In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael

The morning session was half over, as you could see by looking down that row of child faces. Half of them had been washed, and the other half evidently not. Pilarica was one of some five, out of the fifty, that came clean and tidy from home. The teacher, a white-headed grandmother, with a poppy-red handkerchief twisted into a horn over each temple, now appeared scuffling around the corner of the church on her knees, with loud puffings and groanings. She had a hard vow to fulfil, – to go seventy times around the outside of the church on those rheumatic joints, and the gravel was cruel; but she tried to make one circuit every day. Bowing her white head and kissing the lowest step of the porch, she dragged herself up and, sitting down on the alabaster fragment of a long-since-shattered statue, clucked for her pupils to gather round her as a hen would call her chickens.

“We will leave the rest of the faces till afternoon,” she announced. “Some of you may rub my knees, and Pilarica may have her doll and drill you in the scales.”

The shrewd old mistress had discovered that Pilarica was possessed of a little musical knowledge, thanks to Grandfather and his guitar, and so allowed her to bring her doll, essential to the lesson, to school; but its Paris wardrobe and Granada countenance had suffered so much in Galician handling that dolly was now regularly placed, for safe keeping, between the jaws of a stone griffin above the porch. The biggest boy had the daily privilege of climbing up and depositing it there, and the old dame’s rod would knock it out again to be caught in Pilarica’s anxious arms. Battered and tattered as the doll had become under this severe educational process, it was dearer to Pilarica than ever, and she clasped it tight as, standing before the children, she sang in that clear, fresh voice which even the sullen-faced girl gladdened to hear:

“Don’t pin-prick my darling dolly. Do

Respect my domestic matters. Re

Methinks she grows melancholy, Mi

Fast as her sawdust scatters. Fa

Sole rose of your mamma’s posy. Sol

Laugh at your mamma, so! La

Seal up your eyes all cozy. Si

La Sol Fa Mi Re Do.”

After Pilarica and the doll had done their best for half an hour to inculcate a knowledge of the scales, the dame bade the children go and play Kite in the churchyard; but one of them remained.

“Well?” asked the old woman apprehensively.

“Will you please teach me something?” pleaded Pilarica.

“Ay, child, to be sure I will,” and the wrinkled hand drew, from a crack in a wondrously carven pedestal beside her, all the library the school possessed, – a dilapidated primer and a few loose leaves from a prayer-book.

The mistress pored over these dubiously for a while and then her look brightened.

“This is O,” she said impressively, “and that is M.”

“But you teach me O and M every time,” remonstrated Pilarica, “and never anything else. Indeed, I know O and M quite well now.”

The old dame cocked her red horns petulantly and thrust back her library into the marble crevice.

“O and M are very good learning,” she insisted. “Go back under the doorway and say your prayer and don’t come to school again to-day.”

So Pilarica, the corners of her mouth drooping just a little, knelt under the Gothic portal and repeated:

“Mother Most Holy,
Thy servant kneels to say
That with thy kind permission
It is time to play.
Mother Most Holy,
My loving heart implores,
Bless this little sinner
Before she runs outdoors.”

XXII

THE PORCH OF PARADISE

PILARICA was quite at home, by this time, in the crooked, sombre streets of Santiago, whose stones are histories. There fell on her unconscious little figure, as she tripped along, the shadow of ancient buildings, – churches, convents, hospitals, with quaintly sculptured fronts. Over many of the massive, deeply recessed doors was graven the cockle shell of St. James, showing that these were once rest houses for the overflow of pilgrims, of whom thousands used to sleep on the floor of the cathedral. Over the rough granite slabs that paved the roads her little feet danced on to an inner music of her own, though all about her was the harsh uproar of a Spanish city, – children blowing penny whistles, blacksmiths beating their anvils, shopmen calling their wares. The screech of the file, the grating of the saw, the click of the chisel, added their discords to the braying of donkeys, the cracking of whips, the screaming of parrots, the clanging of mule-bells.

Pilarica was glad to come out from the hubbub of the streets into the comparative quiet of the great square from whose midst arises, a dark mass of fretted granite, the cathedral of St. James. About one of its fountains, carved in the shape of the pilgrim shell, were grouped a number of girls, Dolores among them, filling the slender water-buckets of Galicia and lifting them to their heads. They were singing coplas, as in autumns past, but now their songs were sorrowful instead of merry, for the brothers and lovers who had been drafted for the war did not return and slowly there had filtered through, even to Santiago, news of disaster and defeat.

One sad young voice after another made its moan, and Pilarica stood listening with her innocent smile undimmed. She knew these girls, Dolores’ friends, and to her childishness the pathos of their new songs was sweeter than their former coplas of mirth.

It was Milagros who was singing when Pilarica came:

“Wherever the lads are thronging,
I see him, still their chief.
Oh, shadow of my longing!
Vain shadow of my grief!”

Then rose the shrill note of little Peligros:

“Oh, for a horse of air
To gallop down the skies,
And carry me swiftly where
My wounded lover lies!”

The bowed figure of a woman in middle life, moving toward the cathedral, had paused to hear the strains, and suddenly from her there broke a passionate contralto:

“My cabin has a window
That looks on sea and sky,
And all the day I sit and watch
Ships and clouds go by.
Sailor, sailor, climb the mast,
Ask wind and spray and sea
What they have done with a widow’s son
That the King’s fleet took from me.”

The widow passed slowly on into the church, and Pilarica heard a muffled tone, sounding like a sob, that she hardly recognized, at first, as coming from Dolores:

“Three names shall tell his story:
’Twas Vigo gave him breath,
Santiago gave him love,
And Cuba gave him death.”

Then soared the pure, clear voice of Consuelo:

“God has lifted my belovèd
To His fair blue world above;
I shall not see my belovèd,
Not again, till I see Love.”