Four o’clock was the hour appointed for the coming together of our diminished party, and until then the Gran Hotel de Venezuela was supposed to hold me in its ancient decrepitude, and it did hold me until about three o’clock; when the bells set up such a clanging, and were so zealous to get me up and out of bed and into their mid-afternoon vespers, that I finally yielded to their summons, and, making a hasty toilet, stole down the creaking stairs and out into the streets.
No Northern city at midnight is more soundly asleep than the tropical town in mid-afternoon. The heavy white blinds are down, the green lattices closed tightly, awnings dropped close before the shop-doors; while the cabby and his horse, on guard near the Plaza, doze in willing slumber. The market is empty, the little donkeys are long since browsing upon the green slopes of the foot-hills; the street criers are still, the whole world seems dead asleep, and, as I slipped along toward the Cathedral, the drowsy chanting of priests’ voices was the only sound which broke the quiescence of that delicious afternoon. For delicious it was, in truth. All of God’s part was in its perfectness. The air was sweetly cool and refreshing, with a flavour of mountain ozone mingled with the sunlight, and, as I came to a cross street, looking up the long narrow, white reach to the foot-hills, it was with a bit of imagining, like a glimpse through the tube of a huge kaleidoscope, with the green and purple and blue and yellow mountains an ever-changing vista of resplendent colour in the vanishing distance.
The priests’ voices called out again, and I entered the high-domed, sweet place of worship. The chancel and altar were being repaired, so it was in the oblong nave that the priests, white-robed, rich with lace and embroidery, sat in ancient carved chairs, saying in responsive chants the words decreed for Ash Wednesday. The priests were old, and some were very feeble, and it seemed at times an effort for them to rise when the service demanded. A number of young men, of lesser dignity, assisted, and two little acolytes in red sat quite at the end of the row of priests. Still the chanting goes on and on, and the voices are monotonously sleepy, and long drifts of mellow, shaded light drop down on the white robes, and one of the priests yawns, and the little acolyte nods, and then goes fast asleep; and up overhead the lofty dome reëchoes the somnolent voices, and I hear the old bells telling me about four o’clock, but they seem very indistinct and sleepy and uninterested. And I feel sleepy and nod, and wonder if it’s the priests’ voices or the bells that put everybody to sleep, and I forget all about four o’clock until a workman way down near the altar, perched on a high ladder, mending more cracks, knocks off a piece of plaster, and I start and look around, then tiptoe out; while the bells tell me that the quarter-hour is gone with the rest of the day.
VI.
Caracas is responsible for a decided turning about from some of my former estimates of the Spanish character. It is not necessary to say just exactly what these preconceived opinions were, but they were there, and as I supposed, a fixture. In the children’s neighbourhood brawls, I have noticed frequently that, whenever vengeance was to be meted upon some offending head, he was called by one and all, “a Spaniard.” That was enough to arouse all the wrath of his youthful spirit into rebellion, and until the word was recalled, war reigned. This of course is largely since our late trouble with Spain. I shall not say that the use of the word exactly represented my state of mind toward the South Americans, but, in spite of the many pleasant experiences of years gone by in Mexico, I shall confess to a somewhat allied feeling with regard to that name, and to all people who are in any way affiliated with the race, and I dare say that something of this same prejudice has existed among our people at large for some time, and not altogether without cause.
To have that impression partially removed was one of the results of an evening spent at the opera in Caracas, where General Cipriano Castro had arranged an especially fine performance to be given in honour of the North Americans then visiting his republic. The opera-house was decorated in our nation’s colours, intertwined with the yellow, red, and blue of Venezuela, and every seat not taken by our party was occupied by the representative citizens of Caracas. The performance—a light, comic opera—was of excellent standard, and passed off with great applause. Much as we enjoyed the music, the Venezuelans themselves were our greatest object of interest.
The house was apportioned in the usual foreign style, with two tiers of boxes circling on either side from the President’s box in the rear centre. The women, as usual, occupied the front seats in the boxes, and were thus in a position to be seen and observed very closely. And never—I make no exception, no exception whatever—have I seen such modest, womanly appearing women as were present at the opera that night. They did not giggle nor stare nor flirt. They were richly, beautifully, becomingly gowned, but, although arrayed with a desire to please, they were as modest and unassuming as a lot of little girls at a doll’s tea-party. Their eyes no sooner met yours than they dropped,—not affectedly, but naturally, naïvely,—and it was impossible to refrain from forming an opinion of the conditions of society from the faces and actions of these women.
Women make society what it is; they make it right, high, true, and pure; they make it wrong, low, false, and vile, and the general appearance and actions of the women of a country, studied by an observer of human nature, will tell more truthfully the moral condition of a people than any book ever written.
Whatever faults the Spaniard may have bequeathed to his descendants; whatever his failings in government and kindred problems, the women, these beautiful women of Caracas, made us feel that they had set for themselves high standards of morality; that the social life was away beyond the level we had expected; that the family—the wife—is a sacred trust given the man to protect in honour and virtue so long as he lives.
There is, no doubt, much to be said against the rigid life of seclusion led by the Spanish women, but there is this to be said in its favour: it has created a race of men who honour and respect their homes, a race of men whose attitude toward women is universally respectful and deferential. With all our stiff-necked New England self-sufficiency, we have yet much to learn, we women of the North, and let it not be beneath our dignity to remember that the South American women have some lessons learned which we have yet to master; and perhaps there are none who could teach us more gently or more effectively than the modest, womanly women of Caracas.