Poor Folk in Spain

Both on Saturday and on Sunday bull-baiting exhibitions had taken place, but we had not gone to see them. One day had been quite sufficient. On Monday morning we were awakened by the sounds of music. The local band was parading the streets playing a queer semi-Oriental music. As the morning advanced other bands came in until seven or eight bands were in full blast, each playing a different tune and each trying to drown its rivals with sound. Gradually Moors and Christians gathered. The Moors came from the Near East and from the Far. The Chief and his immediate suite were Bedouin Arabs, and there were Turks, Saracens, Hindus, Chinamen, negroes and some of uncertain lineage. Girls accompanied each group dressed in appropriate Houri costume, carrying bottles filled with a liquor which would have pleased Omar rather than Mahomet. The Christians included Roman soldiers, crusaders, cavaliers and smugglers of 1800. The latter were the chief Christian and his retinue. Vivandières attended the Christians with drink no less stimulating than that supplied to their Moorish enemies. Moors and Christians carried large blunderbusses of ancient mode, and all day long to the sounds of indefatigable melody they paraded the town. It appeared to be the duty of the Moors to be comic; they wore big goggles and many had huge imitation beards with which, when the heat grew greater, they fanned themselves. They pranced and postured through the streets while the Christians marched along in solemn ranks. Nor did the fiesta end with the going down of the sun. With discreet intervals for refreshment, marching and music continued till 2 a.m., at which time sleep and a blessed silence fell on Jijona.

Undeterred by but four hours' rest, punctually at six the cacophony of brass began again. By midday crusaders and bandsmen, having exchanged helmets and caps, were dancing jotas down the principal streets. But a short siesta revived them for the principal work of the day: the entry of the Moors. At about four in the afternoon the performers gathered at the picturesque southern entrance of the village, thus symbolizing the direction from which the Moors had come. Then group by group, with blunderbusses banging off into the air, the Christians retreated slowly up the street, going backwards. Last of all the Christians went the Contrabandistas, and last of the Contrabandistas the Captain, dressed in a wonderful ancient costume of velvet, embroidered with gold, silver and silk, and a blanket striped in many colours. Facing him, advanced with equal solemnity and noise the chief Moor. After some two hours of deafening reports the whole troupe was in movement, some forwards, others backwards, and had arrived at the wooden castle in the plaza. By seven o'clock, at this funereal pace, the Moors were at last massed before the castle.

"Now for the charge and for some fun," we thought. But mounting a profusely decorated horse, the chief Moor began a speech. The Contrabandista, evidently a man of deeds only, had hired a real actor, dressed in the costume of a cavalier, to represent him. For almost an hour exchange of dramatic verse continued, after which the Christians quietly walked out of the castle, and the Moors walked in.

"Good heavens," thought we, "is that all?"

With ears deafened from the guns we went home; passing on the way a booth of green branches in which Moors and Christians, overcome either by the heat or by the assiduous ministrations of Houri or Vivandière, were laid out on sacks.

Though officially the day was ended, practically it was not. Those who had private stocks of powder continued the gunfire till midnight. The bands, their music becoming more and more incoherent, played on till two o'clock.

We decided that we had seen enough fiesta. We stayed in our castle and went out sketching in the country to avoid the appalling din which rose from the town to our windows. At night there was a modest display of fireworks in the plaza, which we were quite content to enjoy from where we were.

After all was over they said to us:

"Wasn't it a beautiful fiesta?"

Outwardly we were forced to agree with them, but inwardly we recognized—perhaps with a sense of regret—that to enjoy these fiestas as they ought to be enjoyed, that is, as a Spaniard enjoys them, requires a sense of values and perhaps a nervous organism which we do not possess

