Buch lesen: «In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael», Seite 5

IX
CHOSEN FOR THE KING

THE next morning, as Don Carlos was starting off, as usual, with Rodrigo, Rafael clung to his father’s hand.

The officer who, since that first unhappy night, seemed to have a complete understanding of the boy, hesitated.

“But I may walk all the way into Granada with your brother to-day and may not come back until afternoon. You know how tired you were yesterday by the time we reached the Gate of the Pomegranates.”

Rafael’s black eyes looked wistfully into his father’s.

“I would rather go with you and be tired than not go with you and not be tired,” he said.

Don Carlos smiled so tenderly that Rafael had a queer feeling as if his heart were growing too big for his jacket.

“You may come, my son,” decided the father, and then his glance fell doubtfully on Pilarica. “No, the city will be in tumult; no place for a little girl. But you may walk a bit of the way with us, Sweetheart.”

It seemed such a very wee bit that, when her father kissed her and bade her run back, the tears stood in Pilarica’s eyes like dew on pansies.

“Why not let her romp a while with the other children?” suggested Rodrigo, looking over to where a dozen happy tatterdemalions were skipping songfully about in one of their favorite circle-dances. “There are no gypsies among them this morning, and it is to the gypsies that Tia Marta most objects.”

“Very well,” assented Don Carlos, relieved to see the grieved face brighten. “You may play with them this forenoon, if you like. But don’t follow tourists into the Alhambra.”

“And scamper home if the children get rude,” warned Big Brother.

“And don’t go near the Gypsy King,” put in Rafael.

Uncrushed by all this weight of masculine authority, Pilarica threw kisses to her three guardians as long as they were in sight and then flashed into the midst of the dancing circle, where she was welcomed with a gleeful shout. Carmencita clamored, as always, for Little White Pigeons, and so the children divided into two opposite rows, each line in turn clasping hands and lifting arms while the other danced under, as the song indicates:

 
“Little white pigeons
Are dreaming of Seville,
Sun in the palm tree,
Roses and revel.
Lift up the arches,
Gold as the weather.
Little white pigeons
Come flying together.
 
 
“Little white pigeons
Dream of Granada,
Glistening snows on
Sierra Nevada.
Lift up the arches,
Silver as fountains.
Little white pigeons
Fly to the mountains.”
 

Then they played Hide-and-Seek in their own special fashion. The first seeker was Pepito, who sat doubled over, with his chubby palms pressed tight against his eyes, while the others slipped softly into their hiding-places, all except Pilarica, who, as the Mother, stood by and gave Pepito his signal for the start by singing:

 
“My nightingales of the Alhambra
Forth from the cage are flown.
My nightingales of the Alhambra
Have left me all alone.”
 

After they were tired of this, Isabelita called for Butterfly Tag and was chosen, because of her pink frock – torn though it was, – to be the Butterfly. Forming in a close circle about her, the children lifted her dress-skirt by the border and held it outspread, while Pilarica, on the outside, danced round and round the ring, fluting like a bird:

 
“Who are these chatterers?
Oh, such a number!
Nor by day nor by night
Do they let me slumber.
They’re daughters of the Moorish king
Who search the garden-close
For lovely Lady Ana,
The sweetest thing that grows.
She’s opening the jasmine
And shutting up the rose.”
 

Then the children all at once lifted the pink frock and wrapped it about Isabella’s head, while Pilarica, dancing faster than ever, led them in singing seven times over:

 
“Butterfly, butterfly,
Dressed in rose-petals!
Is it on candle-flame
Butterfly settles?
How many shirts
Have you woven of rain?
Weave me another
Ere I call you again.”
 

Suddenly they varied the song:

 
“Now that Lady Ana
Walks in garden sweet,
Gathering the roses
Whose dew is on her feet,
Butterfly, butterfly,
Can you catch us? Try it, try!”
 

In an instant the circle had broken and scattered, while the Butterfly, blinded and half smothered in the folds of the skirt, dashed about as best she could, trying to catch one or another of her teasing playmates.

Then followed Washerwoman, and Chicken-Market, Rose and Pink, and Golden Earrings, and when, at noon, Don Carlos and Rafael came back, the children were all absorbed in the circle-dance of Mambrú. Don Carlos remembered the song from his own childhood in Saragossa and hummed the pathetic couplets under his breath, as he stood watching.

 
“Mambrú is gone to serve the king,
And comes no more by fall or spring.
 
 
“We’ve looked until our eyes are dim.
Will no one give us word of him?
 
 
“You’d know him for his mother’s son
By peasant dress of Aragon.
 
