Puslapio vaizdai
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Now, this all happened in a flash, but to Tretheway, frightened and ashamed, it seemed to take hours.

"What is it?" said Beauty, smiling like a siren.

queer

Tretheway hesitated, for a tingling trickled through him. His finger-tips became tremulous with nerves, and a strange impulse was battering in his breast. Every fiber of him began to palpitate, and he devoured Beauty's father with a searching gaze.

"Nothing at all," he answered, with a quiver. "I've got an idea, that's all, but it's unusual with me."

"You 've also got twelve minutes," said a hard voice from the chair.

"It 's ample; it's a lifetime." Tretheway seized his palette. "Don't move!"

He began to paint viciously, savagely, with a desperate abandon that set him breathing hard as though in a race. Quick, sharp strokes he used with delicate thrust and touches, from which his brush was jerked nervously away. In the twelve minutes he appeared to do as much work as in the previous month. And all the time his face was twisted into a new and bitter smile, and he grew paler and paler. Presently he threw down his gear and turned to them like a ghost that has come to a great decision.

"It's all finished," he stammered, and threw himself face down on the couch.

The two stepped quickly round. There was Beauty's father, with the eyes of a dominant fish; the sharp, intruding nose; the tight-locked, rat-trap, selfish mouth;

the pink pomposity; and the expression that proclaimed, "I 'm watching you, and you'll get nothing from me." There he was, that self-made man, with his bankbalance and destroyed soul, seeming almost to breathe from the canvas.

And Beauty Beauty gazed and gazed at the paternal figure she had watched all her life. The color mounted to her temples, and her lips parted in delight, and suddenly she threw her arms round her father's neck and exclaimed in rapturous

amazement:

"Father-Father, is n't it marvelous? It's you! it's you! He's a wonderful genius. I did n't think such a thing was possible. Why, Father, it looks alive!"

And Beauty's father stood and stood, while a slow smile of flattered self-satisfaction spread over his face, and his ears got a shade redder, and a cold gleam grew in his expression, for was not here the masterful, successful being, reeking with opulence, that he had always hoped to be? And the sharp nose meant an astuteness, and the piscine orbs meant financial daring, and the slit mouth meant decision; and were not these the qualities to which he had always aspired? So he dropped a heavy arm across the girl's shoulders and purring, "Admirable, admirable!" looked as pleased as an otter with a dead eel.

And Tretheway, when they turned to congratulate him-Tretheway was still on the couch, but shaking with uncontrollable emotion. His purple face was turned toward the wall, and he was stuffing a handkerchief down his throat.

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HAL

Threshing

St. Michael's of the Azores

By HENRY SANDHAM

Illustrations by the author

"God planted a garden eastward"

ALF-WAY between the Norman's conquest of England and the Italian's discovery of America, the Azores sprang full grown from the land of fable into the arena of history. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Portuguese donatories crossed with their ship-loads of mixed humanity to make the Azorean people. There were Moorish slaves and Flemish colonists, African negroes, penitent Algerian pirates, Hebrews, Arabs, a few Spanish and Portuguese outcasts, a French soldier here, an English sailor there, the donatories, of course, and their high-born friends; and having no foes to subdue or neighbors to quarrel with, they slept among the flowers, dreamed, and forgot. Past them the fair-haired sailor of Genoa went his way to wake a new world to life, and later the swashbuckler arms

of Raleigh, Leicester, Drake, Grenville, and Howard, with a host more of Elizabeth's sainted pirates, clashed by for the English laureate to sing of in after years; but the world slipped far, far away from them, and he who now goes to the Azores finds a people untouched by the world.

Grace and beauty are there with them still, but of bold daring and reckless bravery, alas! there is none. Marianna, the small maid-servant in the corner yonder, cried for two days because her only brother had been drafted into the army. We questioned her as to whether war had been declared. Ah, no! Marianna knows he will not leave the islands. It is not like the navy, and, yes, he will be paid every day, and will learn to read, yes, and when no one sees he can carry his shoes in his hand; but, oh, the illustrious Senhor Eng

lish does not understand. He is so timorous, the beloved brother, so very cowardly! The Portuguese are so. Ah, pretty Marianna, are all your heroes so soon forgotten?

Yet she may be right as to her countrymen of the Azores. Even for them the sea, their only bridge to the outside world, loses few of its terrors with constant familiarity. Even the fishermen fish only in fine weather, and no boat is launched till it has been carried, flower-decked, to the church door, consecrated with holy bread and wine, and blessed by priest under the crimson banner of the Holy Ghost.

In a climate sent from heaven for an outdoor life, yachting, bathing, and all other violent exercises are catalogued by the Michaelenses among the idiosyncrasies of the "crazy English," and the Azorean of high degree, elegant of bearing and faultless of attire, leads the idle, vacant life of the cafés, while his senhoras presumably stay hidden behind those high, painted walls that make narrow lanes of the streets, and over the tops of which masses of flowers flash their color and perfume down into the road below. "In my father's time," you will hear, "a good Azorean woman left her home only three times: once for baptism, once to be married, and last to be buried."

The Azorean house, the cheerless barrenness of which explains the flight of the men to the cafés, is a house not only for a man and his family, but for his ox and his ass and all that is his, one roof covering all. When the animals-those poor, ill-used Azorean animals, all of whom, even sheep, dogs, and cows, must bear burdens and draw loads are banished to stalls in the garden, one front door and one common entrance-hall still serves both man and beast. If one has an unreasonable antipathy to our dumb friends, he must be careful in accepting peasant hospitality for the night; for the morning light is sure to discover all the animals of the place nestling in and about his bed, from the huge, black pig and the tiny donkey down to cats, dogs, sheep, and calves, half-starved hens, clean, fat rats, and cosmopolitan fleas.

