Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

It is not royal childhood alone that is dear to this strange, romantic, monstrously inconsistent heart of Spain. The cruelty of Spaniards to horses and donkeys sickens even the roughest Englishman, yet almost every voice softens in speaking to a child, and during my six months in Spanish cities I saw nothing of that street brutality toward the little ones which forces itself upon daily notice in Liverpool and London. Spanish children are too often ill-cared for, but despite the abuses of ignorant motherhood and fatherhood, such vivid, vivacious, bewitching little people as they are! Enter a Spanish schoolroom and see how vehemently the small brown hands are wagged in air, how the black eyes dance and the dimples play, what a stir and bustle, what a young exuberance of energy! They race to the blackboards like colts out at pasture. They laugh at everything, these sons of "the grave Spaniard," and even the teacher will duck his head behind the desk for a half-hidden ecstasy over some dunce's blunder or some rogue's detected trick.

But their high spirits never make them unmindful of those courtesies of life in which they have been so carefully trained. There is an old-fashioned exaggeration about their set phrases of politeness. Just as the casual caller kisses the lady's feet, in words, and she reciprocates by a verbal kissing of his hand, so the school children respond to the roll call with a glib: "Your servant, sir." Ask a well-bred boy his name, and he rattles back, "Jesus Herrera y La-Chica, at the service of God and yourself." They learn these amenities of speech with their first lispings. I was much taken aback one day in Seville by a child of eighteen months. Not in the least expecting this infant, whose rosy face was bashfully snuggled into his young aunt's neck, to understand, I said to her, "What a fine little fellow!" Whereupon Master Roly-poly suddenly sat up straight on her arm, ducked his head in my direction, and gravely enunciated, "Es favor que Usted me hace"—"It is a compliment you pay me." I could hardly recover from the shock in time to make the stereotyped rejoinder, "No es favor, es justicia"—"No compliment, but the truth." To this Don Chubbykins sweetly returned, "Mil gracias"—"A thousand thanks," and I closed this uncanny dialogue with the due response, "No las merece"—"It does not merit them."

Servants, neighbors, passers-by, beggars, all prompt the children in these shibboleths of good manners, adorning the precept with example. "Would you like to go with us to the picture gallery this afternoon?" I once asked a laddie of artistic tastes at a boarding-house table. "Si, señora," he replied, whereupon several of the boarders, greatly scandalized, hastened to remind him, but in the gentlest of tones, of the essential addition, "con mucho gusto" to which we were bound to reply, "The pleasure will be ours." The girls, even more than the boys, are bred in these formal fashions of intercourse. Every morning they ask if you have rested well, and express grief or gratification, according to your response. In Mrs. Gulick's school, mere midgets of six and eight, returning from class, will not close the doors of their rooms if you are in sight, though perhaps seated at a reading table in the farther end of the corridor, lest they should appear inhospitable. On our return from Italica, a thirsty child of seven, heated to exhaustion with the sun and fun of that Andalusian picnic, refused to touch the anise-seed water which some good Samaritan had handed up to the dusty carriage, until the glass had been offered to every one else, driver included, leaving, in the sequel, little enough for her. On our midnight return from the Feria, this same niña of gentle memory, staggering and half crying with sleepiness, would nevertheless not precede any of her elders in entering the home door. "After you," she sobbed, with hardly voice enough to add, "And may you all rest well!" "The same to you," chorussed the adults, trooping by, and her faint murmur followed, "Many thanks."

"Shall I give you this fan when I go away," I asked her once, "or would you rather have it now to take to the party?" She wanted it then and there, but what she answered was, "I shall be best pleased to take it when you like best to give it."

You must beware of saying to a little Spanish maid, "What a beautiful rosebud in your hair!" Instantly the hand is busy with the pins. "It is at your disposal." You hastily protest, "A thousand thanks, but no, no, no! It is very well placed where it is." Off comes the flower, notwithstanding, and is fastened into your belt. For when the elder sister has insisted on giving you (until the next ball) those dancing slippers which you so rashly admired, and the sister's novio went home the night before without his cloak, because you had approved its colors (although he sent his man around for it before breakfast), what can the children do but follow suit? Even their form of "Now I Lay Me" is touched with their quaint politeness:—

"Jesus, Joseph, Mary,

Your little servant keep,

While, with your kind permission,

I lay me down to sleep."

The precocity of Spanish children is a recognized fact. An educational expert, a Frenchman who holds a chair in an English university, assured us that beyond a doubt Spanish children, for the first dozen years of life, develop more rapidly than any other children of Europe. Yet, although these clever little Spaniards are so punctiliously taught to put the pleasure of others before their own, they are treated with universal indulgence. Soldiers lining the curbstones on occasion of a royal progress will let the children press in beside them and cling to their valorous legs, until the military array seems variegated with a Kindergarten. My farewell glimpse of Toledo, on Corpus Christi Day, makes a pretty picture in memory. The red-robed cardinal, who had come to the station to take his train, was fairly stormed by all the children within sight, clamoring for his blessing. In vain the attendant priests tried to scatter the throng, and ladies of high degree, planting their chairs in a circle about the prelate, acted as a laughing body-guard. It was all of no avail. The little people danced up and down with eagerness, dodged under arms, and slipped between elbows. They knelt upon the cardinal's very feet, rapturously kissing his red-gloved hand and clasping to their pinafores and blouses the sacred trinkets he distributed. And he, patting the bobbing black pates, wherever he could get a chance, smiled on the little ones and forbade them not.