The Project Gutenberg EBook of Familiar Spanish Travels, by W. D. Howells #63 in our series by W. D. Howells Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: Familiar Spanish Travels Author: W. D. Howells Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7430] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 29, 2003] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS *** Produced by Eric Eldred
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS
PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND
LONDON
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1913
TO M. H.
PUERTA DEL SOL--GATE OF
THE SUN--TOLEDO
CHAP. PAGE
I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
APPROACHES ........ 1
II. SAN SEBASTIAN
AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY ..... 8
III. BURGOS AND THE
BlTTER COLD OF BURGOS ... 31
IV. THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID ........ 53
V. PHASES OF MADRID
............ 81
VI. A NIGHT AND DAY
IN TOLEDO ........ 124
VII. THE GREAT
GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE .... 150
VIII. CORDOVA AND
THE WAY THERE ........ 165
IX.. FIRST DAYS IN
SEVILLE .......... 196
X.. SEVILLIAN
ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS ...... 226
XI. TO AND IN
GRANADA ........... 267
XII. THE SURPRISES
OF RONDA .......... 296
XIII. ALGECIRAS AND
TARIFA ........... 311
PUERTA DEL SOL-GATE OF THE SUN--TOLEDO .... Frontispiece
THE CASINO, SAN
SEBASTIAN, LOOKS OUT UPON THE
CURVING CONCHA AND THE BLUE BAY ..... Facing p. 12
THE SEA SWEEPS INLAND IN A CIRCLE OF BLUE, TO FORM THE ENTRANCE TO THE HARBOR, SAN SEBASTIAN" 18
GROUPS OF WOMEN ON
THEIR KNEES BEATING CLOTHES IN THE WATER ............. "
32
THE IRON-GRAY BULK
OF THE CATHEDRAL REARS ITSELF
FROM CLUSTERING
WALLS AND ROOFS ..... " 34
THE TOMB OF DONNA
MARIA MANUEL ...... " 42
A BURGOS STREET
............. " 48
A STREET LEADING TO
THE CATHEDRAL ...... " 62
THfi UNIVERSITY OF
VALLADOLID ........ " 66
CHURCH OF SAN PABLO
........... " 70
THE HOUSE IN WHICH
PHILIP II. WAS BORN .... " 74
PUERTA DEL SOL,
MADRID .......... " 88
THE BULL-RING,
MADRID ........... " 92
GUARD-MOUNT IN THE
PLAZA DE ARMAS, ROYAL PALACE,
MADRID
............... " 114
RICHES OF GRAY ROOF
AND WHITE WALL MARK ITS IN-
SURPASSABLE
ANTIQUITY ......... " 130
AN ANCIENT CORNER OF
THE CITY ....... " 138
THE BRIDGE ACROSS
THE YELLOW TAGUS ..... " 142
THE TOWN AND
MONASTERY OF ESCORIAL ..... " 154
THE PANTHEON OF THE
KINGS AND QUEENS OP SPAIN,
UNDER THE HIGH ALTAR
OF THE CHURCH, ESCORIAL " 160
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE ANCIENT CITY OP
CORDOVA ....... . Facing p. 180
THE BELL-TOWER OP
THE GREAT MOSQUE, CORDOVA . " 184 GATEWAY OF THE BRIDGE, CORDOVA
....... " 190
IN ATTITUDES OF
SILENT DEVOTION ....... " 210
THE CATHEDRAL AND
TOWER OF THE GIRALDA .... " 214
ANCIENT ROMAN
COLUMNS LIFTING ALOFT THE FIGURES
OF HERCULES AND
CAESAR ......... " 218
GARDENS OF THE
ALCAZAR .......... " 230
THE COURT OF FLAGS
AND TOWER OF THE GIRALDA . . " 244 THE GATE OF JUSTICE. PRINCIPAL
ENTRANCE TO THE
ALHAMBRA
.............. " 274
THE COURT OP THE
LIONS .......... " 278
LOOKING NORTHWEST
FROM THE GENERALIFE OVER
GRANADA
............... " 290
LOOKING ACROSS THE
NEW BRIDGE (300 FEET HIGH)
OVER THE GUADALAVIAR
GORGE, RONDA .... " 304 VIEW OF ALGECIRAS ............ "
312
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
I AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
APPROACHES
As the train took
its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward Granada on the
soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911, the air that
came to me through the open window breathed as if from an
autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village
of northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time,
the city where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in
this magical air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal
association. The question of my present identity was a thing
indifferent and apart; it did not matter who or where or when I
was. Youth and age were at one with each other: the boy abiding
in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to dwell for
the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would give
him shelter.
In that dignified
and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of seventy-four crossing
the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada from her
conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in the
little room under the stairs in a house now practically
remoter
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
than the Alhambra,
finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the
vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had
structurally ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased
to be home even longer ago had returned to the world with me in
it, and fitted perfectly into the first-class railway compartment
which my luxury had provided for it. From its window I saw
through the car window the olive groves and white cottages of the
Spanish peasants, and the American apple orchards and meadows
stretching to the primeval woods that walled the drowsing village
round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book, the train
slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio
village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of
Granada, and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a
man of seventy-four.
I do not say the
experience was so explicit as all this; no experience so mystical
could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me in it
was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader's
company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be
honest with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish
things which was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better
confess that, however unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage
of a lover still, so that I never wished to escape from it, but
must try to hide the fact whenever the real Spain fell below the
ideal, however I might reason with my infatuation or try to scoff
it away. It had once been so inextinguishable a part of me that
the record of my journey must be more or less autobiographical;
and though I should decently endeavor to keep my past out of it,
perhaps I should not try very hard and should not always
succeed.
2
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
APPROACHES
Just when this
passion began in me I should not be able to say; but probably it
was with my first reading of Don Quixote in the later
eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old;
and, of course, I read that incomparable romance, not only
greatest, but sole of its kind, in English. The purpose of some
time reading it in Spanish and then the purpose of some time
writing the author's life grew in me with my growing years so
strongly that, though I have never yet done either and probably
never shall, I should not despair of doing both if I lived to be
a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early chanced
upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it
which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I
do not remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the
language as has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced
something of everything: literary and political history, drama,
poetry, fiction; but it never condescended to the exigencies of
common parlance. These exigencies did not exist for me in my
dreams of seeing Spain which were not really expectations. It was
not until half a century later, when my longing became a hope and
then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of practicable Spanish.
Then I invoked the help of a young professor, who came to me for
an hour each day of a week in London and let me try to talk with
him; but even then I accumulated so little practicable Spanish
that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain, exhausted my
store. My professor was from Barcelona, but he beautifully lisped
his c's and z's like any old Castilian, when he
might have hissed them in the ac-
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
cent of his native
Catalan; and there is no telling how much I might have profited
by his instruction if he had not been such a charming
intelligence that I liked to talk with him of literature and
philosophy and politics rather than the weather, or the cost of
things, or the question of how long the train stopped and when it
would start, or the dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor's,
or the forms of greeting and parting. If he did not equip me with
the useful colloquial phrases, the fault was mine; and the
misfortune was doubly mine when from my old acquaintance with
Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish) the Italian
phrases would thrust forward as the equivalent of the English
words I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that I was
not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in Spain; and if
in the course of his travels with me the reader finds me
flourishing Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute
them less to my speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I
never employed them in conversation. That reading was itself
without order or system, and I am not sure but it had better been
less than more. Yet who knows? The days, or the nights of the
days, in the eighteen-fifties went quickly, as quickly as the
years go now, and it would have all come to the present pass
whether that blind devotion to an alien literature had cloistered
my youth or not.
I do not know how,
with the merciful make I am of, I should then have cared so
little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly knew
that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and
Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and
the Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for
their atrocious destruction of the only American civilizations.
As nearly as I can
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
APPROACHES
now say, I was of
both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though I do not see
now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for the
softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive
Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state
known to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the
Spanish sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of
history that I had not penetrated till long afterward in pursuit
of Spanish perfidy and inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule
of Holland. When it came in those earlier days to a question of
sides between the Spaniards and the Moors, as Washington Irving
invited my boyhood to take it in his chronicle of the conquest of
Granada, I experienced on a larger scale my difficulty in the
case of the Mexicans and Peruvians. The case of these had been
reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was an
affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and
yet I felt as helpless as I was at ten. Will it be credited that
at seventy-four I am still often in doubt which side I should
have had win, though I used to fight on both? Since the matter
was settled more than four hundred years ago, I will not give the
reasons for my divided allegiance. They would hardly avail now to
reverse the tragic fate of the Moors, and if I try I cannot
altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever Spanish misrule has been
since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has been the error of
law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been the effect
of personal will, the caprice of despots high and low, the
unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and
cruelest error of Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its
adoration of ideal womanhood, than the Mohammedan state with its
sensual dreams of Paradise. I will not pretend (as I very well
might, and as I
5
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
perhaps ought) that
I thought of these things, all or any, as our train began to
slope rather more rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way
under the rising moon over the storied Vega. I will as little
pretend that my attitude toward Spain was ever that of the
impartial observer after I crossed the border of that enchanted
realm where we all have our castles. I have thought it best to be
open with the reader here at the beginning, and I would not, if I
could, deny him the pleasure of doubting my word or disabling my
judgment at any point he likes. In return I shall only ask his
patience when I strike too persistently the chord of
autobiography. That chord is part of the harmony between the boy
and the old man who made my Spanish journey together, and were
always accusing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of
doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really much
difference between the two?
II
It was fully a month
before that first night in Granada that I arrived in Spain after
some sixty years' delay. During this period I had seen almost
every other interesting country in Europe. I had lived five or
six years in Italy; I had been several months in Germany; and a
fortnight in Holland; I had sojourned often in Paris; I had come
and gone a dozen times in England and lingered long each time;
and yet I had never once visited the land of my devotion. I had
often wondered at this, it was so wholly involuntary, and I had
sometimes suffered from the surprise of those who knew of my
passion for Spain, and kept finding out my dereliction, alleging
the Sud-
6
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
APPROACHES
Express to Madrid as
something that left me without excuse. The very summer before
last I got so far on the way in London as to buy a Spanish
phrase-book full of those inopportune conversations with
landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual acquaintance or
agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to America with my
desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and when once
more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding of
another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate
longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in
London I had my doubts and my self-doubts. There were delays at
London, delays at Paris, delays at Tours; and when at last we
crossed the Pyrenees and I found myself in Spain, it was with an
incredulity which followed me throughout and lingered with me to
the end. "Is this truly Spain, and am I actually there?" the
thing kept asking itself; and it asks itself still, in terms that
fit the accomplished fact.
II
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
EVEN at Irún,
where we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at once to be
temperamental differences which ought to have wrought against my
weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a customs
inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed
them all with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ
uncongenial to a gentleman. Perhaps he was also loath to attempt
any inquiry in that Desperanto of French, English, and Spanish
which raged around us; but the porter to whom we had fallen,
while I hesitated at our carriage door whether I should summon
him as Mozo or Usted, was master of that lingua
franca and recovered us from the customs without question on
our part, and understood everything we could not, say. I like to
think he was a Basque, because I like the Basques so much for no
reason that I can think of. Their being always Carlists would
certainly be no reason with me, for I was never a Carlist; and
perhaps my liking is only a prejudice in their favor from the air
of thrift and work which pervades their beautiful province, or is
an effect of their language as I first saw it inscribed on the
front of the Credit Lyonnais at Bayonne. It looked so beautifully
regular, so scholarly, so Latin, so sister to both Spanish and
Italian, so richly and musically voweled, and yet remained so
impenetrable to the most daring surmise, that I conceived
at
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL. BISCAY
once a profound
admiration for the race which could keep such a language to
itself. When I remembered how blond, how red-blond our sinewy
young porter was, I could not well help breveting him of that
race, and honoring him because he could have read those words
with the eyes that were so blue amid the general Spanish
blackness of eyes. He imparted a quiet from his own calm to our
nervousness, and if we had appealed to him on the point I am sure
he would have saved us from the error of breakfasting in the
station restaurant at the deceitful table d'hote, though
where else we should have breakfasted I do not know.
I
One train left for
San Sebastian while I was still lost in amaze that what I had
taken into my mouth for fried egg should be inwardly fish and
full of bones; but he quelled my anxiety with the assurance,
which I somehow understood, that there would be another train
soon. In the mean time there were most acceptable Spanish
families all about, affably conversing together, and freely
admitting to their conversation the children, who so publicly
abound in Spain, and the nurses who do nothing to prevent their
publicity. There were already the typical fat Spanish mothers and
lean fathers, with the slender daughters, who, in the tradition
of Spanish good-breeding, kept their black eyes to themselves, or
only lent them to the spectators in furtive glances. Both older
and younger ladies wore the scanty Egyptian skirt of Occidental
civilization, lurking or perking in deep-drooping or high-raking
hats, though already here and there was the mantilla, which would
more and more prevail as we went southward; older and younger,
they
9
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
were all painted and
powdered to the favor that Spanish women everywhere corne
to.
When the bad
breakfast was over, and the waiters were laying the table for
another as bad, our Basque porter came in and led us to the train
for San Sebastian which he had promised us. It was now raining
outside, and we were glad to climb into our apartment without at
all seeing what Irun was or was not like. But we thought well of
the place because we first experienced there the ample ease of a
Spanish car. In Spain the railroad gauge is five feet six inches;
and this car of ours was not only very spacious, but very clean,
while the French cars that had brought us from Bordeaux to
Bayonne and from Bayonne to Irun were neither. I do not say all
French cars are dirty, or all Spanish cars are as clean as they
are spacious. The cars of both countries are hard to get into, by
steep narrow footholds worse even than our flights of steps; in
fact, the English cars are the only ones I know which are easy of
access. But these have not the ample racks for hand-bags which
the Spanish companies provide for travelers willing to take
advantage of their trust by transferring much of their heavy
stuff to them. Without owning that we were such travelers, I find
this the place to say that, with the allowance of a hundred and
thirty-two pounds free, our excess baggage in two large
steamer-trunks did not cost us three dollars in a month's travel,
with many detours, from Irun in the extreme north to Algeciras in
the extreme south of Spain.
II
But in this sordid
detail I am keeping the reader from the scenery. It had been
growing more and
10
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
more striking ever
since we began climbing into the Pyrenees from Bayonne; but upon
the whole it was not so sublime as it was beautiful. There were
some steep, sharp peaks, but mostly there were grassy valleys
with white cattle grazing in them, and many fields of Indian
corn, endearingly homelike. This at least is mainly the trace
that the scenery as far as Irun has left among my notes; and
after Irun there is record of more and more corn. There was, in
fact, more corn than anything else, though there were many
orchards, also endearingly homelike, with apples yellow and red
showing among the leaves still green on the trees; if there had
been something more wasteful in the farming it would have been
still more homelike, but a traveler cannot have everything. The
hillsides were often terraced, as in Italy, and the culture
apparently close and conscientious. The farmhouses looked
friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape was molested by
some sort of manufactories which could not conceal their tall
chimneys, though they kept the secret of their industry. They
were never, really, very bad, and I would have been willing to
let them pass for fulling-mills, such as I was so familiar with
in Don Quixote, if I had thought of these in time. But one
ought to be honest at any cost, and I must own that the Spain I
was now for the first time seeing with every-day eyes was so
little like the Spain of my boyish vision that I never once
recurred to it. That was a Spain of cork-trees, of groves by the
green margins of mountain brooks, of habitable hills, where
shepherds might feed their flocks and mad lovers and maids
forlorn might wander and maunder; and here were fields of corn
and apple orchards and vineyards reddening and yellowing up to
the doors of those comfortable farmhouses, with nowhere the sign
of 2 11
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
a Christian cavalier
or a turbaned infidel. As a man I could not help liking what I
saw, but I could also grieve for the boy who would have been so
disappointed if he had come to the Basque provinces of Spain when
he was from ten to fifteen years old, instead of
seventy-four.
It took our train
nearly an hour to get by twenty miles of those pleasant farms and
the pretty hamlets which they now and then clustered into. But
that was fast for a Spanish way-train, which does not run, but,
as it were, walks with dignity and makes long stops at stations,
to rest and let the locomotive roll itself a cigarette. By the
time we reached San Sebastian our rain had thickened to a heavy
downpour, and by the time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up
in the hotel, it was storming in a fine fury over the bay under
them, and sweeping the curving quays and tossing the feathery
foliage of the tamarisk-shaded promenade. The distinct advantage
of our lofty perch was the splendid sight of the tempest, held
from doing its worst by the mighty headlands standing out to sea
on the right and left. But our rooms were cold with the stony
cold of the south when it is cooling off from its summer, and we
shivered in the splendid sight.
III
The inhabitants of
San Sebastian will not hesitate to say that it is the prettiest
town in Spain, and I do not know that they could be hopefully
contradicted. It is very modern in its more obvious aspects, with
a noble thoroughfare called the Avenida de Libertad for its
principal street, shaded with a double row of those feathery
tamarisks, and with handsome shops glitter-
12
THE CASINO, SAN
SEBASTIAN, LOOKS OUT UPON THE CURVING CONCHA AND THE BLUE
BAY
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
ing on both sides of
it. Very easily it is first of the fashionable watering-places of
Spain; the King has his villa there, and the court comes every
summer. But they had gone by the time we got there, and the town
wore the dejected look of out-of-season summer resorts; though
there was the apparatus of gaiety, the fine casino at one end of
the beach, and the villas of the rich and noble all along it to
the other end. On the sand were still many bathing-machines, but
many others had begun to climb for greater safety during the
winter to the street above. We saw one hardy bather dripping up
from the surf and seeking shelter among those that remained, but
they were mostly tenanted by their owners, who looked shoreward
through their open doors, and made no secret of their cozy
domesticity, where they sat and sewed or knitted and gossiped
with their neighbors. Good wives and mothers they doubtless were,
but no doubt glad to be resting from the summer pleasure of
others. They had their beautiful names written up over their
doors, and were for the service of the lady visitors only; there
were other machines for gentlemen, and no doubt it was their
owners whom we saw gathering the fat seaweed thrown up by the
storm into the carts drawn by oxen over the sand. The oxen wore
no yokes, but pulled by a band drawn over their foreheads under
their horns, and they had the air of not liking the arrangement;
though, for the matter of that, I have never seen oxen that
seemed to like being yoked.
When we came down to
dinner we found the tables fairly full of belated visitors, who
presently proved tourists flying south like ourselves. The dinner
was good, as it is in nearly all Spanish hotels, where for an
average of three dollars a day you have an inclusive rate which
you must double for as good accommoda-
13
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
tion in our States.
Let no one, I say, fear the rank cookery so much imagined of the
Peninsula, the oil, the pepper, the kid and the like strange
meats; as in all other countries of Europe, even England itself,
there is a local version, a general convention of the French
cuisine, quite as good in Spain as elsewhere, and oftener
superabundant than subabundant. The plain water is generally
good, With an American edge of freshness; but if you will not
trust it (we had to learn to trust it) there are agreeable
Spanish mineral waters, as well as the Apollinaris, the St.
Galmier, and the Perrier of other civilizations, to be had for
the asking, at rather greater cost than the good native wines,
often included in the inclusive rate.
Besides this
convention of the French cuisine there is almost everywhere a
convention of the English language in some one of the waiters.
You must not stray far from the beaten path of your immediate
wants, but in this you are safe. At San Sebastian we had even a
wider range with the English of the little intellectual-looking,
pale Spanish waiter, with a fine Napoleonic head, who came to my
help when I began to flounder in the language which I had read so
much and spoken so little or none. He had been a year in London,
he said, and he took us for English, though, now he came to
notice it, he perceived we were Americans because we spoke
"quicklier" than the English. We did not protest; it was the
mildest criticism of our national accent which we were destined
to get from English-speaking Spaniards before they found we were
not the English we did not wish to be taken for. After dinner we
asked for a fire in one of our grates, but the maid declared
there was no fuel; and, though the hostess denied this and
promised us a fire the next night, she forgot it till nine
o'clock, and then we would not
14
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
have it. The cold
abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian, but the storm
(which had hummed and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke
during the first night, and the day followed with several
intervals of sunshine, which bathed us in a glowing-expectation
of overtaking the fugitive summer farther south.
IV
In the mean time we
hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red Basque cap and
high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at something above the
legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San Sebastian
unseen. He took us, naturally, to several churches, old and new,
with their Gothic and rococo interiors, which I still find
glooming and glinting among my evermore thickening impressions of
like things. We got from them the sense of that architectural and
sculptural richness which the interior of no Spanish church ever
failed measurably to give; but what their historical associations
were I will not offer to say. The associations of San Sebastian
with the past are in all things vague, at least for me. She was
indeed taken from the French by the English under Wellington
during the Peninsular War, but of older, if not unhappier
farther-off days and battles longer ago her history as I know it
seems to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles
between the partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella
so few decades since as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet,
and I am not able to blink the fact that my beloved Basques
fought on the wrong side, when they need not have fought at all.
Why they were Carlists they could perhaps no more say
16
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
than I could. The
monumental historic fact is that the Basques have been where they
are immeasurably beyond the memories of other men; what the scope
of their own memories is one could perhaps confidently say only
in Basque if one could say anything. Of course, in the nature of
things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the Greeks,
doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules;
the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then
Christianized the province. It is next neighbor to that province
of Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed to conquer the Goths,
and from which Spain was to live and grow again and recover all
her losses from the Moors; but what the share of San Sebastian
was in this heroic fate, again I must leave the Basques to say.
They would doubtless say it with sufficient self-respect, for
wherever we came in contact that day with the Basque nature we
could not help imagining in it a sense of racial merit equaling
that of the Welsh themselves, who are indeed another branch of
the same immemorial Iberian stock, if the Basques are Iberians.
Like the Welsh, they have the devout tradition that they never
were conquered, but yielded to circumstances when these became
too strong for them.
Among the ancient
Spanish liberties which were restricted by the consolidating
monarchy from age to age, the Basque fueros, or rights,
were the oldest; they lasted quite to our own day; and although
it is known to more ignorant men that these privileges (including
immunity from conscription) have now been abrogated, the
custodian of the House of Provincial Deputies, whom our driver
took us to visit, was such a glowing Basque patriot that he
treated them as in full force. His pride in the seat of the local
government spared us no detail of
the whole electric-lighting system, or
16
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
even the hose-bibs
for guarding the edifice against fire, let alone every picture
and photograph on the wall of every chamber of greater or less
dignity, with every notable table and chair. He certainly earned
the peseta I gave him, but he would have done far more for it if
we had suffered him to take us up another flight of stairs; and
he followed us in our descent with bows and adieux that ought to
have left no doubt in our minds of the persistence of the Basque
fueros.
