IV
Little of this learning troubled me in my visits to the cathedral, or even the fact that, next to St. Peter's, it was the largest church in the world. It was sufficient to itself by mere force of architectural presence, without the help of incidents or measurements. It was a city in itself, with a community of priests and sacristans dwelling in it, and a floating population of sightseers and worshipers always passing through it. The first morning we had submitted to make the round of the chapels, patiently paying to have each of them unlocked and wearily wondering at their wonders, but only sympathizing really with the stern cleric who showed the ceremonial vestments and jewels of the cathedral, and whose bitter face expressed, or seemed to express, abhorrence of our whole trivial tourist tribe. After that morning we took our curiosity into our own keeping and looked at nothing that did not interest us, and we were interested most in those fellow-beings who kept coming and going all day long.
Chiefly, of course, they were women. In Catholic countries women have either more sins to be forgiven than the men, or else they are sorrier for them; and here, whether there was service or not, they were dropped everywhere in veiled and motionless prayer. In Seville the law of the mantilla is rigorously enforced. If a woman drives, she may wear a hat; but if she walks, she must wear a mantilla under pain of being pointed at by the finger of scorn. If she is a young girl she may wear colors with it (a cheerful blue seems the favorite), but by far the greater number came to the cathedral in complete black. Those somber figures which clustered before chapel, or singly dotted the pavement everywhere, flitted in and out like shadows in the perpetual twilight. For far the greater number, their coming to the church was almost their sole escape into the world. They sometimes met friends, and after a moment, or an hour, of prayer they could cheer their hearts with neighborly gossip. But for the greater part they appeared and disappeared silently and swiftly, and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their history. Many of them would have first met their husbands in the cathedral when they prayed, or when they began to look around to see who was looking at them. It might have been their trysting-place, safeguarding them in their lovers' meetings, and after marriage it had become their social world, when their husbands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They could not go at night, of course, except to some special function, but they could come by day as often as they liked. I do not suppose that the worshipers I saw habitually united love or friendship with their devotions in the cathedral, but some certainly joined business with devotion; at a high function one day an American girl felt herself sharply nudged in the side, and when she turned she found the palm of her kneeling neighbor stretched toward her. They must all have had their parish churches besides the cathedral, and a devotee might make the day a social whirl by visiting one shrine after another. But I do not think that many do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and are expected to keep at home by the men who expect to keep abroad.
I do not know just how it is in the parish churches; they must each have its special rite, which draws and holds the frequenter; but the cathedral constantly offers a drama of irresistible appeal. We non-Catholics can feel this even at the distance to which our Protestantism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the Seville cathedral during mass you cannot help a moment of recreant regret when you wish that a part in the mystery enacting was your birthright. The esthetic emotion is not denied you; the organ-tide that floods the place bears you on it, too; the priests perform their rites before the altar for you; they come and go, they bow and kneel, for you; the censer swings and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your behalf as much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more. The whole unstinted hospitality of the service is there for you, as well as for the children of the house, and the heart must be rude and the soul ungrateful that would refuse it. For my part, I accepted it as far as I knew how, and when I left the worshipers on their knees and went tiptoeing from picture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I, ought to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over. I call him sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of guides in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place and some in civil dress, willing to supplement our hotel interpreter, or lying in wait for us when we came alone. I wish now I had taken them all, but at the time they tired me, and I denied them.
Though not a day passed but we saw it, I am not able to say what the cathedral was like. The choir was planted in the heart of it, as it might be a celestial refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great in girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing to a Gothic firmament horizoned round as with sunset light from near a hundred painted windows. The chapels on each side, the most beautiful in Spain, abound in riches of art and pious memorials, with chief among them the Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, of the ship which the cathedral has been likened to, keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero, King Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life, if not quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint's body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker will tell you, "the troops of the garrison march past and lower their colors" outside the cathedral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when those boys whose effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at Valladolid pace in their mystic dance before the people at the opposite portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is destined to endure through the device practised in defeating the pope who proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only as long as the boys' actual costumes lasted; but by renewing these carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become practically imperishable.
If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good fortune to witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from earthquakes, and on the awful day, dies irae, of the great Lisbon earthquake, during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the Host, when the worshipers were on their knees, there came such a mighty shock in sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that the people started to their feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests ran after them, as soon as the apparent danger was past they led the return of their flock and resumed the interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that the temple was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville had escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should be dramatized in a perpetual observance. Every year now, on the 1st of November, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen moment of the mass, with much more stateliness than in the original event, and lead the people out of one portal, to return with them by another for the conclusion of the ceremonial.
We waited long for the climax, but at last we almost missed it through the overeagerness of the guide I had chosen out of many that petitioned. He was so politely, so forbearingly insistent in his offer to see that we were vigilantly cared for, that I must have had a heart harder than Peter the Cruel's to have denied him, and he planted us at the most favorable point for the function in the High Chapel, with instructions which portal to hurry to when the movement began, and took his peseta and went his way. Then, while we confidingly waited, he came rushing back and with a great sweep of his hat wafted us to the door which he had said the procession would go out by, but which he seemed to have learned it would come in by, and we were saved from what had almost been his fatal error. I forgave him the more gladly because I could rejoice in his returning to repair his error, although he had collected his money; and with a heart full of pride in his verification of my theory of the faithful Spanish nature, I gave myself to the shining gorgeousness of the procession that advanced chanting in the blaze of the Sevillian sun. There was every rank of clergy, from the archbishop down, in robes of ceremonial, but I am unable honestly to declare the admiration for their splendor which I would have willingly felt. The ages of faith in which those vestments were designed were apparently not the ages of taste; yet it was the shape of the vestments and not the color which troubled the eye of unfaith, if not of taste. The archbishop in crimson silk, with his train borne by two acolytes, the canons in their purple, the dean in his gold-embroidered robes, and the priests and choristers in their black robes and white surplices richly satisfied it; and if some of the clerics were a little frayed and some of the acolytes were spotted with the droppings of the candles, these were details which one remembered afterward and that did not matter at the time.
When the procession was housed again, we went off and forgot it in the gardens of the Alcazar. But I must not begin yet on the gardens of the Alcazar. We went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but we did not see them until our second morning in Seville. We gave what was left from the first morning in the cathedral to a random exploration of the streets and places of the city. There was, no doubt, everywhere some touch of the bravery of our square of San Fernando, where the public windows were hung with crimson tapestries and brocades in honor of St. Raphael; but his holiday did not make itself molestively felt in the city's business or pleasure. Where we could drive we drove, and where we must we walked, and we walked of course through the famous Calle de las Sierpes, because no one drives there. As a rule no woman walks there, and naturally there were many women walking there, under the eyes of the popular cafes and aristocratic clubs which principally abound in Las Sierpes, for it is also the street of the principal shops, though it is not very long and is narrower than many other streets of Seville. It has its name from so commonplace an origin as the sign over a tavern door, with some snakes painted on it; but if the example of sinuosity had been set it by prehistoric serpents, there were scores of other streets which have bettered its instruction. There were streets that crooked away everywhere, not going anywhere, and breaking from time to time into irregular angular spaces with a church or a convent or a nobleman's house looking into them.