The Spaniard may be dilatory. He puts off doing to-day what he can do to-morrow, but it is from an exaggerated respect for the benefits of leisure. His handicap is that he has no proper means of filling that leisure, his apparent laziness comes from lack of education. About eighty per cent. cannot read, schooling is not enforced, and children begin work at ten years of age or thereabouts. But do not lay up the Spaniard's desire for inactivity as a crime; it is a virtue ill employed.
Our particular specimen of the Spanish peasant was my female servant, named Encarnacion. She was thirteen years old, could neither read nor write, and worked like a small mule for the not extravagant wage of eleven shillings and sixpence a month. She only worked half the day, it is true, but we did not give her food. We indeed overpaid her, for the regular wage of her kind was about eight shillings and fourpence a month. She had a small, stumpy child's body, sprouting into a long neck, at the top of which was a rounded head. Her forehead was intellectual, her features flattened, and her hair, done up tight into a small ball, was usually decorated with a flower or a green leaf.
At first, like all Spanish peasants, she made up her mind that she could not understand what I said, but gradually learned that she had to do so, and in general succeeded pretty well. But it was to her a tremendous intellectual effort. She would wrinkle her noble-looking brow with the strain, and was never satisfied until she had translated my orders into her own patois for clarity. But she would not allow her fundamental ideas of what was proper to be influenced by my foreign notions. Sometimes she would interrupt me.
"No, Señora," she would say, "I do not like it done thus. That is not the custom. It must be done so."
If one insisted upon one's own way, the work was ill done. So that, as a rule, to save trouble, one allowed her to do as she wished. Encarnacion worked all the morning, singing an interminable Spanish song, which struck our ears queerly and pleasantly at the beginning, but of which in the end we grew very tired. By eleven o'clock she would have done all the housework, the shopping and the cooking, and would leave the stone floors soaked in water, the evaporation of which did a little to counteract the intense heat. She had a habit which we did not like of scattering our household refuse all over the small square yard. It looked dirty and untidy, but we found out that she knew better than we did. The vagrant cats soon cleared up any remains of meat, while the hot sun dried up all the other refuse, which could then be thrown away conveniently.