Part 5 (1/2)
”I looked up. There was Carmen in front of me.
”'Well, _mi payllo_, are you still angry with me?' she said. 'I must care for you in spite of myself, for since you left me I don't know what has been the matter with me. Look you, it is I who ask you to come to the _Calle del Candilejo_, now!'
”So we made it up: but Carmen's temper was like the weather in our country. The storm is never so close, in our mountains, as when the sun is at its brightest. She had promised to meet me again at Dorotea's, but she didn't come.
”And Dorotea began telling me again that she had gone off to Portugal about some gipsy business.
”As experience had already taught me how much of that I was to believe, I went about looking for Carmen wherever I thought she might be, and twenty times in every day I walked through the _Calle del Candilejo_.
One evening I was with Dorotea, whom I had almost tamed by giving her a gla.s.s of anisette now and then, when Carmen walked in, followed by a young man, a lieutenant in our regiment.
”'Get away at once,' she said to me in Basque. I stood there, dumfounded, my heart full of rage.
”'What are you doing here?' said the lieutenant to me. 'Take yourself off--get out of this.'
”I couldn't move a step. I felt paralyzed. The officer grew angry, and seeing I did not go out, and had not even taken off my forage cap, he caught me by the collar and shook me roughly. I don't know what I said to him. He drew his sword, and I unsheathed mine. The old woman caught hold of my arm, and the lieutenant gave me a wound on the forehead, of which I still bear the scar. I made a step backward, and with one jerk of my elbow I threw old Dorotea down. Then, as the lieutenant still pressed me, I turned the point of my sword against his body and he ran upon it. Then Carmen put out the lamp and told Dorotea, in her own language, to take to flight. I fled into the street myself, and began running along, I knew not whither. It seemed to me that some one was following me. When I came to myself I discovered that Carmen had never left me.
”'Great stupid of a canary-bird!' she said, 'you never make anything but blunders. And, indeed, you know I told you I should bring you bad luck.
But come, there's a cure for everything when you have a Fleming from Rome* for your love. Begin by rolling this handkerchief round your head, and throw me over that belt of yours. Wait for me in this alley--I'll be back in two minutes.
* _Flamenco de Roma_, a slang term for the gipsies. Roma does not stand for the Eternal City, but for the nation of the _romi_, or the married folk--a name applied by the gipsies to themselves. The first gipsies seen in Spain probably came from the Low Countries, hence their name of _Flemings_.
”She disappeared, and soon came back bringing me a striped cloak which she had gone to fetch, I knew not whence. She made me take off my uniform, and put on the cloak over my s.h.i.+rt. Thus dressed, and with the wound on my head bound round with the handkerchief, I was tolerably like a Valencian peasant, many of whom come to Seville to sell a drink they make out of '_chufas_.'* Then she took me to a house very much like Dorotea's, at the bottom of a little lane. Here she and another gipsy woman washed and dressed my wounds, better than any army surgeon could have done, gave me something, I know not what, to drink, and finally made me lie down on a mattress, on which I went to sleep.
* A bulbous root, out of which rather a pleasant beverage is manufactured.
”Probably the woman had mixed one of the soporific drugs of which they know the secret in my drink, for I did not wake up till very late the next day. I was rather feverish, and had a violent headache. It was some time before the memory of the terrible scene in which I had taken part on the previous night came back to me. After having dressed my wound, Carmen and her friend, squatting on their heels beside my mattress, exchanged a few words of '_chipe calli_,' which appeared to me to be something in the nature of a medical consultation. Then they both of them a.s.sured me that I should soon be cured, but that I must get out of Seville at the earliest possible moment, for that, if I was caught there, I should most undoubtedly be shot.
”'My boy,' said Carmen to me, 'you'll have to do something. Now that the king won't give you either rice or haddock* you'll have to think of earning your livelihood. You're too stupid for stealing _a pastesas_.**
But you are brave and active. If you have the pluck, take yourself off to the coast and turn smuggler. Haven't I promised to get you hanged?
That's better than being shot, and besides, if you set about it properly, you'll live like a prince as long as the _minons_*** and the coast-guard don't lay their hands on your collar.'
* The ordinary food of a Spanish soldier.
** _Ustilar a pastesas_, to steal cleverly, to purloin without violence.
*** A sort of volunteer corps.
”In this attractive guise did this fiend of a girl describe the new career she was suggesting to me,--the only one, indeed, remaining, now I had incurred the penalty of death. Shall I confess it, sir? She persuaded me without much difficulty. This wild and dangerous life, it seemed to me, would bind her and me more closely together. In future, I thought, I should be able to make sure of her love.
”I had often heard talk of certain smugglers who travelled about Andalusia, each riding a good horse, with his mistress behind him and his blunderbuss in his fist. Already I saw myself trotting up and down the world, with a pretty gipsy behind me. When I mentioned that notion to her, she laughed till she had to hold her sides, and vowed there was nothing in the world so delightful as a night spent camping in the open air, when each _rom_ retired with his _romi_ beneath their little tent, made of three hoops with a blanket thrown across them.
”'If I take to the mountains,' said I to her, 'I shall be sure of you.
There'll be no lieutenant there to go shares with me.'
”'Ha! ha! you're jealous!' she retorted, 'so much the worse for you. How can you be such a fool as that? Don't you see I must love you, because I have never asked you for money?'
”When she said that sort to thing I could have strangled her.
”To shorten the story, sir, Carmen procured me civilian clothes, disguised in which I got out of Seville without being recognised. I went to Jerez, with a letter from Pastia to a dealer in anisette whose house was the smugglers' meeting-place. I was introduced to them, and their leader, surnamed _El Dancaire_, enrolled me in his gang. We started for Gaucin, where I found Carmen, who had told me she would meet me there.