And how patiently he bears
his misfortune!
his misfortune!
Gustavo Adolfo Becuqer
During this sojourn he gathered several legends of
the Moncayo, that precipitous granite wall--known to Martial as the
haunt of AEolus--which bars Old Castile from Aragon and divides the basin
of the Douro, the river of Soria, from that of the Ebro, the river of
Saragossa. To Becquer its snowy crests looked "like the waves of a
motionless, gigantic sea. " But the main literary result of that
retirement is found in the series of eight exquisite letters, _From My
Cell_, the high-water mark of Becquer's prose, sent back to _El
Contemporaneo_. In these he gives a vivid, humorous account of his
journey, by rail to Tudela, by diligence to Tarazona, and by mule up the
Moncayo to Veruela, in whose walled and towered old Cistercian abbey he
found an austere refuge. He had his Shakespeare with him and his Byron,
but the event of the day, in the earlier weeks of his banishment, was
the arrival of the mounted postman with _El Contemporaneo_. He could not
wait for it in the Gothic cloisters, but would wander halfway down the
poplar avenue to the Black Cross of Veruela and, seated at its foot on
one of the marble steps, would wait sometimes the afternoon long
listening for the far-off beat of the horse's hoofs. The journal came
to him like a personal greeting from the life he had left behind. He
loved even the odor of the damp paper and the printer's ink, an odor
that brought back to him "the incessant pounding and creaking of the
presses" and all the eager activity of those hurrying nights in which
the words "came palpitating from the pen. " But with sunset the feverish
memories of Madrid fell from him and his thoughts took on the serenity
of faith, "the faith in something grander, in a coming, unknown destiny
beyond this life, the faith in eternity. " Again he found himself
dreaming of death, but not now of a poet's cherished grave beside the
Guadalquivir, not now of a great patriot's tomb in some sublime
cathedral, but of a mound in a village burial-plot, forgotten under
nettles, thistles and grass. Long tormented by insomnia, it seemed sweet
to him to slumber in such untroubled peace, "wrapt in a light cloak of
earth," without having over him "even the weight of a sepulchral stone. "
As the mountain air brought strength, he began to ramble over the
Moncayo, sketching and gathering up traditions, while through _El
Contemporaneo_ he passionately urged the claims of the past, and
proposed the state organization of archaeological expeditions in groups
made up of an artist, an architect and a man of letters, to explore the
provinces for their hidden, perishing traces of that bygone Spain of
Roman, Visigoth, Moor, mailed knight and saintly vision. Bent, as ever,
on doing his part in this unprized service, he wrote out, in the quiet
and leisure that had been so seldom his, masterly descriptions of the
market-place of Tarazona, and of the peasant-women of the Amazonian
hamlet of Anon. In the sixth letter he narrates, with a pen almost
unendurably graphic, the recent doing to death of a reputed hereditary
witch, a wretched old woman whom the superstitious Aragonese peasants
had, in very truth, hunted to a peak of the Moncayo off which, bleeding
from stones and knives, she had been thrust down the precipice. In the
seventh and eighth letters he goes on to relate, in his most attractive
manner, two local legends of witchcraft,--one of the necromancer who
built in a night the castle of Trasmoz, and one of the pious priest who
exorcised the witches that had come, in course of time, to make its
ruined tower their tryst, only to have his work undone by the girlish
vanity of his niece. She tampered with the holy water and restored to
the witches the freedom of the castle in return for their kind offices
in scrambling down her chimney, gray cats, black cats, all manner of
cats, the night before a festival, and stitching up for her such
fascinating finery that she forthwith won a husband.
His brother followed Becquer to Veruela and together they made trial of
the neighboring Baths of Fitero in Navarre, but they were in Madrid
again by 1865, often sorely put to it in the effort to carry the costs
of their little household. If one of the children fell ill and a doctor
must be called in, a friend might be entreated for an emergency loan of
three or four dollars; but as a rule these invalid brothers bore their
burden unassisted. Valeriano drew woodcuts for such market as he could
find, talking, says Correa, of "the great pictures he would paint as
soon as he could get the canvases," and Gustavo translated the trashy
French novels that were in demand, writing, in the intervals of such
hack work, an occasional fantasy of delicate beauty, as _Withered
Leaves_, and ever looking forward to the time when he should have golden
hours of calm in which he might give his higher and more mystical
conceptions fitting utterance. Twice it seemed as if the way were
opening. Isabella's last prime minister, Luis Gonzalez Bravo, became
interested in the poet and made him censor of novels. Becquer
immediately availed himself of the comparative leisure thus afforded to
gather together a volume of his poems, which Gonzalez Bravo was
proposing to print at his own expense. Then burst the long-gathering
storm of 1868, the genial, unprincipled queen was dethroned, and her
prime minister of literary tastes fled to the frontier with such
precipitation that the precious manuscript entrusted to his keeping was
lost. Becquer, with that scrupulous honor well known to his friends,
promptly resigned his censorship; Valeriano's pension for the study of
national types was withdrawn; and the year 1869 saw them again in
straits. Yet they took daily comfort in their close brotherly love and
their artistic sympathies, even though, in those troublous times, their
joint enthusiasm for the beauties of Toledo once landed them in jail.
They were then temporarily residing, with their little family, in their
favorite city, "the city sombre and melancholy _par excellence_," and
had sallied out, one evening, to contemplate its ghostly charms by
moonlight. Their disordered dress, long beards, excited gestures and
eager talk roused the suspicion of a brace of Civil Guards, who, drawing
near and overhearing such dangerous terms as "apses, squinches, ogives,"
seized the conspirators without more ado and lodged them, for their
further artistic illumination, in one of the historic dungeons of
Toledo. The next morning the editorial room of _El Contemporaneo_
resounded with merriment as a letter from Becquer went the rounds,--a
letter "all full," says Correa, "of sketches representing in detail the
probable passion and death of both innocents. " The entire staff united
in a written protest and explanation to the jailer, and it was long
remembered in that office with what shining eyes and peals of laughter
the delivered prisoners, on their return, set out their adventure in
exuberant wit of words and pencil.
The second opportunity came with the founding of that now famous
periodical, _La Ilustracion de Madrid_; but it came too late. Becquer
was appointed director and looked to for regular contributions, while
Valeriano furnished many of the illustrations. The management had large
schemes in hand, including a _Library of Great Authors_, for which
Becquer began a translation of Dante. But now, when a certain degree of
freedom, relief and recognition had been at last attained, the strained
and fretted cord of life gave way. The first number of _La Ilustracion_
appeared January 12, 1870. On September 23, Valeriano died in his
brother's arms. On December 22, the poet, surrounded by devoted friends
to whom, with his failing breath, he commended his children, sank
exhausted into that mysterious repose on which, from boyhood, his
musings had so often dwelt. But his mocking destiny was not yet content.
His body was buried in one of those crowded city cemeteries always so
repugnant to him, San Nicolas in Madrid. His younger son did not live to
manhood; the elder, his namesake, went wrong.
His loyal friends, after raising what money they could for the children,
gathered together and published in three small volumes the most
characteristic of Becquer's writings,--a series of lyrical poems,[2] the
letters _From My Cell_,[3] some legends and tales of unequal merit;[4]
and a few miscellaneous articles[3] on architecture, literature and the
like.
The _Rimas_ almost immediately established Becquer's fame. He is counted
to-day among the chief lyrists of the nineteenth century. These poignant
snatches of song pass, in theme, from life to love and from love to
death. So far as they give, or purport to give, a history of the poet's
heart, they tell of passion at first requited, then of estrangement and
despair. It is supposed that a certain Julia Espin y Guillen, later the
wife of Don Benigno Quiroga Ballesteros, a living Spaniard of
distinction, figures to some extent in the _Rimas_. The house of her
father, director of the orchestra in the _Teatro Real_, was a resort of
young musicians, artists and men of letters, and here Becquer, during
his earlier years in Madrid, was a frequent guest. There seems little
doubt that his youthful devotion was given, though in silence, to this
disdainful brunette, but the poems likewise tell of a love "of gold and
snow. " There is a green-eyed maiden, too, whom he essays to comfort for
this peculiarity,--though, indeed, eyes of jewel green, strangely
fascinating, are not rare in Spain. He may have had her in mind in
writing his legend of _The Emerald Eyes_. And one of the most beautiful
lyrics follows out the slight thread of story in _Three Dates_,
representing the poet as gazing night after night up from that ancient
Toledo square, with its glorified rubbish-heap, to the ogive windows of
the convent where the nun who had so thrilled his imagination was
immured. Over the spirit of Becquer, to whom the immaterial was ever
more real than the material, no one actual woman held lasting sway. He
tells the truth of the matter in his eleventh lyric:
I am black and comely; my lips are glowing;
I am passion; my heart is hot;
The rapture of life in my veins is flowing.
For me thou callest? --I call thee not.
Pale is my forehead and gold my tresses;
Endless comforts are locked in me,
Treasure of hearthside tendernesses.
'Tis I whom thou seekest? --Nay, not thee.
I am a dream, afar, forbidden.
Vague as the mist on the mountain-brow,
A bodiless glory, haunting, hidden;
I cannot love thee. --Oh, come! come thou!
Becquer himself was wont to ascribe the premature death of poets, that
breaking of the harp while yet the golden chords have yielded but their
least of melodies, to a restless fulness of life, the imprisoned vapor
that bursts the vessel. This appears with pathetic emphasis in the
_Introduction_ that he wrote, not long before his death, for a projected
volume of tales and fantasies. He felt that he must rid his fevered
brain of their importunity, but he had begun to give expression to only
one, _The Woman of Stone_, when death broke the magic pen. The story
remains a fragment,[5] not passing beyond its opening pages of rich
artistic description, nor can its course be clearly conjectured even
though in _The Kiss_, and in the closing passages of his _Literary
Letters to a Woman_, his imagination hovers about the theme. He left,
like Hawthorne, many tantalizing titles that suggest the greatness of
our loss. That drama on "The Brothers of Sorrow," that poem on the
discovery of America, those Andalusian novels on "The Last Minstrel,"
"To Live or Not to Live," those Toledo legends on "The Foundress of
Convents," "_El Cristo de la Vega_," "The Angel Musicians," those
fantasies on "Light and Snow," "The Diana of the Indies," "The Life of
the Dead,"--these are but a few of the conceptions that teemed in his
mind but found no outlet to the world. It seemed to his friends, who
knew the man and had listened to his marvellous talk, that the scanty
handful of tales they could collect from newspapers here and there made
so inadequate a showing as almost to misrepresent his powers. Yet
however thwarted and wronged by circumstance this harvest of his
imagination may be, it deserves attention if only for its finer and less
obvious qualities. Becquer charges himself with a melancholy
temperament, and seldom, in fact, do we find in these pages the blither
humor playing in _The Set of Emeralds_; but the occasional morbidness of
his tone is due rather, it would seem, to illness and its consequent
despondency than to any native quality of his thought. He deals too much
in the horrible for modern taste, but he cannot claim, like Baudelaire,
to have "invented a new shudder. " Tales grounded in folk-lore are bound
to contain elements of superstitious terror, and the affinity of these
legends in that respect is rather with German balladry and the earlier
romanticism in general than with the genius of Poe. Becquer's truer
kinship is with Hawthorne, whose outer faculty of close and minute
observation is his as well as the inner preoccupation with mystery and
symbol. All the senses of this young Spaniard seem to have been of the
finest, his exquisite hearing entering into these tales as effectively
as his keen sight; but he is most himself in presence of the dim, the
fugitive, the impalpable. His mind was essentially mystical. His
religion was not without its human side. In brooding on the inequalities
of the mortal lot, he finds comfort in the reflection: "God, though
invisible, yet holds a hand outreached to lift a little the burden that
presses on the poor. " But faith in him was of the very fibre of
imagination. He even lent a certain sympathetic credence to the mediaeval
legends of the Church, at least when the spell of Toledo was upon him.
