Katharine Lee Bates

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rafael, knowing himself in the wrong, could not retort, but turned abruptly, drew from the mouths of the jars the four fresh lemons he was ingeniously using as corks, handed one to Uncle Manuel, another to Bastiano and, with Shags trotting at his heels like a dog, ploughed back through the deep dust along the train. He, too, was thirsty,—how thirsty nobody should ever know; he was ashamed and wanted comfort. He would join Pilarica who, only a girl though she was, had her values in hours like this. She could always find excuses for him when he could find none for himself. ”

“ The floor of the loft was fashioned of rough-hewn planks so clumsily fitted together that the sleepers had a dim sense, all night long, of what was going on in the stable below,—the snoring of Pedrillo, the munching of the donkeys, the jingling of the mule-bells and the capers of Capitana.
With the first glimmer of dawn, Pedrillo began to load the mules.
“Waking and eating only want a beginning,” he shouted up to his comrades of the road.
“Your rising early will not make the sun rise,” groaned Tia Marta. “Ugh! That mule born for my torment has made of me one bruise. ”

“ Live in Cadiz and you’ll soon know the difference between the sailing-vessels, that spread their white wings and skim over the water like swans, and the battle-ships, dark and low like turtles. God sends his wind to the sailing-ship, but it’s the devil’s own engines, roaring with flame and steam deep down in the iron lungs of them, that drive on the man-of-war.”
“And my father is the master of those roaring engines,” thought Rafael with a thrill of pride, as Capitana started on again with a lunge that nearly dismounted Tia Marta, taken off her guard as she was. ”

“ I could make him well and strong, as I made the donkey. But what am I to be? A stranger in a strange land, a servant in another woman’s kitchen, with not even a cat of my own to mew to me. Never before have I been without a child to rear. There were my little sisters first, and then my blessed Catalina, and then her rosy Rodrigo—ah, that cruel Cuba!—and then those cherubs there that Doña Barbara will steal away from me. Blood is thicker than water, though it be water of tears. Ay de mi!”
“But eat, woman, eat,” gruffly implored Pedrillo. ”

“ Just then—could Rafael’s hungry gaze have reached so far—a grim battleship was lying like a stain upon those azure waters and from her turret a stern-faced officer, with the stripes of a Chief Engineer, was watching through a spy glass a herd of conscripts, driven like cattle down the wharf to the waiting transports.
Don Quixote began to droop as the midday heats came on, and Pedrillo, still trudging along on foot, swung Pilarica up to Peregrina’s back. ”

“ As for Pilarica, she was the pet of the caravan and as happy as the day was long. A yellow butterfly on a scarlet poppy was enough to set her blithe heart dancing. Where Tia Marta saw nothing but endless leagues of arid, barren soil, Pilarica would find, in dips and dimples of that parched tableland, patches of sage and rosemary, wild thyme and lavender, that, trodden under foot and hoof, sent up a cloud of mingled fragrances. The carriers vied with one another in coaxing the child to ride beside them. ”

“ The hoary sycamores were so many grandfathers reaching out their arms to Pilarica; the locusts clapped their little round hands like playmates, and the pepper-trees, festooned with red berries, seemed to rival the gaudy trappings of the mules. Every turn in the road was an adventure. But the child could find no better language for her thoughts than the demure question:
“Do you think, Don Pedrillo, that we shall meet a bear?”
“Surely not,” the Galician hastened to answer; “there are no bears left in Spain to trouble the king’s highways. ”

“ It hurt the child’s sense of romance and poetry to find the same plays that had been robed in beautiful suggestion, as she romped through them with her Andalusian mates, given this queer, workaday, bread-and-butter flavor. How lovely it used to be when the children would choose Pilarica to lead the Morning-stars in their dancing advances nearer and nearer the deep shadow cast by the Alhambra wall! Within the mystery of dusk would lurk the lonely Moon, waiting her chance to spring and catch the first daring star who should venture to skip across the line dividing light from darkness! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tourists! A party of foreign tourists! A host of golden, gullible tourists! Ah, Xarifa would be pleased with him, after all. She would toss him off a panful of crisp fritters for supper and then sit with him in the mouth of their cave, enjoying all the gypsy jest and music. With surprising nimbleness he climbed to the top step of the fountain, and there he stood, brandishing his hat high above his head and bowing and beckoning and twisting and bowing again until Pilarica turned quite giddy just from watching him. ”