V
It was to such a
powerful embodiment of the local patriotism that our driver had
brought us from another civic palace overlooking the Plaza de la
Constitution, chiefly notable now for having been the old theater
of the bull-fights. The windows in the houses round still bear
the numbers by which they were sold to spectators as boxes; but
now the municipality has built a beautiful brand-new bull-ring in
San Sebastian; and I do not know just why we were required to
inspect the interior of the edifice overlooking this square. I
only know that at sight of our bewilderment a workman doing
something to the staircase clapped his hands orientally, and the
custodian was quickly upon us in response to a form of summons
which we were to find so often used in Spain. He was not so
crushingly upon us as that other custodian; he was apologetically
proud, rather than boastfully; at times he waved his hands in
deprecation, and would have made us observe that the place was
little, very little; he deplored it like a host who wishes his
possessions praised. Among the artistic treasures of the place
from which he did not excuse us there were some
pen-drawings,
17
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
such as
writing-masters execute without lifting the pen from the paper,
by a native of South America, probably of Basque descent, since
the Basques have done so much to people that continent. We not
only admired these, but we would not consent to any of the
custodian's deprecations, especially when it came to question of
the pretty salon in which Queen Victoria was received on her
first visit to San Sebastian. We supposed then, and in fact I had
supposed till this moment, that it was Queen Victoria of Great
Britain who was meant; but now I realize that it must have been
the queen consort of Spain, who seems already to have made
herself so liked there.
She, of course,
comes every summer to San Sebastian, and presently our driver
took us to see the royal villa by the shore, withdrawn, perhaps
from a sense of its extreme plainness, not to say ugliness, among
its trees and vines behind its gates and walls. Our driver
excused himself for not being able to show us through it; he
gladly made us free of an unrestricted view of the royal
bathing-pavilion, much more frankly splendid in its gilding,
beside the beach. Other villas ranked themselves along the
hillside, testifying to the gaiety of the social life in summers
past and summers to come. In the summer just past the gaiety may
have been interrupted by the strikes taking in the newspapers the
revolutionary complexion which it was now said they did not wear.
At least, when the King had lately come to fetch the royal
household away nothing whatever happened, and the "constitutional
guarantees," suspended amidst the ministerial anxieties, were
restored during the month, with the ironical applause of the
liberal press, which pretended that there had never been any need
of their suspension.
18
THE SEA SWEEPS
INLAND IN A CIRCLE OF BLUE, TO FORM THE ENTRANCE TO THE HARBOR,
SAN SEBASTIAN
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
VI
All pleasures, mixed
or unmixed, must end, and the qualified joy of our drive through
San Sebastian came to a close on our return to our hotel well
within the second hour, almost within its first half. When I
proposed paying our driver for the exact time, he drooped upon
his box and, remembering my remorse in former years for standing
upon my just rights in such matters, I increased the fare, peseta
by peseta, till his sinking spirits rose, and he smiled
gratefully upon me and touched his brave red cap as he drove
away. He had earned his money, if racking his invention for
objects of interest in San Sebastian was a merit. At the end we
were satisfied that it was a well-built town with regular blocks
in the modern quarter, and not without the charm of
picturesqueness which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the
older parts. Prescient of the incalculable riches before us, we
did not ask much of it, and we got all we asked. I should be
grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing else than the two very
Spanish experiences I had there. One concerned a letter for me
which had been refused by the bankers named in my letter of
credit, from a want of faith, I suppose, in my coming. When I did
come I was told that I would find it at the post-office. That
would be well enough when I found the post-office, which ought to
have been easy enough, but which presented certain difficulties
in the driving rain of our first afternoon. At last in a fine
square I asked a fellow-man in my best conversational Spanish
where the post-office was, and after a moment's apparent
suffering he returned, "Do you speak English?" "Yes." I said,
"and I am so glad you do." "Not
19
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
at all. I don't
speak anything else. Great pleasure. There is the post-office,"
and it seemed that I had hardly escaped collision with it. But
this was the beginning, not the end, of my troubles. When I
showed my card to the poste restante clerk, he went
carefully through the letters bearing the initial of my name and
denied that there was any for me. We entered into reciprocally
bewildering explanations, and parted altogether baffled. Then, at
the hotel, I consulted with a capable young office-lady, who
tardily developed a knowledge of English, and we agreed that it
would be well to send the chico to the post-office for it.
The chico, corresponding in a Spanish hotel to a
piccolo in Germany or a page in England, or our own now
evanescing bell-boy, was to get a peseta for bringing me
the letter. He got the peseta, though he only brought me
word that the axithorities would send the letter to the hotel by
the postman that night. The authorities did not send it that
night, and the next morning I recurred to my bankers. There, on
my entreaty for some one who could meet my Spanish at least
half-way in English, a manager of the bank came out of his office
and reassured me concerning the letter which I had now begun to
imagine the most important I had ever missed. Even while we
talked the postman came in and owned having taken the letter back
to the office. He voluntarily promised to bring it to the bank at
one o'clock, when I hastened to meet him. At that hour every one
was out at lunch; I came again at four, when everybody had
returned, but the letter was not delivered; at five, just before
the bank closed, the letter, which had now grown from a
carta to a cartela, was still on its way. I left
San Sebastian without it; and will it be credited that when it
was forwarded to me a week later at Madrid it proved
the
20
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
most fatuous missive
imaginable, wholly concerning the writer's own affairs and none
of mine?
I cannot guess yet
why it was withheld from me, but since the incident brought me
that experience of Spanish politeness, I cannot grieve for it.
The young banker who left his region of high finance to come out
and condole with me, in apologizing for the original refusal of
my letter, would not be contented with so little. Nothing would
satisfy him but going with me, on my hinted purpose, and
inquiring with me at the railroad office into the whole business
of circular tickets, and even those kilometric tickets which the
Spanish railroads issue to such passengers as will have their
photographs affixed to them for the prevention of transference.
As it seemed advisable not to go to this extreme till I got to
Madrid, my kind young banker put himself at my disposal for any
other service I could imagine from him; but I searched myself in
vain for any desire, much less necessity, and I parted from him
at the door of his bank with the best possible opinion of the
Basques. I suppose he was a Basque; at any rate, he was blond,
which the Spaniards are mostly not, and the Basques often are.
Now I am sorry, since he was so kind, that I did not get him to
read me the Basque inscription on the front of his bank, which
looked exactly like that on the bank at Bayonne; I should not
have understood it, but I should have known what it sounded like,
if it sounded like anything but Basque.
Everybody in San
Sebastian seemed resolved to outdo every other in kindness. In a
shop where we endeavored to explain that we wanted to get a flat
cap which should be both Basque and red, a lady who was buying
herself a hat asked in English if she could help us. When we
gladly answered that
21
SPANISH
TKAVELS
she could, she was
silent, almost to tears, and it appeared that in this generous
offer of aid she had exhausted her whole stock of English. Her
mortification, her painful surprise, at the strange catastrophe,
was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape from it to a shop
across the street. There instantly a small boy rushed
enterprisingly out and brought back with him a very pretty girl
who spoke most of the little French which has made its way in San
Sebastian against the combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap of
the right flatness and redness was brought. I must not forget,
among the pleasures done us by the place, the pastry cook's shop
which advertised in English "Tea at all Hours," and which at that
hour of our afternoon we now found so opportune, that it seemed
almost personally attentive to us as the only Anglo-Saxon
visitors in town. The tea might have been better, but it was as
good as it knew how; and the small boy who came in with his
mother (the Spanish mother seldom fails of the company of a small
boy) in her moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his
finger all the pieces of pastry except those we were
eating.
VII
The high aquiline
nose which is characteristic of the autochthonic race abounds in
San Sebastian, but we saw no signs of the high temper which is
said to go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from my
first reading in Don Quixote, of the terrific combat
between the squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the
knight of La Mancha stopped after his engagement with the
windmills. In their exchange of insults incident to the knight's
desire that the ladies
22
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
should go to Toboso
and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the necromancers
he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks,
"'Get gone,' the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse
Biscayan, ' Get gone, thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by
He Who me create . . . me kill thee now so sure as me be
Biscayan,'" and when the knight called him an "inconsiderable
mortal," and said that if he were a gentleman he would chastise
him: "'What! me no gentleman?' replied the Biscayan. 'I swear
thou be liar as me be Christian. . . . Me will show thee me be
Biscayan, and gentleman by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman in
spite of Devil; and thou lie if thou say the
contrary.'"
It is a scene which
will have lived in the memory of every reader, and I recurred to
it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this fiery
threefold gentleman might have lived in his time. It would be
interesting to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in a
fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to represent in the
talk of his Biscayan. Like the Welsh again they strenuously keep
their immemorial language against the inroads of the neighboring
speech. How much they fix it in a modern literature it would be
easier to ask than to say. I suppose there must be Basque
newspapers; perhaps there are Basque novelists, there are
notoriously Basque bards who recite their verses to the peasants,
and doubtless there are poets who print their rhymes: and I blame
myself for not inquiring further concerning them of that kindly
Basque banker who wished so much to do something for me in
compensation for the loss of my worthless letter. I knew, too
cheaply, that the Basques have their poetical contests, as the
Welsh have their musical competitions in the Eisteddfod, and they
are once more
23
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
like the Welsh,
their brothers in antiquity, in calling themselves by a national
name of their own. They call themselves Euskaldunac, which is as
different from the name of Basque given them by the alien races
as Cymru is from Welsh.
All this lore I have
easily accumulated from the guide-books since leaving San
Sebastian, but I was carelessly ignorant of it in driving from
the hotel to the station when we came away, and was much
concerned in the overtures made us in a mixed Spanish, English,
and French by a charming family from Chili, through the brother
to one of the ladies and luisband to the other. When he perceived
from my Spanish that we were not English, he rejoiced that we
were Americans of the north, and as joyfully proclaimed that they
were Americans of the south. We were at once sensible of a
community of spirit in our difference from our different
ancestral races. They were Spanish, but with a New World
blitheness which we nowhere afterward found in the native
Spaniards; and we were English, with a willingness to laugh and
to joke which they had not perhaps noted in our ancestral
contemporaries. Again and again we met them in the different
cities where we feared we had lost them, until we feared no more
and counted confidently on seeing them wherever we went. They
were always radiantly smiling; and upon this narrow ground I am
going to base the conjecture that the most distinctive difference
of the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern is its habit of seeing
the fun of things. With those dear Chilians we saw the fun of
many little hardships of travel which might have been
insupportable without the vision. Sometimes we surprised one
another in the same hotel; sometimes it was in the street that we
encountered, usually to exchange amus-
24
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
ing misfortunes. If
we could have been constantly with these fellow-hemispherists our
progress through Spain would have been an unbroken
holiday.
There is a
superstition of travelers in Spain, much fostered by innkeepers
and porters, that you cannot get seats in the fast trains without
buying your tickets the day before, and then perhaps not, and we
abandoned ourselves to this fear at San Sebastian so far as to
get places some hours in advance. But once established in the
ten-foot-wide interior of the first-class compartment which we
had to ourselves, every anxiety fell from us; and I do not know a
more flattering emotion than that which you experience in sinking
into your luxurious seat, and, after a glance at your hand-bags
in the racks where they have been put with no strain on your own
muscles, giving your eyes altogether to the joy of the novel
landscape.
The train was what
they call a Rapido in Spain; and though we were supposed to be
devouring space with indiscriminate gluttony, I do not think that
in our mad rush of twenty-five miles an hour we failed to taste
any essential detail of the scenery. .But I wish now that I had
known the Basques were all nobles, and that the peasants owned
many of the little farms we saw declaring the general thrift. In
the first two hours of the six to Burgos we ran through lovely
valleys held in the embrace of gentle hills, where the fields of
Indian corn were varied by groves of chestnut trees, where we
could see the burrs gaping on their stems. The blades and tassels
of the corn had been stripped away, leaving the ripe ears a-tilt
at the top of the stalks, which looked like cranes standing on
one leg with their heads slanted in pensive contemplation. There
were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the farmhouses, and
all about there were other trees
25
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
pollarded to the
quick and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the
slim poplars trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in
southern France. The houses, when they did not stand apart like
our own farmhouses, gathered into gray-brown villages around some
high-shouldered church with a bell-tower in front or at one
corner of the fagade. In most of the larger houses an economy of
the sun's heat, the only heat recognized in the winter of
southern countries, was practised by glassing in the balconies
that stretched quite across their fronts and kept the cold from
at least one story. It gave them a very cheery look, and must
have made them livable at least in the daytime. Now and then the
tall chimney of one of those manufactories we had seen on the way
from Irun invited belief in the march of industrial prosperity;
but whether the Basque who took work in a mill or a foundry
forfeited his nobility remained a part of the universal Basque
secret. From time to time a mountain stream brawled from under a
world-old bridge, and then spread a quiet tide for the women to
kneel beside and wash the clothes which they spread to dry on
every bush and grassy slope of the banks.
The whole scene
changed after we ran out of the Basque country and into the
austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled
into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage
nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the
green of the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the
measureless wheat-lands into which the valleys flattened and
widened. There were no longer any factory chimneys; the villages
seemed to turn from stone to mud; the human poverty showed itself
in the few patched and tattered figures that followed the oxen in
the interminable furrows shallowly
26
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
scraping the surface
of the lonely levels. The haggard mountain ranges were of stone
that seemed blanched with geologic superannuation, and at one
place we ran by a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile
long against the sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered
up again in a succession of titanic bulks. But stupendous as
these mountain masses were, they were not so wonderful as those
wheat-lands which in harvest-time must wash their shores like a
sea of gold. Where these now rose and sank with the long
ground-swell of the plains in our own West, a thin gray stubble
covered them from the feeble culture which leaves Spain, for all
their extent in both the Castiles, in Estremadura, in Andalusia,
still without bread enough to feed herself, and obliges her to
import alien wheat. At the lunch which we had so good in the
dining-car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and
well away from the interesting Spanish pair at our table. It is
never safe in Latin Europe to count upon ignorance of English in
educated people, or people who look so; and with these we had the
reward of our prudence when the husband asked after dessert if we
minded his smoking. His English seemed meant to open the way for
talk, and we were willing he should do the talking. He spoke
without a trace of accent, and we at once imagined circles in
which it was now as chic for Spaniards to speak English as
it once was to speak French. They are said never to speak French
quite well; but nobody could have spoken English better than this
gentleman, not even we who were, as he said he supposed, English.
Truth and patriotism both obliged us to deny his conjecture; and
when He intimated that he would not have known us for Americans
because we did not speak with the dreadful American accent, I
hazarded my belief that this dread-3 27
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
fulness was personal
rather than national. But he would not have it. Boston people,
yes; they spoke very well, and he allowed other exceptions to the
general rule of our nasal twang, which his wife summoned English
enough to say was very ugly. They had suffered from it too
universally in the Americans they had met during the summer in
Germany to believe it was merely personal; and I suppose one may
own to strictly American readers that our speech is
dreadful, that it is very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no
reason and no wish to wound; and they could never know what sweet
and noble natures had been producing their voices through their
noses there in Germany. I for my part could not insist; who,
indeed, can defend the American accent, which is not so much an
accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang? It was mortifying, all
the same, to have it openly abhorred by a foreigner, and I
willingly got away from the question to that of the weather. We
agreed admirably about the heat in England where this gentleman
went every summer, and had never found it so hot before. It was
hot even in Denmark; but he warned me not to expect any warmth in
Spain now that the autumn rains had begun.
If this couple
represented a cosmopolitan and modern Spain, it was interesting
to escape to something entirely native in the three young girls
who got in at the next station and shared our compartment with us
as far as we went. They were tenderly kissed by their father in
putting them on board, and held in lingering farewells at the
window till the train started. The eldest of the three then
helped in arranging their baskets in the rack, but the middle
sister took motherly charge of the youngest, whom she at once
explained to us as enferma. She was the prettiest girl of
the con-
28
SAN SEBASTIAN AND
BEAUTIFUL BISCAY
ventional Spanish
type we Lad yet seen: dark-eyed and dark-haired, regular, but a
little overfull of the chin which she would presently have
double. She was very, very pale of face, with a pallor in which
she had assisted nature with powder, as all Spanish women, old
and young, seem to do. But there was no red underglow in the
pallor, such as gives many lovely faces among them the complexion
of whitewash over pink on a stucco surface. She wrapped up the
youngest sister, who would by and by be beautiful, and now being
sick had only the flush of fever in her cheeks, and propped her
in the coziest corner of the car, where she tried to make her
keep still, but could not make her keep silent. In fact, they all
babbled together, over the basket of luncheon which the middle
sister opened after springing up the little table-leaf of the
window, and spread with a substantial variety including fowl and
sausage and fruit, such as might tempt any sick appetite, or a
well one, even. As she brought out each of these victuals,
together with a bottle of wine and a large bottle of milk, she
first offered it to us, and when it was duly refused with thanks,
she made the invalid eat and drink, especially the milk which she
made a wry face at. When she had finished they all began to
question whether her fever was rising for the day; the good
sister felt the girl's pulse, and got out a thermometer, which
together they arranged under her arm, and then duly inspected. It
seemed that the fever was rising, as it might very well
be, but the middle sister was not moved from her notable calm,
and the eldest did not fear. At a place where a class of young
men was to be seen before an ecclesiastical college the girls
looked out together, and joyfully decided that the brother (or
possibly a cousin) whom they expected to see, was really there
among them. When
29
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
we reached Burgos we
felt that we had assisted at a drama of family medicine and
affection which was so sweet that if the fever was not very
wisely it was very winningly treated. It was not perhaps a very
serious case, and it meant a good deal of pleasant excitement for
all concerned.
III
BURGOS AND THE
BITTER COLD OF BURGOS
IT appears to be the
use in most minor cities of Spain for the best hotel to send the
worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, "Good wine needs
no bush." At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness of
the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of
praise in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong
one. It was indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right
hotel in Burgos when you arrive there on an afternoon of early
October, and feel the prophetic chill of that nine months of
winter which is said to contrast there with three months of
hell.
I
The air of Burgos
when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and clammy
through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer
attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old
Castile. Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but
probably when she ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of
Christian Spain and shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in
the fourteenth century. Now, in the twentieth, we asked nothing
of
31
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
her but two rooms in
which we could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly
declared that it had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though
there must have been one in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out
that it was completely equipped with steam-heating apparatus, but
when I made him observe that there was no steam in the shining
radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was truth in what I
said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south which would
have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing in
San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us
his beautiful new dining-room, cold, with the same sunny
exposure. I rashly declared that all would not do, and that I
would look elsewhere for rooms with fireplaces. I had first to
find a cab in order to find the other hotels, but I found instead
that in a city of thirty-eight thousand inhabitants there was not
one cab standing for hire in the streets. I tried to enlist the
sympathies of some private carriages, but they remained
indifferent, and I went back foiled, but not crushed, to our
hotel. There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was the
omnibus which had brought us from the station. The landlord
calmly (I did not then perceive the irony of his calm) had the
horses put to and our baggage put on, and we drove away. But
first we met our dear Chilians coming to our hotel from the hotel
they had chosen, and from a search for hearthstones in others;
and we drove to the only hotel they had left unvisited. There at
our demand for fires the landlord all but laughed us to scorn; he
laid his hand on the cold radiator in the hotel as if to ask what
better we could wish than that. We drove back, humbled, to our
own hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian cairn he
had kept at our departure. Then there was
32
GROUPS OF WOMEN ON
THEIR KNEES BEATING CLOTHES IN THE WATER
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
nothing for me but
to declare myself the Prodigal Son returned to take the rooms he
had offered us. We were so perfectly in his power that he could
magnanimously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but we
did not care to move. The Chilians had retired baffled to their
own hotel, and there was nothing for us but to accept the long
evening of gelid torpor which we foresaw must follow the effort
of the soup and wine to warm us at dinner. That night we heard
through our closed doors agonized voices which we knew to be the
voices of despairing American women wailing through the freezing
corridors, "Can't she understand that I want boiling
water?" and, "Can't' we go down-stairs to a fire somewhere?" We
knew the one meant the chambermaid and the other the kitchen, but
apparently neither prayer was answered.
II
As soon as we had
accepted our fate, while as yet the sun had not set behind the
clouds which had kept it out of our rooms all day, we hurried out
not only to escape the rigors of our hotel, but to see as soon as
we could, as much as we could of the famous city. We had got an
excellent cup of tea in the glass-roofed pavilion of our
beautiful cold dining-room, and now our spirits rose level with
the opportunities of the entrancing walk we took along the course
of the Arlanson. I say course, because that is the right word to
use of a river, but really there was no course in the Arlanzon.
Between the fine, wide Embankments and under the noble bridges
there were smooth expanses of water (naturally with women washing
at them), which reflected like an afterglow of the evening sky
the splendid masses of yarn hung red from the dyer's vats on
the
33
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
bank. The expanses
of water were bordered by wider spaces of grass which had grown
during the rainless summer, but which were no doubt soon to be
submerged under the autumnal torrent the river would become. The
street which shaped itself to the stream was a rather modern
avenue, leading to a beautiful public garden, with the statues
and fountains proper to a public garden, and densely shaded
against the three infernal months of the Burgos year. But the
houses were glazed all along their fronts with the sun-traps
which we had noted in the Basque country, and which do not wait
for a certain date in the almanac to do the work of
steam-heating. They gave a tempting effect to the house-fronts,
but they could not distract our admiration from the successive
crowds of small boys playing at bull-fighting in the streets
below, and in the walks of the public garden. The population of
Burgos is above thirty-seven thousand and of the inhabitants at
least thirty-six thousand are small boys, as I was convinced by
the computation of the husband and brother of the Chilian ladies
which agreed perfectly with my own hasty conjecture; the rest are
small girls. In fact large families, and large families chiefly
of boys, are the rule in Spain everywhere; and they everywhere
know how to play bull-fighting, to flap any-colored old shawl, or
breadth of cloth in the face of the bull, to avoid his furious
charges, and doubtless to deal him his death-wound, though to
this climax I could not bear to follow.
One or two of the
bull-fighters offered to leave the national sport and show us the
House of Miranda, but it was the cathedral which was dominating
our desire, as it everywhere dominates the vision, in Burgos and
out of Burgos as far as the city can be seen. The iron-gray bulk,
all flattered or fretted by Gothic art, rears
34
THE IRON-GRAY BULK OF
THE CATHEDRAL REARS ITSELF FROM CLUSTERING WALLS AND
ROOFS
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
itself from the
clustering brown walls and roofs of the city, which it seems to
gather into its mass below while it towers so far above them. We
needed no pointing of the way to it; rather we should have needed
instruction for shunning it; but we chose the way which led
through the gate of Santa Maria where in an arch once part of the
city wall, the great Cid, hero above every other hero of Burgos,
sits with half a dozen more or less fabled or storied worthies of
the renowned city. Then with a minute's walk up a stony sloping
little street we were in the beautiful and reverend presence of
one of the most august temples of the Christian faith. The avenue
where the old Castilian nobles once dwelt in their now empty
palaces climbs along the hillside above the cathedral, which on
its lower side seems to elbow off the homes of meaner men, and in
front to push them away beyond a plaza not large enough for it.