"Outside the place that guards their memory," he says, "far from the
precincts which still preserve their traces, and where we seem yet to
breathe the atmosphere of the ages that gave them being, traditions lose
their poetic mystery, their inexplicable hold upon the soul. At a
distance we question, we analyze, we doubt; but there faith, like a
secret revelation, illuminates the spirit, and we believe. " In a letter
from Veruela to a lady of his acquaintance, a letter relating a brief
but lovely legend[6] of an appearance of the Virgin, he asserts: "Only
the hand of faith can touch the delicate flowers of tradition. " "God,"
he elsewhere says, "is the glowing, eternal centre of all beauty. "
The writer of these tales described himself thus: "I have a special
predilection for all that which cannot be vulgarized by the touch and
the judgment of the indifferent multitude. If I were to paint
landscapes, I would paint them without figures. I like the fleeting
ideas that slip away without leaving a trace on the understandings of
practical folk, like a drop of water over a marble shelf. In the cities
I visit, I seek the narrow, lonely streets; in the edifices I examine,
the dusky nooks and corners of the inner courts, where grass springs up,
and moisture enriches with its patches of greenish color the parched
tint of the wall; in the women who impress me, the hint of mystery that
I think I see shining with wavering light in the depths of their eyes,
like the glimmer of a lamp that burns unknown and unsuspected in the
sanctuary of their hearts; even in the blossoms of a shrub, I believe
there is for me something more potent and exciting in the one that
hides beneath the leaves and there, concealed, fills the air with
fragrance, unprofaned by human gaze. In all this I find a certain
unsullied purity of feelings and of things. "
Becquer goes on to admit that this "pronounced inclination sometimes
degenerates into extravagances. "
FOREWORD
In dim corners of my mind there sleep, hidden away and naked, the
freakish children of my imagination, waiting in silence for art to
clothe them with language that it may present them in decency upon the
stage of the world.
My Muse, as fruitful as the marriage-bed of poverty, and like those
parents who bring to birth more children than they have means to rear,
is ever conceiving and bearing in the mystic sanctuary of the
intelligence, peopling it with innumerable creations, to which not my
utmost effort nor all the years that are left to me of life, will be
sufficient to give form.
And here within me I sometimes feel them, all unclad and shapeless as
they are, huddled and twisted together in confusion indescribable,
stirring and living with a dim, strange life, similar to that of those
myriad germs which seethe and quiver in eternal generation within the
secret places of the earth, without winning strength enough to reach the
surface and transform themselves, at the kiss of the sun, into flowers
and fruits.
They go with me, destined to die with me, leaving no more trace than is
left by a midnight dream which the morning cannot recall. On certain
occasions and in face of this terrible idea, there rises in them the
instinct of life, and trooping in formidable though silent multitudes
they seek tumultuously a way of escape from amid the shadows of their
dwelling-place forth to the light. But alas! between the world of idea
and the world of form yawns an abyss which only the word can bridge, and
the word, timid and slothful, refuses to aid their efforts. Mute, dim
and powerless, after the unavailing struggle they fall back into their
old passivity. So fall, inert, into the hollows by the wayside, when the
wind ceases, the yellow leaves which the autumn storm blew up.
These seditions on the part of the rebel sons of my imagination explain
some of my attacks of fever; they are the cause, unrecognized by
science, of my excitements and depressions. And thus, although in ill
estate, have I lived till now, walking among the indifferent throngs of
men with this silent tempest in my head. Thus have I lived till now, but
all things reach an end, and to these must be put their period.
Sleeplessness and fantasy go on begetting and producing with monstrous
fecundity. Their creations, crowded already like the feeble plants of a
conservatory, strive one with another for the expanding of their unreal
existences, fighting for the drops of memory as for the scanty moisture
of a sterile land. It is needful to open a channel for the deep waters,
which, daily fed from a living spring, will at last break down the dike.
Go forth, then! Go forth and live with the only life I can give you. My
intellect shall supply you with nutriment enough to make you palpable; I
will clothe you, though in rags, so that you need not blush for
nakedness. I would like to fashion for each one of you a marvellous
stuff woven of exquisite phrases, in which you could fold yourselves
with pride, as in mantles of purple. I would like to engrave the form
that must contain you as the golden vase which holds a precious ointment
is engraved. But this may not be.
And yet, I need to rest. I need, just as the body through whose swollen
veins the life-blood surges with phlethoric force, is bled, to clear my
brain, inadequate to the lodging of so many grotesqueries.
Then gather here, like the misty trail that marks the passing of an
unknown comet, like atoms dispersed in an embryonic world which Death
fans through the air, until the Creator shall have spoken the _fiat lux_
that divides light from darkness.
I would not that in my sleepless nights you still should pass before my
eyes in weird procession, begging me with gestures and contortions to
draw you out from the limbo in which you lead these phantom, thin
existences into the life of reality. I would not that at the breaking of
this harp already old and cracked the unknown notes which it contained
should perish with the instrument. I would interest myself a little in
the world which lies without me, free at last to withdraw my eyes from
this other world that I carry within my head. Common sense, which is the
barrier of dreamland, is beginning to give way, and the people of the
different camps mingle and grow confused. It costs me an effort to know
which things I have dreamed and which have actually happened. My
affections are divided between real persons and phantasms of the
imagination. My memory shifts from one category to the other the names
of women who have died and the dates of days that have passed, with days
and women that have existed only in my mind. I must put an end to this
by flinging you all forth from my brain once and forever.
If to die is to sleep, I would sleep in peace in the night of death,
without your coming to be my nightmare, cursing me for having doomed you
to nothingness before you had been born. Go, then, to the world at whose
touch you came into being, and linger there, as the echo which life's
joys and griefs, hopes and struggles, found in one soul that passed
across the earth.
Perchance very soon must I pack my portmanteau for the great journey. At
any moment the spirit may free herself from the material that she may
rise to purer air. I would not, when this moment comes, take with me, as
the trivial baggage of a mountebank, the treasure of tinsel and tatters
that my Fancy has been heaping up in the rubbish chambers of the brain.
ROMANTIC LEGENDS OF SPAIN
MASTER PEREZ THE ORGANIST
In Seville, in the very portico of Santa Ines, and while, on Christmas
Eve, I was waiting for the Midnight Mass to begin, I heard this
tradition from a lay-sister of the convent.
As was natural, after hearing it, I waited impatiently for the ceremony
to commence, eager to be present at a miracle.
Nothing could be less miraculous, however, than the organ of Santa Ines,
and nothing more vulgar than the insipid motets with which that night
the organist regaled us.
On going out from the mass, I could not resist asking the lay-sister
mischievously:
"How does it happen that the organ of Master Perez is so unmusical at
present? "
"Why! " replied the old woman. "Because it isn't his. "
"Not his? What has become of it? "
"It fell to pieces from sheer old age, a number of years ago. "
"And the soul of the organist? "
"It has not appeared again since the new organ was set up in place of
his own. "
If anyone of my readers, after perusing this history, should be moved to
ask the same question, now he knows why the notable miracle has not
continued into our own time.
I.
"Do you see that man with the scarlet cloak and the white plume in his
hat,--the one who seems to wear on his waistcoat all the gold of the
galleons of the Indies,--that man, I mean, just stepping down from his
litter to give his hand to the lady there, who, now that she is out of
hers, is coming our way, preceded by four pages with torches? Well, that
is the Marquis of Moscoso, suitor to the widowed Countess of
Villapineda. They say that before setting his eyes upon this lady, he
had asked in marriage the daughter of a man of large fortune, but the
girl's father, of whom the rumor goes that he is a bit of a miser,--but
hush! Speaking of the devil--do you see that man coming on foot under
the arch of San Felipe, all muffled up in a dark cloak and attended by a
single servant carrying a lantern? Now he is in front of the outer
shrine.
"Do you notice, as his cloak falls back while he salutes the image, the
embroidered cross that sparkles on his breast?
"If it were not for this noble decoration, one would take him for a
shop-keeper from Culebras street. Well, that is the father in question.
See how the people make way for him and lift their hats.
"Everybody in Seville knows him on account of his immense fortune. That
one man has more golden ducats in his chests than our lord King Philip
maintains soldiers, and with his merchantmen he could form a squadron
equal to that of the Grand Turk----
"Look, look at that group of stately cavaliers! Those are the four and
twenty knights. Aha, aha! There goes that precious Fleming, too, whom,
they say, the gentlemen of the green cross have not challenged for
heresy yet, thanks to his influence with the magnates of Madrid. All he
comes to church for is to hear the music. But if Master Perez does not
draw from him with his organ tears as big as fists, then sure it is that
his soul isn't under his doublet, but sizzles in the Devil's frying-pan.
Alack, neighbor! Trouble, trouble! I fear there is going to be a fight.
I shall take refuge in the church; for, from what I see, there will be
hereabouts more blows than _Pater Nosters_. Look, look! The Duke of
Alcala's people are coming round the corner of San Pedro's square, and I
think I spy the Duke of Medinasidonia's men in Duenas alley. Didn't I
tell you?
"Now they have caught sight of each other, now the two parties stop
short, without breaking their order, the groups of bystanders dissolve,
the police, who on these occasions get pounded by both sides, slip away,
even the prefect, staff of office and all, seeks the shelter of the
portico,--and yet they say that there is law to be had.
"For the poor----
"There, there! already shields are shining through the dark. Our Lord
Jesus of All Power deliver us! Now the blows are beginning. Neighbor,
neighbor! this way--before they close the doors. But hush! What is this?
Hardly have they begun when they leave off. What light is that? Blazing
torches! A litter! It's His Reverence the Bishop.