 
“You’d know him for my husband dear
By broidered kerchief on his spear.
 
 
“The one I broider now is wet.
Oh, may I see him wear it yet!”
 

With the last word of the song all the little figures in the circle flung themselves face downward on the ground, so impetuously that Carmencita and Pepito bumped their heads together and set up such a duet of stormy weeping that, for dramatic close, there was nothing left to be desired.

Don Carlos swung Pilarica, hotter and more weary than Rafael himself, to her feet, and as she smiled up into his face, she saw in it, for all its gravity, a great relief.

Tia Marta, too, who met them at the garden gate, was quick to read his look.

“Your heart has been taking a bath of roses,” she said.

And Don Carlos, in the same breath, was telling her his good tidings.

“Rodrigo drew a lucky number. There is weeping in other homes to-day, but not in ours.”

“Other people’s troubles are easily borne,” scoffed Tia Marta, but the dry, walnut face was twitching so strangely that the children wished it had been polite to laugh.

After their simple luncheon, a hunch of bread and a bowlful of olives for each, Pilarica coaxed Rafael out to the summer-house where the boy, not ill-pleased to have an audience for his story, seated himself with his back against the column and recounted the great event of the day.

“The Gov’ment,” he explained, with the dignity of a prime minister, “needs more soldiers for Cuba.”

“Acorns,” murmured Pilarica.

“And so it has set up in every city and town and village – my father told me so – urns for the lottery, and all the men who ar’n’t too young, like me, or too old, like Grandfather and the Geography Gentleman, draw out a number. If it’s a very, very high number, you don’t go to Cuba, but if isn’t, you do.”

“And Rodrigo?” breathed Pilarica, who was sitting on the ground exactly in front of Rafael, leaning forward and squeezing her sandals in her hands so hard that her toes ached all the rest of the afternoon.

Rafael’s eyes glowed.

“Oh, he was so tall and straight as he stood there waiting his turn. He had his cap in his hand and he waved it and looked right across the urn to my father and me and laughed. And my father took off his hat to him. Think of that! My father! Some day I am going to be a hero, like the Cid, and then, perhaps, he will take off his hat to me.”

Don Carlos, pacing back and forth on one of the tiled walks, smiled as he caught the words.

“And then it was Rodrigo’s turn?” prompted Pilarica.

“Yes, his turn among the very first, and I stood on my tippiest tiptoes to see. I saw his arm go down into the urn, and I saw it come up again, and in his hand was something that he held out to the officer who was marking the names. Then the officer smiled, and nodded to my father, and we knew it was all right; so we followed Rodrigo out of the hall to embrace him. And I wanted him to come back with us, but he waited to see how the luck went with his friends.”

It was not till late in the afternoon that Rodrigo came back, and then he did not come alone. Along the road was heard a sound of tramping feet and suddenly there broke forth the familiar song of Cuban conscripts.

 
“We’re chosen for Alfonsito;
We serve the little king;
We care not one mosquito
For what the years may bring.
How steel and powder please us,
We’ll tell you bye and bye.
Give us a good death, Jesus,
If we go forth to die.”
 

“What does this mean?” demanded Don Carlos hoarsely, rising from the mosaic bench and fronting the lads as they thronged into the garden. He had already recognized Rodrigo’s voice and now he saw his son marching among the recruits.

There was a moment’s pause and then one of Rodrigo’s classmates stepped forward.

“We kiss your hands, Don Carlos,” he said, “and salute you as the father of a generous son. All Granada rings with his praises. For even while we, chosen for the King, were congratulating him on his better fortune, up to the urn came a young peasant, a laborer in the vineyards, as dazed as a pig in a pulpit. He drew a lot for the hungry island, and his mother – ah, you should have seen and heard her! They say it was she who led the rabble yesterday afternoon, when the women, hating Columbus for having ever discovered Cuba, stoned his statue in the Alameda. Her shrieks, as she pushed her way through the crowd to her boy, might have pierced the very bronze of that statue to the heart. The Civil Guards laid hands on her to drag her out, but she clung to that staring lout of hers like a starved dog to its bone. Then Rodrigo, the head of our class, the pride of the Institute, came forward and gave himself as a substitute for that dull animal, that mushroom there. And not even a God-bless-you did the unmannerly couple stay to give him, but made off as if a bull were after them. To bestow benefits upon the vulgar is to throw water into the ocean. But we, who know a great action when we see it, have escorted Rodrigo home to do him honor.”

For the first moment it looked to Rafael as if the stern face of his father had turned gray, but that may have been only the shadow of the olive-leaves above his head.