Even this the cathedral had not cleared of the horde of small
boys who followed us unbidden to its doors and almost
expropriated those authorized blind beggars who own the church
doors in Spain. When we declined the further company of these
boys they left us with expressions which I am afraid accused our
judgment and our personal appearance; but in another moment we
were safe from their censure, and hidden as it were in the thick
smell of immemorial incense.
It was not the
moment for doing the cathedral in the wonted tiresome and vulgar
way; that was reserved for the next day; now we simply wandered
in the vast twilight spaces; and craned our necks to breaking in
trying to pierce the gathered gloom in the vaulting overhead. It
was a precious moment, but perhaps too weird, and we were glad to
find a sacristan with businesslike activity setting red
candlesticks about a bier in the area before the choir, which
here, as in the other Span-35
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
ish cathedrals, is
planted frankly in the middle of the edifice, a church by itself,
as if to emphasize the incomparable grandeur of the cathedral.
The sacristan willingly paused in his task and explained that he
was preparing the bier for the funeral of a church dignitary (as
we learned later, the dean) which was to take place the next day
at noon; and if we would come at that hour we should hear some
beautiful music. We knew that he was establishing a claim on our
future custom, but we thanked him and provisionally feed him, and
left him at his work, at which we might have all but fancied him
whistling, so cheerfully and briskly he went about it.
Outside we lingered
a moment to give ourselves the solemn joy of the Chapel of the
Constable which forms the apse of the cathedral and is its chief
glory. It mounted to the hard, gray sky, from which a keen wind
was sweeping the narrow street leading to it, and blustering
round the corner of the cathedral, so that the marble men holding
up the Constable's coat-of-arms in the rear of his chapel might
well have ached from the cold which searched the marrow of
flesh-and-blood men below. These hurried by in flat caps and
corduroy coats and trousers, with sashes at their waists and
comforters round their necks; and they were picturesque quite in
the measure of their misery. Some whose tatters were the most
conspicuous feature of their costume, I am sure would have
charmed me if I had been a painter; as a mere word-painter I find
myself wishing I could give the color of their wretchedness to my
page.
III
In the absence of
any specific record in my notebook I do not know just how it was
between this first
36
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
glimpse of the
cathedral and dinner, but it must have been on our return to our
hotel, that the little interpreter who had met us at the station,
and had been intermittently constituting himself our protector
ever since, convinced us that we ought to visit the City Hall,
and see the outside of the marble tomb containing the bones of
the Cid and his wife. Such as the bones were we found they were
not to be seen themselves, and I do not know that I should have
been the happier for their inspection. In fact, I have no great
opinion of the Cid as an historical character or a poetic
fiction. His epic, or his long ballad, formed no part of my young
study in Spanish, and when four or five years ago a friend gave
me a copy of it, beautifully printed in black letter, with the
prayer that I should read it sometime within the twelvemonth, I
found the time far too short. As a matter of fact I have never
read the poem to this day, though. I have often tried, and I
doubt if its author ever intended it to be read. He intended it
rather to be recited in stirring episodes, with spaces for
refreshing slumber in the connecting narrative. As for the Cid in
real life under his proper name of Rodrigo de Vivas, though he
made his king publicly swear that he had had no part in the
murder of his royal brother, and though he was the stoutest and
bravest knight in Castile, I cannot find it altogether admirable
in him that when his king banished him he should resolve to fight
thereafter for any master who paid him best. That appears to me
the part of a road-agent rather than a reformer, and it seems to
me no amend for his service under Moorish princes that he should
make war against them on his personal behalf or afterward under
his own ungrateful king. He is friends now with the Arabian King
of Saragossa, and now he defeats the Aragonese under the
Castilian
37
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
sovereign, and again
he sends an insulting message by the Moslems to the Christian
Count of Barcelona, whom he takes prisoner with his followers,
but releases without ransom after a contemptuous audience. Is it
well, I ask, that he helps one Moor against another, always for
what there is in it, and when he takes Valencia from the
infidels, keeps none of his promises to them, but having tortured
the governor to make him give up his treasure, buries him to his
waist and then burns him alive? After that, to be sure, he enjoys
his declining years by making forays in the neighboring country,
and dies "satisfied with having done his duty toward his
God."
Our interpreter, who
would not let us rest till he had shown us the box holding the
Cid's bones, had himself had a varied career. If you believed him
he was born in Madrid and had passed, when three years old, to
New York, where he grew up to become a citizen and be the driver
of a delivery wagon for a large department-store. He duly married
an American woman who could speak not only French, German, and
Italian, but also Chinese, and was now living with him in Burgos.
His own English had somewhat fallen by the way, but what was left
he used with great courage; and he was one of those government
interpreters whom you find at every large station throughout
Spain in the number of the principal hotels of the place. They
pay the government a certain tax for their license, though it was
our friend's expressed belief that the government, on the
contrary, paid him a salary of two dollars a day; but perhaps
this was no better founded than his belief in a German princess
who, when he went as her courier, paid him ten dollars a day and
all his expenses. She wished him to come and live near her in
Germany, so as to be ready to go with her to
38
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
South America, but
he had not yet made up his mind to leave Burgos, though his poor
eyes watered with such a cold as only Burgos can give a man in
the early autumn; when I urged him to look to the bad cough he
had, he pleaded that it was a very old cough. He had a
fascination of his own, which probably came from his imaginative
habit of mind, so that I could have wished more adoptive
fellow-citizens were like him. He sympathized strongly with us in
our grief with the cold of the hotel, and when we said that a
small oil-heater would take the chill off a large room, he said
that he had advised that very thing, but that our host had
replied, with proud finality, "I am the landlord." Whether this
really happened or not, I cannot say, but I have no doubt that
our little guide had some faith in it as a real incident. He
apparently had faith in the landlord's boast that he was going to
have a stately marble staircase to the public entrance to his
hotel, which was presently of common stone, rather tipsy in its
treads, and much in need of scrubbing.
There is as little
question in my mind that he believed the carriage we had engaged
to take us next morning to the Cartuja de Miraflores would be
ready at a quarter before nine, and that he may have been
disappointed when it was not ready until a quarter after. But it
was worth waiting for if to have a team composed of a brown mule
on the right hand and a gray horse on the left was to be desired.
These animals which nature had so differenced were equalized by
art through the lavish provision of sleigh-bells, without some
strands of which no team in Spain is properly equipped. Besides,
as to his size the mule was quite as large as the horse, and as
to his tail he was much more decorative. About two inches after
this member
39
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
left his body it was
closely shaved for some six inches or more, and for that space it
presented the effect of a rather large size of garden-hose;
below, it swept his thighs in a lordly switch. If anything could
have added distinction to our turnout it would have been the
stiff side-whiskers of our driver: the only pair I saw in real
life after seeing them so long in pictures on boxes of raisins
and cigars. There they were associated with the look and dress of
a torrero, and our coachman, though an old Castilian of
the austerest and most taciturn pattern, may have been in his gay
youth an Andalusian bull-fighter.
IV
Our pride in our
equipage soon gave way to our interest in the market for sheep,
cattle, horses, and donkeys which we passed through just outside
the city. The market folk were feeling the morning's cold;
shepherds folded in their heavy shawls leaned motionless on their
long staves, as if hating to stir; one ingenious boy wore a live
lamb round his neck which he held close by the legs for the
greater comfort of it; under the trees by the roadside some of
the peasants were cooking their breakfasts and warming themselves
at the fires. The sun was on duty in a cloudless sky; but all
along the road to the Cartuja we drove between rows of trees so
thickly planted against his summer rage that no ray of his
friendly heat could now reach us. At times it seemed as if from
this remorselessly shaded avenue we should escape into the open;
the trees gave way and we caught glimpses of wide plains and
distant hills; then they closed upon us again, and in their chill
shadow it was no comfort to know that in summer, when the
townspeople got through their work,
40
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
they came out to
these groves, men, women, and children, and had supper under
their hospitable boughs.
One comes to almost
any Cartuja at last, and we found ours on a sunny top just when
the cold had pinched us almost beyond endurance, and joined a
sparse group before the closed gate of the convent. The group was
composed of poor people who had come for the dole of food daily
distributed from the convent, and better-to-do country-folk who
had brought things to sell to the monks, or were there on affairs
not openly declared. But it seemed that it was a saint's day; the
monks were having service in the church solely for their own
edification, and they had shut us sinners out not only by locking
the gate, but by taking away the wire for ringing the bell, and
leaving nothing but a knocker of feeble note with which different
members of our indignation meeting vainly hammered. Our guide
assumed the virtue of the greatest indignation, though he ought
to have known that we could not get in on that saint's day; but
it did not avail, and the little group dispersed, led off by the
brown peasant who was willing to share my pleasure in our
excursion as a good joke on us, and smiled with a show of teeth
as white as the eggs in his basket. After all, it was not wholly
a hardship; we could walk about in the sunny if somewhat muddy
open, and warm ourselves against the icily shaded drive back to
town; besides, there was a little girl crouching at the foot of a
tree, and playing at a phase of the housekeeping which is the
game of little girls the world over. Her sad, still-faced mother
standing near, with an interest in her apparently renewed by my
own, said that she was four years old, and joined me in watching
her as she built a pile of little sticks and boiled an imaginary
little kettle over them. I was so glad even of a make-believe
fire that I dropped a
41
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
copper coin beside
it, and the mother smiled pensively as if grateful but not very
hopeful from this beneficence, though after reflection I had made
my gift a "big dog" instead of a "small dog," as the Spanish call
a ten and a five centimo piece. The child bent her pretty head
shyly on one side, and went on putting more sticks under her
supposititious pot.
I found the little
spectacle reward enough in itself and in a sort compensation for
our failure to see the exquisite alabaster tomb of Juan II. and
his wife Isabel which makes the Cartuja Church so famous. There
are a great many beautiful tombs in Burgos, but none so beautiful
there (or in the whole world if the books say true) as this;
though we made what we could of some in the museum, where we saw
for the first time in the recumbent effigies of a husband and
wife, with features worn away by time and incapable of expressing
the disappointment, the surprise they may have felt in the vain
effort to warm their feet on the backs of the little marble
angels put there to support them. We made what we could, too, of
the noted Casa de Miranda, the most famous of the palaces in
which the Castilian nobles have long ceased to live at Burgos.
There we satisfied our longing to see a patio, that
roofless colonnaded court which is the most distinctive feature
of Spanish domestic architecture, and more and more distinctively
so the farther south you go, till at Seville you see it in
constant prevalence. At Burgos it could never have been a great
comfort, but in this House of Miranda it must have been a great
glory. The spaces between many of the columns have long been
bricked in, but there is fine carving on the front and the
vaulting of the staircase that climbs up from it in neglected
grandeur. So many feet have trodden its steps that they are worn
hollow in the middle, and to keep from
42
THE TOMB OF DONNA MARIA
MANUEL
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
falling you must go
up next the wall. The object in going up at all is to join in the
gallery an old melancholy custodian in looking down into the
patio, with his cat making her toilet beside him, and to
give them a fee which they receive with equal calm. Then, when
you have come down the age-worn steps without breaking your neck,
you have done the House of Miranda, and may lend yourself with
what emotion you choose to the fact that this ancient seat of
hidalgos has now fallen to the low industry of preparing pigskins
to be wine-skins.
I do not think that
a company of hidalgos in complete medieval armor could have moved
me more strongly than that first sight of these wine-skins,
distended with wine, which we had caught in approaching the House
of Miranda. We had to stop in the narrow street, and let them
pass piled high on a vintner's wagon, and looking like a load of
pork: they are trimmed and left to keep the shape of the living
pig, which they emulate at its bulkiest, less the head and feet,
and seem to roll in fatness. It was joy to realize what they
were, to feel how Spanish, how literary, how picturesque, how
romantic. There they were such as the wine-skins are that hang
from the trees of pleasant groves in many a merry tale, and
invite all swains and shepherds and wandering cavaliers to tap
their bulk and drain its rich plethora. There they were such as
Don Quixote, waking from his dream at the inn, saw them malignant
giants and fell enchanters, and slashed them with his sword till
he had spilled the room half full of their blood. For me this
first sight of them was magic. It brought back my boyhood as
nothing else had yet, and I never afterward saw them without a
return to those days of my delight in all Spanish
things.
4
43
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
Literature and its
associations, no matter from how lowly suggestion, must always be
first for me, and I still thought of those wine-skins in yielding
to the claims of the cathedral on my wonder and reverence when
now for the second time we came to it. The funeral ceremony of
the dean was still in course, and after listening for a moment to
the mighty orchestral music of it--the deep bass of the priests
swelling up with the organ notes, and suddenly shot with the
shrill, sharp trebles of the choir-boys and pierced with the keen
strains of the violins--we left the cathedral to the solemn old
ecclesiastics who sat confronting the bier, and once more
deferred our more detailed and intimate wonder. We went, in this
suspense of emotion, to the famous Convent of Las Huelgas, which
invites noble ladies to its cloistered repose a little beyond the
town. We entered to the convent church through a sort of slovenly
court where a little girl begged severely, almost censoriously,
of us, and presently a cold-faced young priest came and opened
the church door. Then we found the interior of that rank Spanish
baroque which escapes somehow the effeminate effusiveness of the
Italian; it does not affect you as decadent, but as something
vigorously perfect in its sort, somberly authentic, and ripe from
a root and not a graft. In its sort, the high altar, a gigantic
triune, with massive twisted columns and swagger statues of
saints and heroes in painted wood, is a prodigy of inventive
piety, and compositely has a noble exaltation in its powerful
lift to the roof.
The nuns came
beautifully dressed to hear mass at the grilles giving into the chapel adjoining the
church;
44
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
the tourist may have
his glimpse of them there on Sundays, and on week-days he may
have his guess of their cloistered life and his wonder how much
it continues the tradition of repose which the name of the old
garden grounds implies. These lady nuns must be of patrician
lineage and of fortune enough to defray their expense in the
convent, which is of the courtliest origin, for it was founded
eight hundred years ago by Alfonso VIII. "to expiate his sins and
to gratify his queen," who probably knew of them. I wish now I
had known, while I was there, that the abbess of Las Huelgas had
once had the power of life and death in the neighborhood, and
could hang people if she liked; I cannot think just what good it
would have done me, but one likes to realize such things on the
spot. She is still one of the greatest ladies of Spain, though
perhaps not still "lady of ax and gibbet," and her nuns are of
like dignity. In their chapel are the tombs of Alfonso and his
queen, whose figures are among those on the high altar of the
church. She was Eleanor Plantagenet, the daughter of our Henry
II., and was very fond of Las Huelgas, as if it were truly a rest
for her in the far-off land of Spain; I say our Henry II., for in
the eleventh century we Americans were still English, under the
heel of the Normans, as not the fiercest republican of us now
need shame to own.
In a sense of this
historical unity, at Las Huelgas we felt as much at home as if we
had been English tourists, and we had our feudal pride in the
palaces where the Gastilian nobles used to live in Burgos as we
returned to the town. Their deserted seats are mostly to be seen
after you pass through the Moorish gate overarching the stony,
dusty, weedy road hard by the place where the house of the Cid is
said to have stood. The arch, so gracefully Saracenic, was the
first
45
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
monument of the
Moslem obsession of the country which has left its signs so
abundantly in the south; here in the far north the thing seemed
almost prehistoric, almost preglacially old, the witness of a
world utterly outdated. But perhaps it was not more utterly
outdated than the residences of the nobles who had once made the
ancient Castilian capital splendid, but were now as irrevocably
merged in Madrid as the Arabs in Africa.
VI
Some of the palaces
looked down from the narrow street along the hillside above the
cathedral, but only one of them was kept up in the state of other
days; and I could not be sure at what point this street had
ceased to be the street where our guide said every one kept cows,
and the ladies took big pitchers of milk away to sell every
morning. But I am sure those ladies could have been of noble
descent only in the farthest possible remove, and I do not
suppose their cows were even remotely related to the haughty
ox-team which blocked the way in front of the palaces and obliged
xis to dismount while our carriage was lifted round the cart. Our
driver was coldly disgusted, but the driver of the ox-team
preserved a calm as perfect as if he had been an hidalgo
interested by the incident before his gate. It delayed us till
the psychological moment when the funeral of the dean was over,
and we could join the formidable party following the sacristan
from chapel to chapel in the cathedral.
We came to an
agonized consciousness of the misery of this progress in the
Chapel of the Constable, where it threatened to be finally stayed
by the indecision of certain
ladies of our nation in choosing among the postal
46
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
cards for sale
there. By this time we had suffered much from the wonders of the
cathedral. The sacristan had not spared us a jewel or a silvered
or gilded sacerdotal garment or any precious vessel of
ceremonial, so that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand
of the beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady upon it. The
coffer of the Cid, fastened against the cathedral wall for a
monument of his shrewdness in doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with
the characteristic simplicity of their race, received it back
full of sand and gravel in payment of the gold they had lent him
in it, could as little move us. Perhaps if we could have believed
that he finally did return the value received, we might have
marveled a little at it, but from what we knew of the Cid this
was not credible. We did what we could with the painted wood
carving of the cloister doors; the life-size head of a man with
its open mouth for a key-hole in another portal; a fearful
silver-plated chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the
Host in the procession of Corpus Christi; but it was very little,
and I am not going to share my failure with the reader by the
vain rehearsal of its details. No literary art has ever reported
a sense of picture or architecture or sculpture to me: the
despised postal card is better for that; and probably throughout
these "trivial fond records" I shall be found shirking as much as
I may the details of such sights, seen or unseen, as embitter the
heart of travel with unavailing regret for the impossibility of
remembering them. I must leave for some visit of the reader's own
the large and little facts of the many chapels in the cathedral
at Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense of the
whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic exaltation,
which I made such shift as I could to feel in the company of
those picture-postal amateurs. It
47
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
was like, say, a
somber afternoon, verging to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so
that when I came out of it into the open noon it was like
emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because I could there shed
the harassing human environment the outside of the cathedral
seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a moment
in glad relief.
VII
One house in some
forgotten square commemorates the state in which the Castilian
nobles used to live in Burgos before Toledo, and then Valladolid,
contested the primacy of the grim old capital of the northern
uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our carriage
through the open portal into its leafy patio shivering in
the cold, and then we bade our guide hurry back with us to the
hot luncheon which would be the only heat in our hotel. But to
reach this we had to pass through another square, which we found
full of peasants' ox-carts and mule-teams; and there our guide
instantly jumped down and entered into a livelier quarrel with
those peaceable men and women than I could afterward have
believed possible in Spain. I bade him get back to his seat
beside the driver, who was abetting him with an occasional
guttural and whom I bade turn round and go another way. I said
that I had hired this turnout, and I was master, and I would be
obeyed; but it seemed that I was wrong. My proud hirelings never
left off their dispute till somehow the ox-carts and mule-teams
were jammed together, and a thoroughfare found for us. Then it
was explained that those peasants were always blocking that
square in that way and that I had, however unwillingly, been
discharging the duty of a public-spirited citizen in
com-
48
A BURGOS
STREET
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
pelling them to give
way. I did not care for that; I prized far more the quiet with
which they had taken the whole affair. It was the first
exhibition of the national repose of manner which we were to see
so often again, south as well as north, and which I find it so
beautiful to have seen. In a Europe abounding in volcanic
Italians, nervous Germans, and exasperated Frenchmen, it was
comforting, it was edifying to see those Castilian peasants so
self-respectfully self-possessed in the wrong.
From time to time in
the opener spaces we had got into the sun from the chill shadow
of the narrow streets, but now it began to be cloudy, and when we
re-entered our hotel it was almost as warm indoors as out. We
thought our landlord might have so far repented as to put on the
steam; but he had sternly adhered to his principle that the
radiators were enough of themselves; and after luncheon we had
nothing for it but to go away from Burgos, and take with us such
scraps of impression as we could. We decided that there was no
street of gayer shops than those gloomy ones we had chanced into
here and there; I do not remember now anything like a
bookseller's or a milliner's or a draper's window. There was no
sign of fashion among the ladies of Burgos, so far as we could
distinguish them; there was not a glowering or perking hat, and I
do not believe there was a hobble-skirt in all the austere old
capital except such as some tourist wore; the black lace
mantillas and the flowing garments of other periods flitted by
through the chill alleys and into the dim doorways. The only
cheerfulness in the local color was to be noted in the caparison
of the donkeys, which we were to find more and more brilliant
southward. Do I say the only cheerfulness? I ought to except also
the involuntary hilarity of a certain poor man's suit
which
49
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
was so patched
together of myriad scraps that it looked as if cut from the
fabric of a crazy-quilt. I owe him this notice the rather because
he almost alone did not beg of us in a city which swarmed with
beggars in a forecast of that pest of beggary which infests Spain
everywhere. I do not say that the thing is without
picturesqueness, without real pathos; the little girl who kissed
the copper I gave her in the cathedral remains endeared to me by
that perhaps conventional touch of poetry.
There was
compensation for the want of presence among the ladies of Burgos,
in the leading lady of the theatrical company who dined, the
night before, at our hotel with the chief actors of her support,
before giving a last performance in our ancient city. It happened
another time in our Spanish progress that we had the society of
strolling players at our hotel, and it was both times told us
that the given company was the best dramatic company in Spain;
but at Burgos we did not yet know that we were so singularly
honored. The leading lady there had luminous black eyes, large
like the head-lamps of a motor-car, and a wide crimson mouth
which she employed as at a stage banquet throughout the dinner,
while she talked and laughed with her fellow-actors, beautiful as
bull-fighters, cleanshaven, serious of face and shapely of limb.
They were unaffectedly professional, and the lady made no
pretense of not being a leading lady. One could see that she was
the kindest creature in the world, and that she took a genuine
pleasure in her huge, practicable eyes. At the other end of the
room a Spanish family--father, mother, and small children, down
to some in arms--were dining and the children wailing as Spanish
children will, regardless of time and place; and when the nurse
brought one of the disconsolate infants
50
BURGOS AND THE BITTER
COLD OF BURGOS
to be kissed by the
leading lady one's heart went out to her for the amiability and
abundance of her caresses. The mere sight of their warmth did
something to supply the defect of steam in the steam-heating
apparatus, but when one got beyond their radius there was nothing
for the shivering traveler except to wrap himself in the down
quilt of his bed and spread his steamer-rug over his knees till
it was time to creep under both of them between the glacial
sheets.
We were sorry we had
not got tickets for the leading lady's public performance; it
could have been so little more public; but we had not, and there
was nothing else in Burgos to invite the foot outdoors after
dinner. From my own knowledge I cannot yet say the place was not
lighted; but my sense of the tangle of streets lying night long
in a rich Gothic gloom shall remain unimpaired by statistics.
Very possibly Burgos is brilliantly lighted with electricity;
only they have not got the electricity on, as in our steam-heated
hotel they had not got the steam on.
