Some half-dozen pequeñitos, not one of whom was clearly out of petticoats, were scampering off one day, for instance, their thanks duly spoken, and their bits of candy just between hand and mouth, when they turned with one accord, as if suddenly aware of an abruptness in their leave-taking, and trotted back to bow them low, their tatters of cap sweeping the ground, and lisp with all Spanish gravity, "Good afternoon, señora." One chubby hidalgo tipped over with the profundity of his obeisance, but the others righted him so solemnly that the dignity of the ceremonial was unimpaired.
The habit of begging, that plague of tourist resorts, is an incessant nuisance on the Alhambra hill. Half-grown girls and young women were the most shameless and persistent of our tormentors. Age can be discouraged, and babyhood diverted, while the Spanish boy, if his importunities are met by smile and jest, will break into a laugh in the midst of his most pathetic appeals and let you off till next time.
"A little money for our Blessed Lady's sake, señora. I am starving."
"Wouldn't you rather have a cigarette?"
"And that I would."
"Then you are not starving, little brother. Run away. I have no cigarettes."
"But you have money for me, señora."
"No, nor enough for myself, not enough to buy one tile of the Alhambra."
"Then may God take care of you!"
"And of you!"
But the wild-haired, jet-eyed gypsy girl from the Albaicín is impervious to mirth and untouched by courtesy. She would not do us the honor of believing our word, even when we were telling the truth.
"Five centimos to buy me a scarlet ribbon! Five centimos!"
"Not to-day, excuse me. I have no change."
"Hoh! You have change enough. Look in your little brown bag and see."
"I have no change."
"Then give me a peseta. Come, now, a whole peseta!"
"But why should I give you a peseta?"
The girl stares like an angry hawk.
"But why shouldn't you?" Darting away, she hustles together a group of toddlers, hardly able to lisp, and drives them on to the attack.
"Beg, Isabelita! Beg of the lady, little Conception! Beg, Alfonsito! Beg, beg, beg! Beg five centimos, ten centimos! Beg a peseta for us all!"
And out pop the tiny palms, and the babble of baby voices makes a pleading music in the air. It is for such as these that the little brown bag has learned to carry dulces.
Before the month was over we had, in a slow, grippe-chastened fashion, "done our Baedeker." We had our favorite courts and corridors in the magical maze of the Moorish palace; we knew the gardens and fountains of the Generalife, even to that many-centuried cypress beneath whose shade the Sultana Zoraya was wont to meet her Abencerrage lover; our fortunes had been told in the gypsy caves of the Albaicín; we had visited the stately Renaissance cathedral where, in a dim vault, the "Catholic Kings," Ferdinand and Isabella, take their royal rest; we had made a first acquaintance with the paintings of the fire-tempered Granadine, Alonso Cano, and paid our dubious respects to the convent of Cartuja, with its over-gorgeous ornament and its horrible pictures of Spanish martyrdoms inflicted by that "devil's bride," Elizabeth of England. We had explored the parks and streets of the strange old city, where we possessed, according to the terms of Spanish hospitality, several houses; but better than the clamorous town we liked our own wall-girdled height, with its songful wood of English elms, planted by the Duke of Wellington, its ever murmuring runlets of clear water, its jessamines and myrtles, its Arabian Nights of mosque and tower, and its far outlook over what is perhaps the most entrancing prospect any hill of earth can show. The sunset often found us leaning over the ivied wall beneath the Torre de la Vela, that bell-tower where the first cross was raised after the Christian conquest, gazing forth from our trellised garden-nook on a vast panorama of gray city all quaintly set with arch and cupola, of sweeping plain with wealth of olive groves, vineyards, orange orchards, pomegranates, aloes, and cypresses, bounded by glistening ranks of snow-cloaked mountains. From the other side of the Alhambra plateau, the fall is sheer to the silver line of the Darro. Across the river rises the slope of the Albaicín, once the chosen residence of Moorish aristocracy, but now dotted over, amid the thickets of cactus and prickly pear, with whitewashed entrances to gypsy caves. Beyond all shine the resplendent summits of the great Sierras.
Yet it is strange how homely are many of the memories that spring to life in me at the name of the Alhambra, – decorous donkeys, laden with water-jars, trooping up the narrow footpath to the old Fountain of Tears, herds of goats clinging like flies to the upright precipice, a lurking peasant darting out on his wife as she passes with a day's earnings hidden in her stocking and holding her close, with laughter and coaxing, while he persistently searches her clothing until he finds and appropriates that copper hoard, and our own cheery little house-drudge washing our linen in a wayside rivulet and singing like a bird as she rubs and pounds an unfortunate handkerchief between two haphazard stones: —
"I like to live in Granada,
It pleases me so well
When I am falling asleep at night
To hear the Vela bell."
There is the proud young mother, too, whom we came upon by chance over behind the Tower of the Princesses, where her pot of puchero was bubbling above a miniature bonfire, while the velvet-eyed baby boy sucked his thumb in joyous expectation. She often made us welcome, after that, to her home, – a dingy stone kitchen and bedroom, unfurnished save for pallet, a few cooking-utensils, a chest or two, and, fastened to the wall, a gaudy print of La Virgen de las Angustias, the venerated Patrona of Granada. But this wretched abode, the remains of what may once have been a palace, opened on a lordly pleasure-garden with walls inlaid with patterns of rainbow tiles, whose broken edges were hidden by rose bushes. There were pedestals and even fragments of images in this wild Eden, jets of sparkling water and walks of variegated marble. In the course of the month, English and Spanish callers climbed the hill to us and encompassed us with kindness, but we still maintained our incorrigible taste for low society and used to hold informal receptions on sunny benches for all the tatterdemalions within sight. Swarthy boys, wearied with much loafing, would thriftily lay aside their cigarettes to favor us with conversation, asking many questions about America, for whose recent action they gallantly declined to hold us responsible. "It was not the ladies that made the war," said these modern cavaliers of the Alhambra.
Their especial spokesman was a shambling orphan lad of some fifteen summers, with shrewd and merry eyes. Nothing pleased him better than to give an ornamental hitch to the shabby, bright-colored scarf about his thin, brown throat, and proceed to expound the political situation.
"You admire the Alhambra? I suppose you have no palaces in America because your Government is a republic. That is a very good thing. Our Government is the worst possible. All the loss falls on the poor. All the gain goes to the rich. But there are few rich in Spain. America is the richest country of all the world. When America fought us it was as a rich man, fed and clothed, fighting a poor man weak from famine. And the rich man took from the poor man all that he had. Spain has nothing left – nothing."
"Oh, don't say that! Spain has the Alhambra, and beautiful churches, beautiful pictures."
"Can one eat churches and pictures, my lady?"
"And a fertile soil. What country outblooms Andalusia?"
His half-shod foot kicked the battle-trampled earth of the immortal hill contemptuously.
"Soil! Yes. All the world has soil. It serves to be buried in."
This budding politician