CHAPTER XXII

JIJONA—TIA ROGER

Jijona lived on almond paste. All around us the grey, pallid or zebra striped mountains were terraced, and wherever enough earth could be gathered together for an almond tree to grow, there it was planted. The turron of Jijona, which is made in perfection nowhere else, is a very popular sweet meat all over Spain and even is widely appreciated in South America. In Barcelona I have been greeted by turron-selling youths who addressed me as La Valiente. On the French frontier in a little village we found a turron-stall kept by a man in Jijona costume of black blouse and pointed hat; but he was a fraud: he had never been near Jijona, nor could he speak the Jijona dialect. But the whole life of Jijona was dominated by turron marzipan, and the varieties of sweet meats made from almonds. We arrived as the almonds were beginning to ripen. Out on the mountains one heard the thrashing of the canes amongst the branches as the peasants beat the nuts off the almond trees. From the village rose up a sound like that of a gigantic typewriter as the women of the village sat in the streets in circles and cracked the almond shells. In our entrada old Père Chicot crouched most of the day on his haunches, peeling, drying and cracking the almonds from El Señor's garden.

In consequence of the turron work we found it very difficult to get a woman to work for us. Life became difficult. The conditions in Jijona were not the same as those in Verdolay. In the latter place we could buy excellent charcoal, but to our surprise we found charcoal difficult to get in Jijona. When we did get it, from the proprietor of the local cinematograph theatre, it was so hard that it would not burn. Père Chicot said gruffly, "What are almond shells for?" We then tried burning almond shells; but they made a poor fire, and an accumulation of shells soon put itself out. We wasted one and a half hours trying to fry potatoes on an almond-shell fire. So as long as we could not get a woman, we had to live on cold stuff that we could buy from the shops: Dutch cheese, and sardines, principally.

At last I thought that I had found a woman. I was perched on the watercourse which ran across the face of the precipice opposite the entrance of the town. From this spot there was an excellent view of Jijona in its most romantic, but also in its most plastic aspect. To me came a woman walking along the edge of the watercourse, balancing on her head a large washing-basket. She stopped to watch my work, and as was the custom in those early days began to talk about the bull episode.

"Ah, that was a terrible thing to do," she said. "If I had gone down into the plaza, my knees would have turned to water."

I then asked her how I could get somebody to work for me.

"Why," she answered, "I'll come myself, or send somebody else."

She then began to move along her way. The wall of the watercourse was about a foot wide; but ten yards further along it ceased to curve around the face of the precipice and sprang across a chasm over a narrow bridge. The approach to this bridge was guarded by a large polished boulder about three feet high, and to get on to the bridge one had to clamber over this boulder. I had crossed it on hands and knees cautiously, for there was a sheer drop of forty or fifty feet below. The woman looked at this boulder and turning said to me:

"That is a nasty spot. I'll have to be careful there, or I'll drop my washing."

With the basket on her head she walked to the boulder and began to walk up its slippery side. Balancing herself and basket in what appeared a dangerous manner, giving little cries of "Aie! Aie! I'm afraid I'll drop my basket," she surmounted the obstacle and strode carelessly across the bridge. My heart left my throat to regain its normal position and I realized that there is even a fashion in "fear."

But the woman never came, and for a week we were servantless. The pretty girl who had driven out with us in the lorry, and who we had imagined to be the daughter of a fairly well-to-do farmer, was as a matter of fact our nearest neighbour. She lived at the top house of the town. Her father was the village dust-cart, and any day could be seen walking about the streets bent almost double beneath the weight of a huge pannier which he carried on his back, into which he flung any object which had no permanent right on the high road. Her house was a small affair of two rooms only. We put our difficulty to her as she was friendly, and to our surprise she said that she would come and do it herself. She did arrange that the goat with his milk should call upon us; but the Vinegars enticed her into their turron factory, and again we were in despair. However, the girl had an idea.

"Why, Mother will do it for you," she said.

Mother was an apt-looking spouse for the dust-cart, and was considered, we heard, the dirtiest woman in the village. Her foggy blue eyes showed white all round them, and she threw up her lips like a biting horse when she spoke Castilian (which she did very badly). I don't know why she made me think of the Red queen in Alice, but her silhouette was not unlike, and she had a queer trick of being in the house one instant, and in the next of having quite vanished—which was Red-queenlike. She was called "Aunt Roger" in the village, because of her ruddy hair. Aunt Roger cleared up the mystery of the Jijona fuel. She made bargains with boys, who wandered out over the hills, and returned looking like walking haycocks under a load of branches of mountain pine and other coniferous shrub. From then on we cooked over large bonfires built on the square hearth which was in our largest room.