VIII
We had authorized
our little interpreter to engage tickets for us by the mail-train
the next afternoon for Valladolid; he pretended, of course, that
the places could be had only by his special intervention, and by
telegraphing for them to the arriving train. We accepted his
romantic theory of the case, and paid the bonus due the railroad
agent in the hotel for his offices in the matter; we would have
given anything, we were so eager to get out of Burgos before we
were frozen up there. I do not know that we were either surprised
or pained to find that our Chilian friends should
51
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
have got seats in
the same car without anything of our diplomacy, by the simple
process of showing their tickets. I think our little interpreter
was worth everything he cost, and more. I would not have lost a
moment of his company as he stood on the platform with me, adding
one artless invention to another for my pleasure, and
successively extracting peseta after peseta from me till he had
made up the sum which he had doubtless idealized as a just reward
for his half-day's service when he first told me that it should
be what I pleased. We parted with the affection of
fellow-citizens in a strange monarchical country, his English
growing less and less as the train delayed, and his eyes watering
more and more as with tears of com-patriotic affection. At the
moment I could have envied that German princess her ability to
make sure of his future companionship at the low cost of fifty
pesetas a day; and even now, when my affection has had time to
wane, I cannot do less than commend him to any future visitor at
Burgos, as in the last degree amiable, and abounding in surprises
of intelligence and unexpected feats of reliability.
IV THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
WHEN you leave
Burgos at 3.29 of a passably sunny afternoon you are not at once
aware of the moral difference between the terms of your approach
and those of your departure. You are not changing your earth or
your sky very much, but it is not long before you are sensible of
a change of mind which insists more and more. There is the same
long ground-swell of wheat-fields, but yesterday you were
followed in vision by the loveliness of the frugal and fertile
Biscayan farms, and to-day this vision has left you, and you are
running farther and farther into the economic and topographic
waste of Castile. Yesterday there were more or less agreeable
shepherdesses in pleasant plaids scattered over the landscape;
to-day there are only shepherds of three days' unshornness; the
plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in
the cavalcades of both men and women riding donkeys in and out of
the horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves
there. Flocks of brown and black goats, looking large as cows
among the sparse stubble, do little to relieve the scene from
desolation; I am not sure but goats, when brown and black, add to
the horror of a desolate scene. There are no longer any white
farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering about high-shouldered
churches, but very far away to the eastward or westward the dun
expanse of the wheat-lands is
53
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
roughed with
something which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like
the soil at first it is not distinguishable from it, btit which
as your train passes nearer proves to be a town at the base of
tablelands, without a tree or a leaf or any spear of green to
endear it to the eye as the abode of living men. You pull
yourself together in the effort to visualize the immeasurable
fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of harvest;
but it is difficult. What you cannot help seeing is the actual
nakedness of the land which with its spindling stubble makes you
think of that awful moment of the human head, when utter baldness
will be a relief to the spectator.
I
At times and in
places, peasants were scratching the dismal surfaces with the
sort of plows which Abel must have used, when subsoiling was not
yet even a dream; and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it
seemed a question as to which should loiter longest in the
unfinished furrow. Now and then, the rush of the train gave a
motionless goatherd, with his gaunt flock, an effect of
comparative celerity to the rearward. The women riding their
donkeys over
The level waste, the
rounding gray
in the distance were
the only women we saw except those who seemed to be keeping the
stations, and one very fat one who came to the train at a small
town and gabbled volubly to some passenger who made no audible
response. She excited herself, but failed to rouse the interest
of the other party to the interview,
54
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
who remained unseen
as well as unheard. I could the more have wished to know what it
was all about because nothing happened on board the train to
distract the mind from the joyless landscape until we drew near
Valladolid. It is true that for a while we shared our compartment
with a father and his two sons who lunched on slices of the
sausage which seems the favorite refection of the Latin as well
as the Germanic races in their travels. But this drama was not of
intense interest, and we grappled in vain with the question of
our companions' social standard. The father, while he munched his
bread and sausage, read a newspaper which did not rank him or
even define his politics; there was a want of fashion in the cut
of the young men's clothes and of freshness in the polish of
their tan shoes which defied conjecture. When they left the train
without the formalities of leave-taking which had hitherto
distinguished our Spanish fellow-travelers, we willingly
abandoned them to a sort of middling obscurity; but this may not
really have been their origin or their destiny.
That spindling
sparseness, worse than utter baldness, of the wheat stubble now
disappeared with cinematic suddenness, and our train was running
past stretches of vineyard, where, among the green and purple and
yellow ranks, the vintagers, with their donkeys and carts, were
gathering the grapes in the paling light of the afternoon. Again
the scene lacked the charm of woman's presence which the vintage
had in southern France. In Spain we nowhere saw the women sharing
the outdoor work of the men; and we fancied their absence the
effect of the Oriental jealousy lingering from centuries of
Moorish domination; though we could not entirely reconcile our
theory with the publicity of their
washing clothes at every stream. To be sure, that
55'
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
was work which they
did not share with men any more than the men shared the labor of
the fields with them.
It was still
afternoon, well before sunset, when we arrived at Valladolid,
where one of the quaintest of our Spanish surprises awaited us.
We knew that the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen would be the
shabbiest omnibus at the station, and we saw without great alarm
our Chilian friends drive off in an indefinitely finer vehicle.
But what we were not prepared for was the fact of octroi
at Valladolid, and for the strange behavior of the local customs
officer who stopped us on our way into the town. He looked a very
amiable young man as he put his face in at the omnibus door, and
he received without explicit question our declaration that we had
nothing taxable in our trunks. Then, however, he mounted to the
top of the omnibus and thumped our trunks about as if to test
them for contraband by the sound. The investigation continued on
these strange terms until the officer had satisfied himself of
our good faith, when he got down and with a friendly smile at the
window bowed us into Valladolid.
In its way nothing
could have been more charming; and we rather liked being left by
the omnibus about a block from our hotel, on the border of a sort
of promenade where no vehicles were allowed. We had been halted
near a public fountain, where already the mothers and daughters
of the neighborhood were gathered with earthen jars for the
night's supply of water. The jars were not so large as to
overburden any of them when, after just delay for exchange of
gossip, the girls and goodwives put them on their heads and
marched erectly away with them, each beautifully picturesque
irrespective of her age or looks.
The air was soft,
and after Burgos, warm; something southern, unfelt before, began
to qualify the whole
56
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
scene, which as the
evening fell grew more dramatic, and made the promenade the
theater of emotions permitted such unrestricted play nowhere else
in Spain, so far as we were witness. On one side the place was
arcaded, and bordered with little shops, not so obtrusively
brilliant that the young people who walked up and down before
them were in a glare of publicity. A little way off the avenue
expanded into a fine oblong place, where some first martyrs of
the Inquisition were burned. But the promenadefs kept well short
of this, as they walked up and down, and talked, talked, talked
in that inexhaustible interest which youth takes in itself the
world over. They were in the standard proportion of two girls to
one young man, or, if here and there a girl had an undivided
young man to herself, she went before some older maiden or matron
whom she left altogether out of the conversation. They mostly
wore the skirts and hats of Paris, and if the scene of the
fountain was Arabically oriental the promenade was almost
Americanly occidental. The promenaders were there by hundreds;
they filled the avenue from side to side, and
The delight of happy
laughter
The delight of low
replies
that rose from their
progress, with the chirp and whisper of their feet cheered the
night as long as we watched and listened from the sun balcony of
our hotel.
II
There was no more
heat in the radiators of the hotel there than at Burgos, but for
that evening at least there was none needed. It was the principal
hotel of Valladolid, and the
unscrubbed and unswept staircase by which
57
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
we mounted into it
was merely a phase of that genial pause, as for second thought,
in the march of progress which marks so much of the modern
advance in Spain, and was by no means an evidence of arrested
development. We had the choice of reaching our rooms either
through the dining-room or by a circuitous detour past the
pantries; but our rooms had a proud little vestibule of their
own, with a balcony over the great square, and if one of them had
a belated feather-bed the other had a new hair mattress, and the
whole house was brilliantly lighted with electricity. As for the
cooking, it was delicious, and the table was of an abundance and
variety which might well have made one ashamed of paying so small
a rate as two dollars a day for bed and board, wine included, and
very fair wine at that.
In Spain you must
take the bad with the good, for whether you get the good or not
you are sure of the bad, but only very exceptionally are you sure
of the bad only. It was a pleasure not easily definable to find
our hotel managed by a mother and two daughters, who gave the
orders obeyed by the men-servants, and did not rebuke them for
joining in the assurance that when we got used to going so
abruptly from the dining-room into our bedrooms we would like it.
The elder of the daughters had some useful French, and neither of
the younger ladies ever stayed for some ultimate details of
dishabille in coming to interpret the mother and ourselves to one
another when we encountered her alone in the office. They were
all thoroughly kind and nice, and they were supported with
surpassing intelligence and ability by the chico, a
radiant boy of ten, who united in himself the functions which the
amiable inefficiency of the porters and waiters abandoned to
him.
When we came out to
dinner after settling ourselves
58
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
in our almost
obtrusively accessible rooms, we were convinced of the wisdom of
our choice of a hotel by finding our dear Chilians at one of the
tables. We rushed together like two kindred streams of
transatlantic gaiety, and in our mingled French, Spanish, and
English possessed one another of our doubts and fears in coming
to our common conclusion. We had already seen a Spanish gentleman
whom we knew as a fellow-sufferer at Burgos, roaming the streets
of Valladolid, and in what seemed a disconsolate doubt,
interrogating the windows of our hotel; and now we learned from
the Chilians that he had been bitterly disappointed in the inn
which a patrician omnibus had borne him away to from our envious
eyes at the station. We learned that our South American
compatriots had found their own chosen hotel impossible, and were
now lodged in rapturous satisfaction under our roof. Their
happiness penetrated us with a glow of equal content, and
confirmed us in the resolution always to take the worst omnibus
at a Spanish station as the sure index of the best
hotel.
The street-cars,
which in Valladolid are poetically propelled through lyre-shaped
trolleys instead of our prosaic broomstick appliances, groaned
unheeded if not unheard under our windows through the night, and
we woke to find the sun on duty in our glazed balcony and the
promenade below already astir with life: not the exuberant young
life of the night before, but still sufficiently awake to be
recognizable as life. A crippled newsboy seated under one of the
arcades was crying his papers; an Englishman was looking at a
plan of Valladolid in a shop window; a splendid cavalry officer
went by in braided uniform, and did not stare so hard as they
might have expected at some ladies passing in mantillas to mass
or market. In the late afternoon 59
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
as well as the early
morning we saw a good deal of the military in Valladolid, where
an army corps is stationed. From time to time a company of
infantry marched through the streets to gay music, and toward
evening slim young officers began to frequent the arcades and
glass themselves in the windows of the shops, their spurs
clinking on the pavement as they lounged by or stopped and took
distinguished attitudes. We speculated in vain as to their social
quality, and to this day I do not know whether "the career is
open to the talents" in the Spanish army, or whether military
rank is merely the just reward of civil rank. Those beautiful
young swells in riding-breeches and tight gray jackets approached
an Italian type of cavalry officer; they did not look very
vigorous, and the common soldiers we saw marching through the
streets, largely followed by the populace, were not of formidable
stature or figure, though neat and agreeable enough to the
eye.
While I indulge the
record of these trivialities, which I am by no means sure the
reader will care for so much, I feel that it would be wrong to
let him remain as ignorant of the history of Valladolid as I was
while there. My ignorance was not altogether my fault; I had
fancied easily finding at some bookseller's under the arcade a
little sketch of the local history such as you are sure of
finding in any Italian town, done by a local antiquary of those
always mousing in the city's archives. But the bookseller's boy
and then the boy's mother could not at first imagine my wish, and
when they did they could only supply me with a sort of business directorv, full of addresses
and adver-
60
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
tisements. So
instead of overflowing with information when we set out on our
morning ramble, we meagerly knew from the guide-books that
Valladolid had once been the capital of Castile, arid after many
generations of depression following the removal of the court, had
in these latest days renewed its strength in mercantile and
industrial prosperity. There are ugly evidences of the prosperity
in the windy, dusty avenues and streets of the more modern town;
but there are lanes and alleys enough, groping for the churches
and monuments in suddenly opening squares, to console the
sentimental tourist for the havoc which enterprise has made. The
mind readily goes back through these to the palmy prehistoric
times from which the town emerged to mention in Ptolemy, and then
begins to work forward past Iberian and Roman and Goth and Moor
to the Castilian kings who made it their residence in the
eleventh century. The capital won its first great distinction
when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were married
there in 1469. Thirty-five years later these Catholic Kings, as
one had better learn at once to call them in Spain, let Columbus
die neglected if not forgotten in the house recently pulled down,
where he had come to dwell in their cold shadow; they were much
occupied with other things and they could not realize that his
discovery of America was the great glory of their reign; probably
they thought the conquest of Granada was. Later yet, by twenty
years, the dreadful Philip II. was born in Valladolid, and in
1559 a very famous auto da fe wag celebrated in the Plaza
Mayor. Fourteen Lutherans were burned alive for their heresy, and
the body of a woman suspected of imperfect orthodoxy after her
death was exhumed and burned with them. In spite of such
precautions as these, and of all
the pious diligence of the Holy Office,
61
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
the reader will
hardly believe that there is now a Spanish Protestant church in
Valladolid; but such is the fact, though whether it derives from
the times of the Inquisition, or is a modern missionary church I
do not know. That auto da fe was of the greatest possible
distinction; the Infanta Juana presided, and the universal
interest was so great that people paid a dollar and twenty-five
cents a seat; money then worth five or six times as much as now.
Philip himself came to another auto when thirteen persons
were burned in the same place, and he always liked Valladolid; it
must have pleased him in a different way from Escorial, lying
flat as it does on a bare plain swept, but never thoroughly
dusted, by winds that blow pretty constantly over it.
While the
Inquisition was purging the city of error its great university
was renowning it not only throughout Spain, but in France and
Italy; students frequented it from those countries, and artists
came from many parts of Europe. Literature also came in the
person of Cervantes, who seems to have followed the Spanish court
in its migrations from Valladolid to Toledo and then to Madrid.
Here also came one of the greatest characters in fiction, for it
was in Valladolid that Gil Blas learned to practise the art of
medicine tinder the instruction of the famous Dr.
Sangrado.
IV
I put these facts
at the service of the reader for what use he will while he goes
with us to visit the cathedral in Valladolid, a cathedral as
unlike that of Burgos as the severest mood of Spanish renaissance
can render it. In fact, it is the work of Herrera, the architect
who made the Escorial so grim, and is the expres-
62
A STREET LEADING TO THE
CATHEDRAL
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
sion in large
measure of his austere mastery. If it had ever been finished it
might have been quite as dispiriting as the Escorial, but as it
has only one of the four ponderous towers it was meant to have,
it is not without its alleviations, especially as the actual
tower was rebuilt after the fall of the original seventy years
ago. The grass springs cheerfully up in the crevices of the
flagging from which the broken steps falter to the portal, but
within all is firm and solid. The interior is vast, and nowhere
softened by decoration, but the space is reduced by the huge bulk
of the choir in the center of it; as we entered a fine echo
mounted to the cathedral roof from the chanting and intoning
within. When the service ended a tall figure in scarlet crossed
rapidly toward the sacristy. It was of such imposing presence
that we resolved at once it must be the figure of a cardinal, or
of an archbishop at the least. But it proved to be one of the
sacristans, and when we followed him to the sacristy with half a
dozen other sightseers, he showed us a silver monstrance weighing
a hundred and fifty pounds and decked with statites of our first
parents as they appeared before the Fall. Besides this we saw,
much against our will, a great many ecclesiastical vestments of
silk and damask richly wrought in gold and silver. But if we were
reluctant there was a little fat priest there who must have seen
them hundreds of times and had still a childish delight in seeing
them again because he had seen them so often; he dimpled and
smiled, and for his sake we pretended a joy in them which it
would have been cruel to deny him. I suppose we were then led to
the sacrifice at the several side altars, but I have no specific
recollection of them; I know there was a pale, sick-looking young
girl in white who went about with her father, and moved
compassion by her gentle sorrowfulness.
63
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
Of the University,
which we visited next, I recall only the baroque facade; tha
interior was in reparation and I do not know whether it would
have indemnified us for not visiting the University of Salamanca.
That was in our list, but the perversity of the time-table
forbade. You could go to Salamanca, yes, but you could not come
back except at two o'clock in the morning; you could indeed
continue on to Lisbon, but perhaps you did not wish to see
Lisbon. A like perversity of the time-table, once universal in
Spain, but now much reformed, also kept us away from Segovia,
which was on our list. But our knowledge of it enabled us to tell
a fellow-countrywoman whom we presently met in the museum of the
University, how she could best, or worst, get to that city. Our
speech gave us away to her, and she turned to us from the other
objects of interest to explain first that she was in a hotel
where she paid only six pesetas a day, but where she could get no
English explanation of the time-table for any money. She had come
to Valladolid with a friend who was going next day to Salamanca,
but next day was Sunday and she did not like to travel on Sunday,
and Segovia seemed the only alternative. We could not make out
why, or if it came to that why she should be traveling alone
through Spain with such a slender equipment of motive or object,
but we perceived she was one of the most estimable souls in the
world, and if she cared more for getting to Segovia that
afternoon than for looking at the wonders of the place where we
were, we could not blame her. We had to leave her when we left
the museum in the charge of two custodians who led her,
involuntary but unresisting, to an upper chamber where there were
some pictures which she could care no more for than for the wood
carvings below. We ourselves cared so little for those pictures
that
64
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
we would not go to
see them. Pictures you can see anywhere, but not statuary of such
singular interest, such transcendant powerfulness as those
carvings of Berruguete and other masters less known, which held
us fascinated in the lower rooms of the museum. They are the
spoil of convents in the region about, suppressed by the
government at different times, and collected here with little
relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects
and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain
ceremonials of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at
Seville), which have a quaint reality, an intense personal
character. They are of a fascination which I can hope to convey
by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is the motionless
force, the tremendous repose of the figures of the Roman soldiers
taken in the part of sleeping at the Tomb. These sculptures are
in wood, life-size, and painted in the colors of flesh and
costume, with every detail and of a strong mass in which the
detail is lost and must be found again by the wondering eye.
Beyond all other Spanish sculptures they seemed to me expressive
of the national temperament; I thought no other race could have
produced them, and that in their return to the Greek ideal of
color in statuary they were ingenuously frank and unsurpassably
bold.
It might have been
the exhaustion experienced from the encounter with their
strenuousness that suddenly fatigued us past even the thought of
doing any more of Valladolid on foot. At any rate, when we came
out of the museum we took refuge in a corner grocery (it seems
the nature of groceries to seek corners the world over) and asked
the grocer where we could find a cab.
65
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
The grocer was young
and kind, and not so busy but he could give willing attention to
our case. He said he would send for a cab, and he called up from
his hands and knees a beautiful blond half-grown boy who was
scrubbing the floor, and despatched him on this errand, first
making him wipe the suds off his hands. The boy was back
wonderfully soon to say the cab would come for us in ten minutes,
and to receive with self-respectful appreciation the peseta which
rewarded his promptness. In the mean time we feigned a small need
which we satisfied by a purchase, and then the grocer put us
chairs in front of his counter and made us his guests while his
other customers came and went. They came oftener than they went,
for our interest in them did not surpass their interest in us. We
felt that through this we reflected credit upon our amiable host;
rumors of the mysterious strangers apparently spread through the
neighborhood and the room was soon filled with people who did not
all come to buy; but those who did buy were the most,
interesting. An elderly man with his wife bought a large bottle
which the grocer put into one scale of his balance, and poured
its weight in chick-peas into the other. Then he filled the
bottle with oil and weighed it, and then he gave the peas along
with it to his customers. It seemed a pretty convention, though
we could not quite make out its meaning, unless the peas were
bestowed as a sort of bonus; but the next convention was clearer
to us. An old man in black corduroy with a clean-shaven face and
a rather fierce, retired bull-fighter air, bought a whole dried
stock-fish (which the Spaniards eat instead of salt cod) talking
loudly to the grocer and at us while the grocer cut it across in
widths of two inches and folded it into a neat pocketful; then a
glass of wine was poured from a cask behind the counter,
and
66
THE UNIVERSITY OP
VALLADOLID
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
the customer drank
it off in honor of the transaction with the effect also of
pledging us with his keen eyes; all the time he talked, and he
was joined in conversation by a very fat woman who studied us not
unkindly. Other neighbors who had gathered in had no apparent
purpose but to verify our outlandish presence and to hear my
occasional Spanish, which was worth hearing if for nothing but
the effort it cost me. The grocer accepted with dignity the
popularity we had won him, and when at last our cab arrived from
Mount Ararat with the mire of the subsiding Deluge encrusted upon
it he led us out to it through the small boys who swarmed upon us
wherever we stopped or started in Valladolid; and whose bulk was
now much increased by the coming of that very fat woman from
within the grocery. As the morning was bright we proposed having
the top opened, but here still another convention of the place
intervened. In Valladolid it seems that no self-respecting cabman
will open the top of his cab for an hour's drive, and we could
not promise to keep ours longer. The grocer waited the result of
our parley, and then he opened our carriage door and bowed us
away. It was charming; if he had a place on Sixth Avenue I would
be his customer as long as I lived in New York; and to this
moment I do not understand why I did not bargain with that blond
boy to come to America with us and be with us always. But there
was no city I visited in Spain where I was not sorry to leave
some boy behind with the immense rabble of boys whom I hoped
never to see again.
VI
After this passage
of real life it was not easy to sink again to the level of art,
but if we must come
67
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
down it there could
have been no descent less jarring than that which left us in the
exquisite patio of the College of San Gregorio, founded
for poor students of theology in the time of the Catholic Kings.
The students who now thronged the place inside and out looked
neither clerical nor poverty-stricken; but I dare say they were
good Christians, and whatever their condition they were rich in
the constant vision of beauty which one sight of seemed to us
more than we merited. Perhaps the facade of the college and that
of the neighboring Church of San Pablo may be elsewhere surpassed
in the sort of sumptuous delicacy of that Gothic which gets its
name of plateresque from the silversmithing spirit of its
designs; but I doubt it. The wonderfulness of it is that it is
not mechanical or monotonous like the stucco fretting of the
Moorish decoration which people rave over in Spain, but has a
strength in its refinement which comes from its expression in the
exquisitely carven marble. When this is grayed with age it is
indeed of the effect of old silver work; but the plateresque in
Valladolid does not suggest fragility or triviality; its grace is
perhaps rather feminine than masculine; but at the worst it is
only the ultimation of the decorative genius of the Gothic. It
is, at any rate, the finest surprise which the local architecture
has to offer and it leaves one wishing for more rather than less
of it, so that after the facade of San Gregorio one is glad of it
again in the walls of the patio, whose staircases and
galleries, with the painted wooden beams of their ceilings,
scarcely tempt the eye from it.
