Part 8 (1/2)
”'Your eyebrows are arched, Your forehead serene; Your face turned always Looks toward G.o.d;
”'Your eyes' radiance Is like beautiful stars; Like a white dove, You are true to your spouse.'”
Each of these stanzas was sung first alone by the aged leader of the family choir. Then the rest repeated it; then all joined in the chorus.
It is said that there are still to be found, in lonely country regions in California, Mexican homes in which these sweet and holy ”songs before sunrise” are sung.
Looking forward to death, the greatest anxiety of these simple souls was to provide themselves with a priest's cast-off robe to be buried in. These were begged or bought as the greatest of treasures; kept in sight, or always at hand, to remind them of approaching death. When their last hour drew near, this robe was flung over their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and they died happy, their stiffening fingers grasping its folds. The dead body was wrapped in it, and laid on the mud floor of the house, a stone being placed under the head to raise it a few inches. Thus the body must lie till the time of burial. Around it, day and night, squatted, praying and singing, friends who wished not only to show their affection for the deceased, but to win indulgences for themselves; every prayer said thus, by the side of a corpse, having a special and specified value.
A strange demarkation between the s.e.xes was enforced in these ceremonies. If it were a woman who lay dead, only women might kneel and pray and watch with her body; if a man, the circle of watchers must be exclusively of men.
A rough box, of boards nailed together, was the coffin. The body, rolled in the old robe whose virtues had so comforted its last conscious moments, was carried to the grave on a board, in the centre of a procession of friends chanting and singing. Not until the last moment was it laid in the box.
The first attempts to introduce more civilized forms of burial met with opposition, and it was only by slow degrees that changes were wrought. A Frenchman, who had come from France to Los Angeles, by way of the Sandwich Islands, bringing a store of sacred ornaments and trinkets, and had grown rich by sale of them to the devout, owned a spring wagon, the only one in the country. By dint of entreaty, the people were finally prevailed upon to allow their dead to be carried in this wagon to the burial-place. For a long time, however, they refused to have horses put to the wagon, but drew it by hand all the way; women drawing women, and men drawing men, with the same scrupulous part.i.tion of the s.e.xes as in the earlier ceremonies. The picture must have been a strange one, and not without pathos,--the wagon, wound and draped with black and white, drawn up and down the steep hills by the band of silent mourners.
The next innovation was the introduction of stately catafalques for the dead to repose on, either in house or church, during the interval between their death and burial. There had been brought into the town a few old-fas.h.i.+oned, high-post, canopied bedsteads, and from these the first catafalques were made. Gilded, decorated with gold and silver lace, and hung with white and black draperies, they made a by no means insignificant show, which doubtless went far to reconcile people's minds to the new methods.
In 1838 there was a memorable funeral of a woman over a hundred years old. Fourteen old women watched with her body, which lay stretched on the floor, in the ancient fas.h.i.+on, with only a stone beneath the head.
The youngest of these watchers was eighty-five. One of them, Tomasa Camera by name, was herself over a hundred years old. Tomasa was infirm of foot; so they propped her with pillows in a little cart, and drew her to the house that she might not miss of the occasion. All night long, the fourteen squatted or sat on rawhides spread on the floor, and sang and prayed and smoked: as fine a wake as was ever seen. They smoked cigarettes, which they rolled on the spot, out of corn-husks slit fine for the purpose, there being at that day in Los Angeles no paper fit for cigarettes.
Outside this body-guard of aged women knelt a circle of friends and relatives, also chanting, praying, and smoking. In this outer circle any one might come and go at pleasure; but into the inner ring of the watching none must come, and none must go out of it till the night was spent.
With the beginning of the prosperity of the City of the Angels, came the end of its primeval peace. Spanish viceroys, Mexican alcaldes and governors, United States commanders, naval and military, followed on each other's heels, with or without frays, ruling California through a succession of tumultuous years. Greedy traders from all parts of the world added their rivalries and interventions to the civil and military disputation. In the general anarchy and confusion, the peaceful and peace-loving Catholic Fathers were robbed of their lands, their converts were scattered, their industries broken up. Nowhere were these uncomfortable years more uncomfortable than in Los Angeles.
Revolts, occupations, surrenders, retakings, and resurrenders kept the little town in perpetual ferment. Disorders were the order of the day and of the night, in small matters as well as in great.
The Californian fought as impetuously for his old way of dancing as for his political allegiance. There are comical traditions of the men's determination never to wear long trousers to dances; nor to permit dances to be held in houses or halls, it having been the practice always to give them in outdoor booths or bowers, with lattice-work walls of sycamore poles lashed together by thongs of rawhide.
