arm. First he led them to the central court, an Andalusian patio, open to the air, with violet-bordered fountain, with graceful palms and, planted in urns, small, sweet-blossoming trees. Then their adventurous sandals climbed a wide marble stairway and pattered on over the tiled floors from chamber to chamber out to a shaded balcony. Pilarica and Rafael were less impressed by the Moorish arches and windows, the delight of foreign visitors, than by objects less familiar to their eyes, – statues, pictures, tapestried walls, curtained bedsteads, hanging lamps and, strangest of all the strange, an American rocking-chair.

A smiling maid came in, bearing a silver pitcher and basin, and the children bathed their faces and hands in the cool, rose-scented water, but when the maid offered them the embroidered towel of fine linen she carried on her arm, Pilarica drew back in dismay.

“But we would get it wet,” she objected.

Nobody laughed, although the black eyes of the Geography Gentleman twinkled more brightly than ever. Don Carlos stepped forward and held over the basin his own hands, on which the maid poured a fresh stream from the pitcher. Then he dried his hands upon the towel and passed it to Pilarica, who, though still reluctant, ventured to use one end, while Rafael, at the same time, plunged his dripping face into the other.

The luncheon, it seemed to the little guests, was a repast fit for heroes, even for the Cid and Bernardo del Carpio, – a cold soup like a melted salad, a perfumed stew in which were strangely mingled Malaga potatoes, white wine, honey, cinnamon and cloves, and, for a crowning bliss, a dish of sugared chestnuts overflowed by a syrup whose every spoonful yielded a new flavor, – lemon peel, orange peel, tamarind, and a medley of spices.

After luncheon everybody, in true Spanish fashion, took a nap, the Geography Gentleman in one of the hushed chambers, and Don Carlos in another, but the children slept far more soundly on couches in adjoining balconies, though over Pilarica’s slumber two canaries in a gilded cage were chirping drowsily about their family affairs, and a bright green parrot, chained to a perch, did his best to waken Rafael by screaming for bread and butter.

VIII
ONLY A GIRL

PILARICA and Rafael were finally aroused from the siesta by a commotion in the square. Peeping over the queerly twisted iron railing of the balconies, they saw many women, in the bright-hued costume of Andalusian peasants, surging by in stormy groups, talking wildly and making violent gestures. Then came a dozen lads of about Rodrigo’s age, locked arm in arm and chorusing in time to their swinging tread:

 
“To-morrow comes the drawing of lots;
The chosen march delighted
And leave the girls behind with those
Whom the King has not invited.”
 

The children looked and wondered for a while, and then, as they had been bidden, went down to the patio.

Don Carlos and his host were smoking there together and talking so earnestly that they did not notice the light footfalls.

“No, if it comes to that, I shall not buy him off,” Don Carlos was saying. “He must take his chance with the rest of the eighty thousand whom Spain has flung like acorns into Cuba.”

“My own three sons among them, my gentle José, my fearless Adolfo, my merry Celestino,” moaned the old man, rocking himself to and fro like one in bodily pain. “My money can do nothing for them now – my gallant boys! – but if you would accept from an old friend, for the comfort of his lonely heart, the thousand pesetas – ”

“Thanks upon thanks, most honored sir, but no, no!” interrupted Don Carlos, laying his hand upon the other’s arm, while his voice deepened with emotion. “If you, one of the wealthiest of the Granadines, were too loyal a patriot to buy off your sons from military service, shall I, who wear the uniform, hold back my own?”

“Ah, but my lads would not be bought off, though when it came to Adolfo, I consented, and when it came to Celestino, I besought. They were all for adventure and for seeing the world. They had lived among my globes and maps too long. Woe is me! Woe is me!”

Tears were streaming down the yellow face of the Geography Gentleman, and Pilarica could not bear the sight. She ran forward and, leaning against his knee, reached up and tried to wipe the tears away with her tiny handkerchief.

“Oho, oho!” he chirped, changing his manner at once. “Here is our Linnet wide awake again! What now? What now? A fairy story, shall it be? That’s what little girls like – stories of the fairies and the saints.”

“I would rather, if you please, hear about Cuba,” replied Pilarica, nestling close to those trembling knees. “What is it, and why does Spain drop people into it like acorns?”

Rafael, standing close beside his father, felt him start as if to check the childish questions, but already the Geography Gentleman was rising, not without difficulty, from his carven chair.

“Ugh!” he groaned. “My poor bones creak like a Basque cart. But no matter! As for the old, they may sing sorrow. Come with me to my study, all of you, all of you, and we will find out what Cuba looks like. Ah, Cuba, Cuba, Cuba!”

