Once you had seen it peeping forth8 from under the black skirt—have not Castilian ladies worn black immemorially?—you did not require the assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in her day could have danced la jota with Dona Ina Manuelita.
She would clack the castanets for you occasionally still, just to show how it was done, or with the guitar resting on the arm of her chair—laps were no more to be thought of than waists were—she would quaver a song, La Golindrina for choice, or La Noche esta Serena. But unquestionably Dona Ina's time had gone by for shining at anything but conversation. She could talk, and never so fruitfully as when the subject was her garden.
A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It is the innermost under-garment of the family life. Dona Ina's was walled away from the world by six feet of adobe4, around the top of which still lingered the curved red tiles of Mission manufacture. It was not spoken of as the garden at all, it was the patio, an integral part of the dwelling9. There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on the long gallery which gave access to it, and Dona Ina's drawn10-work chemises bleaching11 in the sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia; [89] it is more Greek than Oriental, and the English porch has about as much relation to it as the buttons on the back of a man's coat to the sword-belt they were once supposed to accommodate. The patio is the original mud-walled enclosure of a people who preferred living in the open but were driven to protection; the rooms about three sides of it were an afterthought.
The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable features of the early California establishment, the raised grill13 or cooking platform, and the ramada, the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat sewing at their interminable drawn work, enramada. The single vine which covered the twenty-foot trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted by Dona Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder came over Tejon Pass into the great twin valleys. In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in the corner of the patio where now there was a row of artichokes, which had been allowed to seed in order that their stiff silken tassels14, dyed blue and crimson15, might adorn16 the pair of china vases on either side the high altar. Dona Ina was nothing if not religious. In the corner of the patio farthest from the gallery, a fig17-tree—this [90] also is indispensable—hung over the tiled wall like a cloud. There was a weeping willow18 in the midst of the garden, and just outside, on either side the door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of the parent of all pepper trees in Alta California, which a sea captain from South America gave to the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall there were pomegranates.
A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me understand what a pretty woman is to some men—the kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the days when she danced la jota. The flower of the pomegranate has the crumpled19 scarlet20 of lips that find their excuse in simply being scarlet and folded like the petals21 of a flower; and then the fruit, warm from the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed! It is so tempting22 when broken open—that sort opens of its own accord if you leave it long enough on the bush—the rich heart colour, and the pleasant uncloying, sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and tastes—but when all is said and done there is nothing to a pomegranate except colour and flavour, and at least if it does not nourish neither does it give you indigestion. That is what suggests the comparison; there are so many people who would like to find a pretty woman [91] in the same category. Always when we sat together nibbling23 the rosy24 seeds, I could believe, even without the evidence of the ankles, that Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days. Only, of course, she would not have smelled so of musk25 and—there is no denying it—of garlic. Thick-walled old adobes of the period of the Spanish Occupation give off a faint reek12 of this compelling condiment26 at every pore, and as for the musk, it was always about the gallery in saucers and broken flower-pots.
And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she told me that she had had the datura moved from the place where her mother had planted it, to the far end of the patio, where after nightfall its heavy, slightly fetid perfume, unnoticeable by day, scented27 all the air. She added that she felt convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment toward a plant whose wide, papery-white bells went by the name of "Angels' trumpets28."
On the day that she told me about the datura, which I had only recognised by its resemblance to its offensive wayside congener, the "jimson weed," the Señora Echivarra had been washing her hair with a tonic29 made of oil expressed from the seeds of the megharizza after a recipe which [92] her mother had had from her mother, who had it from an Indian who used to peddle30 vegetables from the Mission, driving in every Saturday in an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if it were any more efficacious than the young shoots of the golden poppy fried in olive oil, which I had already tried. So we fell to talking of the virtues31 of plants and their application.
We began with the blessed "herb of the saints," dried bunches of which hung up under the rafters of the gallery as an unfailing resort in affections of the respiratory tract33, and yerba buena, in which she was careful to distinguish between the creeping, aromatic34 del campo of the woodlands and the yerba buena del poso, "herb of the well," the common mint of damp places. When she added that the buckskin bag on the wall contained shavings of cascara sagrada, the sacred bark of the native buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew that she had named two of the three most important contributions of the west to the modern pharmacopœia. This particular bag of bark had been sent from Sonoma County, for south of Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the gathering35. The Grindelia, she told me, had come from the salt marshes36 about the mouth of the [93] Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have crossed going northward37.
"And were you then at such pains to secure them?"
"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In her mother's time there was a regular traffic carried on by means of roving Indians in healing herbs and simples; things you could get now by no means whatever.
"As for instance——?" I was curious.
Well, there was creosote gum, which came from the desert beyond the Sierra Wall, valuable for sores and for rheumatism38. It took me a moment or two, however, to recognise in her appellation39 of it (hideondo, stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered larrea of the arid40 regions. There were roots also of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet mountains northward, and of the "skunk41 cabbage," which were to be found only in soggy mountain meadows, where any early spring, almost before the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen rooting it from the sod, fairly burying themselves in the black, peaty loam42.
But when it came to yerba mansa, Dona Ina averred43, her mother would trust nobody for its gathering. She would take an Indian or two and [94] as many of her ten children as could not be trusted to be left at home, and make long pasears into the coast ranges for this succulent cure-all. I knew it well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting plants; wherever springs babbled44, wherever a mountain stream lost itself under the roble oaks, the yerba mansa lifted above its heart-shaped leaves of pale green, quaint7, winged cones45 on pink, pellucid46 stems. But I had never heard one half of the curative wonders which Dona Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism, invaluable47 in pulmonary complaints, its bruised48 leaves reduced swellings, the roots were tonic and alterative49.
I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was directly of the line of that lovely Señorita who had disdainfully described the English as the race who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took a whole category of virtues to induce so much effort as a trip into the mountains which had not a baile or a fiesta at the end of it. Other things that were sought for by the housewives of the Spanish Occupation were amole, or soap-root, the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which comes up in the late summer among the stems of the chaparral, and the roots of the wild gourd50, [95] the chili51-cojote, a powerful purgative52. Green fruit of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded to a pulp53, did wonders in the way of removing stains from clothing.
Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the blue-eyed grass of our meadows, upon an infusion54 of which fever patients can
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