In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael

“The months are the branches;
A week is a nest;
The days are the thrushes;
Each song is the best.”

XXI

WORK AND PLAY

RAFAEL still dreamed of his father, especially on gusty nights, and still, as he worked and played, tried to do what his father would approve. For there was plenty of work, as well as play. Work is the fashion in Galicia and neither Uncle Manuel nor Aunt Barbara could have conceived of a happy life without it. Rafael, though he had developed no liking for arithmetic, pegged faithfully away at the simple sums that his uncle delighted to set him and became, if not swift, tolerably sure.

“Dame Diligence is the mother of success,” Aunt Barbara would say cheerfully, when the lad’s face grew flushed over long columns, and presently a purple plum or a russet apple would be dropped upon the blurred and crumpled page. 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?
Should you disturb his studies, beware!
This angry student will pull your hair.”

What the boy longed to do was to learn to write, that he might send a letter to his father, and a tall youth from the Institute, where Rafael was to go, his uncle said, when he was ten years old, came in twice a week to set copies in a free, flourishing script and make fun of his pupil’s painful scrawls.

“I don’t see why letters are so much harder to do than figures,” Rafael would groan, casting his pen to the floor in an Andalusian temper.

But Doña Barbara would pick it up and pat the ink-smeared hand into which she fitted it again with cool, comforting touches.

“Flowers black as night,
Field white as snow,
A plough and five oxen
To make it go,”

she would say in the dear voice that was a softer echo of his father’s, and the five sturdy little oxen would resolutely resume their labors with the plough.

As for play, he found the games of Santiago rougher than those to which he had been accustomed in Granada. He was surprised, at first, to see such big boys dancing in circles, while a lad on the outside would try to touch one of them above the waist, but he soon discovered that these were kicking circles where heels struck out behind so vigorously as to make it no easy matter to tag without receiving the return compliment of a kick.

The work element, too, entered into these Galician games. In the first one Rafael played, he received whispered orders from the leading lad, “the master,” to “be carpenter and gimlet.” After a few more directions, Rafael stooped over, his palms on his knees, and held this position while the other boys in turn took running leaps over him, resting their hands on his shoulders, but careful not to touch him with their legs. At the first jumping, every boy would say in the harsh Galician grumble, like so many leap-frogs at his ear:

“Here’s a new worker good and clever.
Man must work forever and ever.”

On the return jumping-trip, when Rafael’s back was beginning to ache, each asked:

“What do you do with your best endeavor?”

And he, as he had been instructed, made answer:

“I’m a carpenter good and clever.”

On the third leaping, each workman paused with his hands on Rafael’s shoulders to put a question to the master and, upon receiving a negative reply, vaulted as before.

“Have you saws that saw as sharp saws should?”
“Yes, my saws are very good.”
“Have you planes that plane as smooth planes should?”
“Yes, my planes are very good.”
“Have you hammers that pound as hammers should?”
“Yes, my hammers are very good.”
“Have you gimlets that bore as gimlets should?”
“No, my gimlets are not so good.”

At this the last questioner flung his arms about Rafael, pulling the doubled little figure upright, and all the boys dealt him friendly cuffs and tweaks as they dragged him to the master, chorusing:

“He needs a gimlet; that is true.
He needs a gimlet and he’ll take you.”

And then the game began all over again with another youngster secretly appointed by the master as “tinker and tongs.”

Pilarica frankly disdained the Galician games. 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! How the very words of the song twinkled and tempted!

“O the Moon and the Morning-stars!
O the Moon and the Morning-stars!
Who dares to tread – O
Within the shadow?”

And here was the same play in Galicia so degraded that Pilarica would never consent to play it. Instead of the Moon in the shadow, a beanseller sat in his stall, and instead of stars there were thieves who scampered over the forbidden border, shouting rudely:

“Ho! Old Uncle! Seller of Greens!
We are robbing you of your beans.”

On a certain sunshiny morning of her second autumn in Galicia, Pilarica was protesting to her schoolmates against the game of Hunt the Rat. For Pilarica went to school. The little girl had teased so to be taught that Uncle Manuel, to quiet her, was sending her, at a penny a week, to the dame-school kept in the porch of an old gray church. It was against the church wall that the children were seated in a close row, so that the rat, Pilarica’s shoe, could be hidden between the wall and the small of their backs. As the shoe was shuffled along from one to another, the seeker was teased with the song:

“Rat, rat! Can’t you find the rat?
Look in this hole and look in that.”

“It’s ugly,” pouted Pilarica. “I don’t want my shoe to be a rat. Why don’t you hunt a golden cup or a fairy or something else that is nice to think about?”

The other children stared and one tall, sullen-faced girl rudely threw the shoe back to Pilarica.

“Because we don’t have golden cups and fairies in Galicia to hunt,” she said, “and we do have rats. That’s sense, isn’t it? But take your old shoe. We don’t want it.”

“These are not old shoes, yet,” replied Pilarica with untroubled sweetness, “because their eyes are shut.”

“Do you mean anything by that?” demanded the sullen-faced girl.

Pilarica put on the rat-shoe, curling her toes with a shiver of disgust, stretched out her feet and sang:

“Two little brothers
Just of a size;
When they get to be old folks
They’ll open their eyes.”

“Mine are wide open,” lisped a midget beside her, tumbling over on his back that he might the better hold up his ragged footgear to the public gaze, but as most of the children were barefoot, the subject was allowed to lapse.