1492

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1492

by MARY JOHNSON

1492

CHAPTER I

THE morning was gray and I sat by the sea near Palos
in a gray mood. I was Jayme de Marchena, and that
was a good, _old Christian_ name. But my grandmother
was Jewess, and in corners they said that she never
truly recanted, and I had been much with her as a child.
She was dead, but still they talked of her. Jayme de Marchena,
looking back from the hillside of forty-six, saw some
service done for the Queen and the folk. This thing and
that thing. Not demanding trumpets, but serviceable. It
would be neither counted nor weighed beside and against
that which Don Pedro and the Dominican found to say.
What they found to say they made, not found. They took
clay of misrepresentation, and in the field of falsehood sat
them down, and consulting the parchment of malice, proceeded
to create. But false as was all they set up, the time
would cry it true.

It was reasonable that I should find the day gray.

Study and study and study, year on year, and at last
image a great thing, just under the rim of the mind's ocean,
sending up for those who will look streamers above horizon,
streamers of colored and wonderful light! Study and reason
and with awe and delight take light from above. Dream
of good news for one and all, of life given depth and brought
into music, dream of giving the given, never holding it back,
which would be avarice and betraying! Write, and give
men and women to read what you have written, and believe
--poor Deluded!--that they also feel inner warmth and
light and rejoice.

Oh, gray the sea and gray the shore!

But some did feel it.

The Dominican, when it fell into his hands, called it
perdition. A Jewess for grandmother, and Don Pedro for
enemy. And now the Dominican--the Dominicans!

The Queen and the King made edict against the Jews, and
there sat the Inquisition.

I was--I am--Christian. It is a wide and deep and
high word. When you ask, "What is it--Christian?"
then must each of us answer as it is given to him to answer.
I and thou--and the True, the Universal Christ give us
light!

To-day all Andalusia, all Castile and all Spain to me
seemed gray, and gray the utter Ocean that stretched no
man knew where. The gray was the gray of fetters and of
ashes.

The tide made, and as the waves came nearer, eating the
sand before me, they uttered a low crying. _In danger--
danger--in danger, Jayme de Marchena!_

I had been in danger before. Who is not often and always
in danger, in life? But this was a danger to daunt.

Mine were no powerful friends. I had only that which
was within me. I was only son of only son, and my parents
and grandparents were dead, and my distant kindred cold,
seeing naught of good in so much study and thinking of
that old, dark, beautiful, questionable one, my grandmother.
I had indeed a remote kinsman, head of a convent in this
neighborhood, and he was a wise man and a kindly. But
not he either could do aught here!

All the Jews to be banished, and Don Pedro with a steady
forefinger, "That man--take him, too! Who does not
know that his grandmother was Jewess, and that he lived
with her and drank poison?" But the Dominican, "No!
The Holy Office will take him. You have but to read--only
you must not read--what he has written to see why!"

Gray Ocean, stretching endlessly and now coming close,
were it not well if I drowned myself this gray morning
while I can choose the death I shall die? Now the great
murmur sang _Well_, and now it sang Not well.

Low cliff and heaped sand and a solitary bird wide-winging
toward the mountains of Portugal, and the Ocean gray-
blue and salt! The salt savor entered me, and an inner zest
came forward and said No, to being craven. In banishment
certainly, in the House of the Inquisition more doubtfully,
the immortal man might yet find market from which to buy!
If the mind could surmount, the eternal quest need not be
interrupted--even there!

Blue Ocean sang to me.

A vision--it came to me at times, vision--set itself in
air. I saw A People who persecuted neither Jew nor thinker.
It rose one Figure, formed of an infinite number of small
figures, but all their edges met in one glow. The figure
stood upon the sea and held apart the clouds, and was free
and fair and mighty, and was man and woman melted together,
and it took all colors and made of them a sun for its
brow. I did not know when it would live, but I knew that
it should live. Perhaps it was the whole world.

It vanished, leaving sky and ocean and Andalusia. But
great visions leave great peace. After it, for this day, it
seemed not worth while to grieve and miserably to forebode.
Through the hours that I lay there by the sea, airs from that
land or that earth blew about me and faint songs visited
my ears, and the gray day was only gray like a dove's
breast.

Jayme de Marchena stayed by the lonely sea because that
seemed the safest place to stay. At hand was the small
port of Palos that might not know what was breeding in
Seville, and going thither at nightfall I found lodging and
supper in a still corner where all night I heard the Tinto
flowing by.