We thought the front
of San Pablo deserved a second visit, and we were rewarded by
finding it far lovelier than we thought. The church was open, and
when we went in we had the advantage of seeing a large
silver-gilt car moved from the high altar down the nave
to
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
a side altar next
the door, probably for use in some public procession. The tongue
of the car was pulled by a man with one leg; a half-grown boy
under the body of it hoisted it on his back and eased it along;
and a monk with his white robe tucked up into his girdle pushed
it powerfully from behind. I did not make out why so strange a
team should have been employed for the work, but the spectacle of
that quaint progress was unique among my experiences at
Valladolid and of a value which I wish I could make the reader
feel with me. We ourselves were so interested in the event that
we took part in it so far as to push aside a bench that blocked
the way, and we received a grateful smile from the monk in reward
of our zeal.
We were in the mood
for simple kindness because of our stiff official reception at
the Royal Palace, which we visited in the gratification of our
passion for patios. It is now used for provincial or
municipal offices and guarded by sentries who indeed admitted us
to the courtyard, but would not understand our wish (it was not
very articulately expressed) to mount to the cloistered galleries
which all the guide-books united in pronouncing so noble, with
their decorative busts of the Roman Emperors and arms of the
Spanish provinces. The sculptures are by the school of
Berruguete, for whom we had formed so strong a taste at the
museum; but our disappointment was not at the moment further
embittered by knowing that Napoleon resided there in 1809. We
made what we could of other patios in the vicinity,
especially of one in the palace across from San Gregorio, to
which the liveried porter welcomed us, though the noble family
was in residence, and allowed us to mount the red-carpeted
staircase to a closed portal in consideration of the peseta which
he correctly foresaw. It was not a very characteristic
patio, bare
69
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
of flower and
fountain as it was, and others more fully appointed did not
entirely satisfy us. The fact is the patio is to be seen
best in Andalusia, its home, where every house is built round it,
and in summer cooled and in winter chilled by it. But if we were
not willing to wait for Seville, Valladolid did what it could;
and if we saw no house with quite the patio we expected we
did see the house where Philip II. was born, unless the
enterprising boy who led us to it was mistaken; in that case we
were, Ophelia-like, the more deceived.
VII
Such things do not
really matter; the guide-book's object of interest is seldom an
object of human interest; you may miss it or ignore it without
real personal loss; but if we had failed of that mystic progress
of the silver car down the nave of San Pablo we should have been
really if not sensibly poorer. So we should if we had failed of
the charming experience which awaited us in our hotel at
lunch-time. When we went out in the morning we saw a table spread
the length of the long dining-room, and now when we returned we
found every chair taken. At once we surmised a wedding breakfast,
not more from the gaiety than the gravity of the guests; and the
head waiter confirmed our impression: it was indeed a
boda. The party was just breaking up, and as we sat down
at our table the wedding guests rose from theirs. I do not know
but in any country the women on such an occasion would look more
adequate to it than the men; at any rate, there in Spain they
looked altogether superior. It was not only that they were
handsomer and better dressed, but that they expressed finer
social and intellectual quality.
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CHURCH OF SAN
PABLO
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
All the faces had
the quiet which the Spanish face has in such degree that the
quiet seems national more than personal; but the women's faces
were oval, though rather heavily based, while the men's were
squared, with high cheek-bones, and they seemed more distinctly
middle class. Men and women had equally repose of manner, and
when the women came to put on their headgear near our corner, it
was with a surface calm unbroken by what must have been their
inner excitement. They wore hats and mantillas in about the same
proportion; but the bride wore a black mantilla and a black dress
with sprigs of orange blossoms in her hair and on her breast for
the only note of white. Her lovely, gentle face was white, of
course, from the universal powder, and so were the faces of the
others, who talked in low tones around her, with scarcely more
animation than so many masks. The handsomest of them, whom we
decided to be her sister, arranged the bride's mantilla, and was
then helped on with hers by the others, with soft smiles and
glances. Two little girls, imaginably sorry the feast was over,
suppressed their regret in the tutelage of the maiden aunts and
grandmothers who put up cakes in napkins to carry home; and then
the party vanished in unbroken decorum. When they were gone we
found that in studying the behavior of the bride and her friends
we had not only failed to identify the bridegroom, but had
altogether forgotten to try.
VIII
The terrible
Torquemada dwelt for years in Valladolid and must there have
excogitated some of the methods of the Holy Office in dealing
with heresy. As I have noted, Ferdinand and Isabella were married
there and Philip II. was born there; but I think the
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
reader will agree
with me that the highest honor of the city is that it was long
the home of the gallant gentleman who after five years of
captivity in Algiers and the loss of his hand in the Battle of
Lepanto, wrote there, in his poverty and neglect, the first part
of a romance which remains and must always remain one of the
first if not the very first of the fictions of the world. I mean
that
Dear son of memory,
great heir of fame,
Michael Cervantes;
and I wish I could pay here that devoir to his memory and fame
which squalid circumstance forbade me to render under the roof
that once sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise,
and even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the city has
put up a tablet to him with his bust above it in the front of his
incredible house and done him the homage of a reverent
inscription. It is a very little house, as small as Ariosto's in
Ferrara, which he said was so apt for him, but it is not in a
long, clean street like that; it is in a bad neighborhood which
has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the days of
Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of
these a gentleman was stabbed near the author's house. The alarm
brought Cervantes to the door and being the first to reach the
dying man he was promptly arrested, together with his wife, his
two sisters, and his niece, who were living with him and who were
taken up as accessories before the fact. The whole abomination is
matter of judicial record, and it appears from this that
suspicion fell upon the gentle family (one sister was a nun)
because they were living in that infamous place. The man whose
renown has since filled the civilized world fuller even than
the name of his contemporary,
Shakespeare (they died on
72
THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
the same day), was
then so unknown to the authorities of Valladolid that he had
great ado to establish the innocence of himself and his
household. To be sure, his Don Quixote had not yet
appeared, though he is said to have finished the first part in
that miserable abode in that vile region; but he had written
poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy of "Numancia,"
and he had held public employs and lived near enough to courts to
be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish and very
strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most
provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the
extirpation of ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar
did not tell fatally against him. In his declaration before the
magistrates he says that his literary reputation procured him the
acquaintance of courtiers and scholars, who visited him in that
pitiable abode where the ladies of his family cared for
themselves and him with the help of one servant maid.
They had an upper
floor of the house, which stands at the base of a stone terrace
dropping from the wide, dusty, fly-blown street, where I stayed
long enough to buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain)
and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace to revere
the house of Cervantes on its own level. There was no mistaking
it; there was the bust and the inscription; but it was well I
bought my melon before I ventured upon this act of piety; I
should not have had the stomach for it afterward. I was not
satisfied with the outside of the house, but when I entered the
open doorway, meaning to mount to the upper floor, it was as if I
were immediately blown into the street again by the thick and
noisome stench which filled the place from some unmentionable if
not unimaginable source.
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
It was like a filthy
insult to the great presence whose sacred shrine the house should
have been religiously kept. But Cervantes dead was as forgotten
in Valladolid as Cervantes living had been. In some paroxysm of
civic pride the tablet had been set in the wall and then the
house abandoned to whatever might happen. I thought foul shame of
Valladolid for her neglect, and though she might have answered
that her burden of memories was more than she could bear, that
she could not be forever keeping her celebrity sweet, still I
could have retorted, But Cervantes, but Cervantes! There was only
one Cervantes in the world and there never would be another, and
could not she watch over this poor once home of his for his
matchless sake? Then if Valladolid had come back at me with the
fact that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, and
what had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, Madrid done,
for the upkeep of his divers sojourns more than she had done,
after placing a tablet in his house wall?--certainly I could have
said that this did not excuse her, but I must have owned that she
was not alone, though she seemed most to blame.
IX
Now I look back and
am glad I had not consciously with me, as we drove away, the boy
who once meant to write the life of Cervantes, and who I knew
from my recollection of his idolatry of that chief of Spaniards
would not have listened to the excuses of Valladolid for a
moment. All appeared fair and noble in that Spain of his which
shone with such allure far across the snows through which he
trudged morning and evening with his father to and from the
printing-office,
74
THE HOUSE IN WHICH
PHILIP II. WAS BORN
THE VARIETY OP
VALLADOLID
and made his dream
of that great work the common theme of their talk. Now the boy is
as utterly gone as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but
who died a very old man many years ago; and in the place of both
is another old man trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain
visited and unvisited.
It would be a poor
sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any lasting
indignation with Vallado-lid because of the stench of Cervantes's
house. There are a great many very bad smells in Spain
everywhere, and it is only fair to own that a psychological
change toward Valladolid had been operating itself in me since
luncheon which Valladolid was not very specifically to blame for.
Up to the time the wedding guests left us we had said Valladolid
was the most interesting city we had ever seen, and we would like
to stay there a week; then, suddenly, we began to turn against
it. One thing: the weather had clouded, and it was colder. But we
determined to be just, and after we left the house of Cervantes
we drove out to the promenades along the banks of the Pisuerga,
in hopes of a better mind, for we had read that they were the
favorite resort of the citizens in summer, and we did not know
but even in autumn we might have some glimpses of their
recreation. Our way took us sorrowfully past hospitals and
prisons and barracks; and when we came out on the promenade we
found ourselves in the gloom of close set mulberry trees, with
the dust thick on the paths under them. The leaves hung leaden
gray on the boughs and there could never have been a spear of
grass along those disconsolate ways. The river was shrunken in
its bed, and where its current crept from pool to pool, women
were washing some of the rags which already hung so thick on the
bushes that it was wonderful there should be any left to wash.
Squalid 6 76
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
children abounded,
and at one point a crowd of people had gathered and stood looking
silently and motionlessly over the bank. We looked too and on a
sand-bar near the shore we saw three gendarmes standing with a
group of civilians. Between their fixed and absolutely motionless
figures lay the body of a drowned man on the sand, poorly clothed
in a workman's dress, and with his poor, dead clay-white hands
stretched out from him on the sand, and his gray face showing to
the sky. Everywhere people were stopping and staring; from one of
the crowded windows of the nearest house a woman hung with a rope
of her long hair in one hand, and in the other the brush she was
passing over it. On the bridge the man who had found the body
made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized to a group of
spectators without rousing them to a murmur or stirring them from
their statuesque fixity. His own excitement in comparison seemed
indecent.
X
It was now three
o'clock and I thought I might be in time to draw some money on my
letter of credit, at the bank which we had found standing in a
pleasant garden in the course of our stroll through the town the
night before. We had said, How charming it would be to draw money
in such an environment; and full of the romantic expectation, I
offered my letter at the window, where after a discreet interval
I managed to call from their preoccupation some unoccupied
persons within. They had not a very financial air, and I thought
them the porters they really were, with some fear that I had come
after banking-hours. But they joined in reassuring me, and told
me that if I would
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THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
return after five
o'clock the proper authorities would be there.
I did not know then
what late hours Spain kept in every way; but I concealed my
surprise; and I came back at the time suggested, and offered my
letter at the window with a request for ten pounds, which I
fancied I might need. A clerk took the letter and scrutinized it
with a deliberation which I thought it scarcely merited. His
self-respect doubtless would not suffer him to betray that he
could not read the English of it; and with an air of wishing to
consult higher authority he carried it to another clerk at a desk
across the room. To this official it seemed to come as something
of a blow. Tie made a show of reading it several times over,
inside and out, and then from the pigeonhole of his desk he began
to accumulate what I supposed corroborative documents, or
pieces justificatives. When lie had amassed a heap several
inches thick, he rose and hurried out through the gate, across
the hall where I sat, into a room beyond. He returned without in
any wise referring himself to me and sat down at his desk again.
The first clerk explained to the anxious face with which I now
approached him that the second clerk had taken my letter to the
director. I went back to my seat and waited fifteen minutes
longer, fifteen having passed already; then I presented my
anxious face, now somewhat indignant, to the first clerk again.
"What is the director doing with my letter?" The first clerk
referred my question to the second clerk, who answered from his
place, "He is verifying the signature." "But what signature?" I
wondered to myself, reflecting that he had as yet had none of
mine. Could it be the signature of my New York banker or my
London one? I repaired once more to the window, after another
wait, and said in polite but firm
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
Castilian, "Do me
the favor to return me my letter." A commotion of protest took
place within the barrier, followed by the repeated explanation
that the director was verifying the signature. I returned to toy
place and considered that the suspicious document which I had
presented bore record of moneys drawn in London, in Paris, in
Tours, in San Sebastian, which ought to have allayed all
suspicion; then for the last time I repaired to the window; more
in anger now than in sorrow, and gathered nay severest Spanish
together for a final demand: "Do me the favor to give me back my
letter without the pounds sterling." The clerks consulted
together; one of them decided to go to the director's room, and
after a dignified delay he came back with my letter, and dashed
it down before me with the only rudeness I experienced in
Spain.
I was glad to get it
on any terms; it was only too probable that it would have been
returned without the money if I had not demanded it; and I did
what I could with the fact that this amusing financial
transaction, involving a total of fifty dollars, had taken place
in the chief banking-house of one of the commercial and
industrial centers of the country. Valladolid is among other
works the seat of the locomotive works of the northern railway
lines, and as these machines average a speed of twenty-five miles
an hour with express trains, it seemed strange to me that
something like their rapidity should not have governed the action
of that bank director in forcing me to ask back my discredited
letter of credit.
XI
That evening the young
voices and the young feet began to
chirp again under our sun balcony. But there
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THE VARIETY OF
VALLADOLID
had been no sun in
it since noon and presently a cold thin rain was falling and
driving the promenaders under the arcades, where they were
perhaps not unhappier for being closely massed. We missed the
prettiness of the spectacle, though as yet we did not know that
it was the only one of the sort we might hope to see in Spain,
where women walk little indoors, and when they go out, drive and
increase in the sort of loveliness which may be weighed and
measured. Even under the arcades the promenade ceased early and
in the adjoining Plaza Mayor, where the autos da fe once
took place, the rain still earlier made an end of the municipal
music, and the dancing of the lower ranks of the people. But we
were fortunate in our Chilian friend's representation of the
dancing; he came to our table at dinner, and did with charming
sympathy a mother waltzing with her babe in arms for a
partner.
He came to the
omnibus at the end of the promenade, when we were starting for
the station next morning, not yet shaven, in his friendly zeal to
make sure of seeing us off, and we parted with confident
prophecies of meeting each other again in Madrid. We had already
bidden adieu with effusion to our landlady-sisters-and-mother,
and had wished to keep forever our own the adorable chico
who, when cautioned against trying to carry a very heavy bag,
valiantly jerked it to his shoulder and made off with it to the
omnibus, as if it were nothing. I do not believe such a boy
breathes out of Spain, where I hope he will grow up to the
Oriental calm of so many of his countrymen, and rest from the
toils of his nonage. At the last moment after the Chilian had
left us, we perceived that one of our trunks had been forgotten,
and the chico coursed back to the hotel for it and
returned with the delinquent porter bearing it, as if to make
sure of his bringing it.
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
When it was put on
top of the omnibus, and we were in probably unparalleled
readiness for starting to the station, at an hour when scarcely
anybody else in Valladolid was up, a mule composing a portion of
our team immediately fell down, as if startled too abruptly from
a somnambulic dream. I really do not remember how it was got to
its feet again; but I remember the anguish of the delay and the
fear that we might not be able to escape from Valladolid after
all our pains in trying for the Sud-Express at that hour; and I
remember that when we reached the station we found that the
Sud-Express was forty minutes behind time and that we were a full
hour after that before starting for Madrid.
V
PHASES OF
MADRID
I FANCIED that a
kind of Gothic gloom was expressed in the black wine-skins of Old
Castile, as contrasted with the fairer color of those which began
to prevail even so little south of Burgos as Valladolid. I am not
sure that the Old Castilian wine-skins derived their blackness
from the complexion of the pigs, or that there are more pale pigs
in the south than in the north of Spain; I am sure only of a
difference in the color of the skins, which may have come from a
difference in the treatment of them. At a venture I should not
say that there were more black pigs in Old Castile than in
Andalusia, as we observed them from the train, rooting among the
unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands. Rather I should say that
the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown, corresponding to
the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths and the
Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric
Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but
I do not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or
Arabic pig showed himself an animal of great energy and alertness
wherever we saw him, and able to live upon the lean of the land
where it was leanest. At his youngest he abounded in the furrows
and hollows, matching his russet with the russet of the soil and
darting to and fro with the quickness of a hare. He was always of
an ingratiating
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
humorousness and
endeared himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke
that was going, especially that of startling the pedestrian by
his own sudden apparition from behind a tuft of grass or withered
stalk. I will not be sure, but I think we began to see his kind
as soon as we got out of Yalladolid, when we began running
through a country wooded with heavy, low-crowned pines that
looked like the stone-pines of Italy, but were probably not the
same. After twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with
pigs of other complexions, as much guarded as possible,
multiplied among the patches of vineyard. He had there the
company of tall black goats and rather unhappy-looking black
sheep, all of whom he excelled in the art of foraging among the
vines and the stubble of the surrounding wheat-lands. After the
vineyards these opened and stretched themselves wearily, from low
dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in aspect by the squalid
peasants, scratching their tawny expanses with those crooked
prehistoric sticks which they use for plows in Spain. It was a
dreary landscape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any
terms, and especially good to be away from the station which we
had left emulating the odors of the house of
Cervantes.
I
There had been the
usual alarm about the lack of places in the Sud-Express which we
were to take at Valladolid, but we chanced getting them, and our
boldness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment to
ourselves, and a large, fat friendly conductor with an eye out
for tips in every direction. The lunch in our dining-car was for
the first time in Spain not worth
82
PHASES OF
MADRID
the American price
asked for it; everywhere else on the Spanish trains I must
testify that the meals were excellent and abundant; and the
refection may now have felt in some obscure sort the horror of
the world in which the Sud-Express seemed to have lost itself.
The scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our
comfortable planet as if it were the landscape of some star
condemned for the sins of its extinct children to wander through
space in unimaginable desolation. It seldom happens in Spain that
the scenery is the same on both sides of the railroad track, but
here it was malignly alike on one hand and on the other, though
we seemed to be running along the slope of an upland, so that the
left hand was higher and the right lower. It was more as if we
were crossing the face of some prodigious rapid, whose surges
were the measureless granite boulders tossing everywhere in
masses from the size of a man's fist to the size of a house. In a
wild chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater bearing
on their tops or between them on their shoulders smaller regular
or irregular masses of the same gray stone. Everywhere among
their awful shallows grew gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks
and trees spread tufts of gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy
of this mad world, a storm of cold rain broke whirling, and cold
gray mists drove, blinding the windows and chilling us where we
sat within. From time to time the storm lifted and showed again
this vision of nature hoary as if with immemorial eld; if at
times we seemed to have run away from it again it closed in upon
us and held us captive in its desolation.
With longer and
longer intervals of relief it closed upon us for the last time in
the neighborhood of the gloomiest pile that ever a man built for
his life, his death and his prayer between; but before we came
to
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
the palace-tomb of
the Escorial, we had clear in the distance the vision of the
walls and roofs and towers of the medieval city of Avila. It is
said to be the perfectest relic of the Middle Ages after or
before Rothenburg, and we who had seen Rothenburg solemnly
promised ourselves to come back some day from Madrid and spend it
in Avila. But we never came, and Avila remains a vision of walls
and roofs and towers tawny gray glimpsed in a rift of the storm
that again swept toward the Spanish capital.
II
We were very glad
indeed to get to Madrid, though dismayed by apprehensions of the
octroi which we felt sure awaited us. We recalled the
behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our
baggage about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in
Madrid such an officer could not do less than shatter our boxes
and scatter their contents in the streaming street. What was then
our surprise, our joy, to find that in Madrid there was no
octroi at all, and that the amiable mozos who took
our things hardly knew what we meant when we asked for it. At
Madrid they scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of the
station, and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of modernity,
so dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, when we mounted
into a motor-bus and sped away through the spectacular town, so
like Paris, so like Rome as to have no personality of its own
except in this similarity, and never stopped till the liveried
service swarmed upon us at the door of the Hotel Ritz.
Here the modernity
which had so winningly greeted us at the station welcomed us more
and consolingly.
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PHASES OF
MADRID
There was not only
steam-heating, but the steam was on! It wanted but a turn of the
hand at the radiators, and the rooms were warm. The rooms
themselves responded to our appeal and looked down into a silent
inner court, deaf to the clatter of the streets, and sleep
haunted the very air, distracted, if at all, by the instant
facility and luxury of the appliances. Was it really in Spain
that a metallic tablet at the bed-head invited the wanderer to
call with one button for the camerero, another for the
camerera, and another for the mozo, who would all
instantly come speaking English like so many angels? Were we to
have these beautiful chambers for a humble two dollars and forty
cents a day; and if it was true, why did we ever leave them and
try for something ever so much worse and so very little cheaper?
Let me be frank with the reader whom I desire for my friend, and
own that we were frightened from the Eitz Hotel by the rumor of
Eitz prices. I paid my bill there, which was imagined with
scrupulous fullness to the last possible centimo, and so I
may disinterestedly declare that the Eitz is the only hotel in
Madrid where you get the worth of your money, even when the money
seems more but scarcely is so. In all Spain I know of only two
other hotels which may compare with it, and these are the English
hotels, one at Ronda and one at Algeciras. If I add falteringly
the hotel where we stayed a night in Toledo and the hotel where
we abode a fortnight in Seville, I heap the measure of merit and
press it down.
We did not begin at
once our insensate search for another hotel in Madrid: but the
sky had cleared and we went out into the strange capital so
uncharacteristically characteristic, to find tea at a certain
cafe we had heard of. It was in the Calle de Alcala (a name which
so richly stimulates the imagination), and it
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
looked out across
this handsome street, to a club that I never knew the name of,
where at a series of open windows was a flare of young men in
silk hats leaning out on their elbows and letting no passing fact
of the avenue escape them. It was worth their study, and if I had
been an idle young Spaniard, or an idle old one, I would have
asked nothing better than to spend my Sunday afternoon poring
from one of those windows on my well-known world of Madrid as it
babbled by. Even in my quality of alien, newly arrived and
ignorant of that world, I already felt its
fascination.
Sunday in Spain is
perhaps different from other days of the week to the Spanish
sense, but to the traveler it is too like them to be
distinguishable except in that guilty Sabbath consciousness which
is probably an effect from original sin in every Protestant soul.
The casual eye could not see but that in Madrid every one seemed
as much or as little at work as on any other day. My own casual
eye noted that the most picturesquely evident thing in the city
was the country life which seemed so to pervade it. In the Calle
de Alcala, flowing to the Prado out of the Puerta del Sol, there
passed a current of farm-carts and farm-wagons more conspicuous
than any urban vehicles, as they jingled by, with men and women
on their sleigh-belled donkeys, astride or atop the heavily laden
panniers. The donkeys bore a part literally leading in all the
rustic equipages, and with their superior intellect found a way
through the crowds for the string-teams of the three or four
large mules that followed them in harness. Whenever we saw a team
of mules without this sage guidance we trembled for their safety;
as for horses, no team of them attempted the difficult passage,
though ox-trains seemed able to dispense with the path-finding
donkeys.