Tia Roger was elusive in small matters, as she was in larger ones. She had a hasty Spanish way of agreeing at once to save herself the trouble of understanding my language, and we never knew whether she would come or no. She drew our pay without demur, but if an occasion offered for other employment she took it. We would return home at eleven o'clock worn out with a hard day's painting, to find the place uncleaned, no fire alight, no food either bought or prepared. This would entail on our part a rush down the steep hill into the town, to search for food. Probably on the way we would discover Tia Roger sitting amongst a circle of gossiping and pleased women, industriously cracking almonds. She would show no signs of conscious sin, but would grin and nod at us as we passed. Then we had to scramble again up to our eyrie under the full heat of the Mediterranean sun.

Tia Roger had many children. Her eldest daughter was married to a man who for some time puzzled us. We first saw him wandering about the upper streets of the old town during the fiesta. He carried an elaborate pair of sandwich boards. On the front was the well-known picture, "St. Veronica's Handkerchief," and on the back an oleograph representing two conventional angels—golden hair, nightdress, and wings. Both pictures were surrounded by flat wooden frames fretworked in the hideous art-nouveau manner. He wandered about thus, enclosed, as it were a slab of humanity between two slices of divinity; but we could not imagine what his purpose was. We imagined that he filled a semi-religious post, something connected with the priests, and their fiesta, and their cinema, and bull chasings. But on the fourth day of the fiesta, this wandering, apparently purposeless man tripped over a washing-basket. His language at once put to flight all our ideas of his religious functions, it issued straight from a nature by no means purged of old Adam, despite its devotional enclosure. Later, he fell over me as I was sketching, and he cursed me with gusto. I then saw he was blind. This had not been apparent to us earlier, for he took the rough and precipitous streets of Jijona at an extraordinary speed.

One day we saw him still wandering to and fro, but the pictures had disappeared. A cage was on his back, and in the cage, balancing against the joggle and movement of his walk, was an uncomfortable hen. We had become more accustomed to the Jijona speech by this time, and the tickets which the pictures had hidden were plainly visible in his hands. He was running a private lottery at three chances "a little bitch." I took thirty tickets for the hen, and gave fifteen of them to Tia Roger, but we pulled blanks. His next venture was a bedroom looking-glass, the stand of which stuck out from his back in an ungainly fashion. It must have needed considerable ingenuity to keep his small village clientèle sufficiently desirous to ensure for him any sort of a living.

His wife learned that I had put him into one of my sketches. She hurried to the Torre de Blay, carrying her child, and accompanied by a horde of women friends to see "The Portrait." Her disappointment was great to find that he was but a minute figure in a street landscape. She told me that her husband had lost his sight ten years before in a street quarrel. His opponent had slashed a knife across his eyes. For this the law exacted no penalty. But she had drawn no lesson from her husband's misfortune. Her baby was in a bad condition, flies, dust and exposure to the sun were working wickedly on the child's eyes, and even then early blindness appeared to be threatening. But it seemed to us that many of the more ignorant Spanish were careless of their children's eyesight. Blindness is rampant, but blindness leads to beggary; and beggary accompanied by blindness is a profitable pursuit. Possibly a woman may say, "Little Juan seems to be going blind. Well, that's a comfort, he will be settled in life anyhow."

Jijona had two other blind men. The one made a living by selling cigars from a glass case strapped to his chest.

We were sitting in the entrada of the Vinegars' on the first day of the fiesta. The curtain was pushed slowly aside and through the opening crept a pathetic figure. It was that of an old man; his eyes were sightless and suppurating, a straw hat with a torn brim shaded his heavy face, in one hand he grasped an aged guitar, in the other a stick with which he explored the entrada for a chair. Jan quickly got out of his chair for fear that the blind man should sit down on his lap. The man found the chair with his stick, and trembling with the pain of movement took a seat. Adjusting the guitar, with stiff fingers he rasped the strings which gave out a sound, thin as though withered by extreme age. With exercise his fingers strengthened, until from the decrepit instrument he plucked a melody from which one might imagine that the blind in Maeterlinck's play were dancing to solace their loneliness. The almost macabre dance came to an end, then striking out a new set of chords he broke into a Spanish song. His voice was an instrument as worn out as the guitar.

