The Car of Destiny
finds a new world. No matter how much he has read, how many faithful
photographs seen, he must discover everything anew, since it is certain
that nowhere will he find anything more than he has within himself. The
picture he sees will fit the frame his mind can give, and no one ever has,
no one ever will, see there exactly what he sees. If a man’s mind cannot
create a beautiful frame, then the picture must have but a poor effect for
him, and he will go away belittling it.
Now, I believed that I had been making a fine jewelled frame for this
picture of the Alhambra, and I hoped that I deserved the Key which the
Hand had lent.
Inside the gateway, when I had climbed a winding lane, I found myself in
the great Place of the Cisterns, which, with the vast incongruous palace
half finished by Charles the Fifth, I recognized from many pictures; but
not yet would I look down over Granada and the Vega. I would wait until I
could stand at a window in the Hall of the Ambassadors and see what I had
been promised. So, without a glance over the parapet, I walked on to an
open door, where stood two or three men in gold-laced hats. One moved
resignedly forward to act as guide, but a word and a piece of silver
convinced him that I was a person who might be trusted alone, though I
lacked a student’s ticket.
I passed through the room devoted to officialdom, and then—the time had
come to use the key, for I was already in fairyland; the covers of the
“Arabian Nights” had closed on me, and shut me in between the pages.
Physically I was not alone; for there were faded and strident tourists in
the marble-paved court of the Alberca, whom I fain would have had stopped
outside and put into appropriate costume for fairyland; but spiritually I
had the place to myself.
The little glittering fish, like tropical flowers under green glass,
flashed towards me through the beryl water, just as ancestor fish had
flashed when jewelled hands of harem beauties crumbled cake into the
gleaming tank. My mother had told me a legend, that fair favourites of
banished sultans prayed to return after death to the Alhambra, in the
bronze and gold, rose and purple forms of these fish of the Alberca; and
now I half believed the story. Where—since Mahomet grants no heaven to
women—could they be happier than here? Floating ever under their roof of
emerald, did they think themselves more fortunate than their husbands,
lovers, and brothers permitted to rest within the Alhambra walls in the
guise of martens wailing shrilly for days that might not come again?
Dreaming, I passed into the Court of Lions, where I and the twelve quaint,
stone guardians of the place stared at one another across a few feet of
marble pavement that measured centuries. Each prim beast, beautiful
because of his crude hideousness differing from his fellows; each with a
different story to tell if he would. Which one remembered that night when
the brave Abencerrages faced death, there in the hall to the right, where
the fountain kept ominous stains of brown? Which had the seeing eye in
these fallen times, to watch when the ghost of those noble Moors passed by
silent and sad in the moonlight? Upon which had blood-drops spattered when
the boy princes died for jealous Fatima’s pleasure? Which had known the
touch of Morayma’s little hand or lovely Galiana’s?
I asked the questions; yet the deep answering silence of the court, and of
all this hidden, secret, fairy palace seemed to say so much that it was
not like silence, but reserve.
“The Alhambra is music and colour and knowledge,” I said to the lions.
“When I am gone I shall shut my eyes and hear as well as see it; hear the
magic music of the silence, played on silver lutes of Moors, and tinkling
fountains, a siren’s song to draw me back again; and I shall know and feel
things which I’ve never been able to think out quite clearly before.”
Would Monica come here? I wondered. No face more lovely than hers had ever
looked down from those latticed windows supported by pillars delicate as a
child’s white arm. If I could but see her face now! Not seeing it, I knew
that no place, however beautiful, could be perfect for me. Shadows of
sorrow, of separation, would stand out the blacker against the sunlit,
jewelled walls of the fairy palace; and even happiness must sing in minor
notes here, lest it strike out a discord in the tragic poem of the
Alhambra. No wonder, in losing their crown jewel, the Moors lost hope, and
with it all the art and science which had set them far above their
Christian rivals! No wonder they plunged, despairing, into the deserts
they had left, mingling among savage races as some bright spring mingles
with a dark subterranean river, never to glitter in the light again.
But none of my day dreams cheated me into losing count of time.
If my messenger were true, soon Monica would be in one of the _patios_ of
Carmona’s palace, looking up at the Alhambra towers. “The middle window as
you go into the Hall of the Ambassadors,” I repeated, and found my way
back through the court of the Alberca; for you do not need to know the
Alhambra to find your way from _sala_ to _sala_, seen a hundred times in
imagination.
So beautiful had I guessed that room above all others, that I had not
expected to be surprised; yet I was surprised, and oddly excited, for
supreme beauty is always exciting to the Latin mind. A vast bower of
jewels, and old point-lace embroidered with tarnished gold threads and
yellowing pearls, it seemed; its portals lace-curtained too; rich hanging
folds of lace and fringe, like the lifted drapery of a sultan’s tent,
supported on delicate poles of polished ivory.
Behind me was the beryl block of the fish-pond, set in silver instead of
marble by the sunshine in the court. Before me, across the pink-jewelled
dusk of the Sala de los Ambajadores, a blue and green picture of sky and
mountains was framed by lace and precious stones.