Don Carlos tried again to protest, but the Geography Gentleman would have his way. So he led them to a room unlike anything that the children had ever seen before. Great globes swung in their standards, maps lined the walls, a desk with many pigeon-holes stood near a huge brasero, and everywhere were cases of books. Rafael hung back in bewilderment, but Pilarica kept close to their guide and watched with eager eyes while he gave the largest globe a twirl.

“Did you know the world was round?” he asked. “And that there is a red-haired goblin who sits in the center and holds on to our feet so we shan’t tumble off? When he yawns, it gives us an earthquake. A good old fellow, that, but he has too long a name for such little pink ears as yours.”

“My ears are larger,” suggested Rafael.

“And Shags and Don Quixote have the largest ears of all,” added Pilarica, and then blushed to see that even her father smiled, while the Geography Gentleman gurgled and wheezed until his yellow face was streaked with purple.

“Good! good! good!” he squeaked, as soon as he could muster even so much voice again. “The goblin’s name is Gravitation, and he sits all doubled up, with his long nose gripped between his knees, pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling, till his arms are almost ripped out of his shoulders, but not quite. For though he’s uglier than hunger, he’s stronger than the sun and the moon.”

The child gazed doubtfully at the big globe.

“Will you please open it and show him to me?”

Again the Geography Gentleman fell to laughing until he had to hold his aching sides.

“But do you think I have wind-mills in my head that I talk such a monstrous heap of nonsense?” he asked. “It is only that pretty little ladies like nonsense better than sense. No, I cannot open my globe for you, dainty one, but see! I can show you Spain.”

But Pilarica’s faith in the Geography Gentleman was shaken.

“Spain is not blue,” she objected, looking critically at the color of the patch beneath his thumb. And even while he pointed out Andalusia in the south, with its Moorish cities of Granada and Seville and Cordova, and the port of Cadiz; and Castile, occupying the middle of the Peninsula, with its ancient city of Toledo and its royal city of Madrid; and her father’s native province of Aragon to the northeast, with Saragossa, the home of his boyhood, still Pilarica’s air was so skeptical as to throw the lecturer into frequent convulsions of mirth.

“But where is the basket, – the big basket that Spain flings acorns into?” she questioned.

This, again, was too much for the Geography Gentleman, and while he was gasping and choking, Don Carlos came to his little daughter’s aid.

“Cuba is an island,” he explained, “the largest of the West Indian islands and almost all that is left to Spain of her once vast American possessions. One by one, the lands she had discovered and claimed – you remember about Queen Isabella and Columbus – rebelled against her, or otherwise slipped from her hold, and even now there is a revolt in Cuba that has already cost Spain dear in life and treasure.”

“And if the Yankees take a hand in the game,” put in their host, “may cost us Cuba herself.”

“What are Yankees?” asked Rafael, frowning quite terribly at this suggestion.

“The most powerful nation in America,” replied Don Carlos, “a nation that threatens to go to war with us, if the trouble in Cuba continues much longer.”

“They must be very wicked people,” declared Rafael with flashing eyes.

“No, my son; they are much like the rest of the world,” answered his father, quietly. “I have met a few of them, but not to know them well, for they did not understand Spanish.”

“Not understand Spanish!” exclaimed Pilarica. “Then at least they must be very stupid, for Spanish even the donkeys understand!”

This reproach set the Geography Gentleman off again, and his sides were still shaking as he pointed out Cuba on the globe.

And now all Pilarica’s gathering suspicions of the science of geography were confirmed.

“But if Cuba belongs to Spain, who put it there close to America?” she asked. “Did the Yankees make that globe and put it there themselves?”

And once more the Geography Gentleman laughed till the close-fitting cap fell off and showed his shining bald head.

“ ‘Honey is not for the mouth of an ass,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and learning is not for women.’ But what a pity, Don Carlos, that this child is only a girl! Her wits run bright as the quicksilver fountain that used to sparkle in the royal garden of Seville.”

“She is like Rodrigo, keen as a Toledo blade,” assented Don Carlos. “It is this youngster,” drawing Rafael closer to him, “who has the slow brains of his father.”

“Slow and sure often wins the race,” said the old teacher, turning kind eyes on Rafael. “He will make a scholar when the time comes, and it should come soon now. Will you not enter him in the lower school next year? He may not be the mathematical wonder that his brother is, taking prizes as naturally as other lads bite off ripe mulberries, but if his father’s steadfastness of purpose has descended to him with his father’s chin, he will do well in the world. Character is better than talent. But this rosebud brings back to me her mother, who used to coax and coax me, when she was the merest midget, to teach her to read my books. Her parents spent several summers in Granada and, if they had consented, I would have liked to see what a girl’s head could do. But of course they would not hear of it. She was taught to dance and to embroider, only that. Her mind went hungry. But bless my heart! Such talk as this is not meal for chickens. A penny for your thoughts, my sober little man!”