He ceased his heartrending performance, collected his meed of halfpence; I spoke to him, and he broke into an hysterical laugh of joy.

"You have returned, you have returned," he cried.

"It is El Señor that he takes you for," explained one of the girls. "He was very good to him. The old man recognizes the English accent."

We explained to him his mistake, and the delight faded from his poor old face, and the blank expressionless look of the blind came back. Slowly he turned to the entrance and his tapping, which led him away down the street. Thus he pursued his trade, feeling his way from door to door, entering any one that was open, seating himself upon the first unoccupied chair which he could find: few could have been hard-hearted enough to deny his unspoken pleading.

One evening we met him in the upper town.... An accident had happened, and his guitar was opened out like an old boot; it still held together at the handle, but at the front of the instrument the soundboard and back had become detached from the sides. In a clumsy fashion the hurt had been bound up with string. We asked him what had happened. He did not reply, but cried out with a high-pitched, half-crazy laugh. Then standing astraddle in the precipitous street he began to pluck at the strings as though the guitar could answer for him. The thin voice of it had now sunk to a mere ghost of a sound, the murmur of a summer freshet might well have drowned its plaintive whisper. Then turning he made his way downhill

CHAPTER XXIII

JIJONA—A DAY'S WORK

It was a toss-up which would arrive first: the sun shooting its long level rays over the mountain-top through our windows, or Tia Roger's daughter hammering on the door with the milk, warm and frothy, in a jug. Either the one or the other aroused us from our mattress on the floor—for we had dispensed quite comfortably with the complications of a bed. Possibly our night had been restless, for inadvertently I had imported a host of fleas into the house. They had come from the garden, from a small spot near an outhouse door, where there was a fascinating view, and I had stood there one morning with bare legs and feet admiring the scene. When I had returned to the house, I had noticed a strange blackish discoloration on my ankles, and stooping had discovered to my horror that hordes of hungry fleas were crawling up my legs. I had jumped into a basin of water, but many had escaped. From that moment the house was never clear of them, and our nights were sometimes disturbed. We suspect that Père Chicot kept his rabbit skins in the outhouse.

We got out of bed either at the call of the sun or of the milk; and as we were dressing we watched the purple and green mists of night clearing off the valley and from the town below us. Breakfast was a simple affair—tea and dry bread and grapes. Spanish coffee is expensive and bad, cocoa we did not find, and butter and jam were unprocurable. For the boiling water we could not go to the trouble of building a bonfire, so in spite of the expense of spirit we used a methylated spirit stove. This Jan had bought in Murcia. The shopman had ill understood Jan's attempts to make his needs known. "Lampara para alcool"[22] had elicited no response, but at last, driven by repeated requests with variations, explanations, hand wavings, and so on, intelligence had brightened the shopman's face.

"Ah, Señor," he had cried, "I understand you now. What you require is a 'little hell.'"

So the kettle sang daily over "little hell," but this morning, Tia Roger having forgotten to purchase alcohol overnight, it looked as if we were to breakfast on goat's milk alone. But an idea occurred to me. El Señor, when he had transferred his major residence to Murcia, had left some furniture and much litter in El Torre de Blay. Amongst the litter were odd bottles which had contained toilet lotions, one was half full. Was there not a chance then that it was alcoholic? I routed out the bottle. The smell told me nothing. Practical experiment was the only thing. Imagination was rewarded. "Little hell" worked as well on hair-wash as with any other fuel.

We ate our simple breakfast at an ancient refectory table, the top hewn from the width of a large tree, the legs curved and carved like those in Viking pictures. Then we set to packing up paint and brushes, and the preparing of sketch boxes. Leaving the things untidy for Tia Roger to clear, we set off on our respective ways, I down into the old town, Jan out across the mountains. Jijona was a maze of zigzag streets. In the morning it was almost manless, but women went to and fro on their household errands, and the children followed me in swarms. Standing about in the streets were small coops, enclosing either a chicken or a turkey, while the queer lean Egyptian cats, with rat-like tails, slunk along the walls, vanishing like ghosts at any attempt to stroke them. Even the kittens of a few days old spat at a proffered pat as though at a dog. I was bound for the street near the monastery which, with its blue-tiled roof, brought the eastern end of Jijona to a full stop.

