Part 12 (1/2)

When we were eating in the whitewashed room by the light of three bra.s.s olive oil lamps, I found that my argument had suddenly crumbled. What could I, who had come out of ragged and barbarous outlands, tell of the art of living to a man who had taught me both system and revolt? So am I, to whom the connubial lyrics of Patmore and Ella Wheeler Wilc.o.x have always seemed inexpressible soiling of possible loveliness, forced to bow before the rich cadences with which Juan Maragall, Catalan, poet of the Mediterranean, celebrates the _familia_.

And in Maragall's work it is always the Mediterranean that one feels, the Mediterranean and the men who sailed on it in black s.h.i.+ps with bright pointed sails. Just as in Homer and Euripides and Pindar and Theocritus and in that tantalizing kaleidoscope, the Anthology, beyond the grammar and the footnotes and the desolation of German texts there is always the rhythm of sea waves and the smell of well-caulked s.h.i.+ps drawn up on dazzling beaches, so in Maragall, beyond the graceful well-kept literary existence, beyond wife and children and pompous demonstrations in the cause of abstract freedom, there is the sea las.h.i.+ng the rocky s.h.i.+ns of the Pyrenees,--actual, dangerous, wet.

In this day when we Americans are plundering the earth far and near for flowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain, of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuous so that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappy and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, we should not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean where the Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre Vidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding new permanence--poetry richly ordered and lucid.

To the Catalans of the last fifty years has fallen the heritage of the oar which the cunning sailor Odysseus dedicated to the Sea, the earth-shaker, on his last voyage. And the first of them is Maragall.

_XIII: Talk by the Road_

On the top step Telemachus found a man sitting with his head in his hands moaning ”_Ay de mi!_” over and over again.

”I beg pardon,” he said stiffly, trying to slip by.

”Did you see the function this evening, sir?” asked the man looking up at Telemachus with tears streaming from his eyes. He had a yellow face with lean blue chin and jowls shaven close and a little waxed moustache that had lost all its swagger for the moment as he had the ends of it in his mouth.

”What function?”

”In the theatre.... I am an artist, an actor.” He got to his feet and tried to twirl his ragged moustaches back into shape. Then he stuck out his chest, straightened his waistcoat so that the large watchchain clinked, and invited Telemachus to have a cup of coffee with him.

They sat at the black oak table in front of the fire. The actor told how there had been only twelve people at his show. How was he to be expected to make his living if only twelve people came to see him? And the night before Carnival, too, when they usually got such a crowd.

He'd learned a new song especially for the occasion, too good, too artistic for these pigs of provincials.

”Here in Spain the stage is ruined, ruined!” he cried out finally.

”How ruined?” asked Telemachus.

”The _Zarzuela_ is dead. The days of the great writers of _zarzuela_ have gone never to return. O the music, the lightness, the jollity of the _zarzuelas_ of my father's time! My father was a great singer, a tenor whose voice was an enchantment.... I know the princely life of a great singer of _zarzuela_.... When a small boy I lived it.... And now look at me!”

Telemachus thought how strangely out of place was the actor's anaemic wasplike figure in this huge kitchen where everything was dark, strong-smelling, ma.s.sive. Black beams with here and there a trace of red daub on them held up the ceiling and bristled with square iron spikes from which hung hams and sausages and white strands of garlic.

The table at which they sat was an oak slab, black from smoke and generations of spillings, firmly straddled on thick trestles. Over the fire hung a copper pot, sooty, with a glitter of grease on it where the soup had boiled over. When one leaned to put a bundle of sticks on the fire one could see up the chimney an oblong patch of blackness spangled with stars. On the edge of the hearth was the great hunched figure of the _padron_, half asleep, a silk handkerchief round his head, watching the coffee-pot.

”It was an elegant life, full of voyages,” went on the actor. ”South America, Naples, Sicily, and all over Spain. There were formal dinners, receptions, ceremonial dress.... Ladies of high society came to congratulate us.... I played all the child roles.... When I was fourteen a d.u.c.h.ess fell in love with me. And now, look at me, ragged, dying of hunger--not even able to fill a theatre in this hog of a village. In Spain they have lost all love of the art. All they want is foreign importations, Viennese musical comedies, s.m.u.tty farces from Paris....”

”With cognac or rum?” the _padron_ roared out suddenly in his deep voice, swinging the coffee pot up out of the fire.

”Cognac,” said the actor. ”What rotten coffee!” He gave little petulant sniffs as he poured sugar into his gla.s.s.

The wail of a baby rose up suddenly out of the dark end of the kitchen.

The actor took two handfuls of his hair and yanked at them.

”_Ay_ my nerves!” he shrieked. The baby wailed louder in spasm after spasm of yelling. The actor jumped to his feet, ”Dolores, Dolores, _ven aca_!”

After he had called several times a girl came into the room padding softly on bare feet and stood before him tottering sleepily in the firelight. Her heavy lids hung over her eyes. A strand of black hair curled round her full throat and spread raggedly over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She had pulled a blanket over her shoulders but through a rent in her coa.r.s.e nightgown the fire threw a patch of red glow curved like a rose petal about one brown thigh.

”_Que desvergonza'a!_... How shameless!” muttered the _padron_.