“Don’t look too closely, or you will lose the illusion. That is the drying ground, where Pedra’s mother and the other washerwomen of Madrid hang out their clothes.”
“Standards of heroes, standards of heroines, what’s the odds? They are heroines. I stood and watched them yesterday, their petticoats kilted up to their knees, rubbing and scrubbing and singing at their work.”
A young American artist painted an admirable picture of the drying ground with its many-colored garments not long ago. He worked in summer, close to the river when the water was low, and caught a fever that put an end to all his painting!
Fronting the palace is the large oval Plaza del Oriente, with a good equestrian statue of Philip IV, surrounded by a circle of quaint marble statues of Visigothic and Spanish kings and queens, from Berenguela to Isabel the Catholic.
“We know Philip IV better than all the rest of them put together!” Patsy exclaimed, as we walked round the royal group. “Thanks to the genius for making a likeness of that young man shown by Velasquez, whom he engaged as his valet de chambre at a salary of eleven dollars a month. Philip young, thin and cadaverous, Philip old, fat and blowsy; I know his face as well as I know my own. People who want to be remembered by posterity should be very polite to the painters and sculptors—even to the writers—of their day. Strange they don’t realize it!”
Madrid was gay with Christmas bustle; streets and shops were crowded; Pedra was busy with the presents that poured into the house for Lucia and Villegas. From Granada came a cask of oil, from Malaga a small barrel of grapes, from Jerez a cask of olorosa, from Tangiers a box of oranges, from Seville a flagon of cologne, the finest in the world,—it smells of fresh orange blossoms.
One morning, a few days before Christmas, I heard a strange hob-gobbling noise outside in the passage. I opened my door; there was Pedra, flushed and out of breath with the effort, trying to get two large speckled turkeys up the terrace stairs.
“Miré,” she said, “observe these fine birds, Señora, a present from the country. I shall mix a dish of corn meal and hot water for them, that will be the food of luxury, fattening besides. Poor animals! they shall live well until Cisera wrings their necks.”
Cisera, the Tuscan cook, followed the procession up the terrace stairs, and felt the larger turkey.
“In a week,” she said, “he will be fit to kill, perhaps sooner.”