As soon as I had settled down the questions began. They were the usual Spanish questions such as one had heard in Verdolay, and many of the answers I knew now by heart. But one woman behind me said something new.

"It is an English Señora. She is painting. All the English people paint, for there have been other English here—El Señor, and his friends—and they, too, painted. It is strange, indeed, that a whole nation should be thus gifted. Also all the English are very rich, for they come here from a long distance, and they paint pictures, and all that is very expensive. Another thing that I can tell you about the English is that they are all very tall. Every Englishman that I have seen (she had seen four) is much taller than we Spanish are. It does not matter that I am saying this out loud because La Doña does not understand Valenciano."

While I was working this morning there was a continual sound of squealing pigs. Men's voices mingled with those of the pigs, urging them to be quiet. The sound came from a high-walled enclosure to which the entrance was an archway closed by a massive wooden door. Then along came a goat herd leading his flock. But as soon as the herd came opposite to this door it refused to pass it. With shouts, curses, and stones the man urged the goats along. In little quick rushes, thus urged on, one by one the goats dashed past the door and on down the road. But two refused the passage perilous. They made sneezing noises of protestation, but nothing would induce them to move. In despair the man at last had to bring all his goats back and take them to the hills by some other route. Later I realized that the door which these intelligent animals would not pass was the slaughter-house.

Old men, dressed in the ancient Jijona costume of black blouse and black velvet hat with turned-up brim and pointed crown—kept on to the head by an elastic at the back—would address me in a patois impossible to understand. As the sketch neared completion my audience became excited.

"Ha Pintado tod'! tod'! tod'!"[23] they exclaimed. They searched the picture for the smaller details, the strings of red peppers hanging from the balconies especially delighted them. Indeed, they gave my pictures titles because of some minute detail.

"What is she doing?" a new-comer exclaimed. The answer was "The fig tree." I was astonished, because I could see no fig tree in the whole sketch. At last one of my audience pointed to one tiny branch of green projecting over a wall.

Jan had four directions to choose from. North and south led him across a flattish plain seamed with deep watercourses, east and west took him into the mountains. To the east the mountains were grey bare stone, almost uncultivated; to the west the mountains went steeper and steeper, ending in a high ridge, at the foot of which was a queer leprous country, the earth spotted all over with lichens and looking as though mouldy. Wherever he went were the terraces and almond trees; and lonely little farms were perched high up on the slopes. Terrible little places those farms were for the doctor, for, if any one were ill in them, there was often no means of approach other than miles of climbing on foot. But all across the mountains, incongruous enough in that landscape of primitive agriculture where the plough was but a stake with an iron spike, and where no roads were, went standards carrying wires of electricity. On the standards, deaths'-heads were painted to scare off the inquisitive child.

Jan had not only to contend with sun and flies. Shadow was even more difficult to find at Jijona than at Verdolay; the almond as a shade tree is negligible. It was hot setting out, but it was hotter coming back. One did not delay much after half-past ten, but, whether the sketch were finished or no, one packed up one's things and set off homeward. As one walked one could feel the heat of the ground through the soles of the alpagatas. There were reputed to be scorpions in the mountains, and it was as well to be careful when taking a seat or when picking up some painting implement dropped to the ground. But Jan never saw one. The peasants said that if he were stung the best thing to do was to plunge the stung part—usually a finger—into a raw egg; when the yolk had turned black, a fresh egg was to be substituted.

We were both back in good time on this day, because we were to lunch with the doctor and his wife. They had promised us a truly Spanish meal. Here is the menu:

1. Smoked uncooked ham.

2. Hors d'œuvre, olives (cured in anis and mint), pink tomatoes (a Jijona speciality), cucumber, and orange-coloured sausage.

3. Soup.

4. A stew of chicken, potatoes and garbanzos. (Garbanzos, or chick-peas, look something like dried nasturtium seeds. They are cooked like haricot beans, and taste like a blend of haricot bean and lentil. They are a very favourite Spanish vegetable.)

