Part 8 (1/2)

_Los Enemigos de la Mujer_, the latest production, abandons Spain entirely and plants itself in the midst of princes and countesses, all elaborately pro-Ally, at Monte Carlo. Forgotten the proletarian tastes of his youth, the local color he loved to lay on so thickly, the Habanera atmosphere; only the grand vague ideas subsist in the cosmopolite, and the fluency, that fatal Latin fluency.

And now the United States, the home of the blonde stenographer and the typewriter and the press agent. What are we to expect from the combination of Blasco Ibanez and Broadway?

At any rate the movies will profit.

Yet one can't help wis.h.i.+ng that Blasco Ibanez had not learnt the typewriter trick so early. Print so easily spins a web of the commonplace over the fine outlines of life. And Blasco Ibanez need not have been an inverted Midas. His is a superbly Mediterranean type, with something of Arretino, something of Garibaldi, something of Tartarin of Tarascon. Bl.u.s.tering, sensual, enthusiastic, living at bottom in a real world--which can hardly be said of Anglo-Saxon vulgarizers--even if it is a real world obscured by grand vague ideas, Blasco Ibanez's mere energy would have produced interesting things if it had not found such easy and immediate vent in the typewriter. Bottle up a man like that for a lifetime without means of expression and he'll produce memoirs equal to Marco Polo and Casanova, but let his energies flow out evenly without resistance through a corps of clicking typewriters and all you have is one more popular novelist.

It is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibanez and the United States should have discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other no good. We have an abundance both of vague grand ideas and of popular novelists, and we are the favorite breeding place of the inverted Midas. We need writing that shall be acid, with sharp edges on it, yeasty to leaven the lump of glucose that the combination of the ideals of the man in the swivel-chair with decayed puritanism has made of our national consciousness. Of course Blasco Ibanez in America will only be a seven days' marvel. Nothing is ever more than that. But why need we pretend each time that our seven days' marvels are the great eternal things?

Then, too, if the American public is bound to take up Spain it might as well take up the worth-while things instead of the works of popular vulgarization. They have enough of those in their bookcases as it is.

And in Spain there is a novelist like Baroja, essayists like Unamuno and Azorin, poets like Valle Inclan and Antonio Machado, ... but I suppose they will s.h.i.+ne with the reflected glory of the author of the _Four Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse_.

_X: Talk by the Road_

When they woke up it was dark. They were cold. Their legs were stiff.

They lay each along one edge of a tremendously wide bed, between them a tangle of narrow sheets and blankets. Telemachus raised himself to a sitting position and put his feet, that were still swollen, gingerly to the floor. He drew them up again with a jerk and sat with his teeth chattering hunched on the edge of the bed. Lyaeus burrowed into the blankets and went back to sleep. For a long while Telemachus could not thaw his frozen wits enough to discover what noise had waked him up.

Then it came upon him suddenly that huge rhythms were pounding about him, sounds of shaken tambourines and castanettes and beaten dish-pans and roaring voices. Someone was singing in shrill tremolo above the din a song of which each verse seemed to end with the phrase, ”_y manana Carnaval_.”

”To-morrow's Carnival. Wake up,” he cried out to Lyaeus, and pulled on his trousers.

Lyaeus sat up and rubbed his eyes.

”I smell wine,” he said.

Telemachus, through hunger and stiffness and aching feet and the thought of what his mother Penelope would say about these goings on, if they ever came to her ears, felt a tremendous elation flare through him.

”Come on, they're dancing,” he cried dragging Lyaeus out on the gallery that overhung the end of the court.

”Don't forget the b.u.t.terfly net, Tel.”

”What for?”

”To catch your gesture, what do you think?”

Telemachus caught Lyaeus by the shoulders and shook him. As they wrestled they caught glimpses of the courtyard full of couples bobbing up and down in a _jota_. In the doorway stood two guitar players and beside them a table with pitchers and gla.s.ses and a glint of spilt wine. Feeble light came from an occasional little constellation of olive-oil lamps. When the two of them pitched down stairs together and shot out reeling among the dancers everybody cried out: ”_Hola_,” and shouted that the foreigners must sing a song.

”After dinner,” cried Lyaeus as he straightened his necktie. ”We haven't eaten for a year and a half!”

The _padron_, a red thick-necked individual with a week's white bristle on his face, came up to them holding out hands as big as hams.

”You are going to Toledo for Carnival? O how lucky the young are, travelling all over the world.” He turned to the company with a gesture; ”I was like that when I was young.”

They followed him into the kitchen, where they ensconced themselves on either side of a cave of a fireplace in which burned a fire all too small. The hunchbacked woman with a face like tanned leather who was tending the numerous steaming pots that stood about the hearth, noticing that they were s.h.i.+vering, heaped dry twigs on it that crackled and burst into flame and gave out a warm spicy tang.

”To-morrow's Carnival,” she said. ”We mustn't stint ourselves.” Then she handed them each a plate of soup full of bread in which poached eggs floated, and the _padron_ drew the table near the fire and sat down opposite them, peering with interest into their faces while they ate.