I walked to the middle window and looked sheer down over tall tree-tops to
the valley of the Darro, where the roofs of the Albaicín clustered
together, softly grey and glistening as the ruffled plumage of nestling
birds.
Far away to the left lay the Vega, shimmering under a mist of heat, which
gave the look of a crystal sea engulfing the plain, trees and scattered
villages gleaming through the transparent flood. Straight before my eyes,
on the cactus-clothed shoulder of a hill opposite the tower, glittered a
splash of whitewash dotted with black holes, which were the doors and
windows of gypsy caverns. And above me, to the right on a higher hillside,
rose the towers and miradores of that ancient “summer palace of delights,”
the Generalife.
One sweeping glance gave me these details; then, adjusting the field-glass
I had brought, I fixed my attention on a house near the Albaicín, which I
easily identified as Carmona’s palace.
Gazing down from such a height, I had a bird’s-eye view of double _patios_
thick with clustering shrubs, orange trees, and cypresses. The powerful
glasses brought out clearly the delicate marble pillars supporting the
Moorish archways of the upper gallery in one of these _patios_; but the
other was shrouded for me by a group of cypresses.
For a long time I waited—hours it seemed; but no one moved along the
gallery or appeared in the half-shuttered windows that looked down into
the court; and at last I decided to try the gardens of the Generalife,
which I had been told commanded the second _patio_.
Once, said legend, a prince had been secluded by his father in those
gardens and those towers, lest he see the face of a woman, and learn
sorrow through love; nevertheless, he had found out the great secret, and
had had news of the most beautiful lady in the world. I hoped, as I walked
along the avenue of cypresses, that I might be as fortunate; and in the
gardens all things spoke of love. There, under the giant cypress, the
handsome Abencerrage had come to keep the tryst which cost his head, and
thirty-five others as noble. There, at the top of that shaded flight of
stone steps, whose balustrades were jewelled with running water, Prince
Ahmed had sat to play his lute. From that arcaded balcony Zorayda had
looked when love was young, and Boabdil still the lover. In the mirrors of
the water-_patio_ Galiana had bent to her own image and asked, “Am I
worthy to be loved?”
Out of the tangle of red and white roses, bunched in with golden oranges
and scented blooms mingling together in one huge bouquet, I looked to find
my love. It was true, I could see clearly now into the cypress _patio_;
and suddenly a white figure came out from a window upon the gallery. The
glass at my eye, I thought I recognized Monica’s slender girlishness; but
a moment later a larger form appeared. The two women stood together
looking up, Lady Vale-Avon pointing towards the towers of the Alhambra or
the Generalife.
Was it possible she saw me? Yet no, she could not without glasses. But if
Monica had indeed been told where I would be at a certain time, could she
not have contrived some means to elude her mother and come to the balcony
alone?
Long after the two vanished I lingered; waited until sunset; waited until
the sky was flooded with rose and gold, and towers and hills were purple
in a violet mist. But Monica did not come again.
If she had not been given the message, what guarantee had I that she would
receive the other far more important?
It was in a fever of uncertainty that I must spend the next
four-and-twenty hours.
XXXVII
DREAMS AND AN AWAKENING
That night, in my villa above “the road of the great Moor-killing,” the
nightingales were the only _serenos_. Their song was the song of the
stars; and the song of the stars was the song of the nightingales. At
dawn, from my window, I was taken into the private life of my neighbour
birds. I heard them wake each other; I saw them make their toilets; and
from the town far below my terraced garden the sound of bells came
up—church bells, bells of mules and horses beginning work, while their
masters sang _coplas_ with a lilting Moorish wail.
Once again I went down to look at Carmona’s door, to find it still kept by
guardia civile; and most of the day I spent in the Alhambra, seeing rooms
and courts I had missed yesterday, looking down often into the _patio_ of
the palace in the Albaicín.
I dined in the hotel garden, and before nine I was at the appointed spot
in the road outside the high wall of my Carmen. The moments passed as I
walked up and down, my cigarette a spot of fire in the growing moonlight;
still the gypsy-faced girl did not come.
Twenty minutes late, said my watch, and as I stared at it, a man stopped
in front of me.
“Is the noble señor expecting someone?” he asked.
I put my watch away and looked at him. The moon, obscured though it was by
clouds, showed a tall figure, with strong shoulders, and a face which
seemed in the night as dark as a Moor’s. The man had lifted his hat from
his thick black hair, and I said to myself that he was a model for an
artist who wished to paint a gypsy.
Finding that I did not answer on the instant, he went on—
“The señor must forgive me if I have made a mistake; but my sister, who
had an errand to do for a gentleman, has sent me in her place.”
“In that case you have made no mistake,” I said. “You have a message for
me from your sister?”
“And from a lady. The message is, that if the señor will come to my house
in an hour, he will find what he seeks.”
My blood quickened.
“What do I seek?”
“A lady who loves you, and has sent you this through my sister.”
The man produced a tiny white paper packet which I took, but would not
open in his presence.