Light-hearted Andalusian though he was, he had full share of the energy and enterprise of young manhood. Like the dons of long ago, he was equipping himself for the great Western adventure. Despite his Spanish wrath against America, she had for him a persistent fascination. All his ambitions were bent on a business career in New York, the El Dorado of his imagination. But it was no longer, at the end of the nineteenth century, a case of leaping aboard a galleon and waving a Toledo blade in air. The commercial career demands, so he fancied, that its knight go forth armed cap-a-pie in the commercial tongues. Thus he had spent four years of his youth and half of his patrimony in London and Berlin, and now, after this hasty visit home, purposed to go to Paris, for a year or two of French. This unsettled life was little to his liking, but beyond gleamed the vision of a Wall Street fortune.
Yet even now, at the outset of his task, a frequent lethargy would steal over his young vigor. It was curious to see, when the March wind blew chill or the French verbs waxed crabbed, how all his bearing lost its beauty. There was a central dignity that did not lapse, but the brightness and effectiveness were gone. His big body drooped and looked lumpish. His comely face was clouded by an animal sluggishness of expression. Foreign grimaces twisted across it, and something very like a grunt issued from beneath his cherished first mustache. His sarcasm became a little savage. He would sit for hours in a brooding fit, and, when an inexorable call to action came, obey it with a look of dreary patience older than his years. It was as if something inherent in his nature, independent of his will, weighed upon him and dragged him down. The Spain at which he gibed and from which he would have cut himself away was yet a millstone about his neck. He was in the heyday of his youth, progressive and determined, but the torpid blood of an aged people clogged his veins. Spain will never lose her hold on him, despite his strongest efforts. His children may be citizens of the great Republic, but he must be a foreigner to the end. He must wander a stranger in strange cities, puzzling his Spanish wits over alien phrases and fashions and ideals, unless, indeed, his spirit loses edge, and he drifts into chill apathy of disappointment on finding that his golden castles in America are wrought of that same old dream-stuff which used to be the monopoly of castles in Spain.
But it is best to leave ill-boding to the gypsies. Good luck may take a liking to him, if only for the music of his laugh. For even if blithe heart and courtly bearing bring no high cash value in the modern business market, they may smooth the road to simple happiness. Moreover, a Spaniard dearly loves a game of chance, and at the worst, our fortune-seeker will have thrown his dice. His may seem to the Yankee onlooker but a losing play, and yet—who knows? "He who sings frightens away his ills." God's blessing sails in summer clouds as lightly as in costly pleasure yachts. Out of a shaft of sunshine, a cup of chocolate, and a cigarette, this Andalusian immigrant, though stranded in an East Side tenement, may get more luxury than can be purchased by a multi-millionaire.
A Roman Well in Ronda
IX
A BULL-FIGHT
"I wish no living thing to suffer pain."—Shelley: Prometheus Unbound.