“I was thinking about Spain,” answered Rafael, who all this time had been glowering at the globe. “How did we lose what was ours? Were there no more great kings after Ferdinand?”

“Yes,” said Don Carlos. “Spain has had strong kings and weak kings, wise and foolish, but even the best of them blundered at times. Ferdinand and Isabella themselves made mistakes. So some thirty years ago, when I was a boy, Spain tried to be a republic and get on without any king at all, but she did not prosper so.”

“King Alfonsito is not much older than I am,” murmured Rafael, with a wondering look in his great dark eyes.

“And a gallant child it is! A right royal child!” chirruped the Geography Gentleman.

“God bless him and grant him a long and righteous reign!” added Don Carlos, so solemnly that Pilarica clasped her hands as if she were saying her prayers.

“His father, King Alfonso XII, had a great heart,” the Geography Gentleman said musingly, “but his heart was wrung to breaking by sore troubles. I was in Madrid when the young Queen Mercedes died. Woe is me! What a grief was his!”

“Pilarica knows a song about that,” observed Rafael.

“Ah, to be sure! Spanish babies all over the Peninsula dance to that sorrow,” nodded the Geography Gentleman. “Come back into the patio, where the fountain will sing with her, and let us have it.”

So in the fragrant air of the patio, where an awning had been drawn to shut off the direct rays of the sun, Pilarica, dancing with strange, slow movements of feet and hands, sang childhood’s lament for the girl-queen.

 
“ ‘Whither away, young King Alfonso?
(Oh, for pity!) Whither away?’
‘I go seeking my queen Mercedes,
For I have not seen her since yesterday.’
 
 
“ ‘But we have seen your queen Mercedes,
Seen the queen, though her eyes were hid,
While four dukes all gently bore her
Through the streets of sad Madrid.’
 
 
“ ‘Oh, how her face was calm as heaven!
Oh, how her hands were ivory white!
Oh, how she wore the satin slippers
You had kissed on the bridal night!
 
 
“ ‘Dark are the lamps of the lonely palace;
Black are the suits the nobles don;
In letters of gold on the wall ’tis written:
Her Majesty is dead and gone.’
 
 
“He fainted to hear us, young Alfonso,
Drooped like an eagle with broken wing;
But the cannon thundered: ‘Valor, valor!’
And the people shouted: ‘Long live the king!’ ”
 

“And now we must be taking our leave, with a thousand thanks for a red-letter day,” said Don Carlos.

“But no, no, no!” cried the Geography Gentleman. “Not until you have tasted a little light refreshment to wing your feet for the Alhambra hill. We will go up to the balcony and see Lorito – the wasteful rumple-poll that he is – enjoy his bread and butter.”

It was very pleasant on the balcony, with its pots of sweet basil, its earthen jar of fresh water and its caged cricket “singing the song of the heat.” The gentlemen were regaled with wine and biscuit, the children with candied nectarines and tarts, and to Lorito the maid respectfully handed a great slice of bread, thickly buttered. The square was quiet again, though from the Alameda came confused sounds, as of an angry crowd, cut by shrill outcries. A few beggars were gathered beneath the balcony, waiting for the bread which Lorito, after scraping off every least bit of the butter with his crooked beak, tore into strips and threw down to them, dancing on his perch and screaming with excitement to see them scramble for it.

This amused the children so much that they could hardly recall the proper Andalusian phrases for farewell. But their host, loving the ripple of their laughter, found nothing lacking in their courtesy and, at parting, slipped into Pilarica’s hand a dainty white Andalusian fan, painted with birds and flowers, and into Rafael’s a small geography, written by himself. Rafael was deeply impressed at receiving this, the first book he had ever owned, from its author, and carried it, on their homeward walk, in such a way that no learned person who might meet them could fail to see what it was.

“Of course nobody would give a geography to a girl,” he remarked.

“Maybe your geography isn’t true,” retorted Pilarica, flirting her fan. “But look, look! There is Grandfather with the donkeys, and Rodrigo is waiting for us, too.”

Don Carlos, who had his own reasons for wishing to see what Don Quixote was able to do, placed both the children on the white donkey’s back, leaving Shags for Grandfather to ride, and Don Quixote acquitted himself so well that he, with his double burden, was the first to arrive at the garden gate. Shags, trotting for sheer surprise, was close behind, but it was half an hour later before Don Carlos and Rodrigo came slowly up the road, the father’s arm thrown lightly over the lad’s shoulders.