“ Tia Marta! Tia Marta!” came a mocking response from where a wiry figure, arrayed in saffron kerchief and purple petticoat, was seen hurrying in another direction through the shrubbery. “Always Tia Marta, from cock-crow to pigeon-roost! Now it’s Shags that brays to Tia Marta for his mouthful of chopped straw, and then it’s Roxa that mews to Tia Marta for a morsel of dried fish. It’s not slave to every Turk I was in the days when they counted me the fairest maid and the finest dancer in Seville. But all make firewood of a fallen tree.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ All over the garden were hidden her little hoards of such childish wealth as Tia Marta’s well-worn broom would send spinning out of the house,—fragments of ruddy pottery, bits of sunrise-hued mosaic, choice feathers shed by the garden birds, feathers that might some day be fashioned into a fan, beads and ribbons that had come traveling up the Alhambra hill in Rodrigo’s pocket when there chanced to be a fair going on in Granada. ”

“ He must do anything, anything, rather than sit still and be afraid. He clambered, often slipping back, up to the little peephole and listened, listened, listened until he heard, or thought he heard, the thudding tramp of the mule-train far down the road and the click-clack, ding-dong, tinkle-tinkle of its assorted bells. Oh, surely Coronela would have gone safely down; surely Pilarica would send Uncle Manuel and Pedrillo to his relief. ”

“ 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. ”

“ PILGRIMS OF ST. JAMES FROM time to time, while our travellers took their ease in the locust shade, other wayfarers came toiling up or down the steep and stony road and paused to drink at the stream. There were two strings of pack-mules during the hour, the muleteers passing the laconic greeting: “With God!” A freckled lad of a dozen years or so, in charge of a procession of donkeys nearly hidden under their swaying loads of greens, was too busy for any further salutation than an impish grimace at Rafael. There were boorish farmers, doubled up on side-saddles. ”

“ Shall see me lying dead.”
“Ah, this is like my Seville. So long as lovers ‘eat iron,’ we are in Andalusia yet,” sighed Tia Marta.
“Though Murillo leans from Heaven
And his brush in the sunset dips,
He cannot paint the blushes
Of your face beneath my lips.”
“I know about Murillo. He painted a whole skyful of Virgins and cherubs. Grandfather told me,” piped up Pilarica.
“O these brunettes! Their velvet eyes
Most terrible appear,
For they slay more men in one short hour
Than Death slays in a year.”
“Yet I warrant you he’ll eat a good breakfast to-morrow morning,” chuckled Pedrillo. ”

“ When they had come to the Court of the Lions, whose multitude of white marble columns look, in their varied grouping, like guests frozen by some playful enchantment just as they were chatting together or musing apart in this exquisite throne-room of the Sultans, the smaller children began to lag. Plump Pepito sat down firmly on the floor. Carmencita, startled by the twelve marble lions that uphold the fountain-basin in the center, puckered up her face for a cry, and Pilarica, to divert her, started one of the circle-games in which Spanish children delight. ”

“ So be off with you!”
“Ay, busy is the word, for we all start for Cordova at sun-up to-morrow,” returned Pedrillo in his gruff tone and rude northern accent.
“That lie is as big as a mountain,” cried Tia Marta, shaking her fist at an astonished oleander.
“I have got an idea between eyebrow and eyebrow,” continued Pedrillo, as unruffled as if Tia Marta had paid him a compliment. “I will put up Don Manuel’s mules where the little gentleman stables the donkeys and then I will come back and help you with the packing.” ”