Outside these booths the men sat on their horses looking in at the dancing, which was chiefly done by the women. An old man standing in the centre of the enclosure directed the dances. Stopping in front of the girl whom he wished to have join the set, he clapped his hands.
She then rose and took her place on the floor; if she could not dance, or wished to decline, she made a low bow and resumed her seat.
To look in on all this was great sport. Sometimes, unable to resist the spell, a man would fling himself off his horse, dash into the enclosure, seize a girl by the waist, whirl around with her through one dance, then out again and into the saddle, where he sat, proudly aware of his vantage. The decorations of masculine attire at this time were such as to make riding a fine show. Around the crown of the broad-brimmed sombrero was twisted a coil of gold or silver cord; over the shoulders was flung, with ostentatious carelessness, a short cloak of velvet or brocade; the waistcoats were embroidered in gold, silver, or gay colors; so also were the knee-breeches, leggings, and stockings. Long silken garters, with ornamented ta.s.sels at the ends, were wound round and round to hold the stockings in place. Even the c.u.mbrous wooden stirrups were carved in elaborate designs. No wonder that men accustomed to such braveries as these saw ignominy in the plain American trousers.
They seem to have been a variety of Centaur, these early Californian men. They were seldom off their horses except to eat and sleep. They mounted, with jingling silver spur and glittering bridle, for the shortest distances, even to cross a plaza. They paid long visits on horseback, without dismounting. Clattering up to the window or door-sill, halting, throwing one knee over the crupper, the reins lying loose, they sat at ease, far more at ease than in a house. Only at church, where the separation was inevitable, would they be parted from their horses. They turned the near neighborhood of a church on Sunday into a sort of picket-ground, or horse-trainers' yard, full of horse-posts and horses; and the scene was far more like a horse-fair than like an occasion of holy observance. There seems to have been a curious mixture of reverence and irreverence in their natures. They confessed sins and underwent penances with the simplicity of children; but when, in 1821, the Church issued an edict against that ”escandalosisima” dance, the waltz, declaring that whoever dared to dance it should be excommunicated, the merry sinners waltzed on only the harder and faster, and laughed in their priests' faces. And when the advocates of decorum, good order, and indoor dancing gave their first ball in a public hall in Los Angeles, the same merry outdoor party broke every window and door in the building, and put a stop to the festivity. They persisted in taking this same summary vengeance on occasion after occasion, until, finally, any person wis.h.i.+ng to give a ball in his own house was forced to surround the house by a cordon of police to protect it.
The City of the Angels is a prosperous city now. It has business thoroughfares, blocks of fine stone buildings, hotels, shops, banks, and is growing daily. Its outlying regions are a great circuit of gardens, orchards, vineyards, and corn-fields, and its suburbs are fast filling up with houses of a showy though cheap architecture. But it has not yet shaken off its past. A certain indefinable, delicious aroma from the old, ignorant, picturesque times lingers still, not only in byways and corners, but in the very centres of its newest activities.
Mexican women, their heads wrapped in black shawls, and their bright eyes peering out between the close-gathered folds, glide about everywhere; the soft Spanish speech is continually heard; long-robed priests hurry to and fro; and at each dawn ancient, jangling bells from the Church of the Lady of the Angels ring out the night and in the day. Venders of strange commodities drive in stranger vehicles up and down the streets: antiquated carts piled high with oranges, their golden opulence contrasting weirdly with the shabbiness of their surroundings and the evident poverty of their owner; close following on the gold of one of these, one has sometimes the luck to see another cart, still more antiquated and rickety, piled high with something--he cannot imagine what--terra-cotta red in grotesque shapes; it is fuel,--the same sort which Villavicencia, Quintero, and the rest probably burned, when they burned any, a hundred years ago. It is the roots and root-shoots of manzanita and other shrubs. The colors are superb,--terra-cotta reds, shading up to flesh pink, and down to dark mahogany; but the forms are grotesque beyond comparison: twists, querls, contortions, a boxful of them is an uncomfortable presence in one's room, and putting them on the fire is like cremating the vertebrae and double teeth of colossal monsters of the Pterodactyl period.
The present plaza of the city is near the original plaza marked out at the time of the first settlement; the low adobe house of one of the early governors stands yet on its east side, and is still a habitable building.
