The Spanish Virgin Read online

  “This is the cathedral. You have been to the cathedral?”

  “Mummy took me.”

  “You must see it to-morrow. It is Holy Week. Then,” he cried with great animation, “it is a marvel; the altar, the images, the sculptures, the art! It is not surpassed in the world. It has to be seen …” And he blew a kiss into the air.

  “There is only one Seville,” he cried, wagging his finger. “The pasos of Seville are the finest in the world. Yes, if you go to Malaga you will see some cheap imitations; in Madrid it is lifeless, and in Zaragossa it is absurd. La Virgen del Pilar—it is vulgar, without art, without anything. There is no question that in Seville we are at the summit. ‘Whom God loves he gives a house in Seville!’ Eh! You understand?”

  “When you do not speak too quickly.”

  “Ah, not too quickly, eh?”

  “No.”

  “Good. That is the south end of the cathedral. But you are not a Christian?”

  “Oh yes I am.”

  “You are a Protestant, I mean.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Charming. Well, well. I don’t care. Catholics. Protestants. Buddhists—that’s for old women, eh? Ha! ha! And not for the young ones! Beauty is its own god! When I see a beautiful woman like you I renounce the faith and worship. I am now a Protestant. You have converted me. I can do nothing but protest. I protest to begin with that your mother is most intelligent and most clever—most clever to have such a pretty daughter. You excel her though. Your eyes …”

  Another kiss, quite impersonally, into the air.

  Crystal was delighted with him.

  “You are very … funny?” she said.

  “I am funny, I am always making jokes. No, I am a Protestant once more. I protest,” he said with great solemnity, clutching his hand against his heart, which made a dull sound on his pocket-book, “I protest I am not funny, I am making love to you, and you say I am funny! Well.”

  “But you make love so funnily.”

  “There now.” He waved his hand impatiently. “Your hair too. All you English girls have wonderful hair. In London I noticed it. I wanted to kiss everyone. Peekadeely, eh? You know it.”

  “Yes. Marvellous lights.”

  “Ah yes, very nice girls. Not for old men like me. That is so tragic. You all go. You all pass. What are you going to do? Are you promised to Don Alec? He is so serious, so cold.”

  “Oh no,” exclaimed Crystal, “he is usually …hot?”

  “Ah! That is how it is with the English; they are neither hot nor cold. What a pity I am married. It is terrible. But who then are you promised to?”

  “No one.”

  “What! No one. Oh, but what coquetry! What are you going to do if you don’t marry and have lots of children?”

  “Oh yes. I do want to have lots of children!” exclaimed Crystal, patting her hands.

  “But you must have a husband.”

  “I am going on the stage.”

  The Marquès’ jaw dropped and the animation died in his face. He became grave and cynical.

  “Oh yes. That’s true. I had forgotten you do not have husbands on the stage.”

  “Oh, but I mean to have a husband on the stage,” Crystal flushed. “Oh, how silly I’ve been,” she thought.

  The Marquès became suddenly very satisfied and at his ease.

  “Let me look at you. Very nice. Very pretty.” And he patted her on the hair. “Pretty hands too for the stage!”

  His dancing eyes seemed to be breaking through the dried web of wrinkles. He was vigorous and almost youthful. He took her hands.

  “Adios!” cried the Marquès, raising his hat to someone passing by. And then turned to look at Crystal. He was immensely puzzled.

  “Ah no,” he said as if dimming some distant hope. “You are playing with me. You are not going on the stage. Your mother would never let you. Whatever does your mother say?”

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “Oh you haven’t told her yet.” He repeated the words as if adding a meaning to them. Also he was incredulous.

  “No, she would not understand.”

  “She would not understand.”

  “Ladies can go on the stage now in England.”

  “Ladies can.” He stared at her, his lips repeating her words and his gaze writing an undertone, heavy and persistent with some other meaning.

  “Besides,” cried Crystal, to show how strong she was. “I must earn a lot of money for Mummy and me. Mummy was very rich, and now suddenly,” she shrugged her shoulders and raised her brows, “we are very poor.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed the Marquès. “You are very poor.”

  “Yes, dreadfully.”