“ Tia Marta always scolded when Pilarica was found playing with the Alhambra children, for there were usually a few gypsies, rude and lawless, in the group, and some even of the Spaniards were so ill-bred as to make sport of strangers. But they were children, for all that, with the blithe laughter of children, and all the more determined to play with Pilarica because they knew that Pilarica was forbidden to play with them.
“To the Alhambra!” cried Arnaldo. “There are many people there, ugly people, with blue eyes, and hair the color of lemons, and faces flat like pesetas. ”

“ But to think—oh, I could beat my bones for very rage!—that the supper to-night is not a supper of festival.”
“Never mind that!” protested Don Carlos. “Who but you taught me the saying that no bread is hard to the hungry? Let me see the children. Where is Pilarica?”
“The children! Can I have them forever like puppies under my feet? Pilarica! Do you expect me to keep her shut up in a sugar-bowl for you? She is off with Rafael, who promised to look well after her. Never fear! He has, like every boy, a wolf in his stomach, and supper-time will soon bring them home again.” ”

“ Another of Aunt Barbara’s quiet ways of helping was to divert Pilarica’s headlong rushes upon her brother to impart some news of burning importance,—how Bastiano had promised her a hat woven of rushes or how Don Quixote had slipped off the stepping-stones and splashed down into the brook. Aunt Barbara had only to whisper Bat to send the little girl dancing away out of doors again, trilling like a penitent lark:
“Who is the student—hark, oh hark!—
Who studies best in the deepest dark? ”

“ She knew that somebody always came for a little girl who was lost. For one moment a homesick thought fleeted back to her father and Big Brother and the rustling newspaper doll, and in the next she heard, not at all to her surprise, the trot-trot of Don Quixote’s hoofs and beheld that gallant ass, with Pedrillo running alongside, making over the plain toward the nooning place.
“Cry louder, Baby!” she admonished, with a little shake to which Baby instantly responded. It was really marvellous what a roar went forth upon the air, as if the kid had been transformed into a lion-cub. ”

“ Rafael caught off his red cap with a pettish gesture and tossed it aside.
“Your tongue is too full of words, Pilarica,” he grumbled. “It is unseemly to answer back. I am a year older than you. What’s more, I am a boy and you are a girl. As Tia Marta says, the fingers of the hand are not equal.”
Pilarica spread out the little brown fingers of her right hand and considered them so seriously that Rafael was encouraged to go on.
“Besides, I have heard Rodrigo say that a woman who speaks Latin always comes to a bad end.” ”

“ And he could make nothing of the fortune, after all. The Gypsy King, muttering strange words that only gypsies know, bent forward and with his staff traced rude figures in the sand,—a train of mules, a cockle-shell, a battle-ship; but suddenly he lifted his staff and touched it lightly to Rafael’s magic cap.
“That is your fortune,” he declared. “It will turn toads into nightingales and stones into bread. Don’t give that away, my little gentleman, even to the gypsies.”
III
FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES THE eyes of the Gypsy King began to glitter like jet beads. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Pilgrim of the Thorn, as Pilarica called him, instantly had his water-gourd at the white lips, and Rafael revived so rapidly that he was soon sitting upon his uncle’s knee. He even glanced at his watch, with his usual air of careless magnificence in performing this action, and was amazed to find that only one hour had passed since they left the rivulet. Every man of them wanted to carry him down to the road. The boy hesitated to make a choice, but when the vigorous old peasant-woman, who had puffed up the mountainside after the rest, put in her claim, he decided at once. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Patience on fire,” snapped Tia Marta, who had been standing in the doorway and now indignantly popped back into her kitchen.
“Did Tia Marta ring the bells when she was a teenty tinty baby?” asked Pilarica.
“Not just that,” replied Don Carlos, who was seated in the hammock that he had swung beside Rafael’s cot in order to care for the sick boy at night, “but it is true that she was born high up in the Giralda, which, as she may have told you, is the beautiful old Moorish minaret, that looks as if it were wrought of rose-colored lace, close by the glorious cathedral of Seville. ”