To be sure, the
horses abounded in the cabs, which
PHASES OF
MADRID
were mostly bad,
more or less. It is an idiosyncrasy of the cabs in Madrid that
only the open victorias have rubber tires; if you go in a coupe
you must consent to be ruthlessly bounced over the rough
pavements on wheels unsoftened. It "follows as the night the day"
that the coupe is not in favor, and that in its conservative
disuse it accumulates a smell not to be acquired out of Spain.
One such vehicle I had which I thought must have been stabled in
the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, and rushed on the
Sud-Express for my service at Madrid; the stench in it was such
that after a short drive to the house of a friend I was fain to
dismiss it at a serious loss in pesetas and take the risk of
another which might have been as bad. Fortunately a kind lady
intervened with a private carriage and a coachman shaved that
very day, whereas my poor old cabman, who was of one and the same
smell as his cab, had not been shaved for three days.
III
This seems the place
to note the fact that no Spaniard in humble life shaves oftener
than once in three days, and that you always see him on the third
day just before he has shaved. But all this time I have left
myself sitting in the cafe looking out on the club that looks out
on the Calle de Aleala, and keeping the waiter waiting with a jug
of hot milk in his hand while I convince him (such a friendly,
smiling man he is, and glad of my instruction!) that in tea one
always wants the milk cold. To him that does not seem reasonable,
since one wants it hot in coffee and chocolate; but he yields to
niy prejudice, and after that he always says, "Ah, leche fria!" and we smile
radiantly
87
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
together in the bond
of comradery which cold milk establishes between man and man in
Spain. As yet tea is a novelty in that country, though the young
English queen, universally loved and honored, has made it the
fashion in high life. Still it is hard to overcome such a
prepossession as that of hot milk in tea, and in some places you
cannot get it cold for love or money.
But again I leave
myself waiting in that cafe, where slowly, and at last not very
overwhelmingly in number, the beautiful plaster-pale Spanish
ladies gather with their husbands and have chocolate. It is a
riotous dissipation for them, though it does not sound so; the
home is the Spanish ideal of the woman's place, as it is of our
anti-suffragists, though there is nothing corresponding to our
fireside in it; and the cafe is her husband's place without her.
When she walks in the street, where mostly she drives, she walks
with her eyes straight before her; to look either to the right or
left, especially if a man is on either hand, is a superfluity of
naughtiness. The habit of looking straight ahead is formed in
youth, and it continues through life; so at least it is said, and
if I cannot affirm it I will not deny it. The beautiful black
eyes so discreetly directed looked as often from mantillas as
hats, even in Madrid, which is the capital, and much infested by
French fashions. You must not believe it when any one tells you
that the mantilla is going out; it prevails everywhere, and it
increases from north to south, and in Seville it is almost
universal. Hats are worn there only in driving, but at Madrid
there were many hats worn in walking, though whether by Spanish
women or by foreigners, of course one could not, though a
wayfaring man and an American, stop them to ask.
There are more
women in the street at Madrid than 88
PUERTA DEL SOL,
MADRID
PHASES OF
MADRID
in the provincial
cities, perhaps because it is the capital and cosmopolitan, and
perhaps because the streets are many of them open and pleasant,
though there arc enough of them dark and narrow, too. I do not
know just why the Puerta del Sol seems so much ampler and gayer
than the Calle de Alcala; it is not really wider, but it seems
more to concentrate the coming and going, and with its
high-hoteled opposition of corners is of a supreme
spectacularity. Besides, the name is so fine: what better could
any city place ask than to be called Gate of the Sun? Perpetual
trams wheeze and whistle through it; large shops face upon it;
the sidewalks are thronged with passers, and the many little
streets debouching on it pour their streams of traffic and travel
into it on the right and left. It is mainly fed by the avenues
leaving the royal palace on the west, and its eddying tide
empties through the Calle de Alcala into the groves and gardens
of the Prado whence it spreads over all the drives and parks east
and north and south.
For a capital
purposed and planned Madrid is very well indeed. It has not the
symmetry which forethought gave the topography of Washington, or
the beauty which afterthought has given Paris. But it makes you
think a little of Washington, and a great deal of Paris, though a
great deal more yet of Rome. It is Renaissance so far as
architecture goes, and it is very modern Latin; so that it is of
the older and the newer Rome that it makes you think. From, time
to time it seemed to me I must be in. Rome, and I recovered
myself with a pang to find I was not. Yet, as I say, Madrid was
very well indeed, and when I reflected I had to own that I had
come there on purpose to be there, and not to be in Rome, where
also I should have been so satisfied to be.
89
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
IV
I do not know but we
chose our hotel when we left the Ritz because it was so Italian,
so Roman. It had a wide grape arbor before it, with a generous
spread of trellised roof through which dangled the grape bunches
among the leaves of the vine. Around this arbor at top went a
balustrade of marble, with fat putti, or marble boys, on
the corners, who would have watched over the fruit if they had
not been preoccupied with looking like so many thousands of
putti in Italy. They looked like Italian putti with
a difference, the difference that passes between all the Spanish
things and the Italian things they resemble. They were coarser
and grosser in figure, and though amiable enough in aspect, they
lacked the refinement, the air of pretty appeal which Italian art
learns from nature to give the faces of putti. Yet they
were charming, and it was always a pleasure to look at them
posing in pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not
know but dozing in the hours of siesta. If they had been
in wood Spanish art would have known how to make them better, but
in stone they had been gathering an acceptable weather stain
during the human generations they had been there, and their plump
stomachs were weather-beaten white.
I do not know if
they had been there long enough to have witnessed the murder of
Cromwell's ambassador done in our street by two Jacobite
gentlemen who could not abide his coming to honor in the land
where they were in exile from England. That must have been
sometime about the middle of the century after Philip II., bigot
as he was, could not bear the more masterful bigotry of the
archbishop of Toledo, and brought his
90
PHASES OF
MADRID
court from that
ancient capital, and declared Madrid henceforward the capital
forever; which did not prevent Philip III. from taking his court
to Valladolid and making that the capital en titre when he
liked. However, some other Philip or Charles, or whoever,
returned with his court to Madrid and it has ever since remained
the capital, and has come, with many natural disadvantages, to
look its supremacy. For my pleasure I would rather live in
Seville, but that would be a luxurious indulgence of the love of
beauty, and like a preference of Venice in Italy when there was
Rome to live in. Madrid is not Rome, but it makes you think of
Rome as I have said, and if it had a better climate it would make
you think of Rome still more. Notoriously, however, it has not a
good climate and we had not come at the right season to get the
best of the bad. The bad season itself was perverse, for the
rains do not usually begin in their bitterness at Madrid before
November, and now they began early in October. The day would open
fair, with only a few little white clouds in the large blue, and
if we could trust other's experience we knew it would rain before
the day closed; only a morning absolutely clear could warrant the
hope of a day fair till sunset. Shortly after noon the little
white clouds would drift together and be joined by others till
they hid the large blue, and then the drops would begin to fall.
By that time the air would have turned raw and chill, and the
rain would be of a cold which it kept through the
night.
This habit of
raining every afternoon was what kept us from seeing rank,
riches, and beauty in the Paseo de la Castellana, where they
drive only on fine afternoons; they now remained at home even
more persistently than we did, for with that love of the
fashionable world for which I am always blaming myself I
sometimes 7 SI
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
took a cab and fared
desperately forth in pursuit of them. Only once did I seem to
catch a glimpse of them, and that once I saw a closed carriage
weltering along the drive between the trees and the trams that
border it, with the coachman and footman snugly sheltered under
umbrellas on the box. This was something, though not a great
deal; I could not make out the people inside the carriage; yet it
helped to certify to me the fact that the great world does drive
in the Paseo de la Castellana and does not drive in the Paseo del
Prado; that is quite abandoned, even on the wettest days, to the
very poor and perhaps unfashionable people.
V
It may have been our
comparative defeat with fashion in its most distinctive moments
of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the dreariness
of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare with
that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more
determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had
vowed ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an
example of civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a
bull-fight under any circumstances or for any consideration; but
it seemed to us that it was a sort of public duty to go and see
the crowd, what it was like, in the time and place where the
Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go and remain in our
places till everybody else was placed, and then, when the
picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the
arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly
in, we would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go
inexorably away. This union of self-indulgence and
92
THE BULL-RING,
MADRID
PHASES OF
MADRID
self-denial seemed
almost an act of piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to
be on Sunday, and we prepared ourselves with tickets quite early
in the week. On Saturday afternoon it rained, of course, but the
worst was that it rained on Sunday morning, and the clouds did
not lift till noon. Then the glowing concierge of our hotel, a
man so gaily hopeful, so expansively promising that I could
hardly believe he was not an Italian, said that there could not
possibly be a bull-fight that day; the rain would have made the
arena so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall down
together in a common ruin, with no hope whatever of hurting one
another.
We gave up this
bull-fight at once, but we were the more resolved to see a
bull-fight because we still owed it to the Spanish people to come
away before we had time to look at it, and we said we would
certainly go at Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath.
At Cordova we learned that it was the closed season for
bull-fighting, but vague hopes of usefulness to the Spanish
public were held out to us at Seville, the very metropolis of
bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellowing up from their
native fields athirst for the blood of the profession and the
aficionados, who outnumber there the amateurs of the whole
rest of Spain. But at Seville we were told that there would be no
more bull-feasts, as the Spaniards much more preferably call the
bullfights, till April, and now we were only in October. We said,
Never mind; we would go to a bull-feast in Granada; but at
Granada the season was even more hopelessly closed. In Ronda
itself, which is the heart, as Seville is the home of the
bull-feast, we could only see the inside of the empty arena; and
at Algeciras the outside alone offered itself to our vision. By
this time the sense of duty was so
strong upon us that if there
93
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
had been a
bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the
last espada dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of
the last bull transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other
toreros, the banderilleros with their darts and the
picadors with their disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the
blood-stained arena. Such is the force of a high resolve in
strangers bent upon a lesson of civilization to a barbarous
people when disappointed of their purpose. But we learned too
late that only in Madrid is there any bull-feasting in the
winter. In the provincial cities the bulls are dispirited by the
cold; but in the capital, for the honor of the nation, they
somehow pull themselves together and do their poor best to kill
and be killed. Yet in the capital where the zeal of the bulls,
and I suppose, of the bull-fighters, is such, it is said that
there is a subtle decay in the fashionable, if not popular,
esteem of the only sport which remembers in the modern world the
gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said, but I do not
know whether it is true, that the young English queen who has
gladly renounced her nation and religion for the people who seem
so to love her, cannot endure the bloody sights of the
bull-feast; and when it comes to the horses dragging their
entrails across the ring, or the espada despatching the
bull, or the bull tossing a landerillero in the air she
puts up her fan. It is said also that the young Spanish king, who
has shown himself such a merciful-minded youth, and seems so
eager to make the best of the bad business of being a king at
all, sympathizes with her, and shows an obviously abated interest
at these supreme moments.
I do not know
whether or not it was because we had failed with the bull-feast
that we failed to go to any sort of public entertainment in
Madrid. It certainly was in my book to go to the theater, and see
some of
94
PHASES OF
MADRID
those modern plays
which I had read so many of, and which I had translated one of
for Lawrence Barrett in the far-off days before the flood of
native American dramas now deluging our theater. That play was
"Un Drama Nueva," by Estebanez, which between us we called
"Yorick's Love" and which my very knightly tragedian made his
battle-horse during the latter years of his life. In another
version Barrett had seen it fail in New York, but its failure
left him with the lasting desire to do it himself. A Spanish
friend, now dead but then the gifted and eccentric Consul General
at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, and I thought
there was great reason in a suggestion from another friend that
it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of
its characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got
over by making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian
epoch. I did this and the sole obstacle to its success seemed
removed. It went, as the enthusiastic Barrett used to say, "with
a shout," though to please him I had hurt it all I could by some
additions and adaptations; and though it was a most ridiculously
romantic story of the tragical loves of Yorick (whom the Latins
like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more interesting and
important character than Shakespeare ever meant him to be
fancied), and ought to have remained the fiasco it began, still
it gained Barrett much money and me some little.
I was always proud
of this success, and I boasted of it to the bookseller in Madrid,
whom I interested in finding me some still moderner plays after
quite failing to interest another bookseller. Your Spanish
merchant seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction; but
perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this Spanish
bookseller because he was a German and spoke
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
a surprising English
in response to my demand whether he spoke any. He was the
frowsiest bookseller I ever saw, and he was in the third day of
his unshavenness with a shirt-front and coat-collar plentifully
bedandruffed from his shaggy hair; but he entered into the spirit
of my affair and said if that Spanish play had succeeded so
wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty per cent, more than the
current price for the other Spanish plays which I wanted him to
get me. I laughed with him at the joke which I found simple
earnest when our glowing concierge gave me the books next day,
and I perceived that the proposed supplement had really been paid
for them on my account. I should not now be grieving for this
incident if the plays had proved better reading than they did on
experiment. Some of them were from the Catalan, and all of them
dealt with the simpler actual life of Spain; but they did not
deal impressively with it, though they seemed to me more hopeful
in conception than certain psychological plays of ten or fifteen
years ago, which the Spanish authors had too clearly studied from
Ibsen.
They might have had
their effect in the theater, but the rainy weather had not only
spoiled my sole chance of the bull-feast; the effect of it in a
stubborn cold forbade me the night air and kept me from testing
any of the new dramas on the stage, which is always giving new
dramas in Madrid. The stage, or rather the theater, is said to be
truly a passion with the Madrilenos, who go every night to see
the whole or the part of a play and do not mind seeing the same
play constantly, as if it were opera. They may not care to see
the play so much as to be seen at it; that happens in every
country; but no doubt the plays have a charm which did not impart
itself from the printed page. The companies are reported very good: but the reader must take
this
96
PHASES OF
MADRID
from me at second
hand, as he must take the general society fact. I only know that
people ask you to dinner at nine, and if they go to the theater
afterward they cannot well come away till toward one o'clock. It
is after this hour that the tertulia, that peculiarly
Spanish function, begins, but how long it lasts or just what it
is I do not know. I am able to report confidently, however, that
it is a species of salon and that it is said to be called
a tertulia because of the former habit in the guests, and
no doubt the hostess, of quoting the poet Tertullian. It is of
various constituents, according as it is a fashionable, a
literary, or an artistic tertulia, or all three with an
infusion of science. Oftenest, I believe, it is a domestic affair
and all degrees of cousinship resort to it with brothers and
sisters and uncles, who meet with the pleasant Latin liking of
frequent meetings among kindred. In some cases no doubt it is a
brilliant reunion where lively things are said; in others it may
be dull; in far the most cases it seems to be held late at night
or early in the morning.
VI
It was hard, after
being shut up several days, that one must not go out after
nightfall, and if one went out by day, one must go with closed
lips and avoid all talking in the street under penalty of
incurring the dreaded pneumonia of Madrid. Except for that
dreaded pneumonia, I believe the air of Madrid is not so
pestilential as it has been reported. Public opinion is beginning
to veer in favor of it, just as the criticism which has
pronounced Madrid commonplace and unpicturesque because it is not
obviously old, is now finding a charm in it peculiar to the
place. Its very modernity em-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
bodies and imparts
the charm, which will grow as the city grows in wideness and
straightness. It is in the newer quarter that it recalls Rome or
the newer quarters of Rome; but there is an old part of it that
recalls the older part of Naples, though the streets are not
quite so narrow nor the houses so high. There is like bargaining
at the open stands with the buyers and sellers chaffering over
them; there is a likeness in the people's looks, too, but when it
comes to the most characteristic thing of Naples, Madrid is not
in it for a moment. I mean the bursts of song which all day long
and all night long you hear in Naples; and this seems as good a
place as any to say that to my experience Spain is a songless
land. We had read much of the song and dance there, but though
the dance might be hired the song was never offered for love or
money. To be sure, in Toledo, once, a woman came to her door
across the way under otir hotel window and sang over the slops
she emptied into the street, but then she shut the door and we
heard her no more. In Cprdova there was as brief a peal of music
from a house which we passed, and in Algeciras we heard one short
sweet strain from a girl whom we could not see behind her
lattice. Besides these chance notes we heard no other by any
chance. But this is by no means saying that there is not abundant
song in Spain, only it was kept quiet; I suppose that if we had
been there in the spring instead of the fall we should at least
have heard the birds singing. In Madrid there were not even many
street cries; a few in the Puerta del Sol, yes; but the peasants
who drove their mule-teams through the streets scarcely lifted
their voices in reproach or invitation; they could trust the wise
donkeys that led them to get them safely through the difficult
places. There was no audible quarreling among the cabmen, and
when
98
PHASES OF
MADRID
you called a cab it
was useless to cry "Heigh!" or shake your umbrella; you made play
with your thumb and finger in the air and sibilantly whispered;
otherwise the cabman ignored you and went on reading his
newspaper. The cabmen of Madrid are great readers, much greater,
I am sorry to say, than I was, for whenever I bought a Spanish
paper I found it extremely well written. Now and then I expressed
my political preferences in buying El Liberal which I
thought very able; even El Imparcial I thought able,
though it is less radical than El Liberal, a paper which
is published simultaneously in Madrid, with local editions in
several provincial cities.
For all the street
silence there seemed to be a great deal of noise, which I suppose
came from the click of boots on the sidewalks and of hoofs in
roadways and the grind and squeal of the trams, with the harsh
smiting of the unrubbered tires of the closed cabs on the rough
granite blocks of the streets. But there are asphalted streets in
Madrid where the sound of the hoofs and wheels is subdued, and
the streets rough and smooth are kept of a cleanliness which
would put the streets of New York to shame if anything could.
Ordinarily you could get cabs anywhere, but if you wanted one
very badly, when remote from a stand, there was more than one
chance that a cab marked Libre would pass you with lordly
indifference. As for motor taxi-cabs there are none in the city,
and at Cook's they would not take the responsibility of
recommending any automobiles for country excursions.
VII
I linger over these
sordid details because I must needs shrink before the mention of
that incomparable
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
gallery, the Museo
del Prado. I am careful not to call it the greatest gallery in
the world, for I think of what the Louvre, the Pitti, and the
National Gallery are, and what our own Metropolitan is going to
be; but surely the Museo del Prado is incomparable for its
peculiar riches. It is part of the autobiographical associations
with my Spanish travel that when John Hay, who was not yet, by
thirty or forty years, the great statesman he became, but only
the breeziest of young Secretaries of Legation, just two weeks
from his post in Madrid, blew surprisingly into my little
carpenter's box in Cambridge one day, he boasted almost the first
thing that the best Titians in the world were in the Prado
galleries. I was too lately from Venice in 1867 not to have my
inward question whether there could be anywhere a better Titian
than the "Assumption," but I loved Hay too much to deny him
openly. I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other day
I went to the Prado it was with the wish of finding him perfectly
right, triumphantly right. I had been from the first a strong
partisan of Titian, and in many a heated argument with Ruskin,
unaware of our controversy, I had it out with that most
prejudiced partisan of Tintoretto. I always got the better of
him, as one does in such dramatizations, where one frames one's
opponent's feeble replies for him; but now in the Prado, sadly
and strangely enough, I began to wonder if Ruskin might not have
tacitly had the better of me all the time. If Hay was right in
holding that the best Titians in the world were in the Prado,
then I was wrong in having argued for Titian against Tintoretto
with Ruskin. I could only wish that I had the "Assumption" there,
or some of those senators whose portraits I remembered in the
Academy at Venice. The truth is that to my eye he seemed to
weaken before
100
PHASES OF
MADRID
the Spanish masters,
though I say this, who must confess that I failed to see the room
of his great portraits. The Italians who hold their own with the
Spaniards are Tintoretto and Veronese; even Murillo was more than
a match for Titian in such pictures of his as I saw (I must own
that I did not see the best, or nearly all), though properly
speaking Murillo is to be known at his greatest only in
Seville.
But Velasquez, but
Velasquez! In the Prado there is no one else present when he is
by, with his Philips and Charleses, and their "villainous hanging
of the nether lip," with his hideous court dwarfs and his pretty
princes and princesses, his grandees and jesters, his allegories
and battles, his pastorals and chases, which fitly have a vast
salon to themselves, not only that the spectator may realize at
once the rich variety and abundance of the master, but that such
lesser lights as Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Giorgione,
Tintoretto, Veronese, Rembrandt, Zurbaran, El Greco, Murillo, may
not be needlessly dimmed by his surpassing splendor. I leave to
those who know painting from the painter's art to appreciate the
technical perfection of Velasquez; I take my stand outside of
that, and acclaim its supremacy in virtue of that reality which
all Spanish art has seemed always to strive for and which in
Velasquez it incomparably attains. This is the literary quality
which the most unteclmical may feel, and which is not clearer to
the connoisseur than to the least unlearned.
After Velasquez in
the Prado we wanted Goya, and more and more Goya, who is as
Spanish and as unlike Velasquez as can very well be. There was
not enough Goya abovestairs to satisfy us, but in the Goya room
in the basement there was a series of scenes from Spanish life,
mostly frolic campestral things, which he did
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
as patterns for
tapestries and which came near being enough in their way: the way
of that reality which is so far from the reality of Velasquez.
There, striving with their strangeness, we found a young American
husband and wife who said they were going to Egypt, and seemed so
anxious to get out of Spain that they all but asked us which
turning to take. They had a Baedeker of 1901. which they had been
deceived in at New York as the latest edition, and they were
apparently making nothing of the Goyas and were as if lost down
there in the basement. They were in doubt about going further in
a country which had inveigled them from Gibraltar as far as its
capital. They advised with us about Burgos, of all places, and
when we said the hotels in Burgos were very cold, they answered,
Well they had thought so; and the husband asked, Spain was a
pretty good place to cut out, wasn't it? The wife expected that
they would find some one in Egypt who spoke English; she had
expected they would speak French in Spain, but had been
disappointed. They had left their warm things at Gibraltar and
were almost frozen already. They were as good and sweet and nice
as they could be, and we were truly sorry to part with them and
leave them to what seemed to be a mistake which they were not to
blame for.
I wish that all
Europeans and all Europeanized Americans knew how to value such
incorruptible con-nationals, who would, I was sure, carry into
the deepest dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the
light of our American single-heartedness. I would have given
something to know from just which kind country town and
companionable commonwealth of our Union they had come, but I
would not have given much, for I knew that they could have come
from almost any. In their modest satisfaction with our own
order
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of things, our
language, our climate, our weather, they would not rashly condemn
those of other lands, but would give them a fair chance; and, if
when they got home again, they would have to report unfavorably
of the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman's Club, it
would not be without intelligent reservations, even generous
reservations. They would know much more than they knew before
they came abroad, and if they had not seen Europe distinctly, but
in a glass darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the
wiser and none the worse for it. They would still be of their
shrewd, pure American ideals, and would judge their recollections
as they judged their experiences by them; and I wish we were all
as confirmed in our fealty to those ideals.