5. Cold fish and mayonnaise. (The mayonnaise was made from almond oil, lemon juice and hard-boiled egg, and was extremely delicate in flavour.)

6. Fried ham and grilled tomatoes.

7. Turron and almond paste sweets.

8. Yellow melon and muscatel grapes. Brandy.

9. Iced coffee (brought in by a boy from the Casino).

The doctor's wife asked me if it were true that English people did not like questions. I said personally we did not mind questions, but that in England direct intimate questions were generally avoided.

"But," said the doctor's wife in amazement, "if you wish to find out something about anybody, how do you do so? And how do you carry on conversations?"

The meal over, we toiled slowly up again to El Torre, taking the hill in as leisurely a manner as we could. Tia Roger's daughter was sitting on our doorstep eating grapes. As we passed she held the bunch out to us.

"Les Gusta?"[24] she said.

"Buen aproveche," we replied.

Before their gateway, the two aged men and the one old woman sat, as they did from morning till night, plaiting an everlasting rope of esparto grass.

We had acquired the siesta habit, so lay down until four o'clock. Then, as the dinner had rather disorganized our desire to paint, Jan and I went for a walk. We clambered down through the town, passed out by the southern entrance, across the bridge, and clambered up the hill opposite. At a long open washing-place, women were on their knees beating and scrubbing clothes with the Spanish soap which will not lather; amongst them, working as hard as the rest, was a child of five years old.

We skirted the line between the mountains, and the flat and plain for about two miles, then Jan took a path leading away from the mountains. We came out into the most fantastic scenery of its kind I have ever seen. In the winter the torrential rains burst on the mountains and the water rushing down had scooped deep clefts in the earth of the plain. The ground itself appeared to be in layers of various colours, and these layers falling in one above the other had striped the sides of the deep canyon purple, blue, white, orange and red. The water had cut out of the clayey earth a hundred fantastic shapes—I have seen photographs of the Grand Canyon of Colorado, this was like them on a small scale; at one place the clay was harder and the water dripping down had carved the cliff-side like great organ pipes or like the columns of an Egyptian temple. In the deep bottoms of the canyon were vine terraces; and further down flat, irrigated fields of tomatoes, of herbage or of vegetables. Little farm-houses sheltered under the mud cliffs, and on the circular threshing floors almonds and red peppers were spread out to dry in the sun. In one place a man had scooped his dwelling out of the cliff-side. These cave dwellings are common enough. At Verdolay was a whole colony of them, and the cavemen were reputed to be thieves and vagabonds, and the members were despised by the peasants proper. At the end of the ravine or barranca we came to a many-arched bridge which towered high above our heads, and clambering up by a zigzag track found ourselves on the Alicante road.

In appearance this country is very deceptive. It appears arid, almost desolate, but the mountains are covered with almond trees, which for all their scanty foliage bear valuable crops, while the plain hides its richness in ravines a hundred feet or more below the level of its surface.

We arrived home to find a stranger dressed in black clothes, but with an official cap on his head, sitting on a stone seat before our door. He was reading a book, and as we came up he bowed and said that he hoped his presence was not distasteful to us. We, of course, in the fashion of Spanish courtesy, put our whole home at his disposal, and invited him indoors. He demurred in the correct fashion, but on a second invitation came in with us. In the long entrada Père Chicot was looking out through the back door and shaking his head at the garden.

"There's another tree dying," he said. "All the trees are dying, and the vines won't bear. You can't do anything without water."

"But is there no water at all?" we asked.

"Ay," replied Père Chicot, "there used to be the right to two hours of water once a fortnight. But the owners sold it. They wanted money and it was worth many hundreds of pesetas."

Our visitor was very interested in the house, for he confided in us that there was a housing shortage in Jijona, like that in the rest of the world. He was chief of the municipal officers, dust-cart, water-supply, electric light and so on. He had just come from Toledo, and the only place he could find in Jijona was not nearly large enough for his family.

"This would just suit me," he said, peering into room after room, "seven rooms; and they say that St. Sebastian used to live here. Did you know that?"

