"I will go and fetch Don Luis, and he will play for us."
What then could be seen of Don Luis was a large nose, a check cap and a pair of gnarled hands which grasped his guitar in a capable manner. He sat down on a chair on the sidewalk and began to play.
"Curse it!" he exclaimed. "Do you know I used to play very well, but all this factory work ruins the fingers for playing. Mine are getting as stiff as if they had no joints in them."
Presently he was playing a jota and demanded that somebody should dance.
"Dance, dance!" he shouted. "Curse it! What's the good of playing if nobody dances?"
By this time most of the inhabitants of the houses near had gathered round, although almost hidden; but there were no young men. Antonio's sister danced a jota with a pretty girl. The jota is the most common of Spanish dances, as the waltz used to be with us. It has a _tempo_ which fluctuates between three-four and two-four, the phrases being divided into two beats each or three bars of two beats each at the will of the player. The jota that evening appeared to be a very sedate kind of dance. When it was over the crowd urged us to dance something English. We asked Don Luis to play the jota again, and to it we danced a rather mad waltz which we had invented. The path upon which we danced was of dried mud, which is pounded into unusual shapes in the winter and dries in whatever shape it happens to be when the heat comes. It was full of lumps and holes, and the light was dim. In a moment we partially understood why Antonio's sister had been so sedate. But the brother-in-law informed us:
"Say," he said, "my girl can dance wonderful. But 't'aint proper, in de town. Say, you see 'er in de country. Den she hop. She kick de window in wid 'er toe. Sure. Show you one day."
Murcia is a town of about 100,000 inhabitants and is the capital of its province, but it is hardly more than an overgrown village in spite of its cathedral, its bullring, its theatre and its cinema palace. Both at Avila and at Madrid they had said to us: "Aha, you are going to the town of the beautiful women!"
But the women of Murcia, with the exception of some lovely and filthy gipsies, were not unusually beautiful. They were thick-set and useful looking with muscular necks and ankles, and their eyes had a domesticated expression. Their clothes emphasized their defects. They indulged in pastel shades and frills which were used in fantastic ways. We have seen frills in spiral twisting around the frock from neck to hem, or a series of jaunty inverted frills round the hips, which gave to the wearer something of the appearance of one of those oleographs of a maiden half emerging from the calyx of a flower: or perpendicular frills which made the wearer resemble a cog-wheel.