Part 4 (2/2)
Sunset colors were in the sky before the procession of the second brotherhood arrived. At last, far down the _Sierpes_, the dusk was dotted with the gleam of many tapers, and above these, most impressive in the dim distance, glimmered a white figure high upon the cross. As the pageant drew near, waves of incense rolled out upon the air. The crash of trumpets and deep boom of drums announced that Our Lady of the Angels was advancing upon the same platform with her Son, for music in these Pa.s.sion Week processions is always a sign of the presence of the Virgin. The brothers of this retinue wore black, save that their peaked caps were purple.
As twilight gathered, a company of strange dark shapes bore past in solemn hush the Most Holy Christ of the Waters. The Saviour hung upon the cross, an angel receiving in a golden cup the blood from his wounded side. Then her great banner of white and blue heralded the approach of Our Lady of the Utter Grief, who pa.s.sed with her accustomed pomp of lights and music, holding to her eyes a handkerchief said to be of the most exquisite lace.
Night had fallen when, at eight o'clock, a maid left on vigil called us all from the dinner table to see the beautiful procession of white-robed figures conducting Our Father Jesus of the Silence. The figure of Christ, resplendent in gold and purple, stood before Herod, whose mail-clad soldiers guarded the prisoner. The Roman costumes were so well copied, and all the postures and groupings so startlingly natural, that _vivas_ went up all along the crowded square. As the banner of the Virgin saluted the Alcalde, her attendants let fall their long white trains, which swept out quite six yards behind, reaching from one brother to the next and yielding a wonderfully fine effect in the slow march. Our Lady of the Bitterness, toward whom leaned the tender look of St. John, was robed in superb brocade, so precious that her train, which stood stiffly out behind, was guarded by a soldier with drawn sword.
This closed the ceremonies of Palm Sunday, and the throng, catching one from another the blithe, sweet Andalusian melodies, went singing softly through the darkness on their various ways.
After Palm Sunday a secular quiet fell upon Seville, not broken until Wednesday. At five o'clock this March afternoon it was still so hot that few people were rash enough to move about without the shelter of parasols. Sevillian priests, sombre-robed as they were, sauntered cheerily across the _plaza_ under sunshades of the gayest hues, orange, green, azure, red, and usually all at once, but the shamefaced Englishmen flapped up broad umbrellas of an uncompromising black.
There was a breezy flutter of fans on the grand stand, the water-sellers had to fill their jars again and again, and the mult.i.tude of smokers, puffing at their paper cigarettes to cool themselves, really brought on a premature twilight.
It was nearly seven before a score of gendarmes, marching abreast, cleared the way for the procession. Then appeared, in the usual guise, some twenty feet apart, two files of those strange shapes, with high, peaked caps, whose visors descended to the breast, slowly advancing, with an interval of about six feet from man to man. Their caps and frocks were black, but the long capes glowed a vivid red. They carried the customary lighted tapers, so tall that, when rested on the ground, they reach to the shoulder. Midway between the files walked a cross-bearer, followed by a Nazarene, who uplifted the standard of St. Andrew's Cross in red on a black ground. Bearers of other insignia of the order preceded the great litter, on which, under a golden palm tree, was represented by life-size effigies the arrest of Christ among His Disciples, St. Andrew having the foremost place. The second pageant presented by this brotherhood was accompanied by bevies of white-robed boys swinging censers and chanting anthems. Then came, in effulgence of light, the Most Holy Virgin, escorted, as if she were the earthly Queen of Spain, by a detachment of the Civil Guard, whose white tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and gold belts gleamed in the candle rays.
The remaining three _cofradias_ that had part in the Wednesday ceremonies exhibited but one pageant each. A troop in black and gold conducted a Calvary, with Mary Mother and Mary Magdalene both kneeling at the foot of the cross, robed in the richest velvet. Figures in white, with stripes of red, came after, with a yet more costly Calvary. The well-carved crucifix rose from a gilded mound, and Our Mother of Healing wore a gold crown of exceeding price. But the third Calvary, all wrought in black and gold, the colors of the brotherhood, which were repeated in standard and costume, won the plaudits of the evening. Here Longinus, the Roman centurion, mounted on a spirited horse, was in the act of piercing with his lance the Saviour's side.