“You are welcome, Don Ernesto,” he replied in a voice even deeper than its wont, “and welcome to you all, soldiers of Spain. Marta, do me the favor to bring forth such refreshment as the house affords. Gentlemen, all that I have is yours. Take your ease and be merry.”

And so all was bustle and jollity till the conscripts trooped away again, and the family had, but only for one night more, Rodrigo to themselves. The children decided that it must be a fine thing, after all, to go and help put Cuba in its right place on the map, for everybody was talking faster and more cheerily than usual. Only Grandfather was heard murmuring a riddle that made a sudden silence in the group:

 
“In my little black pate
Is no love nor hate,
No loyalty nor treason,
And though I’ve killed your soldier boy,
I do not know the reason.”
 

“Bullet,” guessed Pilarica, her lip quivering as she looked toward Big Brother.

“That’s the bullet I’m going to dodge,” laughed Rodrigo. “There are more bullets than wounds in every battle. Eh, Tia Marta?”

“A shut mouth catches no flies,” returned the old woman tartly. But she bundled Grandfather into the house where he was still heard crooning to his guitar:

 
“I would not be afraid of Death,
Though I saw him walking by,
For without God’s permission
He can not kill a fly.”
 

Suddenly Don Carlos turned to Rodrigo, holding out both hands:

“My noble boy, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I will tell you frankly that I have thought it was your fault to lay overmuch stress on your own concerns and your own career, a career whose promise has indeed been bright, and now you have cast it all away that a peasant lad may not be torn from his mother.”

“I have no mother, sir,” replied Rodrigo, blushing like a girl and speaking in a hesitating way most unlike his usual fluency. “If there had been anyone to grieve over me like that – and yet I don’t know. Something happened – happened inside of me. It was as if a candle-flame went out and the daylight flooded in. After all, a life is a life.”

“Bah!” sniffed Tia Marta. “All trees are timber, but pine is not mahogany.”

Yet the children reasoned that she was not displeased, for she spared no pains to prepare a festival supper that evening, serving all the dishes that Rodrigo liked best, even to spiced wine and fritters.

X
TIA MARTA’S REBELLION

WHEN they gathered in the garden that evening, the grown people would still keep talking. Rafael and Pilarica, who were tired and drowsy after all the excitement of the day, missed the silence that usually fell as their father smoked and Rodrigo puzzled out his problems. To-night it seemed that nobody could keep quiet for ten seconds together.

“What shall I bring you back from Cuba, Tia Marta?” laughed Rodrigo.

“Yourself,” snapped the old woman, “with a grain of sense under your hair for something new.”

“And epaulets on my shoulders? I may return a general. Who knows?”

“Bah! Being a man I may come to be Pope. But many go out for wool and return shorn.”

Meanwhile Grandfather was strumming on his guitar and murmuring a riddle that neither of the children had heard before:

 
“An old woman gathering fig upon fig,
Nor heeds whether moist or dry,
Soft or hard or little or big,
A basketful for the sky.”
 

Before they could ask the answer, their father was pointing out to them the lovely cluster of stars that we call the Pleiades.

“Those are what shepherds know as the Seven Little Nanny Goats,” he said, “and that long river of twinkling light you see across the sky” – designating the Milky Way – “is the Road to Santiago. For Santiago, St. James the Apostle, was the Guardian Saint of all Spain in the centuries when the Moors and Christians were at war in the Peninsula, and the story goes that in one desperate battle, at sunrise, when the Christian cause was all but lost, there appeared at the head of their ranks an unknown knight gleaming in silver armor, as if he had ridden right out of the dawn, waving a snow-white banner stamped with a crimson cross. He charged full on the infidel army, his sword flashing through the air with such lightning force that his fierce white steed trampled the turbaned heads like pebbles beneath his hoofs. This was St. James – so the legend says – and from that time on he led the Christian hosts till the Moors were driven back to Africa. And up in Galicia, in the city of Santiago, where your Aunt Barbara lives, is his famous shrine, to which pilgrims used to flock from all over Europe, and they looked up at the heavens as they trudged along and named that beautiful stream of stars the Road to Santiago.”

Now information is amusing in the morning, and pleasant enough in the middle of the afternoon, when one’s brain has been refreshed by the siesta, but after a long day of dancing, walking, guests and feasting, information is good for little but to put one to sleep. Pilarica did not awaken even enough to know when her father and Big Brother kissed her good-night, but Rafael questioned with an enormous gape:

“Was Santiago’s horse as good as Bavieca?” and then his blinking eyes shut tight without waiting for the answer.