I had wandered to Palos because of the Franciscan convent
of Santa Maria de la Rabida and my very distant kins-
man, Fray Juan Perez. The day after the gray day by the
shore I walked half a league of sandy road and came to
convent gate. The porter let me in, and I waited in a little
court with doves about me and a swinging bell above until
the brother whom he had called returned and took me to
Prior's room. At first Fray Juan Perez was stiff and cold,
but by littles this changed and he became a good man, large-
minded and with a sense for kindred. Clearly he thought
that I should not have had a Jewish grandmother, nor have
lived with her from my third to my tenth birthday, and most
clearly that I should not have written that which I had
written. But his God was an energetic, enterprising, kindly
Prince, rather bold himself and tolerant of heathen. Fray
Juan Perez even intimated a doubt if God wanted
the Inquisition. "But that's going rather far!" he said
hastily and sat drumming the table and pursing his lips.
Presently he brought out, "But you know I can't do anything!"

I did know it. What could he do? I suppose I had
had a half-hope of something. I knew not what. Without
a hope I would not have come to La Rabida. But it was
maimed from the first, and now it died. I made a gesture
of relinquishment. "No, I suppose you cannot--"

He said after a moment that he was glad to see that I
had let my beard grow and was very plainly dressed, though
I had never been elaborate there, and especially was he glad
that I was come to Palos not as Jayme de Marchena, but
under a plain and simple name, Juan Lepe, to wit. His advice
was to flee from the wrath to come. He would not say
flee from the Holy Office--that would be heinous!--but
he would say absent myself, abscond, be banished, Jayme
de Marchena by Jayme de Marchena. There were barques
in Palos and rude seamen who asked no question when
gold just enough, and never more than enough, was shown.
He hesitated a moment and then asked if I had funds. If
not--

I thanked him and said that I had made provision.

"Then," said he, "go to Barbary, Don Jayme! An intelligent
and prudent man may prosper at Ercilla or at Fez.
If you must study, study there."

"You also study," I said.

"In fair trodden highways--never in thick forest and
mere fog!" he answered. "Now if you were like one who
has been here and is now before Granada, at Santa Fe, sent
for thither by the Queen! That one hath indeed studied to
benefit Spain--Spain, Christendom, and the world!"

I asked who was that great one, but before he could tell
me came interruption. A visitor entered, a strong-lipped,
bold-eyed man named Martin Pinzon. I was to meet him
again and often, but at this time I did not know that. Fray
Juan Perez evidently desiring that I should go, I thought
it right to oblige him who would have done me kindness
had he known how. I went without intimate word of parting
and after only a casual stare from Martin Pinzon.

But without, my kinsman came after me. "I want to
say, Don Jayme, that if I am asked for testimony I shall
hold to it that you are as good Christian as any--"

It was kinsman's part and all that truly I could have
hoped for, and I told him so. About us was quiet, vacant
cloister, and we parted more warmly than we had done
within.

The white convent of La Rabida is set on a headland
among vineyards and pine trees. It regards the ocean and,
afar, the mountains of Portugal, and below it runs a small
river, going out to sea through sands with the Tinto and the
Odiel. Again the day was gray and the pine trees sighing.
The porter let me out at gate.

I walked back toward Palos through the sandy ways. I
did not wish to go to Africa.

It is my belief that that larger Self whom they will call
protecting Saint or heavenly Guardian takes hand in affairs
oftener than we think! Leaving the Palos road, I went to
the sea as I had done yesterday and again sat under heaped
sand with about me a sere grass through which the wind
whined. At first it whined and then it sang in a thin, outlandish
voice. Sitting thus, I might have looked toward
Africa, but I knew now that I was not going to Africa.
Often, perhaps, in the unremembered past I had been in
Africa; often, doubtless, in ages to come its soil would be
under my foot, but now I was not going there! To-day I
looked westward over River-Ocean, unknown to our fathers
and unknown to ourselves. It was unknown as the future
of the world.

Ocean piled before me. From where I lay it seemed to
run uphill to one pale line, nor blue nor white, set beneath
the solid gray. Over that hilltop, what? Only other hills
and plains, water, endlessly water, until the waves, so much
mightier than waves of that blue sea we knew best, should
beat at last against Asia shore! So high, so deep, so vast,
so real, yet so empty-seeming save for strange dangers! No
sails over the hilltop; no sails in all that Vast save close at
hand where mariners held to the skirts of Mother. Europe.
Ocean vast, Ocean black, Ocean unknown. Yet there, too,
life and the knowing of life ran somehow continuous.

It wiled me from my smaller self. How had we all
suffered, we the whole earth! But we were moving, we the
world with none left out, moving toward That which held
worlds, which was conscious above worlds. Long the
journey, long the adventure, but it was not worth while fearing,
it was not worth while whining! I was not alone
Jayme de Marchena, nor Juan Lepe, nor this name nor that
nor the other.