"The most holy Virgin of Protection, on whom this very instant I was
calling in my heart, brings him to my aid. Ah! But nobody knows what I
owe to that Blessed Lady,--how richly she pays me back for the little
candles that I burn to her every Saturday. --See him! How beautiful he is
with his purple vestments and his red cardinal's cap! God preserve him
in his sacred chair as many centuries as I wish to live myself! If it
were not for him, half Seville would have been burned up by this time
with these quarrels of the dukes. See them, see them, the great
hypocrites, how they both press close to the litter of the prelate to
kiss his ring! How they drop behind and, mingling with his household
attendants, follow in his train! Who would dream that those two who
appear on such good terms, if within the half hour they should meet in a
dark street--that is, the dukes themselves--God deliver me from thinking
them cowards; good proof have they given of valor, warring more than
once against the enemies of Our Lord; but the truth remains, that if
they should seek each other--and seek with the wish to find--they would
find each other, putting end once for all to these continuous scuffles,
in which those who really do the fighting are their kinsmen, their
friends and their servants.
"But come, neighbor, come into the church, before it is packed full.
Some nights like this it is so crowded that there is not room left for a
grain of wheat. The nuns have a prize in their organist. When has the
convent ever been in such high favor as now? I can tell you that the
other sisterhoods have made Master Perez magnificent offers, but there
is nothing strange about that, for the Lord Archbishop himself has
offered him mountains of gold to entice him to the cathedral,--but he,
not a bit of it! He would sooner give up his life than his beloved
organ. You don't know Master Perez? True enough, you are a newcomer in
this neighborhood. Well, he is a saint; poor, but the most charitable
man alive. With no other relative than his daughter and no other friend
than his organ, he devotes all his life to watching over the innocence
of the one and patching up the registers of the other. Mind that the
organ is old. But that counts for nothing, he is so handy in mending it
and caring for it that its sound is a marvel. For he knows it so
perfectly that only by touch,--for I am not sure that I have told you
the poor gentleman is blind from his birth.
And how patiently he bears
his misfortune! When people ask him how much
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE]
he would give to see, he replies: 'Much, but not as much as you think,
for I have hopes. ' 'Hopes of seeing? ' 'Yes, and very soon,' he adds,
smiling like an angel. 'Already I number seventy-six years; however long
my life may be, soon I shall see God. '
"Poor dear! And he will see Him, for he is humble as the stones of the
street, which let all the world trample on them. He always says that he
is only a poor convent organist, when the fact is he could give lessons
in harmony to the very chapel master of the Cathedral, for he was, as it
were, born to the art. His father held the same position before him; I
did not know the father, but my mother--God rest her soul! --says that he
always had the boy at the organ with him to blow the bellows. Then the
lad developed such talent that, as was natural, he succeeded to the
position on the death of his father. And what a touch is in his hands,
God bless them! They deserve to be taken to Chicarreros street and there
enchased in gold. He always plays well, always, but on a night like this
he is a wonder. He has the greatest devotion for this ceremony of the
Midnight Mass, and when the Host is elevated, precisely at twelve
o'clock, which is the moment Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world,
the tones of his organ are the voices of angels.
"But, after all, why should I praise to you what you will hear to-night?
It is enough to see that all the most distinguished people of Seville,
even the Lord Archbishop himself, come to a humble convent to listen to
him; and don't suppose that it is only the learned people and those who
are versed in music that appreciate his genius, but the very rabble of
the streets. All these groups that you see arriving with pine-torches
ablaze, chorusing popular songs, broken by rude outcries, to the
accompaniment of timbrels, tambourines and rustic drums, these, contrary
to their custom, which is to make disturbance in the churches, are still
as the dead when Master Perez lays his hands upon the organ, and when
the Host is elevated, you can't hear a fly; great tears roll down from
the eyes of all, and at the end is heard a sound like an immense sigh,
which is nothing else than the expulsion of the breath of the multitude,
held in while the music lasts. But come, come! The bells have stopped
ringing, and the mass is going to begin. Come inside.
"This night is Christmas Eve for all the world, but for nobody more than
for us. "
So saying, the good woman who had been acting as _cicerone_ for her
neighbor pressed through the portico of the Convent of Santa Ines, and
by dint of elbowing and pushing succeeded in getting inside the church,
disappearing amid the multitude which thronged the inner spaces near the
doors.
II.
The church was illuminated with astonishing brilliancy. The flood of
light which spread from the altars through all its compass sparkled on
the rich jewels of the ladies who, kneeling on the velvet cushions
placed before them by their pages and taking their prayer-books from the
hands of their duennas, formed a brilliant circle around the
choir-screen. Grouped just behind them, on foot, wrapped in bright-lined
cloaks garnished with gold-lace, with studied carelessness letting
glimpses of their red and green crosses be seen, in one hand the hat,
whose plumes kissed the carpet, the other hand resting upon the polished
hilt of a rapier or caressing the handle of an ornate dagger, the four
and twenty knights, with a large proportion of the highest nobility of
Seville, seemed to form a wall for the purpose of protecting their
daughters and their wives from contact with the populace. This, swaying
back and forth at the rear of the nave, with a murmur like that of a
surging sea, broke out into a joyous acclaim, accompanied by the
discordant sounds of the timbrels and tambourines, at the appearance of
the archbishop, who, after seating himself, surrounded by his
attendants, near the High Altar under a scarlet canopy, thrice blessed
the assembled people.
It was time for the mass to begin.
There passed, nevertheless, several minutes without the appearance of
the celebrant. The throng commenced to stir about impatiently; the
knights exchanged low-toned words with one another, and the archbishop
sent one of his attendants to the sacristy to inquire the cause of the
delay.
"Master Perez has been taken ill, very ill, and it will be impossible
for him to come to the Midnight Mass. "
This was the word brought back by the attendant.
The news spread instantly through the multitude. It would be impossible
to depict the dismay which it caused; suffice it to say that such a
clamor began to arise in the church that the prefect sprang to his feet,
and the police came in to enforce silence, mingling with the
close-pressed, surging crowd.
At that moment, a man with unpleasant features, thin, bony, and
cross-eyed, too, hurriedly made his way to the place where the prelate
was sitting.
"Master Perez is sick," he said. "The ceremony cannot begin. If it is
your pleasure, I will play the organ in his absence; for neither is
Master Perez the first organist of the world, nor at his death need this
instrument be left unused for lack of skill. "
The archbishop gave a nod of assent, and already some of the faithful,
who recognized in that strange personage an envious rival of the
organist of Santa Ines, were breaking out in exclamations of
displeasure, when suddenly a startling uproar was heard in the portico.
"Master Perez is here! Master Perez is here! "
At these cries from the press in the doorway, every one looked around.
Master Perez, his face pallid and drawn, was in fact entering the
church, brought in a chair about which all were contending for the honor
of carrying it upon their shoulders.
The commands of the physicians, the tears of his daughter had not been
able to keep him in bed.
"No," he had said. "This is the end, I know it, I know it, and I would
not die without visiting my organ, and this night above all, Christmas
Eve. Come, I wish it, I command it; let us go to the church. "
His desire had been fulfilled. The people carried him in their arms to
the organ-loft, and the mass began.
At that instant the cathedral clock struck twelve.
The introit passed, and the Gospel, and the offertory, and then came the
solemn moment in which the priest, after having blessed the Sacred
Wafer, took it in the tips of his fingers and began to elevate it.
A cloud of incense, rolling forth in azure waves, filled the length and
breadth of the church; the little bells rang out with silvery
vibrations, and Master Perez placed his quivering hands upon the keys of
the organ.
The hundred voices of its metal tubes resounded in a prolonged, majestic
chord, which died away little by little, as if a gentle breeze had
stolen its last echoes.
To this opening chord, that seemed a voice lifted from earth to heaven,
responded a sweet and distant note, which went on swelling and swelling
in volume until it became a torrent of pealing harmony.
It was the song of the angels, which, traversing the ethereal spaces,
had reached the world.
Then there began to be heard a sound as of far-off hymns entoned by the
hierarchies of seraphim, a thousand hymns at once, melting into one,
which, nevertheless, was no more than accompaniment to a strange
melody,--a melody that seemed to float above that ocean of mysterious
echoes as a strip of fog above the billows of the sea.
One anthem after another died away; the movement grew simpler; now there
were but two voices, whose echoes blended; then one alone remained,
sustaining a note as brilliant as a thread of light. The priest bowed
his face, and above his gray head, across an azure mist made by the
smoke of the incense, appeared to the eyes of the faithful the uplifted
Host. At that instant the thrilling note which Master Perez was holding
began to swell and swell until an outburst of colossal harmony shook the
church, in whose corners the straitened air vibrated and whose stained
glass shivered in its narrow Moorish embrasures.
From each of the notes forming that magnificent chord a theme was
developed,--some near, some far, these keen, those muffled, until one
would have said that the waters and the birds, the winds and the woods,
men and angels, earth and heaven, were chanting, each in its own tongue,
an anthem of praise for the Redeemer's birth.
The multitude listened in amazement and suspense. In all eyes were
tears, in all spirits a profound realization of the divine.
The officiating priest felt his hands trembling, for the Holy One whom
they upheld, the Holy One to whom men and archangels did reverence, was
God, was very God, and it seemed to the priest that he had beheld the
heavens open and the Host become transfigured.
The organ still sounded, but its music was gradually sinking away, like
a tone dropping from echo to echo, ever more remote, ever fainter with
the remoteness, when suddenly a cry rang out in the organ-loft, shrill,
piercing, the cry of a woman.
The organ gave forth a strange, discordant sound, like a sob, and then
was still.
The multitude surged toward the stair leading up to the organ-loft, in
whose direction all the faithful, startled out of their religious
ecstasy, were turning anxious looks.
"What has happened? " "What is the matter? " they asked one of another,
and none knew what to reply, and all strove to conjecture, and the
confusion increased, and the excitement began to rise to a height which
threatened to disturb the order and decorum fitting within a church.
"What was it? " asked the great ladies of the prefect who, attended by
his officers, had been one of the first to mount to the loft, and now,
pale and showing signs of deep grief, was making his way to the
archbishop, waiting in anxiety, like all the rest, to know the cause of
that disturbance.
"What has occurred? "
"Master Perez has just died. "
In fact, when the foremost of the faithful, after pressing up the
stairway, had reached the organ-loft, they saw the poor organist fallen
face down upon the keys of his old instrument, which was still faintly
murmuring, while his daughter, kneeling at his feet, was vainly calling
to him amid sighs and sobs.
III.