It was as well, as it turned out, that the children had a full night’s sleep, for never in all their lives had there been a day so crowded with emotions and surprises as the morrow. Pilarica in the great bed of the inner room and Rafael on his cot under the olive tree were aroused at the same time by angry screaming that their tousled heads, still in the borderland between sleep and waking, took at first for Lorito’s, but as the dream-mist cleared away, they knew the voice for that of Tia Marta in a rage. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen, arms akimbo, facing their father, whose hand was raised in a vain effort to check her torrent of words.

“Would you throw the rope after the bucket?” she was crying. “Is it not enough that the señorito must sail to the Indies, and you, but you would have me lead forth those forsaken innocents to Galicia? Galicia! That will I never do in spite of your teeth. Don’t tell me of their Aunt Barbara. Did she not stoop to marry a Galician? Bah! Coarse is the web out of which a Galician is spun. It is not the maid of the Giralda who will pass the end of her days among pigs.”

“But I cannot leave them, Marta, here on your hands. Their grandfather is now little more than a child himself. What could you do if Rodrigo and I should neither of us come back? No, no, the children must be in shelter. They must be with their kindred. The arrangements are all made. When my ship put in at Vigo for supplies, I took train to Santiago and settled the whole matter with my sister and her husband. And be assured that you, who have been so faithful, so devoted, will find warm welcome under their roof. You can be very useful to my sister.”

“Toss that bone to another dog. An Andalusian to go into service in Galicia! Take your wares to a better market. Is it at fifty years that one becomes a vagabond and goes about the world, sucking the wind? Ay de mi! The wheel of fortune turns swifter than a mill-wheel. Ah, but your heart, Don Carlos, is harder than a hazel-nut, – ay, as hard as your head, for the head of an Aragonese pounds the nail better than a hammer.”

“And your pride, my good Marta, is as big as a church. Why should you not serve my sister as you have served me? There is sunshine on the wall even in Galicia. And the children – how could they bear to lose you, too, on this day when they must lose so much? And what would become of you, if you were left behind?”

“The dear saints know. When one door shuts, another opens. Hammer away with that Aragonese head of yours till the skies fall. You are hammering on cold iron, Don Carlos. Whoever goes, Roxa and I stay here. You may tear my little angels from me, if you will, but not one step, not one inch of a step, does either foot of mine take toward Galicia.”

“Galicia? Who is going to Galicia?” called Rafael, appearing in the doorway.

“Out with you!” bade Tia Marta, stamping angrily. “The secret of three is nobody’s secret. Go wash your face, for the world is turned over since you washed it last. And out with you, too, Don Carlos, if I am ever to have a chance to get the chocolate ready.”

The chocolate, because of Tia Marta’s agitation or for some other reason, did not taste right that morning. Even Rafael set his bowl down half full. All was hurry and commotion. Rodrigo’s new knapsack and a bag of extra clothing for the voyage were swung upon Shags, while Don Quixote, who was beginning to wear a sleek and comfortable aspect that belied his name, was laden with the hammock and a couple of valises that the children, casting dismayed looks at each other, recognized as their father’s. Then Rodrigo embraced Grandfather and, with a mischievous air of gallantry, Tia Marta, who flung her arms about his neck and burst into a storm of crying. At first she refused to touch the hand that Don Carlos held out to her, but, suddenly relenting, snatched it to her lips and rushed back into the house, thrusting the ends of her saffron kerchief into her mouth to choke her sobs. Roxa, bristling and spitting, retreated under the bench. But Grandfather sat serene, crooning to his guitar:

 
“There is no song in all the world
That has not its refrain;
When our soldiers war in the Indies,
Our women weep in Spain.”
 

Half the dwellers on the Alhambra hill and a swarthy troop from the gypsy caves flocked down to the railroad station with them. The English consul tucked into Rodrigo’s pocket a tiny purse through whose silken meshes came a yellow glint.

“My wife knit it last night for the finest lad we know,” he said. “If she had had more time, it would have been larger; but it serves to hold a little English gold, which is a good weapon everywhere.”

Arnaldo was in their following, and Leandro. Even Xarifa had a smile for the young soldier, but when he waved his cap to Zinga with a blithe compliment – “throwing flowers,” as the Spaniards say – the girl’s fierce eyes misted over. At the station were Rodrigo’s professors all praising him till his face was as red as a pomegranate blossom, and there, puffing and wheezing, was the Geography Gentleman, with a little case of medicine to ward off the Cuban fever, and there, just as the train was about to start, was a clumsy young peasant, who all but dropped the jar of honey he handed up to Rodrigo, and a gaunt woman, weeping like a fountain as she pressed upon her son’s deliverer a package of cheese-cakes made from milk of her one goat.

