Chapter 51
"Now you're coming with me to Spain," Sylvia announced.
"Good land alive! Where?"
"Spain."
"Are you going chasing after Lily again?"
"No, we're going off on our own."
"Well, I may have started on the gad late in life, but I've certainly started now," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Spain? That's where the Spanish flies come from, isn't it? Well, they ought to be lively enough, so I suppose we shall enjoy ourselves. And how do we get there?"
"By train!"
"Dear land! it's wonderful what they can do nowadays. What relation then is Spain to Portugal exactly? You must excuse my ignorance, Sylvia, but really I'm still all of a fl.u.s.ter. Fancy being bounced out of me bed into Spain. You really are a demon. Fancy you getting yellow fever. You haven't changed color much. Spain! Upon my word I never heard anything like it. We'd better take plenty with us to eat. I knew it reminded me of something. The Spanish Armada! I once heard a clergyman recite the Spanish Armada, though what it was all about I've completely forgotten.
There was some fighting in it though. I went with the captain. Well, if he could see me now. You may be sure he's laughing, wherever he is. The idea of me going to Spain."
The idea materialized; that night they drove to the Gare d'Orleans.
CHAPTER XII
The journey to Madrid was for Mrs. Gainsborough a long revelation of human eccentricity.
"Not even Mrs. Ewings would believe it," she a.s.sured Sylvia. "It's got to be seen to be believed. I opened my mouth a bit wide when I first came to France, but France is Peckham Rye if you put it alongside of Spain. When that guard or whatever he calls himself opened our door and bobbed in out of the runnel with the train going full speed and asked for our tickets, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Showing off, that's what I call it. And carrying wine inside of goats!
Disgusting I should say. Nice set-out there'd be in England if the brewers started sending round beer inside of sheep. Why, it would cause a regular outcry; but these Spanish seem to put up with everything. I'm not surprised they come round selling water at every station. The cheek of it though, when you come to think about it. Putting wine inside of goats so as to make people buy water. If I'd have been an enterprising woman like Mrs. Marsham, I should have got out at the last station and complained to the police about it. But really the stations aren't fit for a decent person to walk about in. I'm not considered very particular, but when a station consists of nothing but a signal-box and a lavatory and no platform, I don't call it a station. And what a childish way of starting a train--blowing a toy horn like that. More like a school treat than a railway journey. And the turkeys! Now I ask you, Sylvia, would you believe it? Four turkeys under the seat and three on the rack over me head. A regular Harlequinade! And every time anybody takes out a cigarette or a bit of bread they offer it all around the compartment. Fortunately I don't look hungry, or they might have been offended. No wonder England's full of aliens. I shall explain the reason of it when I get home."
The place of entertainment where Sylvia worked was called the Teatro j.a.pones, for what reason it would have been difficult to say. The girls were, as usual, mostly French, but there were one or two Spanish dancers that, as Mrs. Gainsborough put it, kept one "rum-tum-tumming in one's seat all the time it was going on." Sylvia found Madrid a dull city entirely without romance of aspect, nor did the pictures in the Prado make up for the bull-ring's wintry desolation. Mrs. Gainsborough considered the most remarkable evidence of Spanish eccentricity was the way in which flocks of turkeys, after traveling in pa.s.senger-trains, actually wandered about the chief thoroughfares.
"Suppose if I was to go shooing across Piccadilly with a herd of chickens, let alone turkeys, well, it _would_ be a circus, and that's a fact."
When they first arrived they stayed at a large hotel in the Puerta del Sol, but Mrs. Gainsborough got into trouble with the baths, partly because they cost five pesetas each and partly because she said it went to her heart to see a perfectly clean sheet floating about in the water.
After that they tried a smaller hotel, where they were fairly comfortable, though Mrs. Gainsborough took a long time to get used to being brought chocolate in the morning.
"I miss my morning tea, Sylvia, and it's no use me pretending I
It really did not seem worth while to remain any longer in Madrid, and Sylvia asked to be released from her contract. The manager, who had been wondering to all the other girls why Sylvia had ever been sent to him, discovered that she was his chief attraction when she wanted to break the contract. However, a hundred pesetas in his own pocket removed all objections, and she was free to leave Spain.
"Well, do you want to go home?" she asked Mrs. Gainsborough. "Or would you come to Seville?"
"Now we've come so far, we may as well go on a bit farther," Mrs.
Gainsborough thought.
Seville was very different from Madrid.
"Really, when you see oranges growing in the streets," Mrs. Gainsborough said, "you begin to understand why people ever goes abroad. Why, the flowers are really grand, Sylvia. Carnations as common as daisies. Well, I declare, I wrote home a post-card to Mrs. Beardmore and told her Seville was like being in a conservatory. She's living near Kew now, so she'll understand my meaning."
They both much enjoyed the dancing in the cafes, when solemn men hurled their sombreros on the dancers' platform to mark their appreciation of the superb creatures who flaunted themselves there so gracefully.
"But they're bold hussies with it all, aren't they?" Mrs. Gainsborough observed. "Upon me word, I wouldn't care to climb up there and swing my hips about like that."