The gardens of St. Michael's are beautiful beyond description; the largest and finest are usually open to the public, and always free to the foreigner. Just why, in distant vegetable gardens and hidden orchards, shelter-walls are made of camellias or hydrangeas, paths hedged by heliotrope or blazing azaleas, tool-closets concealed back of pseudo-ferneries, waterworks disguised by spraying fountains, fish-stocked ponds, and palm-tufted islands, while tomatoes ripen on a long, trellised isle down the middle of the orchid-house, and pale-yellow roses are trained to mingle their petals with the purple bloom of the grape-arbor-just why such beauty where no eye but the gardener's ever looks at it is hard to explain, unless it is, like those exquisite under parts of Orcagna's shrine, for the "gods, who see everywhere."

The feasts of St. Michael's, thanks to the wealth of material and to the innate genius of the people, have a bewildering fascination for the new-comer. Occurring with but few exceptions in the spring and early summer, they are the dominant and quite the most insistent note of the national life. The majority are peculiar to the islands, though some are local to St. Michael's, and one, regarded as among the great Portuguese feasts, is the exclusive property of the city of Ponta Delgada. It is in honor of Santo Christo, a crude wooden statue that has acquired miraculous powers during its century or two of life, and makes one public procession yearly, clothed in its votive gems, amid oceans of flowers that tax even Michaelense resources.

Everything is a feast, from the passing of a railroad bill by the legislature to the killing of a pig. "We Azoreans are a festa-loving people" [festa, with the soft sh sound to the s], they sigh softly. As though one could doubt it after a week in Ponta Delgada, or blame them after a night of the Espirito Santo, that feast dear to Azorean hearts, when the narrow, lanelike streets are bright with myriads of softly colored lamps and fantastic lanterns; when aslant from every balcony

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great flags make Gothic arches of fluttering color against the deep sky of night, and from open windows golden embroideries and rich hangings cover stone palaces and plaster cottages. Festoons and arches of flowers mingle with the banners, the roadways are ankle-deep in rose-petals, a throng of people in brave array moves gently up and down, with dark eyes bright and watchful. For it is the love-time of the Azorean year; half-way down the street one of their rhythmic bands throbs out melody, now the plaintive Holy Ghost hymn, sole property of this feast; now the yearning, haunting fado Hilario, that legacy of a dead young heart to his country's youth. In the wonderful Michaelense night, with the flowers, the perfumes, the roses, and the lilies at your feet, the lights and music and subdued, but passionate, throb of life about you, you begin to understand why the Azorean is a festa-loving soul, even if you are old enough to know better, and Anglo-Saxon to boot.

Possessing many features in common, these multiple feasts of St. Michael's yet escape monotony. They are composed usually of a mass and a street procession, in the latter of which there is more or less pageantry. These processions are heralded by outbursts of sky-rockets,for ebullitions of Azorean jubilation seem to find vent in rockets set off in bright daylight, and enlivened by bands. The island bands are good and inconceivably numerous, with a special talent for playing cloyingly sweet melodies in remarkable rhythm; hence they are indispensable to festa processions, each feast having its own peculiar hymn.

At the head of the procession in the Espirito Santo, or Holy Ghost festa, may often be seen three quaint, semi-grotesque figures in scarlet robes and bishops' miters capering on to music of viola, guitar, and violin. The processions move to the church or place of pilgrimage down flower-strewn ways, amid prostrate throngs of spectators. Ordinary church services partake of the eternal festa air, as much through the people's supreme joy in the

church as through the brilliant spectacle of color presented by the assemblage. The interiors of the churches are lofty, noble in proportions, and without seats, so that the people sit or kneel hour after hour on the bare stone floors, the women, in bright shawls and lençoes (gay head-kerchiefs), in the great central inclosure, for all the world like a monster flower-bed. At the nine-o'clock service of Sunday morning, known as the "Soldiers' Mass," the flower-bed in the middle spreads out into a border, to give place to the needier sons of Mars, though here and there an audacious blossom crouches within the inclosure. Organ and choir yield to the bugle, which conducts the entire mass, drowning even the priests' chant.

Even the gray Lenten season wraps carnival's domino over its sackcloth and ashes for these people whose grace turns all to favor and prettiness; only the inevitable statues of the tortured Christ remind one of the season, and soon wounds and bruises are hidden by violets, heliotrope, and pansies (amores perfeitos, they call them). To fast when one may feast is, in Azorean creed, lack of gratitude to a very good God, so Holy Thursday is a beautiful feast called Almond day, when one eats almond-sweets till he positively sickens at the shrill cry of almond-venders, which goes up from dawn till midnight.

RELIGIOUS REALISM

GOOD FRIDAY is supposed to be the day of mourning, and in the churches the closing scenes of the Calvary tragedy are enacted. The three crosses rise on a rocky mound before the veiled high altar, whereon lifesized dummy figures are crucified by aid of pulleys and ropes and mechanical devices. The entombment takes place at a side altar, converted into a garden for the purpose, where life-sized figures in armor represent Roman sentinels. The Saturday continues Friday's gloom and darkness with the aid of much dreary chanting, till just on the hour of noon, when the droning clergy, marching round the church, pause before the chapel of the tomb in an instant's silence, there comes

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