All this was said with the most courteous of intentions, direct questioning being permissible in Spain. Chairs were generally brought out, one for me and others for the spectators. Nurse-maids with half-nude babies formed a large proportion of my audiences. The Spanish baby suffers from over nursing; it is carried remorselessly about from six in the morning till twelve at night; it is as a rule fretful and feverish both from the heat and from lack of sleep. Indeed Verdolay always shrilled with wailing children.
At about nine o'clock the Spaniard takes a morning snack. This consists of a slice of bread soaked with olive oil and a dried sardine, the smell of which was almost paralysing. With the perfect courtesy which marked all my peasant audiences, this would be offered to me before it was chewed loudly in my ear. When the heat was very great I would abandon my sketch as soon as the sardine stage arrived.
I was continually pestered by polite requests that So-and-so should be painted in. This often led to a lecture on composition and on the introduction of figures. If I did, however, paint in anybody the enthusiasm was enormous. People would run down the road shouting in at every cottage door:
"She has painted Enrico" (or Miguel or Maria) "into her picture."
Once while near the water-fountain I painted in the donkey of a water-carrier. For days afterwards Paco, the donkey-boy, grasped the passers-by and exclaimed with tears of joy in his voice:
The water-fountain was one of the gathering places of the village. It was the end of a small iron pipe which writhed down from the hills.
There were generally three or four donkey-boys with cantaros, and a crowd of women with amphoras waiting their turns to wedge their pots beneath the small trickle which ran from the nozzle of the pipe. Old Grumpy spent the best part of his day there, sitting with sour face in the shadow of a small tree--his chief work was either waiting his turn or leaving his pots to fill themselves. A tall bank of prickly pear cactus made a background to the gay scene. Women came from dawn until midnight, and even from the villages of the valley, for water was very scarce and most of the water in the valley wells unfit for drinking. With their heavy cantaros balanced on a projecting hip, these women walked two miles or more beneath the sweltering sun; and they asked me if I _liked_ painting.