  “My God!” said the Marquès, thinking of the expensive hotel in which he and his wife had taken one of the smaller upper rooms at a lower price because he was a good friend of the manager.

  “Yes,” said Crystal, to whom it occurred that she might tell the Marquès all about their misfortunes, and perhaps he would help them. She did not know how, but Mummy always thought it helped to tell people everything.

  “Since we are in Seville it has all occurred. It is simply dreadful. Poor Mummy is so worried.”

  “Your mother is very worried!” he nodded with mock sympathy.

  “Oh yes. You see, she wrote to my uncle for the money when she found she had not got enough. Mummy is extravagant, and she cannot get used to being poor since daddy died. And my uncle has done nothing. And the manager of the hotel is being so rude to Mummy.”

  “Ah, the manager!” exclaimed the Marquès, ceasing to wag his head.

  Crystal put her hand on his knee:

  “If only I could do something now to get the money. Couldn’t I play at the theatre here? Or sing at the cabaret? Or do something?”

  The Marquès sat up in astonishment and horror. “It would be impossible,” he said with dignity.

  Then in a moment all those stories of foreign adventuresses who stayed at expensive hotels danced into his mind, that gossip he had heard at San Sebastian, the strange vices that those pink impassive English faces, their fish-grey eyes, and their long teeth, concealed. Ah, ha! He giggled inside himself, and all sorts of significant words were spoken. Whiskee! Peekadeeley, Laycester Squah. Salvation Army. Pretty mees, pretty mees, shocking! Owh, shocking! He stuck his tongue into his back teeth and wobbled it there, at the exquisite point of indecision. La hipocresia inglesa! Her mother sends her out as a decoy. That is why she goes about alone! Doubts and plans passed through his mind rapidly. They passed like a faint cavalry charge with pennants flaunted and, gaining their extreme, turned about and swung back in equally agitating retreat; ought he to be on his guard, warn his wife and the manager at the hotel? Or, how much did the lady want, was she willing? He would have to make some little arrangement with his friend, the manager? But at the back of his mind he was confused by a technical difficulty: it was more usual to woo the mother or the chaperon first when one had designs—even honourable designs—upon the younger one; and here the situation was reversed, for the younger one had made the clearest advances. Were they on behalf of the mother? He was embarrassed. It was so difficult to know the customs of other countries.

  “No,” he repeated, “it would be impossible.”

  “But why? Mummy doesn’t really know what to do. I wish you would talk to her about it.”

  He put his arm on her shoulder and gave her a gentle squeeze.

  Crystal opened her eyes very wide in slight surprise, and then invitingly, very very mysteriously.

  He stroked her arm.

  “The little Virgin of the Narrow Purse!” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Wouldn’t you sooner talk to me about it? Mothers you know!” he wagged his head.

  “If you could do anything,” said Crystal. She withdrew her hand, but he patted it again and said, with a droll but fervent air:

  “A lily! A lily! We will do something about it. Oh yes, we will. That could be arranged, eh?” He
winked at her and leaned very closely to her, “Nothing. That is, a little nothing! You are adorable, you are divine and ravishing. Do you see how I protest! I’ll tell you something. We will go and dance and enjoy ourselves this evening. The classic Sevillian gaiety. A pretty little supper all to ourselves!” The lines in the thick skin of his forehead arched and deepened with a sardonic anxiousness. He was whispering sharply. Every word was sharper. His words were running away with him, but he still could not get out of sight of those charging and counter-charging doubts.

  “Oh!” Her eyes exclaimed with light, her pursed mouth with something between mockery and happiness. Here, she was doing what she liked with the Marquès. Every time she felt his arm pass down her arm, she wanted to kick her heels and send a carillon of laughter and triumph into the sky.

  “Lovely little body,” he said. “Lovely pigeon.”

  His leonine head was agitated with lively, breaking lines, his eyes scheming and beseeching.