His eye was attracted by the guitar of El Señor, which we had brought with us.

"And you an afficionado of the guitar," he exclaimed. "I, too, have played in my time."

We pressed him to play.

"No, no; indeed I would like to, but I may not. You see, my wife's father died a week ago, and it would seem very wicked if I were to play, or to sing."

Jan played him a farouka which he had learned from Blas.

"It seems a good guitar," said the man.

He picked it up, and fingered the chords. Then he went to the door and peered round it to see if Père Chicot had gone home.

"I might sing you something if you won't tell any one," said the chief of the municipal officers. "But I will sing it in a very low voice, so that it will be less disrespectful to my wife's father."

He sang, in a hoarse unmusical whisper, a guajiras.

"I like the guajiras and also the tango," said he. "You see, I did my military duty in Cuba, and I learned many over there."

Here are three of the songs he sang:

As he went on he began to forget his father-in-law, and in a short while he was bawling indecent tangos at the top of his voice. He showed no signs of departure, so I began to prepare for supper. I lit the bonfire which Tia Roger had laid in the wide hearth-place, placed over it a three-legged trivet of iron and on the trivet our huge saucepan full to the brim with olive oil. We then made use of a Spanish custom. We asked him to supper with us. This he was forced by Spanish custom to refuse, and as we did not repeat the invitation he had to make his compliments—which he did with the greatest courtesy—and go home.

After supper, as our bread supply was short, we felt our way down the hill in the dark and down the staircases of streets to the shop of Manuel Garcia. Garcia and his wife sold bread at one fat dog cheaper than the other shops. The bread was quite as good as any other, it had a very white powdery kind of consistency, baked in flat loaves with a very hard, anæmic crust. The Garcias had showed us one of the economical devices which were in current use. We had for some days bought candles at this shop, but Mrs. Garcia said:

"Why do you spend all this money on candles? Here is a thing much better, and much cheaper. You first pour water into a cup or bowl until half-way up, then fill to the top with olive oil. Float one of these on the top of the oil, and set fire to it. There you have a light at half the cost of candles."

The box she handed to us was full of pieces of cork through which a wick had been thrust. On the top of the box was the name of the device "little-lamps-little-boats" and a picture of the Virgin. We stepped back in our illumination to the most ancient of methods—the old Roman conquerors of Spain must have illuminated their villas in this way. "Little-lamps-little-boats" had probably given light to the halls of the Saracen castle which now was but a few crumbling masses of slowly disintegrating cement. It was curious to think that one-half of Jijona was lit by electric light, the other by this antique device, and that there was practically nothing between. Mrs. Garcia had urged us to the stewing of garbanzos.

The Garcias were go-ahead Spaniards. Starting from very small origins, they had begun a small turron factory in a back room. Not content with making turron alone, they had peddled it all over the Balearic Isles. Gradually they had prospered, and the whole upper part of the house was now factory, the entrance to the factory being higher up the hill in a back street. Yet they remained simple people, sitting, in the evenings, on their doorstep gossiping, while the flaxen-haired daughter, sixteen years old, painted with a toothpick dipped in dye eyes and noses on sugar pigs and cats.

"We had a hard time at first," said Mrs. Garcia. "In Majorca the people were very jealous of us, and often very rude. They would tell us to go back to our own district; they used to laugh at our speech, though God knows they can't speak proper Spanish themselves."

This inter-district jealousy seems characteristic of Spain. The man from Toledo laughed at the Jijona people; the people of Jijona called those of Murcia "gipsies"; the people of Murcia say that the Jijona folk are mere uncultivated mountaineers; Catalan and Castilian are in semi-enmity. Each person that one spoke to lauded the beauties and the food of his own district at the expense of other places. All about Jijona they would have nothing but malegueñas and Valencian jotas. The other varieties of Spanish music they were not interested in.

But the Garcias were progressive people. They had made a success of their Balearic venture, and now had a stall in the market of Alicante. This was kept by a sister-in-law. Garcia and his wife were making preparations to go to the great fair at Albacete. The shop was full of large bales done up in straw matting, boxes and crates of sweets and of turron. They would go by road, for it was cheaper, and only about a hundred miles away.