There was now a great space of quiet in my mind. Suddenly
formed there the face and figure of Don Enrique de
Cerda whose life I had had the good hap to save. He was
far away with the Queen and King who beleaguered Granada.
I had not seen him for ten years. A moment before
he had rested among the host of figures in the unevenly
lighted land of memory. Now he stood forth plainly and
seemed to smile.

I took the leading. With the inner eye I have seen lines
of light like subtle shining cords running between persons.
Such a thread stretched now between me and Enrique de
Cerda. I determined to make my way, as Juan Lepe, through
the mountains and over the plain of Granada to Santa Fe.

CHAPTER II

SET will to an end and promptly eyes open to means!
I did not start for Granada from Palos but from
Huelva, and I quitted Andalusia as a porter in a small
merchant train carrying goods of sorts to Zarafa that was a
mountain town taken from the Moors five years back. I
was to these folk Juan Lepe, a strong, middle-aged man
used to ships but now for some reason tired of them. My
merchants had only eyes for the safety of their persons and
their bales, plunged the third day into mountainous wild
country echoing and ghastly with long-lasting war. Their
servants and muleteers walked and rode, lamented or were
gay, raised faction, swore, laughed, traveled grimly or in
a dull melancholy or mirthfully; quarreled and made peace,
turn by turn, day by day, much alike. One who was a
bully fixed a quarrel upon me and another took my part.
All leaped to sides. I was forgotten in the midst of them;
they could hardly have told now what was the cause of battle.
A young merchant rode back to chide and settle matters.
At last some one remembered that Diego had struck
Juan Lepe who had flung him off. Then Tomaso had
sprung in and struck Diego. Then Miguel--"Let Juan
Lepe alone!" said my merchant. "Fie! a poor Palos seafaring
child, and you great Huelva men!" They laughed at
that, and the storm vanished as it had come.

I liked the young man.

How wild and without law, save "Hold if you can!"
were these mountains!' "Hold if you can to life--hold if
you can to knowledge--hold if you can to joy!" Black
cliff overhung black glen and we knew there were dens of
robbers. Far and near violence falls like black snow. This
merchant band gathered to sleep under oaks with a great
rock at our back. We had journeyers' supper and fire, for
it was cold, cold in these heights. A little wine was given
and men fell to sleep by the heaped bales; horses, asses and
mules being fastened close under the crag. Three men
watched, to be relieved in middle night by other three who
now slept. A muleteer named Rodrigo and Juan Lepe and
the young merchant took the first turn. The first two sat on
one side of the fire and the young merchant on the other.

The muleteer remained sunken in a great cloak, his chin
on his arms folded upon his knees, and what he saw in the
land within I cannot tell. But the young merchant was of a
quick disposition and presently must talk. For some distance
around us spread bare earth set only with shrubs and stones.
Also the rising moon gave light, and with that and our own
strength we did not truly look for any attack. We sat and
talked at ease, though with lowered voices, Rodrigo somewhere
away and the rest of the picture sleeping. The merchant
asked what had been my last voyage.

I answered, after a moment, to England.

"You do not seem to me," he said, "a seaman. But I
suppose there are all kinds of seamen."

I said yes, the sea was wide.

"England now, at the present moment?" he said, and
questioned me as to Bristol, of which port he had trader's
knowledge. I answered out of a book I had read. It was
true that, living once by the sea, I knew how to handle a
boat. I could find in memory sailors' terms. But still he
said, "You are not a seaman such as we see at Palos and
San Lucar."

It is often best not to halt denial. Let it pass by and
wander among the wild grasses!

"I myself," he said presently, "have gone by sea to Vigo
and to Bordeaux." He warmed his hands at the fire, then
clasped them about his knees and gazed into the night.
"What, Juan Lepe, is that Ocean we look upon when we
look west? I mean, where does it go? What does it
strike?"

"India, belike. And Cathay. To-day all men believe
the earth to be round."

"A long way!" he said. "O Sancta Maria! All that
water!"

"We do not have to drink it."

He laughed. "No! Nor sail it. But after I had been on
that voyage I could see us always like mice running close to
a wall, forever and forever! Juan Lepe, we are little and
timid!"

I liked his spirit. "One day we shall be lions and eagles
and bold prophets! Then our tongue shall taste much beside
India and Cathay!"

"Well, I hope it," he said. "Mice running under the
headlands."

He fell silent, cherishing his knees and staring into the
fire. It was not Juan Lepe's place to talk when master merchant
talked not. I, too, regarded the fire, and the herded
mountains robed in night, and the half-moon like a sail rising
from an invisible boat.