"Good evening, my dear Dona Baltasara. Are you, too, going to-night to
the Christmas Eve Mass? For my part, I was intending to go to the parish
church to hear it, but after what has happened--'where goes John? With
all the town. ' And the truth, if I must tell it, is that since Master
Perez died, a marble slab seems to fall on my heart whenever I enter
Santa Ines. --Poor dear man! He was a saint. I assure you that I keep a
piece of his doublet as a relic, and he deserves it, for by God and my
soul it is certain that if our Lord Archbishop would stir in the matter,
our grandchildren would see the image of Master Perez upon an altar.
But what hope of it? 'The dead and the gone are let alone. ' We're all
for the latest thing now-a-days; you understand me. No? You haven't an
inkling of what has happened? It's true we are alike in this,--from
house to church, and from church to house, without concerning ourselves
about what is said or isn't said--except that I, as it were, on the
wing, a word here, another there, without the least curiosity whatever,
usually run across any news that may be going. Well, then! It seems to
be settled that the organist of San Roman, that squint-eye, who is
always throwing out slurs against the other organists, that great
sloven, who looks more like a butcher from the slaughter-house than a
professor of music, is going to play this Christmas Eve in place of
Master Perez. Now you must know, for all the world knows and it is a
public matter in Seville, that nobody was willing to attempt it. Not
even his daughter, though she is herself an expert, and after her
father's death entered the convent as a novice. And naturally enough;
accustomed to hear those marvellous performances, any other playing
whatever must seem poor to us, however much we would like to avoid
comparisons. But no sooner had the sisterhood decided that, in honor of
the dead and as a token of respect to his memory, the organ should be
silent to-night, than--look you! --here comes along our modest friend,
saying that he is ready to play it. Nothing is bolder than ignorance. It
is true the fault is not so much his as theirs who have consented to
this profanation, but so goes the world. I say, it's no trifle--this
crowd that is coming. One would think nothing had changed since last
year. The same great people, the same magnificence, the same pushing in
the doorway, the same excitement in the portico, the same throng in the
church. Ah, if the dead should rise, he would die again rather than hear
his organ played by hands like those. The fact is, if what the people of
the neighborhood have told me is true, they are preparing a fine
reception for the intruder. When the moment comes for placing the hand
upon the keys, there is going to break out such a racket of timbrels,
tambourines and rustic drums that nothing else can be heard. But hush!
there's the hero of the occasion just going into the church. Jesus! what
a showy jacket, what a fluted ruff, what a high and mighty air! Come,
come, the archbishop arrived a minute ago, and the mass is going to
begin. Come; it looks as though this night would give us something to
talk about for many a day. "
With these words the worthy woman, whom our readers recognize by her
disconnected loquacity, entered Santa Ines, opening a way through the
press, as usual, by dint of shoving and elbowing.
Already the ceremony had begun.
The church was as brilliant as the year before.
The new organist, after passing through the midst of the faithful who
thronged the nave, on his way to kiss the ring of the prelate, had
mounted to the organ-loft, where he was trying one stop of the organ
after another with a solicitous gravity as affected as it was
ridiculous.
Among the common people clustered at the rear of the church was heard a
murmur, muffled and confused, sure augury of the coming storm which
would not be long in breaking.
"He's a clown, who doesn't know how to do anything, not even to look
straight," said some.
"He's an ignoramus, who after having made the organ in his own parish
church worse than a rattle comes here to profane Master Perez's," said
others.
And while one was throwing off his coat so as to beat his drum to better
advantage, and another was trying his timbrels, and the clatter was
increasing more and more, only here and there could one be found to
defend in lukewarm fashion that alien personage, whose pompous and
pedantic bearing formed so strong a contrast to the modest manner and
kindly courtesy of the dead Master Perez.
At last the looked-for moment came, the solemn moment when the priest,
after bowing low and murmuring the sacred words, took the Host in his
hands. The little bells rang out, their chime like a rain of crystal
notes; the translucent waves of incense rose, and the organ sounded.
At that instant a horrible din filled the compass of the church,
drowning the first chord.
Bagpipes, horns, timbrels, drums, all the instruments of the populace
raised their discordant voices at once, but the confusion and the clang
lasted but a few seconds. All at once as the tumult had begun, so all at
once it ceased.
The second chord, full, bold, magnificent, sustained itself, still
pouring from the organ's metal tubes like a cascade of inexhaustible,
sonorous harmony.
Celestial songs like those that caress the ear in moments of ecstasy,
songs which the spirit perceives but the lip cannot repeat; fugitive
notes of a far-off melody, which reach us at intervals, sounding in the
bugles of the wind; the rustle of leaves kissing one another on the
trees with a murmur like rain; trills of larks which rise warbling from
among the flowers like a flight of arrows to the clouds; nameless
crashes, overwhelming as the thunders of a tempest; a chorus of seraphim
without rhythm or cadence, unknown harmony of heaven which only the
imagination understands; soaring hymns, that seem to mount to the throne
of God like a fountain of light and sound--all this was expressed by the
organ's hundred voices, with more vigor, more mystic poetry, more weird
coloring than had ever been known before.
* * * * *
When the organist came down from the loft, the crowd which pressed up
to the stairway was so great, and their eagerness to see and praise him
so intense, that the prefect, fearing, and not without reason, that he
would be suffocated among them all, commanded some of the police to
open, by their staves, a path for him that he might reach the High Altar
where the prelate waited his arrival.
"You perceive," said the archbishop, when the musician was brought into
his presence, "that I have come all the way from my palace hither only
to hear you. Will you be as cruel as Master Perez, who would never save
me the journey by playing the Midnight Mass in the cathedral? "
"Next year," responded the organist, "I promise to give you that
pleasure, for not all the gold of the earth would induce me to play this
organ again. "
"And why not? " interrupted the prelate.
"Because," replied the organist, striving to repress the agitation
revealed in the pallor of his face,--"because it is old and poor, and
one cannot express on it all that one would. "
The archbishop retired, followed by his attendants. One by one, the
litters of the great folk went filing away, lost to sight in the
windings of the neighboring streets; the groups of the portico melted,
as the faithful dispersed in different directions; and already the
lay-sister who acted as gate-keeper was about to lock the vestibule
doors, when there appeared two women, who, after crossing themselves and
muttering a prayer before the arched shrine of Saint Philip, went their
way, turning into Duenas alley.
"What would you have, my dear Dona Baltasara? " one of them was saying.
"That's the way I'm made. Every fool has his fancy. The barefooted
Capuchins might assure me that it was so and I wouldn't believe it in
the least. That man cannot have played what we have just been hearing. A
thousand times have I heard him in San Bartolome, his parish church,
from which the priest had to send him away for his bad playing,--enough
to make you stop your ears with cotton. Besides, all you need is to look
at his face, which, they say, is the mirror of the soul. I remember,
poor dear man, as if I were seeing him now,--I remember Master Perez's
look when, on a night like this, he would come down from the organ loft,
after having entranced the audience with his marvels. What a gracious
smile, what a happy glow on his face! Old as he was, he seemed like an
angel. But this fellow came plunging down the stairs as if a dog were
barking at him on the landing, his face the color of the dead, and--come
now, my dear Dona Baltasara, believe me, believe me with all your soul.
I suspect a mystery in this. "
With these last words, the two women turned the corner of the street and
disappeared.
We count it needless to inform our readers who one of them was.
IV.
Another year had gone by. The abbess of the convent of Santa Ines and
the daughter of Master Perez, half hidden in the shadows of the church
choir, were talking in low tones. The peremptory voice of the bell was
calling from its tower to the faithful, and occasionally an individual
would cross the portico, silent and deserted now, and after taking the
holy water at the door, would choose a place in a corner of the nave,
where a few residents of the neighborhood were quietly waiting for the
Midnight Mass to begin.
"There, you see," the mother superior was saying, "your fear is
excessively childish. There is nobody in the church. All Seville is
trooping to the cathedral to-night. Play the organ and play it without
the least uneasiness. We are only the sisterhood here. Well? Still you
are silent, still your breaths are like sighs. What is it? What is the
matter? "
"I am--afraid," exclaimed the girl, in a tone of the deepest agitation.
"Afraid? Of what? "
"I don't know--of something supernatural. Last night, see, I had heard
you say that you earnestly wished me to play the organ for the mass and,
pleased with this honor, I thought I would look to the stops and tune
it, so as to give you a surprise to-day. I went into the choir--alone--I
opened the door which leads to the organ-loft. At that moment the clock
of the cathedral struck the hour--what hour, I do not know. The peals
were exceedingly mournful, and many--many. They kept on sounding all the
time that I stood as if nailed to the threshold, and that time seemed to
me a century.
"The church was empty and dark. Far away, in the hollow depth, there
gleamed, like a single star lost in the sky of night, a feeble light,
the light of the lamp which burns on the High Altar. By its faint rays,
which only served to make more visible all the deep horror of the
darkness, I saw--I saw--mother, do not disbelieve it--I saw a man who,
in silence and with his back turned toward the place where I stood, was
running over the organ-keys with one hand, while he tried the stops with
the other. And the organ sounded, but it sounded in a manner
indescribable. It seemed as if each of its notes were a sob smothered
within the metal tube which vibrated with its burden of compressed air,
and gave forth a muffled tone, almost inaudible, yet exact and true.
"And the cathedral clock kept on striking, and that man kept on running
over the keys. I heard his very breathing.
"The horror of it had frozen the blood in my veins. In my body I felt an
icy chill and in my temples fire. Then I longed to cry out, but could
not. That man had turned his face and looked at me,--no, not looked at
me, for he was blind. It was my father. "
"Bah, sister! Put away these fancies with which the wicked enemy tries
to trouble weak imaginations. Pray a _Pater Noster_ and an _Ave Maria_
to the archangel Saint Michael, captain of the celestial hosts, that he
may aid you to resist the evil spirits. Wear on your neck a scapulary
which has been touched to the relics of Saint Pacomio, our advocate
against temptations, and go, go in power to the organ-loft. The mass is
about to begin, and the faithful are growing impatient. Your father is
in heaven, and thence, instead of giving you a fright, he will descend
to inspire his daughter in this solemn service which he so especially
loved. "
The prioress went to occupy her seat in the choir in the centre of the
sisterhood. The daughter of Master Perez opened the door of the loft
with trembling hand, sat down at the organ, and the mass began.
The mass began, and continued without any unusual occurrence until the
consecration. Then the organ sounded, and at the same time came a scream
from the daughter of Master Perez.
The mother superior, the nuns, and some of the faithful rushed up to the
organ-loft.
"Look at him! look at him! " cried the girl, fixing her eyes, starting
from their sockets, upon the organ-bench, from which she had risen in
terror, clinging with convulsed hands to the railing of the organ-loft.
All eyes were fixed upon the spot to which her gaze was turned. No one
was at the organ, yet it went on sounding--sounding as the archangels
sing in their raptures of mystic ecstasy.