From Seville, after an idle month of exquisite weather, often so warm that Sylvia could sit in the garden of the Alcazar and read in the shade of the lemon-trees, they went to Granada.
"So they've got an Alhambra here, have they?" said Mrs. Gainsborough.
"But from what I've seen of the performances in Spain it won't come up to good old Leicester Square."
On Sylvia the Alhambra cast an enchantment more powerful than any famous edifice she had yet seen. Her admiration of cathedrals had always been tempered by a sense of missing most of what they stood for. They were still exercising their functions in a modern world and thereby overshadowed her personal emotions in a way that she found most discouraging to the imagination. The Alhambra, which once belonged to kings, now belonged to individual dreams. Those shaded courts where even at midday the ice lay thick upon the fountains; that sudden escape from a frozen chast.i.ty of brown stone out on the terraces rich with sunlight; that vision of the Sierra Nevada leaping against the blue sky with all its snowy peaks; this incredible meeting of East and South and North--to know all these was to stand in the center of the universe, oneself a king.
"What's it remind you of, Sylvia?" Mrs. Gainsborough asked.
"Everything," Sylvia cried. She felt that it would take but the least effort of will to light in one swoop upon the Sierra Nevada and from those bastions storm... what?
"It reminds me just a tiddly-bit of Earl's Court," said Mrs.
Gainsborough, putting her head on one side like a meditative hen. "If you shut one eye against those mountains, you'll see what I mean."
Sylvia came often by herself to the Alhambra; she had no scruples in leaving Mrs. Gainsborough, who had made friends at the pension with a lonely American widower.
"He knows everything," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "I've learned more in a fortnight with him than I ever learned in my whole life. What that man doesn't know! Well, I'm sure it's not worth knowing. He's been in trade and never been able to travel till now, but he's got the world off by heart, as you might say. I sent a p. c. to Mrs. Ewings to say I'd found a masher at last. The only thing against him is the noises he makes with his throat. I gave him some lozenges at first, but he made more noise than ever sucking them, and I had to desist."
Soon after Mrs. Gainsborough met her American, Sylvia made the acquaintance of a youthful guide of thirteen or fourteen years, who for a very small wage adopted her and gave her much entertainment. Somehow or other Rodrigo had managed to pick up a good deal of English and French, which, as he pointed out, enabled him to compete with the older guides who resented his intrusion. Rodrigo did not consider that the career of a guide was worthy of real ambition. For the future he hesitated between being a gentleman's servant and a tobacconist in Gibraltar. He was a slim child with the perfect grace of the young South in movements and in manners alike.
Rodrigo was rather distressed at the beginning by Sylvia's want of appet.i.te for mere sight-seeing; he reproved her indeed very gravely for wasting valuable time in repeating her visits to favorite spots while so many others remained unvisited. He was obsessed by the rapidity with which most tourists pa.s.sed through Granada, but when he discovered that Sylvia had no intention of hurrying or being hurried, his native indolence blossomed to her sympathy and he adapted himself to her pleasure in sitting idle and dreaming in the sun.
Warmer weather came in February, and Rodrigo suggested that the Alhambra should be visited by moonlight. He did not make this suggestion because it was the custom of other English people to desire this experience; he realized that the Senorita was not influenced by what other people did; at the same time the Alhambra by moonlight could scarcely fail to please the Senorita's pa.s.sion for beauty. He himself had a pa.s.sion for beauty, and he pledged his word she would not regret following his advice; moreover, he would bring his guitar.
On a February night, when the moon was still high, Sylvia and Rodrigo walked up the avenue that led to the Alhambra. There was n.o.body on the summit but themselves. Far down lights flitted in the gipsy quarter, and there came up a faint noise of singing and music.
It was Carnival, Rodrigo explained, and the Senorita would have enjoyed it; but, alas! there were many rascals about on such nights, and though he was armed, he did not recommend a visit. He brought out his guitar; from beneath her Spanish cloak Sylvia also brought out a guitar.
"The Senorita plays? _Maravilloso!_" Rodrigo exclaimed. "But why the Senorita did not inform me to carry her guitar? The hill was long. The Senorita will be tired."
Sylvia opened with one of her old French songs, after which Rodrigo, who had paid her a courteous and critical attention, declared that she had a musician's soul like himself, and forthwith, in a treble that was limpid as the moon, light, unpa.s.sionate as the snow, remote as the mountains, he too sang.
"Exquisite," Sylvia sighed.
The Senorita was too kind, and as if to disclaim the compliment he went off into a mad gipsy tune. Suddenly he broke off.
"Hark! Does the Senorita hear a noise of weeping?"
There was indeed a sound of some one's crying, a sound that came nearer every moment.
"It is most unusual to hear a sound of weeping in the Alhambra _au clair de la lune_," said Rodrigo. "If the Senorita will permit me, I shall find out the cause."
Soon he came back with a girl whose cheeks glistened with tears.
"She is a dancer," Rodrigo explained. "She says she is Italian, but--"
With a shrug of the shoulders he gave Sylvia to understand that he accepted no responsibility for her statement. It was Carnival.