Amid _vivas_ and _bravos_ this Pa.s.sion picture pa.s.sed, like its predecessors, in clouds of incense and peals of solemn music.
On Thursday the wearing of black was almost universal. We rummaged our shawl straps for some poor equivalent of the Spanish black silks and black mantillas. The Civil Guard was more superb than ever in full-dress uniform, with red vests and white trousers. No sound of wheels was suffered within the city limits, and late arrivals had to commit their luggage to a porter and follow him on foot.
At three o'clock, in the Sagrario of the cathedral, the archbishop washed the feet of thirteen old paupers, who sat in two confronting rows, looking neat as wax and happy as honey, each dressed in a brand-new suit, with a long-fringed damask towel over his shoulder.
Their old blood had been warmed by the archbishop's own wine, for they had just come from luncheon in the ecclesiastical palace, where they had been served by the highest dignitaries of the church and the proudest n.o.bles of the city. The function of foot was.h.i.+ng was not taken too seriously. The fat canons smiled good-humoredly on their archbishop, as his group of attendants lowered him to his knees and lifted him again before every old man in turn, and the acolytes nudged one another with boyish mirth over the rheumatic, embarra.s.sed efforts of the beneficiaries to put on their stockings.
A Franciscan friar mounted the pulpit, however, and turned the congregation, thickly sprinkled with English visitors, serious enough by a succinct and fiery sermon, saying, in a nutsh.e.l.l, that love is the glory of the religious life, but is the fruit only of Catholicism, for nowhere, though one searches the world over, can there be found a work of mercy--hospital, asylum, endowed school, charity of any sort or kind--due to Protestantism. And the old paupers, glancing down at their new suits and feeling the glow of their banquet, were glad to the tips of their purified toes that their lots had been cast in Catholic Spain.
By six o'clock the squares and streets along the processional route were thronged again, although our Spanish friends a.s.sured us that the numbers were less than usual. The war feeling kept the Americans and, to some extent, the English away, while many of the Spanish of the provinces, who were accustomed to take their annual outing in Seville during the _Semana Santa_, were held at home this year by poverty or mourning.
The first two pageants of the afternoon, those of the bull-fighters and the cigarette-makers, were awaited with especial eagerness. For these Seville brotherhoods, more than thirty in all, still maintain something of the mediaeval structure of the guilds. Just as in England and France, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, or thereabouts, organized companies of craftsmen used to present in Pa.s.sion Week successive scenes from the life of Christ, these Spanish _cofradias_ to-day maintain such general lines of division in performing a similar function. Yet any Catholic Sevillian may, if he chooses, secure admission to any of these societies, irrespective of his occupation. The young _caballero_ who chanced to be our prime source of information this Thursday afternoon was himself of a prominent family, a protege of the archbishop, and a student of law, yet he belonged to the brotherhood of Fruit Venders, although his devotion seemed a little languid, and he had excused himself on this occasion from the long march in the breathless Nazarene garb.
Not all the brothers feel bound to perform this penitential service every Pa.s.sion Week, and, indeed, not all the brotherhoods. Several of the most elaborate pageants were missing from the ranks this year.
Such omissions are not as disastrous to the processional effect as they would have been in England, for example, some six centuries ago.
Then the gilded and tapestried platforms, set on wheels, which the processions conducted through the streets, were really stages, and at the halting places the best actors of each guild played upon its particular platform an appointed scene from the sacred drama. The sequence of events was duly observed, and the spectator, standing in market-place or at street corner, while one theatre after another rolled by him, saw acted out with much finery of wardrobe and ingenuity of machinery, with tragic dialogue and declamation, relieved by comic interludes, all the Bible story, from the revolt of Lucifer to the Day of Judgment. But modern Spain, abandoning the acting and recitation and subst.i.tuting puppets for living men, has let slip the dramatic sequence, so that a few pageants less means only so much abatement in the general splendor of the spectacle.