The night went peacefully by. It was followed by a
hard day's travel and the incident of the road. At evening
we saw the walls of Zarafa in a sunset glory. The merchants
and their train passed through the gate and found
their customary inn. With others, Juan Lepe worked hard,
unlading and storing. All done, he and the bully slept almost
in each other's arms, under the arches of the court,
dreamlessly.

The next day and the next were still days of labor. It
was not until the third that Juan Lepe considered that he
might now absent himself and there be raised no hue and
cry after strong shoulders. He had earned his quittance,
and in the nighttime, upon his hands and knees, he crept
from the sleepers in the court. Just before dawn the inn
gate swung open. He had been waiting close to it, and he
passed out noiselessly.

In the two days, carrying goods through streets to market
square and up to citadel and pausing at varying levels
for breath and the prospect, I had learned this town well
enough. I knew where went the ascending and descending
ways. Now almost all lay asleep, antique, shaded, Moorish,
still, under the stars. The soldiery and the hidalgos, their
officers, slept; only the sentinels waked before the citadel
entry and on the town walls and by the three gates. The
town folk slept, all but the sick and the sorrowful and the
careful and those who had work at dawn. Listen, and you
might hear sound like the first moving of birds, or breath
of dawn wind coming up at sea. The greater part now of
the town folk were Christian, brought in since the five-year-
gone siege that still resounded. Moors were here, but they
had turned Christian, or were slaves, or both slave and
Christian. I had seen monks of all habits and heard ring
above the inn the bells of a nunnery. Now again they
rang. The mosque was now a church. It rose at hand,--
white, square, domed. I went by a ladder-like lane down
toward Zarafa wall and the Gate of the Lion. At sunrise
in would pour peasants from the vale below, bringing vegetables
and poultry, and mountaineers with quails and conies,
and others with divers affairs. Outgoing would be those
who tilled a few steep gardens beyond the wall, messengers
and errand folk, soldiers and traders for the army before
Granada.

It was full early when I came to the wall. I could make
out the heavy and tall archway of the gate, but as yet was
no throng before it. I waited; the folk began to gather, the
sun came up. Zarafa grew rosy. Now was clatter enough,
voices of men and brutes, both sides the gate. The gate
opened. Juan Lepe won out with a knot of brawny folk
going to the mountain pastures. Well forth, he looked back
and saw Zarafa gleaming rose and pearl in the blink of the
sun, and sent young merchantward a wish for good. Then
he took the eastward way down the mountain, toward lower
mountains and at last the Vega of Granada.

CHAPTER III

THE day passed. I had adventures of the road, but
none of consequence. I slept well among the rocks,
waked, ate the bit of bread I had with me, and fell
again to walking.

Mountains were now withdrawing to the distant horizon
where they stood around, a mighty and beautiful wall. I
was coming down into the plain of Granada, that once had
been a garden. Now, north, south, east, west, it lay war-
trampled. Old owners were dead, men and women, or were
_mudexares_, vassals, or were fled, men and women, all who
could flee, to their kindred in Africa. Or they yet cowered,
men and women, in the broken garden, awaiting individual
disaster. The Kingdom of Granada had sins, and the Kingdom
of Castile, and the Kingdom of Leon. The Moor was
stained, and the Spaniard, the Moslem and the Christian
and the Jew. Who had stains the least or the most God
knew--and it was a poor inquiry. Seek the virtues and
bind them with love, each in each!

If the mountain road had been largely solitary, it was not
so of this road. There were folk enough in the wide Vega
of Granada. Clearly, as though the one party had been
dressed in black and the other in red, they divided into
vanquished and victor. Bit by bit, now through years, all
these towns and villages, all these fertile fields and bosky
places, rich and singing, had left the hand of the Moor for
the hand of the Spaniard.

In all this part of his old kingdom the Moor lay low in
defeat. In had swarmed the Christian and with the Christian
the Jew, though now the Jew must leave. The city
of Granada was not yet surrendered, and the Queen and
King held all soldiery that they might at Santa Fe, built as
it were in a night before Granada walls. Yet there seemed
at large bands enough, licentious and loud, the scum of
soldiery. Ere I reached the village that I now saw before
me I had met two such bands, I wondered, and then wondered
at my own wonder.