* * * * *
"Didn't I tell you so a thousand times, my dear Dona Baltasara--didn't I
tell you so?
the Moncayo, that precipitous granite wall--known to Martial as the
haunt of AEolus--which bars Old Castile from Aragon and divides the basin
of the Douro, the river of Soria, from that of the Ebro, the river of
Saragossa. To Becquer its snowy crests looked "like the waves of a
motionless, gigantic sea. " But the main literary result of that
retirement is found in the series of eight exquisite letters, _From My
Cell_, the high-water mark of Becquer's prose, sent back to _El
Contemporaneo_. In these he gives a vivid, humorous account of his
journey, by rail to Tudela, by diligence to Tarazona, and by mule up the
Moncayo to Veruela, in whose walled and towered old Cistercian abbey he
found an austere refuge. He had his Shakespeare with him and his Byron,
but the event of the day, in the earlier weeks of his banishment, was
the arrival of the mounted postman with _El Contemporaneo_. He could not
wait for it in the Gothic cloisters, but would wander halfway down the
poplar avenue to the Black Cross of Veruela and, seated at its foot on
one of the marble steps, would wait sometimes the afternoon long
listening for the far-off beat of the horse's hoofs. The journal came
to him like a personal greeting from the life he had left behind. He
loved even the odor of the damp paper and the printer's ink, an odor
that brought back to him "the incessant pounding and creaking of the
presses" and all the eager activity of those hurrying nights in which
the words "came palpitating from the pen. " But with sunset the feverish
memories of Madrid fell from him and his thoughts took on the serenity
of faith, "the faith in something grander, in a coming, unknown destiny
beyond this life, the faith in eternity. " Again he found himself
dreaming of death, but not now of a poet's cherished grave beside the
Guadalquivir, not now of a great patriot's tomb in some sublime
cathedral, but of a mound in a village burial-plot, forgotten under
nettles, thistles and grass. Long tormented by insomnia, it seemed sweet
to him to slumber in such untroubled peace, "wrapt in a light cloak of
earth," without having over him "even the weight of a sepulchral stone. "
As the mountain air brought strength, he began to ramble over the
Moncayo, sketching and gathering up traditions, while through _El
Contemporaneo_ he passionately urged the claims of the past, and
proposed the state organization of archaeological expeditions in groups
made up of an artist, an architect and a man of letters, to explore the
provinces for their hidden, perishing traces of that bygone Spain of
Roman, Visigoth, Moor, mailed knight and saintly vision. Bent, as ever,
on doing his part in this unprized service, he wrote out, in the quiet
and leisure that had been so seldom his, masterly descriptions of the
market-place of Tarazona, and of the peasant-women of the Amazonian
hamlet of Anon. In the sixth letter he narrates, with a pen almost
unendurably graphic, the recent doing to death of a reputed hereditary
witch, a wretched old woman whom the superstitious Aragonese peasants
had, in very truth, hunted to a peak of the Moncayo off which, bleeding
from stones and knives, she had been thrust down the precipice. In the
seventh and eighth letters he goes on to relate, in his most attractive
manner, two local legends of witchcraft,--one of the necromancer who
built in a night the castle of Trasmoz, and one of the pious priest who
exorcised the witches that had come, in course of time, to make its
ruined tower their tryst, only to have his work undone by the girlish
vanity of his niece. She tampered with the holy water and restored to
the witches the freedom of the castle in return for their kind offices
in scrambling down her chimney, gray cats, black cats, all manner of
cats, the night before a festival, and stitching up for her such
fascinating finery that she forthwith won a husband.
His brother followed Becquer to Veruela and together they made trial of
the neighboring Baths of Fitero in Navarre, but they were in Madrid
again by 1865, often sorely put to it in the effort to carry the costs
of their little household. If one of the children fell ill and a doctor
must be called in, a friend might be entreated for an emergency loan of
three or four dollars; but as a rule these invalid brothers bore their
burden unassisted. Valeriano drew woodcuts for such market as he could
find, talking, says Correa, of "the great pictures he would paint as
soon as he could get the canvases," and Gustavo translated the trashy
French novels that were in demand, writing, in the intervals of such
hack work, an occasional fantasy of delicate beauty, as _Withered
Leaves_, and ever looking forward to the time when he should have golden
hours of calm in which he might give his higher and more mystical
conceptions fitting utterance. Twice it seemed as if the way were
opening. Isabella's last prime minister, Luis Gonzalez Bravo, became
interested in the poet and made him censor of novels. Becquer
immediately availed himself of the comparative leisure thus afforded to
gather together a volume of his poems, which Gonzalez Bravo was
proposing to print at his own expense. Then burst the long-gathering
storm of 1868, the genial, unprincipled queen was dethroned, and her
prime minister of literary tastes fled to the frontier with such
precipitation that the precious manuscript entrusted to his keeping was
lost. Becquer, with that scrupulous honor well known to his friends,
promptly resigned his censorship; Valeriano's pension for the study of
national types was withdrawn; and the year 1869 saw them again in
straits. Yet they took daily comfort in their close brotherly love and
their artistic sympathies, even though, in those troublous times, their
joint enthusiasm for the beauties of Toledo once landed them in jail.
They were then temporarily residing, with their little family, in their
favorite city, "the city sombre and melancholy _par excellence_," and
had sallied out, one evening, to contemplate its ghostly charms by
moonlight. Their disordered dress, long beards, excited gestures and
eager talk roused the suspicion of a brace of Civil Guards, who, drawing
near and overhearing such dangerous terms as "apses, squinches, ogives,"
seized the conspirators without more ado and lodged them, for their
further artistic illumination, in one of the historic dungeons of
Toledo. The next morning the editorial room of _El Contemporaneo_
resounded with merriment as a letter from Becquer went the rounds,--a
letter "all full," says Correa, "of sketches representing in detail the
probable passion and death of both innocents. " The entire staff united
in a written protest and explanation to the jailer, and it was long
remembered in that office with what shining eyes and peals of laughter
the delivered prisoners, on their return, set out their adventure in
exuberant wit of words and pencil.
The second opportunity came with the founding of that now famous
periodical, _La Ilustracion de Madrid_; but it came too late. Becquer
was appointed director and looked to for regular contributions, while
Valeriano furnished many of the illustrations. The management had large
schemes in hand, including a _Library of Great Authors_, for which
Becquer began a translation of Dante. But now, when a certain degree of
freedom, relief and recognition had been at last attained, the strained
and fretted cord of life gave way. The first number of _La Ilustracion_
appeared January 12, 1870. On September 23, Valeriano died in his
brother's arms. On December 22, the poet, surrounded by devoted friends
to whom, with his failing breath, he commended his children, sank
exhausted into that mysterious repose on which, from boyhood, his
musings had so often dwelt. But his mocking destiny was not yet content.
His body was buried in one of those crowded city cemeteries always so
repugnant to him, San Nicolas in Madrid. His younger son did not live to
manhood; the elder, his namesake, went wrong.
His loyal friends, after raising what money they could for the children,
gathered together and published in three small volumes the most
characteristic of Becquer's writings,--a series of lyrical poems,[2] the
letters _From My Cell_,[3] some legends and tales of unequal merit;[4]
and a few miscellaneous articles[3] on architecture, literature and the
like.
The _Rimas_ almost immediately established Becquer's fame. He is counted
to-day among the chief lyrists of the nineteenth century. These poignant
snatches of song pass, in theme, from life to love and from love to
death. So far as they give, or purport to give, a history of the poet's
heart, they tell of passion at first requited, then of estrangement and
despair. It is supposed that a certain Julia Espin y Guillen, later the
wife of Don Benigno Quiroga Ballesteros, a living Spaniard of
distinction, figures to some extent in the _Rimas_. The house of her
father, director of the orchestra in the _Teatro Real_, was a resort of
young musicians, artists and men of letters, and here Becquer, during
his earlier years in Madrid, was a frequent guest. There seems little
doubt that his youthful devotion was given, though in silence, to this
disdainful brunette, but the poems likewise tell of a love "of gold and
snow. " There is a green-eyed maiden, too, whom he essays to comfort for
this peculiarity,--though, indeed, eyes of jewel green, strangely
fascinating, are not rare in Spain. He may have had her in mind in
writing his legend of _The Emerald Eyes_. And one of the most beautiful
lyrics follows out the slight thread of story in _Three Dates_,
representing the poet as gazing night after night up from that ancient
Toledo square, with its glorified rubbish-heap, to the ogive windows of
the convent where the nun who had so thrilled his imagination was
immured. Over the spirit of Becquer, to whom the immaterial was ever
more real than the material, no one actual woman held lasting sway. He
tells the truth of the matter in his eleventh lyric:
I am black and comely; my lips are glowing;
I am passion; my heart is hot;
The rapture of life in my veins is flowing.
For me thou callest? --I call thee not.
Pale is my forehead and gold my tresses;
Endless comforts are locked in me,
Treasure of hearthside tendernesses.
'Tis I whom thou seekest? --Nay, not thee.
I am a dream, afar, forbidden.
Vague as the mist on the mountain-brow,
A bodiless glory, haunting, hidden;
I cannot love thee. --Oh, come! come thou!
Becquer himself was wont to ascribe the premature death of poets, that
breaking of the harp while yet the golden chords have yielded but their
least of melodies, to a restless fulness of life, the imprisoned vapor
that bursts the vessel. This appears with pathetic emphasis in the
_Introduction_ that he wrote, not long before his death, for a projected
volume of tales and fantasies. He felt that he must rid his fevered
brain of their importunity, but he had begun to give expression to only
one, _The Woman of Stone_, when death broke the magic pen. The story
remains a fragment,[5] not passing beyond its opening pages of rich
artistic description, nor can its course be clearly conjectured even
though in _The Kiss_, and in the closing passages of his _Literary
Letters to a Woman_, his imagination hovers about the theme. He left,
like Hawthorne, many tantalizing titles that suggest the greatness of
our loss. That drama on "The Brothers of Sorrow," that poem on the
discovery of America, those Andalusian novels on "The Last Minstrel,"
"To Live or Not to Live," those Toledo legends on "The Foundress of
Convents," "_El Cristo de la Vega_," "The Angel Musicians," those
fantasies on "Light and Snow," "The Diana of the Indies," "The Life of
the Dead,"--these are but a few of the conceptions that teemed in his
mind but found no outlet to the world. It seemed to his friends, who
knew the man and had listened to his marvellous talk, that the scanty
handful of tales they could collect from newspapers here and there made
so inadequate a showing as almost to misrepresent his powers. Yet
however thwarted and wronged by circumstance this harvest of his
imagination may be, it deserves attention if only for its finer and less
obvious qualities. Becquer charges himself with a melancholy
temperament, and seldom, in fact, do we find in these pages the blither
humor playing in _The Set of Emeralds_; but the occasional morbidness of
his tone is due rather, it would seem, to illness and its consequent
despondency than to any native quality of his thought. He deals too much
in the horrible for modern taste, but he cannot claim, like Baudelaire,
to have "invented a new shudder. " Tales grounded in folk-lore are bound
to contain elements of superstitious terror, and the affinity of these
legends in that respect is rather with German balladry and the earlier
romanticism in general than with the genius of Poe. Becquer's truer
kinship is with Hawthorne, whose outer faculty of close and minute
observation is his as well as the inner preoccupation with mystery and
symbol. All the senses of this young Spaniard seem to have been of the
finest, his exquisite hearing entering into these tales as effectively
as his keen sight; but he is most himself in presence of the dim, the
fugitive, the impalpable. His mind was essentially mystical. His
religion was not without its human side. In brooding on the inequalities
of the mortal lot, he finds comfort in the reflection: "God, though
invisible, yet holds a hand outreached to lift a little the burden that
presses on the poor. " But faith in him was of the very fibre of
imagination. He even lent a certain sympathetic credence to the mediaeval
legends of the Church, at least when the spell of Toledo was upon him.
