Part 3 (1/2)
”And taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me. I didn't know which way to look.
I sat stock-still, like a wooden board. When she had gone into the factory, I saw the acacia blossom, which had fallen on the ground between my feet. I don't know what made me do it, but I picked it up, unseen by any of my comrades, and put it carefully inside my jacket.
That was my first folly.
”Two or three hours later I was still thinking about her, when a panting, terrified-looking porter rushed into the guard-room. He told us a woman had been stabbed in the great cigar-room, and that the guard must be sent in at once. The sergeant told me to take two men, and go and see to it. I took my two men and went upstairs. Imagine, sir, that when I got into the room, I found, to begin with, some three hundred women, stripped to their s.h.i.+fts, or very near it, all of them screaming and yelling and gesticulating, and making such a row that you couldn't have heard G.o.d's own thunder. On one side of the room one of the women was lying on the broad of her back, streaming with blood, with an X newly cut on her face by two strokes of a knife. Opposite the wounded woman, whom the best-natured of the band were attending, I saw Carmen, held by five or six of her comrades. The wounded woman was crying out, 'A confessor, a confessor! I'm killed!' Carmen said nothing at all. She clinched her teeth and rolled her eyes like a chameleon. 'What's this?'
I asked. I had hard work to find out what had happened, for all the work-girls talked at once. It appeared that the injured girl had boasted she had money enough in her pocket to buy a donkey at the Triana Market.
'Why,' said Carmen, who had a tongue of her own, 'can't you do with a broom?' Stung by this taunt, it may be because she felt herself rather unsound in that particular, the other girl replied that she knew nothing about brooms, seeing she had not the honour of being either a gipsy or one of the devil's G.o.dchildren, but that the Senorita Carmen would shortly make acquaintance with her donkey, when the _Corregidor_ took her out riding with two lackeys behind her to keep the flies off.
'Well,' retorted Carmen, 'I'll make troughs for the flies to drink out of on your cheeks, and I'll paint a draught-board on them!'* And thereupon, slap, bank! She began making St. Andrew's crosses on the girl's face with a knife she had been using for cutting off the ends of the cigars.
* _Pintar un javeque_, ”paint a xebec,” a particular type of s.h.i.+p. Most Spanish vessels of this description have a checkered red and white stripe painted around them.
”The case was quite clear. I took hold of Carmen's arm. 'Sister mine,' I said civilly, 'you must come with me.' She shot a glance of recognition at me, but she said, with a resigned look: 'Let's be off. Where is my mantilla?' She put it over her head so that only one of her great eyes was to be seen, and followed my two men, as quiet as a lamb. When we got to the guardroom the sergeant said it was a serious job, and he must send her to prison. I was told off again to take her there. I put her between two dragoons, as a corporal does on such occasions. We started off for the town. The gipsy had begun by holding her tongue. But when we got to the _Calle de la Serpiente_--you know it, and that it earns its name by its many windings--she began by dropping her mantilla on to her shoulders, so as to show me her coaxing little face, and turning round to me as well as she could, she said:
”'_Oficial mio_, where are you taking me to?'
”'To prison, my poor child,' I replied, as gently as I could, just as any kind-hearted soldier is bound to speak to a prisoner, and especially to a woman.
”'Alack! What will become of me! Senor Oficial, have pity on me! You are so young, so good-looking.' Then, in a lower tone, she said, 'Let me get away, and I'll give you a bit of the _bar lachi_, that will make every woman fall in love with you!'
”The _bar lachi_, sir, is the loadstone, with which the gipsies declare one who knows how to use it can cast any number of spells. If you can make a woman drink a little sc.r.a.p of it, powdered, in a gla.s.s of white wine, she'll never be able to resist you. I answered, as gravely as I could:
”'We are not here to talk nonsense. You'll have to go to prison. Those are my orders, and there's no help for it!'
”We men from the Basque country have an accent which all Spaniards easily recognise; on the other hand, not one of them can ever learn to say _Bai, jaona_!*
* Yes, sir.
”So Carmen easily guessed I was from the Provinces. You know, sir, that the gipsies, who belong to no particular country, and are always moving about, speak every language, and most of them are quite at home in Portugal, in France, in our Provinces, in Catalonia, or anywhere else.
They can even make themselves understood by Moors and English people.
Carmen knew Basque tolerably well.
”'_Laguna ene bihotsarena_, comrade of my heart,' said she suddenly. 'Do you belong to our country?'
”Our language is so beautiful, sir, that when we hear it in a foreign country it makes us quiver. I wish,” added the bandit in a lower tone, ”I could have a confessor from my own country.”
After a silence, he began again.
”'I belong to Elizondo,' I answered in Basque, very much affected by the sound of my own language.
”'I come from Etchalar,' said she (that's a district about four hours'
journey from my home). 'I was carried off to Seville by the gipsies.
I was working in the factory to earn enough money to take me back to Navarre, to my poor old mother, who has no support in the world but me, besides her little _barratcea_* with twenty cider-apple trees in it.
Ah! if I were only back in my own country, looking up at the white mountains! I have been insulted here, because I don't belong to this land of rogues and sellers of rotten oranges; and those hussies are all banded together against me, because I told them that not all their Seville _jacques_,** and all their knives, would frighten an honest lad from our country, with his blue cap and his _maquila_! Good comrade, won't you do anything to help your own countrywoman?'
* Field, garden.
** Bravos, boasters.
”She was lying then, sir, as she has always lied. I don't know that that girl ever spoke a word of truth in her life, but when she did speak, I believed her--I couldn't help myself. She mangled her Basque words, and I believed she came from Navarre. But her eyes and her mouth and her skin were enough to prove she was a gipsy. I was mad, I paid no more attention to anything, I thought to myself that if the Spaniards had dared to speak evil of my country, I would have slashed their faces just as she had slashed her comrade's. In short, I was like a drunken man, I was beginning to say foolish things, and I was very near doing them.