Both the children were so spell-bound by the cheering and the music, the strange faces and the dramatic scenes that were being enacted all about them, that they hardly realized what the moment meant when their father lifted them up for the good-bye kisses to Rodrigo, who, boyish and merry, stood squeezed in among his fellow-conscripts on the platform of the car. The children cried a little, but their father hushed them with a few grave words and drew them to one side, away from the press of people about the train.

“Nobody will hurt Rodrigo?” asked Pilarica, with a sudden terror knocking at her heart.

“No, my darling,” answered her father. “Nothing can hurt Rodrigo.”

“Is that because he is a hero?” queried Rafael, trying hard to get his voice safely through the fog in his throat.

“Yes,” assented Don Carlos. “That is because he is a hero. He has won his battle already.”

And with that the engine whistled, and the long train, packed close with smiling, singing, wet-eyed lads, each young figure leaning forward to wave a hand, to throw a kiss, to catch a rose, rumbled out of the station, while all along the line there rose a tumult of farewells.

“Bravo! Bravo!”

“Oh, my son!”

“Till we meet again!”

“Go with God!”

Then Don Carlos led the bewildered children back to the corner where he had left the donkeys in charge of a man who had been waiting there when they first arrived. Pilarica and Rafael were sure that they had never seen him before, for his was not a form to be forgotten, but Don Carlos had greeted him familiarly as Pedrillo. The man stood now, his short legs wide apart, grasping in one hand the bridles of Shags and Don Quixote, who were trying to pull him on to the sidewalk, while with the other he held the halter of a mule, whose ambition it was to cross the road. Behind this mule stood, in single file, two more, each with head-rope tied to the tail of the mule in front. All three were tall, well-kept, handsome animals, but the man had such a squat, dwarfish body that he looked to the children nearly as broad as he was long. The face under the grey sombrero had a nose so flat that it might about as well have had no nose at all. The stranger was dressed almost as gaily as an Andalusian in a grass-green jacket inset with yellow stripes and adorned with rows of bell-buttons, red sash, russet trousers and brown gaiters.

And now Don Carlos set his face in sterner lines than ever and spoke to the children briskly, as if there were no time to be lost.

“Your Uncle Manuel is a carrier, an expressman, as so many of the Galicians are. He is thrifty and well-to-do and owns his own train of mules. Among the muleteers who hire themselves out to him for trip after trip there is no one whom he trusts as much as Pedrillo here, and so he has sent Pedrillo to conduct you and Grandfather and Tia Marta, if she will go – ”

Pedrillo winked.

“To Cordova, where you will find your uncle, with the rest of his men and mules, all ready for the return journey to Galicia, for you are to have the pleasure of a long visit with your Aunt Barbara and Cousin Dolores. But first will come wonderful weeks of travel, seeing Spain as you could never see it from the windows of a railway car.”

Pedrillo nodded hard like a toadstool in the wind.

“When your visit is done, I will come for you, if that is God’s will, but now I must take this train just drawing into the station, for I have to join my ship at Cadiz to-morrow. Rafael, listen to me. You have many things to do, my son. You must take care of your sister, now that you are the only able-bodied man left at home, and look after Shags and Don Quixote, who are going with you, and do what you can for Grandfather and Tia Marta. And be sure to kiss the Sultana’s foot for me as soon as you get back. I failed to pay her my parting respects and, besides, she may have a message for you. And Pilarica, little daughter of my heart, don’t forget to run out to the summer-house the minute you reach the garden. Who knows what may be waiting for you there? Now I leave you with Pedrillo, precious ones. Good-bye, good-bye, and Heaven bless you!”

But Rafael flung his arms wildly about his father, and would not let him go.

“Oh, I wish – I wish – ” sobbed the boy.

“Wish nothing for yourself nor for me but that we may do our duty,” said Don Carlos, his voice, rich with caressing tones, as quiet as if they were all guessing riddles together under the old olive tree. “Hush! I will tell you one story, one short story, more. Will you give me a smile for a story, my Pilarica? And will you remember it every word, my Rafael, till I come again? The sun goes forth in the morning, on the course that God has set him, and never halts nor turns. Yet three times in the day he lifts his face and calls: ‘Lord, I am tired.’ And three times God answers him out of heaven and says: ‘Follow thy path.’ ”

Then Rafael let fall his clasping arms, and Pilarica’s smile, her mother’s smile, gleamed out through the tears, and their father’s look, as he lifted his hat, rested lovingly on two brave children before he turned and went swiftly out of their sight.