They were not,
clearly enough, of that yet older fashion of Americans who used
to go through European galleries buying copies of the
masterpieces which the local painters were everywhere making.
With this pair the various postal-card reproductions must have
long superseded the desire or the knowledge of copies, and I
doubt if many Americans of any sort now support that honored
tradition. Who, then, does support it? The galleries of the Prado
seem as full of copyists as they could have been fifty years ago,
and many of them were making very good copies. I wish I
could say they were working as diligently as copyists used to
work, but copyists are now subject to frequent interruptions, not
from the tourists but from one another. They used to be all men,
mostly grown gray in their pursuit, but now they are both men and
women, and younger and the women are sometimes very pretty. In
the Prado one saw several pairs of such youth conversing
together, forgetful of everything around them, and on terms so
very like flirtatious that they could
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not well be
distinguished from them. They were terms that other Spanish girls
could enjoy only with a wooden lattice and an iron grille between
them and the novios outside their windows; and no tourist
of the least heart could help rejoicing with them. In the case of
one who stood with her little figure slanted and her little head
tilted, looking up into the charmed eyes of a tall rubio,
the tourist could not help rejoicing with the young man
too.
The day after our
day in the Prado we found ourselves in the Museum of Modern Art
through the kind offices of our mistaken cabman when we were
looking for the Archaeological Museum. But we were not sorry, for
some of the new or newer pictures and sculptures were well worth
seeing, though we should never have tried for them. The force of
the masters which the ideals of the past held in restraint here
raged in unbridled excess: but if I like that force so much, why
do I say excess? The new or newer Spanish art likes an immense
canvas, say as large as the side of a barn, and it chooses mostly
a tragical Spanish history in which it riots with a young sense
of power brave to see. There were a dozen of those mighty dramas
which I would have liked to bring away with me if I had only had
a town hall big enough to put them into after I got them home.
There were sculptures as masterful and as mighty as the pictures,
but among the paintings there was one that seemed to subdue all
the infuriate actions to the calm of its awful repose. This was
Gisbert's "Execution of Torrejos and his Companions," who were
shot at Malaga in 1830 for a rising in favor of constitutional
government. One does not, if one is as wise as I, attempt to
depict pictures, and I leave this most heroic, most pathetic,
most heart-breaking, most consoling masterpiece for my reader to
go and
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see for himself; it
is almost worth going as far as Madrid to see. Never in any
picture do I remember the like of those sad, brave, severe faces
of the men standing up there to be shot, where already their
friends lay dead at their feet. A tumbled top-hat in the
foreground had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head would have
had.
VIII
Besides this and
those other histories there were energetic portraits and vigorous
landscapes in the Modern Museum, where if we had not been bent so
on visiting the Archaeological Museum, we would willingly have
spent the whole morning. But we were determined to see the
Peruvian and Mexican antiquities which we believed must be
treasured up in it; and that we might not fail of finding it, I
gave one of the custodians a special peseta to take us out on the
balcony and show us exactly how to get to it. He was so precise
and so full in. his directions that we spent the next half-hour
in wandering fatuously round the whole region before we stumbled,
almost violently, upon it immediately back of the Modern Museum.
Will, it be credited that it was then hardly worth seeing for the
things we meant to see? The Peruvian and Mexican antiquities were
so disappointing that we would hardly look at the Etruscan,
Greek, and Roman things which it was so much richer in. To be
sure, we had seen and overseen the like of these long before in
Italy; but they were admirably arranged in this museum, so that
without the eager help of the custodians (which two cents would
buy at any turn) we could have found pleasure in them, whereas
the Aztec antiquities were mostly copies in plaster and the Inca
jewelry not striking.
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Before finding the
place we had had the help of two policemen and one newsboy and a
postman in losing ourselves in the Prado where we mostly sought
for it, and with difficulty kept ourselves from being thrust into
the gallery there. In Spain a man, or even a boy, does not like
to say he does not know where a place is; he is either too proud
or too polite to do it, and he will misdirect you without mercy.
But the morning was bright, and almost warm, and we should have
looked forward to weeks of sunny weather if our experience had
not taught us that it would rain in the afternoon, and if greater
experience than ours had not instructed us that there would be
many days of thick fog now before the climate of Madrid settled
itself to the usual brightness of February. We had time to note
again in the Paseo Castellana, which is the fashionable drive,
that it consists of four rows of acacias and tamarisks and a
stretch of lawn, with seats beside it; the rest is bare
grasslessness, with a bridle-path on one side and a tram-line on
the other. If it had been late afternoon the Paseo would have
been filled with the gay world, but being the late forenoon we
had to leave it well-nigh unpeopled and go back to our hotel,
where the excellent midday breakfast merited the best appetite
one could bring to it.
In fact, all the
meals of our hotel were good, and of course they were only too
superabundant. They were pretty much what they were everywhere in
Spain, and they were better everywhere than they were in Granada
where we paid most for them. They were appetizing, and not of the
cooking which the popular superstition attributes to Spain, where
the hotel cooking is not rank with garlic or fiery with pepper,
as the untraveled believe. At luncheon in our Madrid hotel we had
a liberal choice of eggs in any form, the
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delicious arroz a
la Valencia, a kind of risotto, with saffron to savor and
color it; veal cutlets or beefsteak, salad, cheese, grapes,
pears, and peaches, and often melon; the ever-admirable melon of
Spain, which I had learned to like in England. At dinner there
were soup, fish, entree, roast beef, lamb, or poultry,
vegetables, salad, sweet, cheese, and fruit; and there was pretty
poor wine ad libitum at both meals. For breakfast there
was good and true (or true enough) coffee with rich milk, which
if we sometimes doubted it to be goat's milk we were none the
worse if none the wiser for, as at dinner we were not either if
we unwittingly ate kid for lamb.
There were not many
people in the hotel, but the dining-room was filled by citizens
who came in with the air of frequenters. They were not people of
fashion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking mercantile
folk, and ladies painted as white as newly calcimined house
walls; and all gravely polite. There was one gentleman as large
round as a hogshead, with a triple arrangement of fat at the back
of his neck which was fascinating. He always bowed when we met
(necessarily with his whole back) and he ate with an appetite
proportioned to his girth. I could wish still to know who and
what he was, for he was a person very much to my mind. So was the
head waiter, dark, silent, clean-shaven, who let me use my
deplorable Spanish with him, till in the last days he came out
with some very fair English which he had been courteously
concealing from me. He looked own brother to the room-waiter in
our corridor, whose companionship I could desire always to have.
One could not be so confident of the sincerity of the little
camarera who slipped out of the room with a soft, sidelong
"De nada" at one's thanks for the hot water in the
morn-
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ing; but one could
stake one's life on the goodness of this camarero. He was
not so tall as his leanness made him look; he was of a national
darkness of eyes and hair which as imparted to his tertian
clean-shavenness was a deep blue. He spoke, with a certain
hesitation, a beautiful Castilian, delicately lisping the
sibilants and strongly throating the gutturals; and what he said
you could believe. He never was out of the way when wanted; he
darkled with your boots and shoes in a little closet next your
door, and came from it with the morning coffee and rolls. In a
stress of frequentation he appeared in evening dress in the
dining-room at night, and did honor to the place; but otherwise
he was to be seen only in our corridor, or in the cold, dark
chamber at the stair head where the camareras sat sewing,
kept in check by his decorum. Without being explicitly advised of
the fact, I am sure he was the best of Catholics, and that he
would have burnt me for a heretic if necessary; but he would have
done it from his conscience and for my soul's good after I had
recanted. He seldom smiled, but when he did you could see it was
from his heart.
His contrast, his
very antithesis, the joyous concierge, was always smiling, and
was every way more like an Italian than a Spaniard. He followed
us into the wettest Madrid weather with the sunny rays of his
temperament, and welcomed our returning cab with an effulgence
that performed the effect of an umbrella in the longish walk from
the curbstone to the hotel door, past the grape arbor whose fruit
ripened for us only in a single bunch, though he had so
confidently prophesied our daily pleasure in it. He seemed at
first to be the landlord, and without reference to higher
authority he gave us beautiful rooms overlooking the bacchanal
vine which would have been filled with sun-
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shine if the
weather had permitted. When he lapsed into the concierge, he got
us, for five pesetas, so deep and wide a wood-box, covered with
crimson cloth, that he was borne out by the fact in declaring
that the wood in it would last us as long as we stayed; it was
oak wood, hard as iron, and with the bellows that accompanied it
we blew the last billet of it into a solid coal by which we drank
our last coffee in that hotel. His spirit, his genial
hopefulness, reconciled us to the infirmities of the house during
the period of transition beginning for it and covering our stay.
It was to be rebuilt on a scale out-Ritzing the Ritz; but in the
mean while it was not quite the Ritz. There was a time when the
elevator-shaft seemed to have tapped the awful sources of the
smell in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, but I do not
remember what blameless origin the concierge assigned to the
odor, or whether it had anything to do with the horses and the
hens which a chance-opened back door showed us stabled in the
rear of the hotel's grandiose entrance.
Our tourist
clientele, thanks I think to the allure of our concierge for all
comers, was most respectable, though there was no public place
for people to sit but a small reading-room colder than the baths
of Apollo. But when he entered the place it was as if a fire were
kindled in the minute stove never otherwise heated, and the old
English and French newspapers freshened themselves up to the
actual date as nearly as they could. We were mostly, perhaps,
Spanish families come from our several provinces for a bit of the
season which all Spanish families of civil condition desire more
or less of: lean, dark fathers, slender, white-stuccoed
daughters, and fat, white-stuccoed mothers; very still-faced, and
grave-mannered. We were also a few English, and from time to time a few Americans, but I
believe we
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were not, however
worthy, very great-world. The concierge who had so skilfully got
us together was instant in our errands and commissions, and when
it came to two of us being shut up with colds brought from Burgos
it vas he who supplemented the promptness of the apothecaries in
sending our medicines and coming himself at times to ask after
our welfare.
IX
In a strange
country all the details of life are interesting, and we noticed
with peculiar interest that Spain was a country where the
prescriptions were written in the vulgar tongue instead of the
little Latin in which prescriptions are addressed to the
apothecaries of other lands. We were disposed to praise the
faculty if not the art for this, but our doctor forbade. He said
it was because the Spanish apothecaries were so unlearned that
they could not read even so little Latin as the shortest
prescription contained. Still I could not think the custom a bad
one, though founded on ignorance, and I do not see why it should
not have made for the greater safety of those who took the
medicine if those who put it up should follow a formula in their
native tongue. I know that at any rate we found the Spanish
medicines beneficial and were presently suffered to go
out-of-doors, but with those severe injunctions against going out
after nightfall or opening our lips when we went out by day. It
was rather a bother, but it was fine to feel one's self in the
classic Madrid tradition of danger from pneumonia and to be of
the dignified company of the Spanish gentlemen whom we met with
the border of their cloaks over their mouths; like being a
character in a capa y espada drama.
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There was almost as
little acted as spoken drama in the streets. I have given my
impression of the songlessness of Spain in Madrid as elsewhere,
but if there was no street singing there was often street playing
by pathetic bands of blind minstrels with guitars and mandolins.
The blind abound everywhere in Spain in that profession of street
beggary which I always encouraged, believing as I do that comfort
in this unbalanced world cannot be too constantly reminded of
misery. As the hunchbacks are in Italy, or the wooden peg-legged
in England, so the blind are in Spain for number. I could not say
how touching the sight of their sightlessness was, or how the
remembrance of it makes me wish that I had carried more coppers
with me when I set out. I would gladly authorize the reader when
he goes to Madrid to do the charity I often neglected; he will be
the better man, or even woman, for it; and he need not mind if
his beneficiary is occasionally unworthy; he may be unworthy
himself; I am sure I was.
But the Spanish
street is rarely the theatrical spectacle that the Italian street
nearly always is. Now and then there was a bit in Madrid which
one would be sorry to have missed, such as the funeral of a civil
magistrate, otherwise unknown to me, which I saw pass my cafe
window: a most architectural black hearse, under a black roof,
drawn by eight black horses, sable-plumed. The hearse was open at
the sides, with the coffin fully showing, and a gold-laced
chapeau bras lying on it. Behind came twenty or
twenty-five gentlemen on foot in the modern ineffectiveness of
frock-coats and top-hats, and after them eight or ten closed
carriages. The procession passed without the least notice from
the crowd, which I saw at other times stirred to a flutter of
emulation in its small boys by companies of infantry
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marching to the
music of sharply blown bugles. The men were handsomer than
Italian soldiers, but not so handsome as the English, and in
figure they were not quite the deplorable pigmies one often sees
in France. Their bugles, with the rhythmical note which the
tram-cars sound, and the guitars and mandolins of the blind
minstrels, made the only street music I remember in
Madrid.
Between the daily
rains, which came in the afternoon, the sun was sometimes very
hot, but it was always cool enough indoors. The indoors interests
were not the art or story of the churches. The intensest Catholic
capital in Christendom is in fact conspicuous in nothing more
than the reputed uninterestingness of its churches. I went into
one of them, however, with a Spanish friend, and I found it
beautiful, most original, and most impressive for its
architecture and painting, but I forget which church it was. We
were going rather a desultory drive through those less frequented
parts of the city which I have mentioned as like a sort of muted
Naples: poor folk living much out-of-doors, buying and selling at
hucksters' stands and booths, and swarming about the chief
market, where the guilty were formerly put to death, but the
innocent are now provisioned. Outside the market was not
attractive, and what it was within we did not look to see. We
went rather to satisfy my wish to see whether the Manzanares is
as groveling a stream as the guide-books pretend in their effort
to give a just idea of the natural disadvantages of Madrid, as
the only great capital without an adequate river. But whether
abetted by the arts of my friend or not, the Manzanares managed
to conceal itself from me; when we left our carriage and went to
look for it, I saw only some pretty rills and falls which it
possibly fed and which lent their beauty
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to the charming up
and down hill walks, now a public pleasaunce, but formerly the
groves and gardens of the royal palace. Our talk in Spanish from
him and Italian from me was of Tolstoy and several esthetic and
spiritual interests, and when we remounted and drove back to the
city, whom should I see, hard by the King's palace, but those
dear Chilians of my heart whom we had left at
Valladolid--husband, wife, sister, with the addition of a Spanish
lady of very acceptable comeliness, in white gloves, and as
blithe as they. In honor of the capital the other ladies wore
white gloves too, but the husband and brother still kept the
straw hat which I had first known him in at San Sebastian, and
which I hope yet to know him by in New York. It was a glad clash
of greetings which none of us tried to make coherent or
intelligible, and could not if we had tried. They acclaimed their
hotel, and I ours; but on both sides I dare say we had our
reserves; and then we parted, secure that the kind chances of
travel would bring us together again somewhere.
I did not visit the
palace, but the Royal Armory I had seen two days before on a gay
morning that had not yet sorrowed to the afternoon's rain. At the
gate of the palace I fell into the keeping of one of the
authorized guides whom I wish I could identify so that I could
send the reader to pay him the tip I came short in. It is a pang
to think of the repressed disappointment in his face when in a
moment of insensate sparing I gave him the bare peseta to which
he was officially entitled, instead of the two or three due
his zeal and intelligence; and I
strongly urge my readers
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to be on their
guard against a mistaken meanness like mine. I can never repair
that, for if I went back to the Royal Armory I should not know
him by sight, and if I sought among the guides saying I was the
stranger who had behaved in that shabby sort, how would that
identify me among so many other shabby strangers? He had the
intelligence to leave me and the constant companion of these
travels to ourselves as we went about that treasury of wonders,
but before we got to the armory he stayed us with a delicate
gesture outside the court of the palace till a troop for the
guard-mounting had gone in. Then he led us across the fine,
beautiful quadrangle to the door of the museum, and waited for us
there till we came out. By this time the space was brilliant with
the confronted bodies of troops, those about to be relieved of
guard duty, and those come to relieve them, and our guide got us
excellent places where we could see everything and yet be out of
the wind which was beginning to blow cuttingly through the gates
and colonnades. There were all arms of the service--horse, foot,
and artillery; and the ceremony, with its pantomime and parley,
was much more impressive than the changing of the colors which I
had once seen at Buckingham Palace. The Spanish privates took the
business not less seriously than the British, and however they
felt the Spanish officers did not allow themselves to look bored.
The marching and countermarching was of a refined stateliness, as
if the pace were not a goose step but a peacock step; and the
music was of an exquisitely plaintive and tender note, which
seemed to grieve rather than exult; I believe it was the royal
march which they were playing, but I am not versed in such
matters. Nothing could have been fitter than the quiet beauty of
the spectacle, opening through the westward colon-
114
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& Underwood
GUARD-MOUNT IN THE
PLAZA DE ARMAS, ROYAL PALACE, MADRID
PHASES OF
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nade to the hills
and woods of the royal demesne, with yellowing and embrowning
trees that billowed from distance to distance. Some day these
groves and forests must be for the people's pleasure, as all
royal belongings seem finally to be; and in the mean time I did
not grudge the landscape to the young king and queen who probably
would not have grudged it to me. Our guide valued himself upon
our admiration of it; without our special admiration he valued
himself upon the impressive buildings of the railway station in
the middle distance. I forget whether he followed us out of the
quadrangle into the roadway where we had the advantage of some
picturesque army wagons, and some wagoners in red-faced jackets
and red trousers, and top-boots with heavy fringes of leathern
strings. Yet it must have been he who made us aware of a
high-walled inclosure where soldiers found worthy of death by
court martial could be conveniently shot; though I think we
discovered for ourselves the old woman curled up out of the wind
in a sentry-box, and sweetly asleep there while the boys were
playing marbles on the smooth ground before it. I must not omit
the peanut-boaster in front of the palace; it was in the figure
of an ocean steamer, nearly as large as the Lusitania, and
had smoke coming out of the funnel, with rudder and screw
complete and doll sailors climbing over the rigging.
But it is impossible
to speak adequately of the things in that wonderful armory. If
the reader has any pleasure in the harnesses of Spanish kings and
captains, from the great Charles the Fifth down through all the
Philips and the Charleses, he can glut it there. Their suits
begin almost with their steel baby clothes, and adapt themselves
almost to their senile decrepitude. There is the horse-litter in
which the great emperor was borne to battle, and there is the
sword which
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Isabella the great
queen wore; and I liked looking at the lanterns and the flags of
the Turkish galleys from the mighty sea-fight cf Lepanto, and the
many other trophies won from the Turks. The pavilion of Francis
I. taken at Pavia was of no secondary interest, and everywhere
was personal and national history told in the weapons and the
armor of those who made the history. Perhaps some time the
peoples will gather into museums the pens and pencils and chisels
of authors and artists, and the old caps and gowns they wore, or
the chairs they sat in at their work, or the pianos and
violoncellos of famous musicians, or the planes of surpassing
carpenters, or the hammers of eminent ironworkers; but these
things will never be so picturesque as the equipments with which
the military heroes saved their own lives or took others'. We who
have never done either must not be unreasonable or impatient. It
will be many a long century yet before we are appreciated at the
value we now set upon ourselves. In the mean while we do not have
such a bad time, and we are not so easily forgotten as some of
those princes and warriors.
XI
One of the first
errors of our search for the Archaeological Museum, promoted by
the mistaken kindness of people we asked the way, found us in the
Academy of Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and flabby
Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) we chanced
on a portrait of Goya by himself: a fine head most takingly
shrewd. But there was another portrait by him, of the ridiculous
Godoy, Prince of the Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy
George Fourthish person looking his character and
history:
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one of the miost
incredible parasites who ever fattened on a nation. This
impossible creature, hated more than feared, and despised more
than hated, who misruled a generous people for twenty-five years,
throughout the most heroic period of their annals, the low-born
paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of the king her
husband, who honored and trusted him with the most pathetic
single-hearted and simple-minded devotion, could not look all
that he was and was not; but in this portrait by Goya he
suggested his unutterable worthlessness: a worthlessness which
you can only begin to realize by successively excluding all the
virtues, and contrasting it with the sort of abandon of faith on
the part of the king; this in the common imbecility, the triune
madness of the strange group, has its sublimity. In the next room
are two pieces of Goya's which recall in their absolute realism
another passage of Spanish history with unparalleled effect. They
represent, one the accused heretics receiving sentence before a
tribunal of the Inquisition, and the other the execution of the
sentence, where the victims are mocked by a sort of fools' caps
inscribed with the terms of their accusal. Their faces are turned
on the spectator, who may forget them if he can.
I had the help of a
beautiful face there which Goya had also painted: the face of
Moratin, the historian of the Spanish drama whose book had been
one of the consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village.
That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, to the
village, with its long maple-shaded summer afternoons, and its
long lamp-lit winter nights when I was trying to find my way
through Moratin's history of the Spanish drama, and somehow not
altogether failing, so that fragments of the fact still hang
about me. I wish now I could find the way back through it, or
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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to it, but between
me and it there are so many forgotten passes that it would be
hopeless trying. I can only remember the pride and joy of finding
my way alone through it, and emerging from time to time into the
light that glimmered before me. I cannot at all remember whether
it was before or after exploring this history that I ventured
upon the trackless waste of a volume of the dramatists
themselves, where I faithfully began with the earliest and came
down to those of the great age when Cervantes and Calderon and
Lope de Vega were writing the plays. It was either my misfortune
that I read Lope and not Calderon, or that I do not recall
reading Calderon at all, and know him only by a charming little
play of Madrid life given ten or fifteen years ago by the pupils
of the Dramatic Academy in New York. My lasting ignorance of this
master was not for want of knowing how great he was, especially
from Lowell, who never failed to dwell on it when the talk was of
Spanish literature. The fact is I did not get much pleasure out
of Lope, but I did enjoy the great tragedy of Cervantes, and such
of his comedies as I found in that massive volume.
I did not realize,
however, till I saw that play of Calderon's, in New York, how
much the Spanish drama lias made Madrid its scene; and until one
knows modern Spanish fiction one cannot know how essentially the
incongruous city is the capital of the Spanish imagination. Of
course the action of Gil Bias largely passes there, but Gil Blas
in only adoptively a Spanish novel, and the native picaresque
story is oftener at home in the provinces; but since Spanish
fiction has come to full consciousness in the work of the modern
masters it has resorted more and more to Madrid. If I speak only
of Galdos and Valdes by name, it is because I
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know them best as
the greatest of their time; but I fancy the allure of the capital
has been felt by every other modern more or less; and if I were a
Spanish author I should like to put a story there. If I were a
Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of the year,
or to come up for some sojourn, as the real Spaniards do. In such
an event I should be able to tell the reader more about Madrid
than I now know. I should not be poorly keeping to hotels and
galleries and streets and the like surfaces of civilization; but
should be saying all sorts of well-informed and surprising things
about my fellow-citizens. As it is I have tried somewhat to say
how I think they look to a stranger, and if it is not quite as
they have looked to other strangers I do not insist upon my own
stranger's impression. There is a great choice of good books
about Spain, so that I do not feel bound to add to them with
anything like finality.