  The party! The dancing! All that silly money trouble melting into nothing. And why? Just because she was Crystal, very pretty, very gay, very naughty. But there was a pin-point of doubt in her conscience. She would never, never be able to tell mummy everything that had happened in this wonderful drive. “No,” she thought, primly looking at her hands, “though they are like lilies. I shan’t be able to tell her very much. How funny the Marquès has been! Poor Mummy.” Then Crystal looked down for a moment at the Marquès’ boots. She smiled. They were small as wasps, black and yellow. She smiled because the man who had such very small feet was going to talk to the manager, and see all about that dreadful money. The man with very small feet—strange colours blending with merriment were curling up inside her, and suddenly they formed into a ridiculous picture of him in London lying under a frothy cloud of quilt with his toes poking out at the end. She began to tremble, to smile more broadly, to laugh in the throat, to bite her lips, to be filled with bubbles of amusement that pressed against her colouring cheeks, to fly up in laughter. The merriment hummed unsteadily along her lips and tears of light glittered in her eyes.

  “Oh dear,” she thought, “all the time we are there this evening I shall be thinking about it. And Mummy will be so cross.”

  She took out her handkerchief and laughed shamefacedly into it.

  “What are you laughing at?” he said amorously.

  “Oh, oh, dear.”

  “Ah,” he laughed, “what is it, eh? I know what it is!”

  “Oh no! Oh no!” laughed Crystal.

  “Yes I do. We’ll have some fun. They won’t guess, will they?”

  “Oh no! Oh no!” Crystal could not think of anything, for the ludicrous picture that was in her mind and the laughter that was pouring like warm, ticklish water all over her body.

  “You’re laughing at me,” he exclaimed, puzzled and a little suspicious.

  “No! No! I’m not. It is your fault. You should not have told me about them.”

  “Should not have told you about what?”

  “The quilts.”

  “The quilts?” he asked, and every motion in his body stopped. His face went as blank as a clock that has stopped. Then he remembered.

  “Ah, the quilts!” And his mind, heart and body began to work again, with a roar inside him.

  “Yes, the quilts,” she said recovering, and rebuked him: “You had forgotten what you told me!”

  “Ah, the quilts—what I told you! Oh yes,” the roar diminished. Perhaps he was disappointed.

  “Yes, you had forgotten,” she reproved him. “And now,” she added, as the carriage drove into a sandy avenue, “this is where I have to go, I think. So if he will … stop.”

  “Kindly stop here,” said the Marquès to the driver in a lost voice.

  “And you will go back now and will talk to my mother about this evening …yes?”

  “To your mother?” said the amazed Marquès.

  “Yes, if you will tell my mother,” said Crystal very formally, “that would be very kind. She will be so grateful.”

  “Oh, so your mother …”

  He looked at her, begging for light.

  “My God,” he said in sudden bewilderment to himself. “So it is the mother!”

  “So you will! And how can I thank you? It is marvellously kind of you to think of us and to be so good to us.”

  Crystal was getting out of the carriage and standing with her shoes primly pointing together and her head on one side, smiling.

  The Marquès stood speechless. He began several times to say something, but failed.

  “Nothing! Nothing!” he said. “And I am to speak to your mother?”

  “Oh, but come,” he pulled her gently by the hand, but very anxious and startled. “No, but.…A moment, I will wait for you here.”

  “No,” she said. “That would be too much. Besides …now I remember, Alec is coming for me.”

  “Oh, Alec is coming for you,” he said blankly and more amazed than ever.

  “Yes, he is coming,”

  “Oh,” he said opening his mouth very wide, and stretching it down at the corner when he shut it. “Oh, I see! He’s coming here. And I am to speak to your mother, eh?” he insinuated and winked. Crystal thought this was very funny. He was too baffled to know whether he ought to feel regret or ecstasy. Had he won the mother or the daughter, or both? It was so difficult to know about these foreign customs. He said, “Good-bye.”

  He lay back in his carriage too bewildered to notice anything. The carriage passed out of the glare of the sun into the shade of the park. The tasselled shadows of the eucalyptus trees rippled over him. He lay inert, cooling after his passion. “Tell my mother, tell my mother!” he kept repeating to himself. He shook his head. This was a technique, a custom he did not understand.