"Outside the place that guards their memory," he says, "far from the
precincts which still preserve their traces, and where we seem yet to
breathe the atmosphere of the ages that gave them being, traditions lose
their poetic mystery, their inexplicable hold upon the soul. At a
distance we question, we analyze, we doubt; but there faith, like a
secret revelation, illuminates the spirit, and we believe. " In a letter
from Veruela to a lady of his acquaintance, a letter relating a brief
but lovely legend[6] of an appearance of the Virgin, he asserts: "Only
the hand of faith can touch the delicate flowers of tradition. " "God,"
he elsewhere says, "is the glowing, eternal centre of all beauty. "
The writer of these tales described himself thus: "I have a special
predilection for all that which cannot be vulgarized by the touch and
the judgment of the indifferent multitude. If I were to paint
landscapes, I would paint them without figures. I like the fleeting
ideas that slip away without leaving a trace on the understandings of
practical folk, like a drop of water over a marble shelf. In the cities
I visit, I seek the narrow, lonely streets; in the edifices I examine,
the dusky nooks and corners of the inner courts, where grass springs up,
and moisture enriches with its patches of greenish color the parched
tint of the wall; in the women who impress me, the hint of mystery that
I think I see shining with wavering light in the depths of their eyes,
like the glimmer of a lamp that burns unknown and unsuspected in the
sanctuary of their hearts; even in the blossoms of a shrub, I believe
there is for me something more potent and exciting in the one that
hides beneath the leaves and there, concealed, fills the air with
fragrance, unprofaned by human gaze. In all this I find a certain
unsullied purity of feelings and of things. "
Becquer goes on to admit that this "pronounced inclination sometimes
degenerates into extravagances. "
FOREWORD
In dim corners of my mind there sleep, hidden away and naked, the
freakish children of my imagination, waiting in silence for art to
clothe them with language that it may present them in decency upon the
stage of the world.
My Muse, as fruitful as the marriage-bed of poverty, and like those
parents who bring to birth more children than they have means to rear,
is ever conceiving and bearing in the mystic sanctuary of the
intelligence, peopling it with innumerable creations, to which not my
utmost effort nor all the years that are left to me of life, will be
sufficient to give form.
And here within me I sometimes feel them, all unclad and shapeless as
they are, huddled and twisted together in confusion indescribable,
stirring and living with a dim, strange life, similar to that of those
myriad germs which seethe and quiver in eternal generation within the
secret places of the earth, without winning strength enough to reach the
surface and transform themselves, at the kiss of the sun, into flowers
and fruits.
They go with me, destined to die with me, leaving no more trace than is
left by a midnight dream which the morning cannot recall. On certain
occasions and in face of this terrible idea, there rises in them the
instinct of life, and trooping in formidable though silent multitudes
they seek tumultuously a way of escape from amid the shadows of their
dwelling-place forth to the light. But alas! between the world of idea
and the world of form yawns an abyss which only the word can bridge, and
the word, timid and slothful, refuses to aid their efforts. Mute, dim
and powerless, after the unavailing struggle they fall back into their
old passivity. So fall, inert, into the hollows by the wayside, when the
wind ceases, the yellow leaves which the autumn storm blew up.
These seditions on the part of the rebel sons of my imagination explain
some of my attacks of fever; they are the cause, unrecognized by
science, of my excitements and depressions. And thus, although in ill
estate, have I lived till now, walking among the indifferent throngs of
men with this silent tempest in my head. Thus have I lived till now, but
all things reach an end, and to these must be put their period.
Sleeplessness and fantasy go on begetting and producing with monstrous
fecundity. Their creations, crowded already like the feeble plants of a
conservatory, strive one with another for the expanding of their unreal
existences, fighting for the drops of memory as for the scanty moisture
of a sterile land. It is needful to open a channel for the deep waters,
which, daily fed from a living spring, will at last break down the dike.
Go forth, then! Go forth and live with the only life I can give you. My
intellect shall supply you with nutriment enough to make you palpable; I
will clothe you, though in rags, so that you need not blush for
nakedness. I would like to fashion for each one of you a marvellous
stuff woven of exquisite phrases, in which you could fold yourselves
with pride, as in mantles of purple. I would like to engrave the form
that must contain you as the golden vase which holds a precious ointment
is engraved. But this may not be.
And yet, I need to rest. I need, just as the body through whose swollen
veins the life-blood surges with phlethoric force, is bled, to clear my
brain, inadequate to the lodging of so many grotesqueries.
Then gather here, like the misty trail that marks the passing of an
unknown comet, like atoms dispersed in an embryonic world which Death
fans through the air, until the Creator shall have spoken the _fiat lux_
that divides light from darkness.
I would not that in my sleepless nights you still should pass before my
eyes in weird procession, begging me with gestures and contortions to
draw you out from the limbo in which you lead these phantom, thin
existences into the life of reality. I would not that at the breaking of
this harp already old and cracked the unknown notes which it contained
should perish with the instrument. I would interest myself a little in
the world which lies without me, free at last to withdraw my eyes from
this other world that I carry within my head. Common sense, which is the
barrier of dreamland, is beginning to give way, and the people of the
different camps mingle and grow confused. It costs me an effort to know
which things I have dreamed and which have actually happened. My
affections are divided between real persons and phantasms of the
imagination. My memory shifts from one category to the other the names
of women who have died and the dates of days that have passed, with days
and women that have existed only in my mind. I must put an end to this
by flinging you all forth from my brain once and forever.
If to die is to sleep, I would sleep in peace in the night of death,
without your coming to be my nightmare, cursing me for having doomed you
to nothingness before you had been born. Go, then, to the world at whose
touch you came into being, and linger there, as the echo which life's
joys and griefs, hopes and struggles, found in one soul that passed
across the earth.
Perchance very soon must I pack my portmanteau for the great journey. At
any moment the spirit may free herself from the material that she may
rise to purer air. I would not, when this moment comes, take with me, as
the trivial baggage of a mountebank, the treasure of tinsel and tatters
that my Fancy has been heaping up in the rubbish chambers of the brain.
ROMANTIC LEGENDS OF SPAIN
MASTER PEREZ THE ORGANIST
In Seville, in the very portico of Santa Ines, and while, on Christmas
Eve, I was waiting for the Midnight Mass to begin, I heard this
tradition from a lay-sister of the convent.
As was natural, after hearing it, I waited impatiently for the ceremony
to commence, eager to be present at a miracle.
Nothing could be less miraculous, however, than the organ of Santa Ines,
and nothing more vulgar than the insipid motets with which that night
the organist regaled us.
On going out from the mass, I could not resist asking the lay-sister
mischievously:
"How does it happen that the organ of Master Perez is so unmusical at
present? "
"Why! " replied the old woman. "Because it isn't his. "
"Not his? What has become of it? "
"It fell to pieces from sheer old age, a number of years ago. "
"And the soul of the organist? "
"It has not appeared again since the new organ was set up in place of
his own. "
If anyone of my readers, after perusing this history, should be moved to
ask the same question, now he knows why the notable miracle has not
continued into our own time.
I.
"Do you see that man with the scarlet cloak and the white plume in his
hat,--the one who seems to wear on his waistcoat all the gold of the
galleons of the Indies,--that man, I mean, just stepping down from his
litter to give his hand to the lady there, who, now that she is out of
hers, is coming our way, preceded by four pages with torches? Well, that
is the Marquis of Moscoso, suitor to the widowed Countess of
Villapineda. They say that before setting his eyes upon this lady, he
had asked in marriage the daughter of a man of large fortune, but the
girl's father, of whom the rumor goes that he is a bit of a miser,--but
hush! Speaking of the devil--do you see that man coming on foot under
the arch of San Felipe, all muffled up in a dark cloak and attended by a
single servant carrying a lantern? Now he is in front of the outer
shrine.
"Do you notice, as his cloak falls back while he salutes the image, the
embroidered cross that sparkles on his breast?
"If it were not for this noble decoration, one would take him for a
shop-keeper from Culebras street. Well, that is the father in question.
See how the people make way for him and lift their hats.
"Everybody in Seville knows him on account of his immense fortune. That
one man has more golden ducats in his chests than our lord King Philip
maintains soldiers, and with his merchantmen he could form a squadron
equal to that of the Grand Turk----
"Look, look at that group of stately cavaliers! Those are the four and
twenty knights. Aha, aha! There goes that precious Fleming, too, whom,
they say, the gentlemen of the green cross have not challenged for
heresy yet, thanks to his influence with the magnates of Madrid. All he
comes to church for is to hear the music. But if Master Perez does not
draw from him with his organ tears as big as fists, then sure it is that
his soul isn't under his doublet, but sizzles in the Devil's frying-pan.
Alack, neighbor! Trouble, trouble! I fear there is going to be a fight.
I shall take refuge in the church; for, from what I see, there will be
hereabouts more blows than _Pater Nosters_. Look, look! The Duke of
Alcala's people are coming round the corner of San Pedro's square, and I
think I spy the Duke of Medinasidonia's men in Duenas alley. Didn't I
tell you?
"Now they have caught sight of each other, now the two parties stop
short, without breaking their order, the groups of bystanders dissolve,
the police, who on these occasions get pounded by both sides, slip away,
even the prefect, staff of office and all, seeks the shelter of the
portico,--and yet they say that there is law to be had.
"For the poor----
"There, there! already shields are shining through the dark. Our Lord
Jesus of All Power deliver us! Now the blows are beginning. Neighbor,
neighbor! this way--before they close the doors. But hush! What is this?
Hardly have they begun when they leave off. What light is that? Blazing
torches! A litter! It's His Reverence the Bishop.
