“You cannot tell how I have longed for music sometimes, as I grew accustomed to my loss,” she said, “but I could not bring myself to play. It would have seemed so dreadful to my friends and relations. I have often been terribly sad. I have sometimes almost gone mad with depression. My husband has begged me to travel with him, to play the piano, to do anything in the world that would tend to lessen my sadness. But as I never obey him when I am happy, you may guess how little attention I paid to his wishes when I was mourning for my mother. Now it is a year since she died, and I cannot help it if my neighbours criticise me. I must begin to live again.”
The strange thing about this shocking exaggeration of the outward semblance of grief is that while almost every woman one meets complains of its absurdity, its evil effects on the health, its cruel inroads on youth and happiness, none of them have the courage actively to rebel.
Poor people, while of necessity rousing themselves speedily to go out in search of the day’s wage, are just as strict as the rich in their mourning garb. When a parent dies, everything has to be black: black facings are stitched on to the men’s shirt fronts and cuffs, black cotton coats are worn, black neckties in place of collars, and black felt hats, even in the height of summer. The women for their part wear black underclothes beneath their black dresses, and tie up their heads in black handkerchiefs, sometimes pawning all their coloured clothes to pay for the conventional garments of woe. Beneath these gloomy trappings one often sees beaming smiles and eyes full of life and fun; for the workers are nothing if not sincere, and when they feel happy they show it. But when the country is in trouble whole towns and villages seem to feel it; as, for instance, during the Moroccan War of 1909. The massacre of some two thousand soldiers in the death-trap of the Gurugú at Melilla threw a great number of poor families into mourning; and again in 1913, during the campaign of Larache, as it was here called, mourning was widespread. Every day brought news that one or two or ten or twenty men had fallen in the guerilla war carried on against Spain by the arch-bandit El Raisuli: and here not only the immediate family of the dead man wears black for him, but mourning is de rigueur among all the collateral relations even to second and third cousins.
This was brought home to me one day when I wanted to photograph a stream where women and girls were washing, for every one of them that day wore black. We finally gave up the attempt, and waited for another occasion, for, as I remarked to my photographer, we ought to introduce in the brilliant sunshine at least one girl dressed in colours.
“Very true,” was his answer, “but there is a great deal of mourning about. You see there are so many soldiers dying in Morocco just now.”
And many officers too, was my mental addition, for his words sent my thoughts with a painful rebound to a scene of domestic tragedy which I had witnessed not long before.
A lad of twenty-one, fresh from the Military Academy at Toledo, had been killed in his first action, within a week of landing in Africa. His younger brother and sister were driving to attend the Jura de la Bandera (oath to the colours) of the new recruits on the parade-ground outside the town where they lived. They bought a morning paper and read in it the news of their brother’s death, “which he gloriously met in the endeavour to save a wounded private.” Their father, who was an army doctor, was away from home; their mother, an invalid suffering from heart trouble, never read a paper. The two poor children, for they were nothing more, determined to conceal from her what had happened until their father’s return. He meanwhile, to break the blow, telegraphed to her that their Antonito was wounded, and she jumped to the conclusion that he was bringing the young man home to be nursed, and for three mortal days Julian and Adelita kept their secret and watched their mother preparing the bedroom and making cooling drinks and strengthening broths for the boy who was already in his grave.
My girl, who was a great friend of theirs, told me that Adela and her brother broke down completely when they were with her and out of their mother’s sight, but they contrived somehow or other to pull themselves together and bear brave faces before her, even when she called them straight from the condolences of sympathetic friends in the cancela to ask their opinion of this or that arrangement she had made for the comfort of their lost brother. They thought that their father, being a doctor, would know how to tell her what had happened without danger to her health, when he came home, and that gave them strength to play their parts.
Poor children and poor mother! When on the third day the cab drove up and the father got out alone, Doña Ramona needed no telling of the truth. She cried out, “My son is dead! I knew it all the time,” and fell fainting on the floor. And even then Adela and Julian subdued their own grief, while they helped to carry her upstairs and lay her on the bed which she did not leave again for many weeks.