"That is a queer town," said Garcia. "There are gates to the walls, and at a certain hour they shut the gates, and if you are outside you stay outside till the morning."

Mrs. Garcia wanted me to paint her portrait. If she would have posed to me in the ordinary, peasant, workaday dress I would have done it with pleasure. But she had a fine fashionable modern silk dress of black and she wanted to pose in this. I managed to put off the proposal until the time of her departure was too close. She went away unsatisfied

CHAPTER XXIV

JIJONA—THE GOATHERDS

Murcia could be counted as unmusical, in Verdolay one heard either a gramophone of the little Señor, or the piano banged by the girls who lived in the topmost house of the village. In Jijona, on the contrary, almost every evening could be heard the sound of the guitar or of that strange Eastern singing of Spain. Young men sat on the edge of the cliff below the Saracen castle and thumped two or three chords from a guitar for half the night long. It had a delight, analogous to that which the tom-tom gives, a delight drawn from the hypnotism of inexorable rhythm. But save for the commandant of the municipal officers, who was a stranger, we had made the acquaintance of none of the musicians until one afternoon the goatherds perched themselves in the shadow beneath our walls.

We were taking a siesta when the sound of thrumming roused us from the half sleep which the afternoon gives. Jan exclaimed:

"That music sounds quite near."

He jumped up and looked out of the window. On a narrow ledge of flat rock at the foot of the wall three men were sitting in the shadow of the house. Two had guitars, and all along the wall of the garden a number of goats were lying down or were browsing on the small weeds which sprouted between the rocks. On the hill-side the kids were engaging one another in mock battle, rearing up in feint, with the most dainty of gestures, or interlocking their infantile horns.

We slipped on our clothes, and crawling out by the garden door, the opening of which was only about four feet high, we joined the goatherds in their patch of shadow.

"Buenos dias," said Jan. "I, too, love the guitar."

"Si, Señor," answered one of the herds, "through the windows we have heard you playing."

One of the men was thin but wore an enormous pagoda-like sombrero of straw, one was a boy of eighteen with a huge moustache, the third was an old man with a large nose, the wrinkles on his face drawn more deeply than any we have before seen. Their guitars were poor instruments and the strings were broken and knotted together, in consequence of which little bits of stick were tied across the arm of the instrument in order to clamp the strings down to the fingerboard below the knotted parts. As the strings break and are repaired, this stick is moved up the fingerboard until the strings are too short to play upon. Jan crawled through the small door and brought out the big white guitar. The thin man handled it with reverence.

"I know the instrument," he said. "It is El Señor's. It is a good instrument, but he has a better. A big brown one which is a marvel. He must be very rich. They say he gave more than two hundred pesetas for it."

He played on it for a moment, but soon handed it back to Jan.

"I'd rather play on my old one," he said. "I'm not afraid of it, and I can knock it about as I like."

All three were dressed in cotton shirts and pants, tied at the ankle with tape, over these they wore cotton coats and trousers; when the weather was very hot they dispensed with the trousers. Their feet were bare of stocking, but their shoes were heavy; woven by themselves out of esparto grass, very Oriental in shape with turned-up, pointed toes. On their backs were sacks containing esparto grass and half-fashioned sandals. Each possessed a long, heavy, crook'd stick shod with an iron point.

All too soon they said that they must be moving on. "But come down to the street of the soap house, top side, this evening, and we'll have a dance and singing."

I had sketched in this street. It was on the steepest part of the hill and ran almost horizontally across, so that the front door of the upper houses were on a level with the roofs of the lower ones. The roadway was divided along the centre, one-half being some twenty feet above the other; a low parapet protected the drop. It was lucky that the dwellers in the upper part of the street were sober Spaniards.

We found, as usual, the party seated on chairs in the middle of the street, near a small electric light; some of the men were sitting along the parapet. We were greeted by an old, but very large woman who groaned all the evening with rheumatism. The girls were in their best dresses of pale coloured skirt and embroidered paisley patterned shawls. A long silence followed our arrival. We were waiting for a player who was the best in the village. He could not come, but sent his brother instead, who played well, but was left-handed. Three guitars and a guitarron formed the orchestra.