The chief house of the village was become an inn. Two
long tables stood in the patio where no fountain now flowed
nor orange trees grew nor birds sang in corners nor fine
awning kept away the glare. Twenty of these wild and
base fighting men crowded one table, eating and drinking,
clamorous and spouting oaths. At the other table sat together
at an end three men whom by a number of tokens
might be robbers of the mountains. They sat quiet, indifferent
to the noise, talking low among themselves in a
tongue of their own, kin enough to the soldiery not to
fear them. The opposite end of the long table was given to
a group to which I now joined myself. Here sat two Franciscan
friars, and a man who seemed a lawyer; and one who
had the air of the sea and turned out to be master of a
Levantine; and a brisk, talkative, important person, a Catalan,
and as it presently appeared alcalde once of a so-so
village; and a young, unhealthy-looking man in black with
an open book beside him; and a strange fellow whose
Spanish was imperfect.

I sat down near the friars, crossed myself, and cut a piece
of bread from the loaf before me. The innkeeper and his
wife, a gaunt, extraordinarily tall woman, served, running
from table to table. The place was all heat and noise.
Presently the soldiers, ending their meal, got up with clamor
and surged from the court to their waiting horses. After
them ran the innkeeper, appealing for pay. Denials, expostulation,
anger and beseeching reached the ears of the patio,
then the sound of horses going down stony ways. "O God
of the poor!" cried the gaunt woman. "How are we
robbed!"

"Why are they not before Granada?" demanded the
lawyer and alertly provided the answer to his own question.
"Take locusts and give them leave to eat, being careful to
say, `This fellow's fields only!' But the locusts have wings
and their nature is to eat!"

The mountain robbers, if robbers they were, dined quietly,
the gaunt woman promptly and painstakingly serving them.
They were going to pay, I was sure, though it might not be
this noon.

The two friars seemed, quiet, simple men, dining as
dumbly as if they sat in Saint Francis's refectory. The
sometime alcalde and the shipmaster were the talkers, the
student sitting as though he were in the desert, eating bread
and cheese and onions and looking on his book. The lawyer
watched all, talked to make them talk, then came in and settled
matters. The alcalde was the politician, knowing the
affairs of the world and speaking familiarly of the King
and the Queen and the Marquis of Cadiz.

The shipmaster said, "This time last year I was in London,
and I saw their King. His name is Henry. King
Henry the Seventh, and a good carrier of his kingship!"

"That for him!" said the alcalde. "Let him stay in his
foggy island! But Spain is too small for King Ferdinand."
"All kings find their lands too small," said the lawyer.

The shipmaster spoke again. "The King of Portugal's
ship sails ahead of ours in that matter. He's stuck his banner
in the new islands, Maderia and the Hawk Islands and
where not! I was talking in Cadiz with one who was with
Bartholomew Diaz when he turned Africa and named it
Good Hope. Which is to say, King John has Good Hope of
seeing Portugal swell. Portugal! Well, I say, `Why not
Spain'?"

The student looked up from his book. "It is a great
Age!" he said and returned to his reading.

When we had finished dinner, we paid the tall, gaunt
woman and leaving the robbers, if robbers they were, still
at table, went out into the street. Here the friars, the alcalde
and the lawyer moved in the direction of the small, staring
white and ruined mosque that was to be transformed into
the church of San Jago the Deliverer. That was the one
thing of which the friars had spoken. A long bench ran by
inn wall and here the shipmaster took his seat and began to
discourse with those already there. Book under arm, the
student moved dreamily down the opposite lane. Juan
Lepe walked away alone.

Through the remainder of this day he had now company
and adventure without, now solitude and adventure within.
That night he spent in a ruined tower where young
trees grew and an owl was his comrade and he read the face
of a glorious moon. Dawn. He bathed in a stream that
ran by the mound of the tower and ate a piece of bread from
his wallet and took the road.

The sun mounted above the trees. A man upon a mule
came up behind me and was passing. "There is a stone
wedged in his shoe," I said. The rider drew rein and I
lifted the creature's foreleg and took out the pebble. The
rider made search for a bit of money. I said that the deed
was short and easy and needed no payment, whereupon he
put up the coin and regarded me out of his fine blue eyes.
He was quite fair, a young man still, and dressed after a
manner of his own in garments not at all new but with
a beauty of fashioning and putting on. He and his mule
looked a corner out of a great painting. And I had no
sooner thought that than he said, "I see in you, friend, a
face and figure for my `Draught of Fishes.' And by Saint
Christopher, there is water over yonder and just the landscape!"
He leaned from the saddle and spoke persuasively,
"Come from the road a bit down to the water and let me
draw you! You are not dressed like the kin of Midas! I
will give you the price of dinner." As he talked he drew out
of a richly worked bag a book of paper and pencils.
I thought, "This beard and the clothes of Juan Lepe. He
can hardly make it so that any may recognize." It was resting
time and the man attracted. I agreed, if he would take
no more than an hour.

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