"The most holy Virgin of Protection, on whom this very instant I was
calling in my heart, brings him to my aid. Ah! But nobody knows what I
owe to that Blessed Lady,--how richly she pays me back for the little
candles that I burn to her every Saturday. --See him! How beautiful he is
with his purple vestments and his red cardinal's cap! God preserve him
in his sacred chair as many centuries as I wish to live myself! If it
were not for him, half Seville would have been burned up by this time
with these quarrels of the dukes. See them, see them, the great
hypocrites, how they both press close to the litter of the prelate to
kiss his ring! How they drop behind and, mingling with his household
attendants, follow in his train! Who would dream that those two who
appear on such good terms, if within the half hour they should meet in a
dark street--that is, the dukes themselves--God deliver me from thinking
them cowards; good proof have they given of valor, warring more than
once against the enemies of Our Lord; but the truth remains, that if
they should seek each other--and seek with the wish to find--they would
find each other, putting end once for all to these continuous scuffles,
in which those who really do the fighting are their kinsmen, their
friends and their servants.
"But come, neighbor, come into the church, before it is packed full.
Some nights like this it is so crowded that there is not room left for a
grain of wheat. The nuns have a prize in their organist. When has the
convent ever been in such high favor as now? I can tell you that the
other sisterhoods have made Master Perez magnificent offers, but there
is nothing strange about that, for the Lord Archbishop himself has
offered him mountains of gold to entice him to the cathedral,--but he,
not a bit of it! He would sooner give up his life than his beloved
organ. You don't know Master Perez? True enough, you are a newcomer in
this neighborhood. Well, he is a saint; poor, but the most charitable
man alive. With no other relative than his daughter and no other friend
than his organ, he devotes all his life to watching over the innocence
of the one and patching up the registers of the other. Mind that the
organ is old. But that counts for nothing, he is so handy in mending it
and caring for it that its sound is a marvel. For he knows it so
perfectly that only by touch,--for I am not sure that I have told you
the poor gentleman is blind from his birth.
And how patiently he bears
his misfortune! When people ask him how much
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE]
he would give to see, he replies: 'Much, but not as much as you think,
for I have hopes. ' 'Hopes of seeing? ' 'Yes, and very soon,' he adds,
smiling like an angel. 'Already I number seventy-six years; however long
my life may be, soon I shall see God. '
"Poor dear! And he will see Him, for he is humble as the stones of the
street, which let all the world trample on them. He always says that he
is only a poor convent organist, when the fact is he could give lessons
in harmony to the very chapel master of the Cathedral, for he was, as it
were, born to the art. His father held the same position before him; I
did not know the father, but my mother--God rest her soul! --says that he
always had the boy at the organ with him to blow the bellows. Then the
lad developed such talent that, as was natural, he succeeded to the
position on the death of his father. And what a touch is in his hands,
God bless them! They deserve to be taken to Chicarreros street and there
enchased in gold. He always plays well, always, but on a night like this
he is a wonder. He has the greatest devotion for this ceremony of the
Midnight Mass, and when the Host is elevated, precisely at twelve
o'clock, which is the moment Our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world,
the tones of his organ are the voices of angels.
"But, after all, why should I praise to you what you will hear to-night?
It is enough to see that all the most distinguished people of Seville,
even the Lord Archbishop himself, come to a humble convent to listen to
him; and don't suppose that it is only the learned people and those who
are versed in music that appreciate his genius, but the very rabble of
the streets. All these groups that you see arriving with pine-torches
ablaze, chorusing popular songs, broken by rude outcries, to the
accompaniment of timbrels, tambourines and rustic drums, these, contrary
to their custom, which is to make disturbance in the churches, are still
as the dead when Master Perez lays his hands upon the organ, and when
the Host is elevated, you can't hear a fly; great tears roll down from
the eyes of all, and at the end is heard a sound like an immense sigh,
which is nothing else than the expulsion of the breath of the multitude,
held in while the music lasts. But come, come! The bells have stopped
ringing, and the mass is going to begin. Come inside.
"This night is Christmas Eve for all the world, but for nobody more than
for us. "
So saying, the good woman who had been acting as _cicerone_ for her
neighbor pressed through the portico of the Convent of Santa Ines, and
by dint of elbowing and pushing succeeded in getting inside the church,
disappearing amid the multitude which thronged the inner spaces near the
doors.
II.
The church was illuminated with astonishing brilliancy. The flood of
light which spread from the altars through all its compass sparkled on
the rich jewels of the ladies who, kneeling on the velvet cushions
placed before them by their pages and taking their prayer-books from the
hands of their duennas, formed a brilliant circle around the
choir-screen. Grouped just behind them, on foot, wrapped in bright-lined
cloaks garnished with gold-lace, with studied carelessness letting
glimpses of their red and green crosses be seen, in one hand the hat,
whose plumes kissed the carpet, the other hand resting upon the polished
hilt of a rapier or caressing the handle of an ornate dagger, the four
and twenty knights, with a large proportion of the highest nobility of
Seville, seemed to form a wall for the purpose of protecting their
daughters and their wives from contact with the populace. This, swaying
back and forth at the rear of the nave, with a murmur like that of a
surging sea, broke out into a joyous acclaim, accompanied by the
discordant sounds of the timbrels and tambourines, at the appearance of
the archbishop, who, after seating himself, surrounded by his
attendants, near the High Altar under a scarlet canopy, thrice blessed
the assembled people.
It was time for the mass to begin.
There passed, nevertheless, several minutes without the appearance of
the celebrant. The throng commenced to stir about impatiently; the
knights exchanged low-toned words with one another, and the archbishop
sent one of his attendants to the sacristy to inquire the cause of the
delay.
"Master Perez has been taken ill, very ill, and it will be impossible
for him to come to the Midnight Mass. "
This was the word brought back by the attendant.
The news spread instantly through the multitude. It would be impossible
to depict the dismay which it caused; suffice it to say that such a
clamor began to arise in the church that the prefect sprang to his feet,
and the police came in to enforce silence, mingling with the
close-pressed, surging crowd.
At that moment, a man with unpleasant features, thin, bony, and
cross-eyed, too, hurriedly made his way to the place where the prelate
was sitting.
"Master Perez is sick," he said. "The ceremony cannot begin. If it is
your pleasure, I will play the organ in his absence; for neither is
Master Perez the first organist of the world, nor at his death need this
instrument be left unused for lack of skill. "
The archbishop gave a nod of assent, and already some of the faithful,
who recognized in that strange personage an envious rival of the
organist of Santa Ines, were breaking out in exclamations of
displeasure, when suddenly a startling uproar was heard in the portico.
"Master Perez is here! Master Perez is here! "
At these cries from the press in the doorway, every one looked around.
Master Perez, his face pallid and drawn, was in fact entering the
church, brought in a chair about which all were contending for the honor
of carrying it upon their shoulders.
The commands of the physicians, the tears of his daughter had not been
able to keep him in bed.
"No," he had said. "This is the end, I know it, I know it, and I would
not die without visiting my organ, and this night above all, Christmas
Eve. Come, I wish it, I command it; let us go to the church. "
His desire had been fulfilled. The people carried him in their arms to
the organ-loft, and the mass began.
At that instant the cathedral clock struck twelve.
The introit passed, and the Gospel, and the offertory, and then came the
solemn moment in which the priest, after having blessed the Sacred
Wafer, took it in the tips of his fingers and began to elevate it.
A cloud of incense, rolling forth in azure waves, filled the length and
breadth of the church; the little bells rang out with silvery
vibrations, and Master Perez placed his quivering hands upon the keys of
the organ.
The hundred voices of its metal tubes resounded in a prolonged, majestic
chord, which died away little by little, as if a gentle breeze had
stolen its last echoes.
To this opening chord, that seemed a voice lifted from earth to heaven,
responded a sweet and distant note, which went on swelling and swelling
in volume until it became a torrent of pealing harmony.
It was the song of the angels, which, traversing the ethereal spaces,
had reached the world.
Then there began to be heard a sound as of far-off hymns entoned by the
hierarchies of seraphim, a thousand hymns at once, melting into one,
which, nevertheless, was no more than accompaniment to a strange
melody,--a melody that seemed to float above that ocean of mysterious
echoes as a strip of fog above the billows of the sea.
One anthem after another died away; the movement grew simpler; now there
were but two voices, whose echoes blended; then one alone remained,
sustaining a note as brilliant as a thread of light. The priest bowed
his face, and above his gray head, across an azure mist made by the
smoke of the incense, appeared to the eyes of the faithful the uplifted
Host. At that instant the thrilling note which Master Perez was holding
began to swell and swell until an outburst of colossal harmony shook the
church, in whose corners the straitened air vibrated and whose stained
glass shivered in its narrow Moorish embrasures.
From each of the notes forming that magnificent chord a theme was
developed,--some near, some far, these keen, those muffled, until one
would have said that the waters and the birds, the winds and the woods,
men and angels, earth and heaven, were chanting, each in its own tongue,
an anthem of praise for the Redeemer's birth.
The multitude listened in amazement and suspense. In all eyes were
tears, in all spirits a profound realization of the divine.
The officiating priest felt his hands trembling, for the Holy One whom
they upheld, the Holy One to whom men and archangels did reverence, was
God, was very God, and it seemed to the priest that he had beheld the
heavens open and the Host become transfigured.
The organ still sounded, but its music was gradually sinking away, like
a tone dropping from echo to echo, ever more remote, ever fainter with
the remoteness, when suddenly a cry rang out in the organ-loft, shrill,
piercing, the cry of a woman.
The organ gave forth a strange, discordant sound, like a sob, and then
was still.
The multitude surged toward the stair leading up to the organ-loft, in
whose direction all the faithful, startled out of their religious
ecstasy, were turning anxious looks.
"What has happened? " "What is the matter? " they asked one of another,
and none knew what to reply, and all strove to conjecture, and the
confusion increased, and the excitement began to rise to a height which
threatened to disturb the order and decorum fitting within a church.
"What was it? " asked the great ladies of the prefect who, attended by
his officers, had been one of the first to mount to the loft, and now,
pale and showing signs of deep grief, was making his way to the
archbishop, waiting in anxiety, like all the rest, to know the cause of
that disturbance.
"What has occurred? "
"Master Perez has just died. "
In fact, when the foremost of the faithful, after pressing up the
stairway, had reached the organ-loft, they saw the poor organist fallen
face down upon the keys of his old instrument, which was still faintly
murmuring, while his daughter, kneeling at his feet, was vainly calling
to him amid sighs and sobs.
III.