The plaza is a dusty and dismal little place, with a parsimonious fountain in the centre, surrounded by spokes of thin turf, and walled at its outer circ.u.mference by a row of tall Monterey cypresses, shorn and clipped into the shape of huge croquettes or brad-awls standing broad end down. At all hours of the day idle boys and still idler men are to be seen basking on the fountain's stone rim, or lying, face down, heels in air, in the triangles of shade made by the cypress croquettes. There is in Los Angeles much of this ancient and ingenious style of shearing and compressing foliage into unnatural and distorted shapes. It comes, no doubt, of lingering reverence for the traditions of what was thought beautiful in Spain centuries ago; and it gives to the town a certain quaint and foreign look, in admirable keeping with its irregular levels, zigzag, toppling precipices, and houses in tiers one above another.
One comes sometimes abruptly on a picture which seems bewilderingly un-American, of a precipice wall covered with bird-cage cottages, the little, paling-walled yard of one jutting out in a line with the chimney-tops of the next one below, and so on down to the street at the base of the hill. Wooden staircases and bits of terrace link and loop the odd little perches together; bright green pepper-trees, sometimes tall enough to shade two or three tiers of roofs, give a graceful plumed draping at the sides, and some of the steep fronts are covered with bloom, in solid curtains, of geranium, sweet alyssum, heliotrope, and ivy. These terraced eyries are not the homes of the rich: the houses are lilliputian in size, and of cheap quality; but they do more for the picturesqueness of the city than all the large, fine, and costly houses put together.
Moreover, they are the only houses that command the situation, possess distance and a horizon. From some of these little ten-by-twelve flower-beds of homes is a stretch of view which makes each hour of the day a succession of changing splendors,--the snowy peaks of San Bernardino and San Jacinto in the east and south; to the west, vast open country, billowy green with vineyard and orchard; beyond this, in clear weather, s.h.i.+ning glints and threads of ocean, and again beyond, in the farthest outing, hill-crowned islands, misty blue against the sky. No one knows Los Angeles who does not climb to these sunny outlying heights, and roam and linger on them many a day. Nor, even thus lingering, will any one ever know more of Los Angeles than its lovely outward semblances and mysterious suggestions, unless he have the good fortune to win past the barrier of proud, sensitive, tender reserve, behind which is hid the life of the few remaining survivors of the old Spanish and Mexican _regime_.
Once past this, he gets glimpses of the same stintless hospitality and immeasurable courtesy which gave to the old Franciscan establishments a world-wide fame, and to the society whose tone and customs they created an atmosphere of simple-hearted joyousness and generosity never known by any other communities on the American continent.
In houses whose doors seldom open to English-speaking people, there are rooms full of relics of that fast-vanis.h.i.+ng past. Strongholds also of a religious faith, almost as obsolete, in its sort and degree, as are the garments of the aged creatures who are peacefully resting their last days on its support.
In one of these houses, in a poverty-stricken but gayly decorated little bedroom, hangs a small oil-painting, a portrait of Saint Francis de Paula. It was brought from Mexico, fifty-five years ago, by the woman who still owns it, and has knelt before it and prayed to it every day of the fifty-five years. Below it is a small altar covered with flowers, candlesticks, vases, and innumerable knick-knacks. A long string under the picture is hung full of tiny gold and silver votive offerings from persons who have been miraculously cured in answer to prayers made to the saint. Legs, arms, hands, eyes, hearts, heads, babies, dogs, horses,--no organ, no creature, that could suffer, is unrepresented. The old woman has at her tongue's end the tale of each one of these miracles. She is herself a sad cripple; her feet swollen by inflammation, which for many years has given her incessant torture and made it impossible for her to walk, except with tottering steps, from room to room, by help of a staff. This, she says, is the only thing her saint has not cured. It is her ”cross,”
her ”mortification of the flesh,” ”to take her to heaven.” ”He knows best.” As she speaks, her eyes perpetually seek the picture, resting on it with a look of ineffable adoration. She has seen tears roll down its cheeks more than once, she says; and it often smiles on her when they are alone. When strangers enter the room she can always tell, by its expression, whether the saint is or is not pleased with them, and whether their prayers will be granted. She was good enough to remark that he was very glad to see us; she was sure of it by the smile in his eye. He had wrought many beautiful miracles for her. Nothing was too trivial for his sympathy and help. Once when she had broken a vase in which she had been in the habit of keeping flowers on the altar, she took the pieces in her hands, and standing before him, said: ”You know you will miss this vase. I always put your flowers in it, and I am too poor to buy another. Now, do mend this for me. I have n.o.body but you to help me.” And the vase grew together again whole while she was speaking. In the same way he mended for her a high gla.s.s flower-case which stood on the altar.