  After she had left the Marquès, Crystal walked away thrilled, dreaming and rapturous up the drive. It was wide and sandy. The dust was white on the trees and the broken stumps of cactus. She walked towards an ornate yellow villa decorated with blue tiles. Only as she reached the front door did she remember her letter, and discovered that she had left her bag in the Marquès carriage.

  Alec Ferguson, returning early from his day at the workshops where corrugated iron sheds glittered like the teeth of a long saw among the eucalyptus trees, called at Madame Mathieu’s house for Crystal as her mother had carefully arranged. Finding Crystal had not come, he did not know what to do. In the end he began his way home through the thick yellow dust of the outskirts of the city annoyed, worried and shrugging his shoulders by turns.

  “Oh, there you are!” cried Crystal’s voice at the corner of the Park. “Where have you been? I have been waiting hours for you. Why didn’t you come?”

  She had been talking to a tall and affable young man who was reluctant to go away.

  “Good-bye,” she said, “and thank you. Here is my friend.” And blushing slightly, went up to Alec, who protested that she was quite wrong. He had been at the place appointed. But she would have none of this.

  “Now, Alec, you know you’re wrong, so why excuse yourself? And while I was waiting for you I found this Spanish boy, and he says he has lots of horses. Alec, isn’t it wonderful! I want to ride and ride, and dance, don’t you?”

  “Do you know him?” asked Alec cautiously.

  “Why of course not, you silly. Haven’t I told you I was waiting for you and he came and talked to me. He gave me his address, and I told him about Mummy and the Marquès, and how I used to ride in Rosario and Egypt and everywhere. He was very …gallant. He wanted me to go and dance with him then, and if I hadn’t promised to meet you here,” she said firmly and reproachfully, “I should have gone. It was disappointing. You must learn to keep your appointments.”

  He closed his mouth slowly and looked at her narrowly but enchanted. He was left with nothing to say.

  “Wasn’t it funny, too,” she went on. “He knew the Marquès very well. He said he was his uncle.”

  “They always are,” said Alec
. “You mustn’t talk to people like that, Crystal.” And he led her on solemnly by the arm, taking one long stride to her two short ones.

  “You were just like Mummy then, elderly and horrid,” she said. “Horses, Alec. Think of it!”

  “I don’t know what your mother is thinking about, letting you come out alone. It isn’t safe.”

  Her eyes brightened with the flattery, and she did not or would not see the rebuke. She teased him more.

  “I think that is rather …rude.”

  “It is true,” he persisted.

  “But, Alec, that makes it ruder.”

  “I see,” he sighed.

  “So do think a little more, Alec!” Her voice was mistress of him in her mother’s way. She was elated with her success, but she did not say anything to him about the Marquès.

  They walked in silence, Crystal with her head gallantly in the air and nearly whistling to herself, and he watching the white dust powder on the toes of his shoes at every step. Crystal at last thought the silence long enough.

  She stopped, holding her finger in the air.

  “Music!” she said, poised as if she would fly to the sound. Distantly the gilded, signatory sound of a bugle seemed to be written in the sky over the cathedral’s elaborate roof. Through the orange trees, over the flowers of the park, swathed in the warmth of the sweet air, came the scented tap of drums. The processions had begun.

  Mrs. Lance was waiting in the hotel for Crystal to return. In Crystal’s absence she had gone as usual to the Poste Restante, and the visit was as fruitless as she supposed Crystal’s would be. Mrs. Lance sat in the patio of the hotel listening with amused contempt to the conversations of the tourists. They were examining their money, disputing about guides, stammering their few words of Spanish to the waiter and fussing about their rooms, while she had been twice round the world, and for twenty years had lived abroad! They were at the most expensive hotel in Seville merely because they were afraid of going anywhere else. She stayed there because she had always stayed at expensive hotels and would continue to do so, money or no money. A lifetime’s habit of wealthiness had become, now that she was in fact poor, almost a superstition. In the old days the money had come naturally from her husband; now he was dead, it might well descend from heaven, and she began to look upon everyone as possible intermediaries of the divine will. She was in this mood of drowsy expectancy when she saw the Marquès enter the patio. She was a little annoyed that the other tourists began to leave at this moment, because they might have envied her command of the language.