The bull-fighters of Andalusia are eminently religious and are said, likewise, to be remarkable for their domestic virtues. All their manly fury is launched against the bull, and they have only gentleness left for wives and children. I have heard no better argument for the bull ring. At all events, these _toreros_, marching soberly in black, with yellow belts, escorted with well-ordered solemnity an image of the crucified Christ, followed by a queenly effigy of Our Lady of Refuge, erect behind terraced ranks of candles on a flower-strewn litter, under a costly canopy of black velvet embroidered with gold. The cigarette-makers came after with their two pageants, Christ fastened to the pillar, and Our Lady of Victory.
It was, as usual, the second upon which the main expense had been lavished. A great company of acolytes, richly clad and swinging censers of pure silver, went in advance of the Virgin, and three bands of music followed her with continuous acclaim, while a regiment of soldiers attended as a guard of honor. Immediately in front of the _paso_ went, surrounded by officers and aides, General Ochando, his head uncovered and his breast glittering with decorations, for the young king of Spain is a member of this _cofradia_, and had sent the distinguished military governor of the Provinces, who has a palace in Seville, to represent him. Especial enthusiasm was called out by this image of Mary, for the cigarette-makers had just presented her with a new mantle at a cost of nine thousand dollars. The brothers were willingly aided by the seven thousand women who work in the immense tobacco factory, the average contribution of each donor being two _centimos_ (two-fifths of a cent) a week during the preceding year. No wonder that the Virgin seemed to stand proudly upon her silvered pedestal, her gorgeous new mantle streaming out until it almost touched the head of a white-vested girl who walked barefoot close behind the litter, so fulfilling a vow made in extremity of illness.
Black and white were the banners and costumes of the third procession, very effective through the deepening dusk. Their leading pageant was a Gethsemane, famous for the beauty of the carving. Christ is represented in prayer before an angel, who bears in one hand the cross and in the other the cup of bitterness, while Peter, James, and John are sleeping near their Master. These Pa.s.sion groups are, with a few exceptions of still earlier date, works of the seventeenth century, the glorious period of Spanish art, the day of Murillo and Velazquez.
The most and best are from the hand of the Sevillian Montanes, of chief repute in the Spanish school of polychrome sculpture, but this Gethsemane was carved by his imitator, Roldan, whose daughter, La Roldana, is accredited with the figure of the angel and with the reliefs that adorn the pedestal.
Another Virgin, who, like all the rest, seemed a scintillation of gold and jewels, swept by, and a new troop of Nazarenes, this time in purple and white, pa.s.sed with two august pageants,--the Descent from the Cross and the Fifth Anguish of Mary. Then came two files of ash-colored figures, who marshalled, between their rows of starry tapers, each taper bending toward its opposite, a vivid presentation of the Crowning with Thorns; and, after this, their Mary of the Valley, noted for the gracious sweetness of her countenance. This image is held to be one of Montanes's masterpieces in wood-carving.
Five processions had now pa.s.sed, with their two pageants each, and the hour was late, but we could not leave the balcony for anything so commonplace as dinner. Far down the street of _Las Sierpes_ waved a river of lights, announcing the advent of the most ancient of all the Sevillian brotherhoods, Jesus of the Pa.s.sion. The crowded _plaza_ rose in reverence as the Crucifixion _paso_ was borne by, and Our Lady of Mercy, too magnificent for her name, was greeted with rapturous outcries.
[Ill.u.s.tration: OFF FOR THE WAR]
Just how and when and where something in the way of food was taken, I hardly know, but as this, the last of the Thursday evening processions, pa.s.sed in music out of the _plaza_, a few of us made speed by a deserted side street to the cathedral. We were too late for the _Miserere_, which was just closing in that surprising hubbub, the stamping of feet and beating of canes and chairs against the floor, by which Spanish piety is wont to ”punish Judas.” But we took our station near by the entrance to the Royal Chapel, wherein had been erected the grand Holy Week monument, in white and gold, shaped like a temple, and s.h.i.+ning with innumerable silver lamps and taper lights.
<script>