Cordova, Spain, December 18, 1905. The great mosque of Cordova is one of the wonders of the world. It represents the finest religious architecture left by the Moors, as the Alhambra is the finest monument of their secular architecture. It was rather late and the light was not good, but the impression was one of surprising beauty. The forest of columns of alabaster and every kind of precious marble brought back your lines:
Columns that demurely paired guard the solemn aisles!
Spain seems two hundred years behind Italy. Already I feel I am getting some understanding of this strange race. The racial type, after the Egyptian, is the strongest I have seen; there are a few varieties often repeated. I fancy there has been little intermarriage with other races, for the dominant traits do not seem to have changed since the time of Philip II. I see him everywhere! The people all look like Velasquez portraits. The gravity, the politeness, the pride all weigh upon one like tangible atmospheric conditions. Such manners I have not seen, even in France; honesty, cleanliness, sobriety, seem common virtues.
In Seville I had a wonderful morning in the cathedral, where I heard High Mass with both organs pealing grandly and such a choir! It was very moving to stand beside the sarcophagus that it is claimed actually holds the ashes of Columbus and to remember that we had seen both in Santo Domingo and in Havana, the places where his bones formerly lay!—Found your letter here. What a gay time you have had lately. “First in fun, first in sport, first in the heart of her familee.”
Madrid, December 21, 1905. Our good friends, Villegas and Lucia, met us at the train and brought us to their house, bag and baggage, scrip and scrippage, typewriter too. We have an alcove room with an open fire where we burn olive wood. Lucia’s housekeeping is a fine art, the most perfect neatness imaginable. The cook they brought with them from Rome gives us the dear old Italian dishes; the Spanish cooking is good but deadly rich. Here’s the best recipe for “left-overs” I know. Take whatever scraps of meat, poultry and fish you have and bake them in a foundation of rice, olives and tomatoes, slightly flavoured with onion. It sounds incredible, it is delicious.
Christmas was a nice bright day. I wanted to go to Mass, but the English doctor, called in for a slight cold, forbade it. There is a lot of influenza and some smallpox in the city. In a family where there is illness the old women and the children are sent to church to pray for the sick person, and so the contagion is spread.
In the evening, Rosilio, the painter who followed Villegas from Spain to Italy and has now followed him back from Rome to Madrid, came to greet us. When J. first knew him in Rome he was a lad of twenty, with a divine tenor voice. Rosilio, like Villegas, is an Andalusian, the race that has inherited most of the art and feeling of the Moor. In Rome R. used to be pounced upon by the other artists of the Spanish colony and made to sing Spanish songs, Andalusian ballads, Zingari ditties. His listeners were torn by homesickness and moved to tears by his songs. Now a strange thing has happened. With the translation of Villegas, the leading spirit of the group, to Spain, the colony broke up and many of them followed Villegas to Madrid. Now the tables are turned; the homesickness is for Rome. Last night Rosilio was called upon for song after song in the soft Roman dialect; he is a nightingale and sang the tears into my eyes and the heart into my throat!
Among the habitués of the house is Don Antonio Weyler, son of General Weyler, once military governor of Cuba. Until recently the General has been the Secretary of War, but with the change of government is now out of office. Antonio has adopted us and we call him “the key” because he seems able to open all manner of locked doors to us. He intends to enter the Church,—the call seems to be more a political than a spiritual one, as he wishes to devote himself to diplomacy. His model seems to be our old friend, Monsignor Merry del Val, who is now Secretary of the State to the Pope.
December 30, 1905. J. is posing for the figure of the King of Spain in the wonderful portrait Villegas is making of Don Alfonso. He looks very nice in the court suit with the little dress sword and the order of the garter. This has only just been awarded to the King, and J. wore it to pose in, before Don Alfonso himself ever put it on. Yesterday his leg went to sleep—the King’s breeches are woefully tight for him—and nearly fell off the model table, spraining his finger. The King will hardly sit at all for the portrait and so J. sits or rather stands. The pose is a killing one, which accounts for the downfall.
“The King, the King,” Villegas kept grumbling, “he can go hunting and amusing himself all the time, and I must stay and work on his picture, about which he doesn’t care enough to give me a decent number of sittings!”