"Good evening, my dear Dona Baltasara. Are you, too, going to-night to
the Christmas Eve Mass? For my part, I was intending to go to the parish
church to hear it, but after what has happened--'where goes John? With
all the town. ' And the truth, if I must tell it, is that since Master
Perez died, a marble slab seems to fall on my heart whenever I enter
Santa Ines. --Poor dear man! He was a saint. I assure you that I keep a
piece of his doublet as a relic, and he deserves it, for by God and my
soul it is certain that if our Lord Archbishop would stir in the matter,
our grandchildren would see the image of Master Perez upon an altar.
But what hope of it? 'The dead and the gone are let alone. ' We're all
for the latest thing now-a-days; you understand me. No? You haven't an
inkling of what has happened? It's true we are alike in this,--from
house to church, and from church to house, without concerning ourselves
about what is said or isn't said--except that I, as it were, on the
wing, a word here, another there, without the least curiosity whatever,
usually run across any news that may be going. Well, then! It seems to
be settled that the organist of San Roman, that squint-eye, who is
always throwing out slurs against the other organists, that great
sloven, who looks more like a butcher from the slaughter-house than a
professor of music, is going to play this Christmas Eve in place of
Master Perez. Now you must know, for all the world knows and it is a
public matter in Seville, that nobody was willing to attempt it. Not
even his daughter, though she is herself an expert, and after her
father's death entered the convent as a novice. And naturally enough;
accustomed to hear those marvellous performances, any other playing
whatever must seem poor to us, however much we would like to avoid
comparisons. But no sooner had the sisterhood decided that, in honor of
the dead and as a token of respect to his memory, the organ should be
silent to-night, than--look you! --here comes along our modest friend,
saying that he is ready to play it. Nothing is bolder than ignorance. It
is true the fault is not so much his as theirs who have consented to
this profanation, but so goes the world. I say, it's no trifle--this
crowd that is coming. One would think nothing had changed since last
year. The same great people, the same magnificence, the same pushing in
the doorway, the same excitement in the portico, the same throng in the
church. Ah, if the dead should rise, he would die again rather than hear
his organ played by hands like those. The fact is, if what the people of
the neighborhood have told me is true, they are preparing a fine
reception for the intruder. When the moment comes for placing the hand
upon the keys, there is going to break out such a racket of timbrels,
tambourines and rustic drums that nothing else can be heard. But hush!
there's the hero of the occasion just going into the church. Jesus! what
a showy jacket, what a fluted ruff, what a high and mighty air! Come,
come, the archbishop arrived a minute ago, and the mass is going to
begin. Come; it looks as though this night would give us something to
talk about for many a day. "
With these words the worthy woman, whom our readers recognize by her
disconnected loquacity, entered Santa Ines, opening a way through the
press, as usual, by dint of shoving and elbowing.
Already the ceremony had begun.
The church was as brilliant as the year before.
The new organist, after passing through the midst of the faithful who
thronged the nave, on his way to kiss the ring of the prelate, had
mounted to the organ-loft, where he was trying one stop of the organ
after another with a solicitous gravity as affected as it was
ridiculous.
Among the common people clustered at the rear of the church was heard a
murmur, muffled and confused, sure augury of the coming storm which
would not be long in breaking.
"He's a clown, who doesn't know how to do anything, not even to look
straight," said some.
"He's an ignoramus, who after having made the organ in his own parish
church worse than a rattle comes here to profane Master Perez's," said
others.
And while one was throwing off his coat so as to beat his drum to better
advantage, and another was trying his timbrels, and the clatter was
increasing more and more, only here and there could one be found to
defend in lukewarm fashion that alien personage, whose pompous and
pedantic bearing formed so strong a contrast to the modest manner and
kindly courtesy of the dead Master Perez.
At last the looked-for moment came, the solemn moment when the priest,
after bowing low and murmuring the sacred words, took the Host in his
hands. The little bells rang out, their chime like a rain of crystal
notes; the translucent waves of incense rose, and the organ sounded.
At that instant a horrible din filled the compass of the church,
drowning the first chord.
Bagpipes, horns, timbrels, drums, all the instruments of the populace
raised their discordant voices at once, but the confusion and the clang
lasted but a few seconds. All at once as the tumult had begun, so all at
once it ceased.
The second chord, full, bold, magnificent, sustained itself, still
pouring from the organ's metal tubes like a cascade of inexhaustible,
sonorous harmony.
Celestial songs like those that caress the ear in moments of ecstasy,
songs which the spirit perceives but the lip cannot repeat; fugitive
notes of a far-off melody, which reach us at intervals, sounding in the
bugles of the wind; the rustle of leaves kissing one another on the
trees with a murmur like rain; trills of larks which rise warbling from
among the flowers like a flight of arrows to the clouds; nameless
crashes, overwhelming as the thunders of a tempest; a chorus of seraphim
without rhythm or cadence, unknown harmony of heaven which only the
imagination understands; soaring hymns, that seem to mount to the throne
of God like a fountain of light and sound--all this was expressed by the
organ's hundred voices, with more vigor, more mystic poetry, more weird
coloring than had ever been known before.
* * * * *
When the organist came down from the loft, the crowd which pressed up
to the stairway was so great, and their eagerness to see and praise him
so intense, that the prefect, fearing, and not without reason, that he
would be suffocated among them all, commanded some of the police to
open, by their staves, a path for him that he might reach the High Altar
where the prelate waited his arrival.
"You perceive," said the archbishop, when the musician was brought into
his presence, "that I have come all the way from my palace hither only
to hear you. Will you be as cruel as Master Perez, who would never save
me the journey by playing the Midnight Mass in the cathedral? "
"Next year," responded the organist, "I promise to give you that
pleasure, for not all the gold of the earth would induce me to play this
organ again. "
"And why not? " interrupted the prelate.
"Because," replied the organist, striving to repress the agitation
revealed in the pallor of his face,--"because it is old and poor, and
one cannot express on it all that one would. "
The archbishop retired, followed by his attendants. One by one, the
litters of the great folk went filing away, lost to sight in the
windings of the neighboring streets; the groups of the portico melted,
as the faithful dispersed in different directions; and already the
lay-sister who acted as gate-keeper was about to lock the vestibule
doors, when there appeared two women, who, after crossing themselves and
muttering a prayer before the arched shrine of Saint Philip, went their
way, turning into Duenas alley.
"What would you have, my dear Dona Baltasara? " one of them was saying.
"That's the way I'm made. Every fool has his fancy. The barefooted
Capuchins might assure me that it was so and I wouldn't believe it in
the least. That man cannot have played what we have just been hearing. A
thousand times have I heard him in San Bartolome, his parish church,
from which the priest had to send him away for his bad playing,--enough
to make you stop your ears with cotton. Besides, all you need is to look
at his face, which, they say, is the mirror of the soul. I remember,
poor dear man, as if I were seeing him now,--I remember Master Perez's
look when, on a night like this, he would come down from the organ loft,
after having entranced the audience with his marvels. What a gracious
smile, what a happy glow on his face! Old as he was, he seemed like an
angel. But this fellow came plunging down the stairs as if a dog were
barking at him on the landing, his face the color of the dead, and--come
now, my dear Dona Baltasara, believe me, believe me with all your soul.
I suspect a mystery in this. "
With these last words, the two women turned the corner of the street and
disappeared.
We count it needless to inform our readers who one of them was.
IV.
Another year had gone by. The abbess of the convent of Santa Ines and
the daughter of Master Perez, half hidden in the shadows of the church
choir, were talking in low tones. The peremptory voice of the bell was
calling from its tower to the faithful, and occasionally an individual
would cross the portico, silent and deserted now, and after taking the
holy water at the door, would choose a place in a corner of the nave,
where a few residents of the neighborhood were quietly waiting for the
Midnight Mass to begin.
"There, you see," the mother superior was saying, "your fear is
excessively childish. There is nobody in the church. All Seville is
trooping to the cathedral to-night. Play the organ and play it without
the least uneasiness. We are only the sisterhood here. Well? Still you
are silent, still your breaths are like sighs. What is it? What is the
matter? "
"I am--afraid," exclaimed the girl, in a tone of the deepest agitation.
"Afraid? Of what? "
"I don't know--of something supernatural. Last night, see, I had heard
you say that you earnestly wished me to play the organ for the mass and,
pleased with this honor, I thought I would look to the stops and tune
it, so as to give you a surprise to-day. I went into the choir--alone--I
opened the door which leads to the organ-loft. At that moment the clock
of the cathedral struck the hour--what hour, I do not know. The peals
were exceedingly mournful, and many--many. They kept on sounding all the
time that I stood as if nailed to the threshold, and that time seemed to
me a century.
"The church was empty and dark. Far away, in the hollow depth, there
gleamed, like a single star lost in the sky of night, a feeble light,
the light of the lamp which burns on the High Altar. By its faint rays,
which only served to make more visible all the deep horror of the
darkness, I saw--I saw--mother, do not disbelieve it--I saw a man who,
in silence and with his back turned toward the place where I stood, was
running over the organ-keys with one hand, while he tried the stops with
the other. And the organ sounded, but it sounded in a manner
indescribable. It seemed as if each of its notes were a sob smothered
within the metal tube which vibrated with its burden of compressed air,
and gave forth a muffled tone, almost inaudible, yet exact and true.
"And the cathedral clock kept on striking, and that man kept on running
over the keys. I heard his very breathing.
"The horror of it had frozen the blood in my veins. In my body I felt an
icy chill and in my temples fire. Then I longed to cry out, but could
not. That man had turned his face and looked at me,--no, not looked at
me, for he was blind. It was my father. "
"Bah, sister! Put away these fancies with which the wicked enemy tries
to trouble weak imaginations. Pray a _Pater Noster_ and an _Ave Maria_
to the archangel Saint Michael, captain of the celestial hosts, that he
may aid you to resist the evil spirits. Wear on your neck a scapulary
which has been touched to the relics of Saint Pacomio, our advocate
against temptations, and go, go in power to the organ-loft. The mass is
about to begin, and the faithful are growing impatient. Your father is
in heaven, and thence, instead of giving you a fright, he will descend
to inspire his daughter in this solemn service which he so especially
loved. "
The prioress went to occupy her seat in the choir in the centre of the
sisterhood. The daughter of Master Perez opened the door of the loft
with trembling hand, sat down at the organ, and the mass began.
The mass began, and continued without any unusual occurrence until the
consecration. Then the organ sounded, and at the same time came a scream
from the daughter of Master Perez.
The mother superior, the nuns, and some of the faithful rushed up to the
organ-loft.
"Look at him! look at him! " cried the girl, fixing her eyes, starting
from their sockets, upon the organ-bench, from which she had risen in
terror, clinging with convulsed hands to the railing of the organ-loft.
All eyes were fixed upon the spot to which her gaze was turned. No one
was at the organ, yet it went on sounding--sounding as the archangels
sing in their raptures of mystic ecstasy.
* * * * *
"Didn't I tell you so a thousand times, my dear Dona Baltasara--didn't I
tell you so?