I have tried to give
a sense of the grand-opera effect of the street scene, but I have
record of only one passage such as one often sees in Italy where
moments of the street are always waiting for transfer to the
theater. A pair had posed themselves, across the way from our
hotel, against the large closed shutter of a shop which made an
admirable background. The woman in a black dress, with a red
shawl over her shoulders, stood statuesquely immovable,
confronting the middle-class man who, while people went and came
about them, poured out his mind to her, with many frenzied
gestures, but mostly using one hand for emphasis. He seemed to be
telling something rather than asserting himself or accusing her;
portraying a past fact or defining a situation; and she waited
immovably silent till he had finished. Then she began and warmed
to her work, but apparently without anger or prejudice. She
talked herself
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
out, as he had
talked himself out. He waited and then he left her and crossed to
the other corner. She called after him as he kept on down the
street. She turned away, but stopped, and turned again and called
after him till he passed from sight. Then she turned once more
and went her own way. Nobody minded, any more than if they had
been two unhappy ghosts invisibly and inaudibly quarreling, but I
remained, and remain to this day, afflicted because of the
mystery of their dispute.
We did not think
there were so many boys, proportionately, or boys let loose, in
Madrid as in the other towns we had seen, and we remarked to that
sort of foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities
that the children seemed like little men and women. "Yes," he
said, "the Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or
forty, and then they never grow up." It was perhaps too
epigrammatic, but it may have caught at a fact. From another
foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite
of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold
novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far
the severity of the church characterizes manners it would be hard
to say. Perhaps these are often the effect of temperament. One
heard more than one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to
shoppers in Madrid; in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one
saw nothing of it. But from the testimony of sufferers it appears
to be the Madrid shop-keeper's reasonable conception that if a
customer comes to buy something it is because he, or more
frequently she, wants it and is more concerned than himself in
the transaction. He does not put himself about in serving her,
and if she intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that
though she has often come to him before she will never
come
120
PHASES OF
MADRID
again, he remains
tranquil. From experience I cannot say how true this is; but
certainly I failed to awaken any lively emotion in the
booksellers of whom I tried to buy some modern plays. It seemed
to me that I was vexing them in the Oriental calm which they
would have preferred to my money, or even my interest in the new
Spanish drama. But in a shop where fans were sold, the shopman,
taken in an unguarded moment, seemed really to enter into the
spirit of our selection for friends at home; he even corrected my
wrong accent in the Spanish word for fan, which was certainly
going a great way.
XII
It was not the
weather for fans in Madrid, where it rained that cold rain every
afternoon, and once the whole of one day, and we could not
reasonably expect to see fans in the hands of ladies in real life
so much as in the pictures of ladies on the fans themselves. In
fact, I suppose that to see the Madrilenas most in character one
should see them in summer which in southern countries is the most
characteristic season. Theophile Gautier was governed by this
belief when he visited Spain in the hottest possible weather, and
left for the lasting delight of the world the record of that
Voyage en Espagne which he made seventy-two years ago. He
then thought the men better dressed than the women at Madrid.
Their boots are as "varnished, and they are gloved as white as
possible. Their coats are correct and their trousers laudable;
but the cravat is not of the same purity, and the waistcoat, that
only part of modern dress where the fancy may play, is not always
of irreproachable taste." As to
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
the women: "What we
understand in France as the Spanish type does not exist in Spain.
. . One imagines usually, when one says mantilla and
senora, an oval, rather long and pale, with large dark
eyes, surmounted with brows of velvet, a thin nose, a little
arched, a mouth red as a pomegranate, and, above all, a tone warm
and golden, justifying the verse of romance, She is yellow
like an orange. This is the Arab or Moorish type and not the
Spanish type. The Madrilenas are charming in the full acceptation
of the word; out of four three will be pretty; but they do not
answer at all to the idea we have of them. They are small,
delicate, well formed, the foot narrow and the figure curved, the
bust of a rich contour; but their skin is very white, the
features delicate and mobile, the mouth heart-shaped and
representing perfectly certain portraits of the Regency. Often
they have fair hair, and you cannot take three turns in the Prado
without meeting eight blonds of all shades, from the ashen blond
to the most vehement red, the red of the beard of Charles V. It
is a mistake to think there are no blonds in Spain. Blue eyes
abound there, but they are not so much liked as the
black."
Is this a true
picture of the actual Madrilenas? What I say is that seventy-two
years have passed since it was painted and the originals have had
time to change. What I say is that it was nearly always raining,
and I could not be stire. What I say, above all, is that I am not
a Frenchman of the high Romantic moment and that what I chiefly
noticed was how beautiful the mantilla was whether worn by old or
young, how fit, how gentle, how winning. I suppose that the women
we saw walking in it were never of the highest class; who would
be driving except when we saw them going to church. But they were often of the
latest
122
PHASES OF
MADRID
fashion, with their
feet hobbled by the narrow skirts, of which they lost the last
poignant effect by not having wide or high or slouch or
swashbuckler hats on; they were not top-heavy. What seems certain
is that the Spanish women are short and slight or short and fat.
I find it recorded that when a young English couple came into the
Royal Armory the girl looked impossibly tall and fair.
The women of the
lower classes are commonly handsome and carry themselves finely;
their heads are bare, even of mantillas, and their skirts are
ample. When it did not rain they added to the gaiety of the
streets, and when it did to their gloom. Wet or dry the streets
were always thronged; nobody, apparently, stayed indoors who
could go out, and after two days' housing, even with a fire to
air and warm our rooms, we did not wonder at the universal
preference. As I have said, the noise that we heard in the
streets was mainly the clatter of shoes and hoofs, but now and
then there were street cries besides those I have noted. There
was in particular a half-grown boy in our street who had a flat
basket decorated with oysters at his feet, and for long hours of
the day and dark he cried them incessantly. I do not know that he
ever sold them or cared; his affair was to cry them.
VI
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
IF you choose to
make your visit to Toledo an episode of your stay in Madrid, you
have still to choose between going at eight in the morning and
arriving back at five in the evening, or going at five one
evening and coming back at the same hour the next. In either case
you will have two hours' jolting each way over the roughest bit
of railroad in the world, and if your mozo, before you
could stop him, has selected for your going a compartment over
the wheels, you can never be sure that he has done worse for you
than you will have done for yourself when you come back in a
compartment between the trucks. However you go or come, you
remain in doubt whether you have been jolting over rails jointed
at every yard, or getting on without any track over a
cobble-stone pavement. Still, if the compartment is wide and well
cushioned, as it is in Spain nearly always, with free play for
your person between roof and floor and wall and wall; and if you
go at five o'clock you have from your windows, as long as the
afternoon light lasts, while you bound and rebound, glimpses of
far-stretching wheat-fields, with nearer kitchen-gardens rich in
beets and cabbages, alternating with purple and yellow patches of
vineyard.
I
I find from my
ever-faithful note-book that the landscape seemed to grow
drearier as we got away from
124
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
Madrid, but this
may have been the effect of the waning day: a day which at its
brightest had been dim from recurrent rain and incessant damp.
The gloom was not relieved by the long stops at the frequent
stations, though the stops were good for getting one's breath,
and for trying to plan greater control over one's activities when
the train should be going on again. The stations themselves were
not so alluring that we were not willing to get away from them;
and we were glad to get away from them by train, instead of by
mule-team over the rainy levels to the towns that glimmered along
the horizon two or three miles off. There had been nothing to
lift the heart in the sight of two small boys ready perched on
one horse, or of a priest difficultly mounting another in his
long robe. At the only station which I can remember having any
town about it a large number of our passengers left the train,
and I realized that they were commuters like those who might have
been leaving it at some soaking suburb of Long Island or New
Jersey. In the sense of human brotherhood which the fact inspired
I was not so lonely as I might have been, when we resumed our
gloomy progress, with all that punctilio which custom demands of
a Spanish way-train. First the station-master rings a bell of
alarming note hanging on the wall, and the mozos run along
the train shutting the car doors. After an interval some other
official sounds a pocket whistle, and then there is still time
for a belated passenger to find his car and scramble aboard. When
the ensuing pause prolongs itself until you think the train has
decided to remain all day, or all night, and several passengers
have left it again, the locomotive rouses itself and utters a
peremptory screech. This really means going, but your doubt has
not been fully overcome when the
wheels begin to bump under your compartment,
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
and you set your
teeth and clutch your seat, and otherwise prepare yourself for
the renewal of your acrobatic feats. I may not get the order of
the signals for departure just right, but I am sure of their
number. Perhaps the Sud-Express starts with less, but the
Sud-Express is partly French.
It had been raining
intermittently all day; now that the weary old day was done the
young night took up the work and vigorously devoted itself to a
steady downpour which, when we reached our hotel in Toledo, had
taken the role of a theatrical tempest, with sudden peals of
thunder and long loud bellowing reverberations and blinding
flashes of lightning, such as the wildest stage effects of the
tempest in the Catskills when Rip Van Winkle is lost would have
been nothing to. Foreboding the inner chill of a Spanish hotel on
such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in our rooms, and our
eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well as in letter.
It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the
station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an
interpreter who intuitively opened our compartment door, and
conveyed us dry and warm to our hotel, in every circumstance of
tender regard for our comfort, during the slow, sidelong uphill
climb to the city midst details of historic and romantic
picturesqueness which the lightning momently flashed in sight.
From our carriage we passed as in a dream between the
dress-coated head waiter and the skull-capped landlord who
silently and motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and
mounted by a stately stair from a beautiful glass-roofed
patio, columned round with airy galleries, to the rooms
from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome us.
The warmth was from the
generous blaze kindled
126
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
in the fireplace
against our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a
chimneypiece not sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the
smoke going up the flue. The fastidious may think this a defect
in our perfect experience, but we would not have had it
otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not. We easily
assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo,
adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision
which need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece.
The storm bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly
on the patio roof which the lightning illumined, and as we
descended that stately stair, with its walls ramped and foliaged
over with heraldic fauna and flora, I felt as never before the
disadvantage of not being still fourteen years old.
But you cannot be of
every age at once and it was no bad thing to be presently sitting
down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent Spanish dinners
which no European hotel can surpass and no American hotel can
equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged
steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses
with unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of
woman is hungry after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was
with no appreciable loss to our sense of enchantment that we
presently learned from our host, waiting skull-capped in the
patio, that we were in no real palace of an ancient
hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by the fancy of a
rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip his city
with a hotel of poetic perfection. I am afraid I have forgotten
his name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade it here
if I remembered it; but I cannot help saluting him brother in
imagination, and thanking him for one
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
of the rarest
pleasures that travel, even Spanish travel, has given
me.
II
One must recall the
effect of such a gentle fantasy as his with some such emotion as
one recalls a pleasant tale unexpectedly told when one feared a
repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of
retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening
after dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city
where this Spanish castle received us. What better could I have
done in the smoky warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the
light of the electric bulb dangling overhead, its annals in some
such voluntarily quaint and unconsciously old-fashioned volume as
Irving's Legends of the Conquest of Spain; or to read in
some such (if there is any such other) imperishably actual and
unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as Gautier's Voyage
en Espagne, the miserably tragic tale of that poor, wicked,
over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick? It comes to
much the same effect in both, and as I knew it already from the
notes to Scott's poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty
years before in the loft of our log cabin (long before the era of
my unguided Spanish studies), I found it better to go to bed
after a day which had not been without its pains as well as
pleasures. I could recall the story well enough for all purposes
of the imagination as I found it in the fine print of those
notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it I would
tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the daughter
of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in his
capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted
to his
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A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
rule. That was in
the eighth century when the hearts of kings were more easily
corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is
possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with
Count Julian's passion for revenge on the king, when he invited
the Moors to invade his native land and helped them overrun it.
The conquest, let me remind the reader, was also abetted by the
Jews who had been flourishing mightily under the Gothic anarchy,
but whom Don Roderick had reduced to a choice between exile or
slavery when he came to full power. Every one knows how in a few
weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders. Toledo fell
after the battle of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of Seville
fought on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered among
the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing has since been
heard of him. It was not until nearly three hundred years
afterward that the Christians recovered the city. By this time
they were no longer Arians, but good Catholics; so good that
Philip II. himself, one of the best of Catholics (as I have
told), is said to have removed the capital to Madrid because he
could not endure the still more scrupulous Catholicity of the
Toledan Bishop.
Nobody is obliged to
believe this, but I should be sorry if any reader of mine
questioned the insurpassable antiquity of Toledo, as attested by
a cloud of chroniclers. Theophile Gautier notes that "the most
moderate place the epoch of its foundation before the Deluge,"
and he does not see why they do not put the time "under the
pre-Adamite kings, some years before the creation of the world.
Some attribute the honor of laying its first stone to Jubal,
others to the Greek; some to the Roman consuls Tolmor and Brutus;
some to the Jews who entered Spain with Nebuchad-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
nezzar, resting
their theory on the etymology of Toledo, which comes from
Toledoth, a Hebrew word signifying generations, because the
Twelve Tribes had helped to build and people it."
III
Even if the whole
of this was not accurate, it offered such an embarrassing
abundance to the choice that I am glad I knew little or nothing
of the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny
morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and
lighted all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The outlook
was over vast plowed lands red as Virginia or New Jersey fields,
stretching and billowing away from the yellow Tagus in the
foreground to the mountain-walled horizon, with far stretches of
forest in the middle distance. What riches of gray roof, of white
wall, of glossy green, or embrowning foliage in the city gardens
the prospect included, one should have the brush rather than the
pen to suggest; or else one should have an inexhaustible
ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic scale in it to pour
the right tints. Mostly, however, I should say that the city of
Toledo is of a mellow gray, and the country of Toledo a rich
orange. Seen from any elevation the gray of the town made me
think of Genoa; and if the reader's knowledge does not enable
him, to realize it from this association, he had better lose no
time in going to Genoa.
I myself should
prefer going again to Toledo, where we made only a day's demand
upon the city's wealth of beauty when a lifetime would hardly
have exhausted it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his
whole life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the
fullness of that beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, add
tragedy, add unendurable orthodoxy, add the pathos
130
RICHES OP GRAY ROOF AND
WHITE WALL MARK ITS INSURPASSABLE ANTIQUITY
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
of hopeless decay,
and I think I would rather give a day than a lifetime to Toledo.
Or I would like to go back and give another day to it and come
every year and give a day. This very moment, instead of writing
of it in a high New York flat and looking out on a prospect
incomparably sky-scrapered, I would rather be in that
glass-roofed patio of our histrionic hotel, engaging the
services of one of the most admirable guides who ever fell to the
lot of mortal Americans, while much advised by our skull-capped
landlord to shun the cicerone of another hotel as "an Italian
man," with little or no English.
As soon as we
appeared outside the beggars of Toledo swarmed upon us; but I
hope it was not from them I formed the notion that the beauty of
the place was architectural and not personal, though these poor
things were as deplorably plain as they were obviously miserable.
The inhabitants who did not ask alms were of course in the
majority, but neither were these impressive in looks or bearing.
Rather, I should say, their average was small and dark, and in
color of eyes and hair as well as skin they suggested the African
race that held Toledo for four centuries. Neither here nor
anywhere else in Spain are there any traces of the Jews who
helped bring the Arabs in; once for all, that people have been
banished so perfectly that they do not show their noses anywhere.
Possibly they exist, but they do not exist openly, any more than
the descendants of the Moorish invaders practise their Moslem
rites. As for the beggars, to whom I return as they constantly
returned to us, it did not avail to do them charity; that by no
means dispersed them; the thronging misery and mutilation in the
lame, the halt and the blind, was as great at our coming back to
our hotel as our going out of it. They were of every
age
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
and sex; the very
school-children left their sports to chance our charity; and it
is still with a pang that I remember the little girl whom we
denied a copper when she was really asking for a florecito
out of the nosegay that one of us carried. But how could we know
that it was a little flower and not a "little dog" she
wanted?
There was something
vividly spectacular in the square, by no means large, which we
came into on turning the corner from our hotel. It was a sort of
market-place as well as business place, and it looked as if it
might be the resort at certain hours of the polite as well as the
impolite leisure of a city of leisure not apparently overworked
in any of its classes. But at ten o'clock in the morning it was
empty enough, and after a small purchase at one of the shops we
passed from it without elbowing or being elbowed, and found
ourselves at the portal of that ancient posada where
Cervantes is said to have once sojourned at least long enough to
write one of his Exemplary Novels. He was of such a
ubiquitous habit that if we had visited every city of Spain we
should have found some witness of his stay, but I do not believe
we could have found any more satisfactory than this. It is
verified by a tablet in its outer wall, and within it is
convincingly a posada of his time. It has a large
low-vaulted interior, with the carts and wagons of the muleteers
at the right of the entrance, and beyond these the stalls of the
mules where they stood chewing their provender, and glancing
uninterestedly round at the intruders, for plainly we were not of
the guests who frequent the place. Such, for a chamber like those
around and behind the stalls, on the same earthen level, pay five
cents of our money a day; they supply their own bed and board and
pay five cents more for the use of a fire.
Some guests were
coming and going in the dim light 132
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
of the cavernous
spaces; others were squatting on the ground before their morning
meal. An endearing smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three
sides of the patio overhead; half-way to this at one side
rose an immense earthen watei jar, dim red; piles of straw mats,
which were perhaps the bedding of the guests, heaped the ground
or hung from the gallery; and the guests, among them a most
beautiful youth, black as Africa, but of a Greek perfection of
profile, regarded us with a friendly indifference that contrasted
strikingly with the fixed stare of the bluish-gray hound beside
one of the wagons. He had a human effect of having brushed his
hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a sad, hopeless puzzle
in the effort to make us out. If he was haunted by some
inexplicable relation in me to the great author whose dog he
undoubtedly had been in a retroactive incarnation, and was
thinking to question me of that ever unfulfilled boyish
self-promise of writing the life of Cervantes, I could as
successfully have challenged him to say how and where in such a
place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written even the
story of The Illustrious Scullion. But he seemed on
reflection not to push the matter with me, and I left him still
lost in his puzzle while I came away in mine. Whether Cervantes
really wrote one of his tales there or not, it is certain that he
could have exactly studied from that posada the setting of
the scene for the episode of the enchanted castle in Don
Quixote, where the knight suffered all the demoniacal
torments which a jealous and infuriate muleteer knew how to
inflict.
IV
Upon the whole I am not
sure that I was more edified by the cathedral of Toledo, though I
am afraid
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
to own it, and must
make haste to say that it is a cathedral surpassing in some
things any other cathedral in Spain. Chiefly it surpasses them in
the glory of that stupendous retablo which fills one whole
end of the vast fane, and mounting from floor to roof, tells the
Christian story with an ineffable fullness of dramatic detail, up
to the tragic climax of the crucifixion, the Calvario, at
the summit. Every fact of it fixes itself the more ineffaceably
in the consciousness because of that cunningly studied increase
in the stature of the actors, who always appear life-size in
spite of their lift from level to level above the spectator. But
what is the use, what is the use? Am I to abandon the
young and younger wisdom with which I have refrained in so many
books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian, any English
church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of trying to
say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish churches
says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest
endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the
memory of monuments and make the experience of them endurable.
The beautiful choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree,
might have been art or not, as one chose, but the three young
girls who smiled and whispered with the young man near it were
nature, which there could be no two minds about. They were
pathetically privileged there to a moment of the free interplay
of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish convention
forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.
The Spanish religion
is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and on our way to
the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in
appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting
husbands; they have only to drop a pin inside the grating
before
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A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
her and draw a
husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if
they can make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying
money are good. The Virgin is always ready to befriend her
devotees, and in the cathedral near that beautiful choir screen
she has a shrine above the stone where she alighted when she
brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso (she owed him something for
his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception long before it was
imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot in the pavement.
The fact is attested by the very simple yet absolute
inscription:
Quando la Reina del
Cielo Puso los pies en el suelo, En esta piedra los
puso,
or as my English will
have it:
When the Queen of
Heaven put Upon the earth her foot, She put it on this
stone
and left it
indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger through
the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years of
purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still
something.
We saw a woman and
a priest touching it as we stood by and going away enviably
comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries;
and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing
grandeur and beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain
the passionate desire of the race to realize a fact in art
expresses itself gloriously or grotesquely according to the
occasion. The rear of the chorus is one vast riot of rococo
sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical event; but
down through the midst of the livingly studied performance a
mighty angel comes
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
plunging, with his
fine legs following his torso through the air, like those of a
diver taking a header into the water. Nothing less than the
sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied the instinct
from which and for which the artist worked; they gave reality to
the affair in every part.
I wish I could give
reality to every part of that most noble, that most lovably
beautiful temple. We had only a poor half-hour for it, and we
could not do more than flutter the pages of the epic it was and
catch here and there a word, a phrase: a word writ in
architecture or sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and
silver and precious marble, or painted in the dyes of the dawns
and sunsets which used to lend themselves so much more willingly
to the arts than they seem to do now. From our note-books I find
that this cathedral of Toledo appeared more wonderful to one of
us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows? It might have
been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet
shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate
the vast church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow
in which we left it steeped when we went out and took our
dreamway through the narrow, winding, wandering streets that
seemed to lure us where they would. One of them climbed with us
to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great thing to see in
itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its court for a
prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of
yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded
azure sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole
earth. In itself, as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for
where it is, but if we had here in New York an Alcazar that
remembered historically back through French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and
Cartha-
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A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
ginian occupations
to the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from
far and near to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its
outlook, we left it hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for
our kindly guide, in the crooked little stony lanes, with the sun
hot on our backs and the shade cool in our faces. There were
Moorish bits and suggestions in the white walls and the low flat
roofs of the houses, but these were not so jealous of their
privacy as such houses were once meant to be. Through the gate of
one we were led into a garden of simple flowers belted with a
world-old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of the
Gothic wall of King Wamba's time, before the miserable Roderick
won and lost his kingdom. A pomegranate tree, red with fruit,
overhung us, and from the borders of marigolds and zinnias and
German clover the gray garden-wife gathered a nosegay for us. She
said she was three duros and a half old, as who should say
three dollars and a half, and she had a grim amusement in so
translating her seventy years.
V
It was hard by her
cottage that we saw our first mosque, which had begun by being a
Gothic church, but had lost itself in paynim hands for centuries,
in spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then one day the
Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight of a white stone in
the street pavement, knelt down and would not budge till men came
and dug through the wall of the mosque and disclosed this
indefatigable lamp in the church. We expressed our doubt of the
man's knowing so unerringly that the horse meant them to dig
through the mosque. "If you can believe the rest I think you can
believe that," our guide argued.
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
He was like so many
taciturn Spaniards, not inconversable, and we had a pleasure in
his unobtrusive intelligence which I should be sorry to
exaggerate. He supplied us with such statistics of his city as we
brought away with us, and as I think the reader may join me in
trusting, and in regretting that I did not ask more. Still it is
something to have learned that in Toledo now each family lives
English fashion in a house of its own, while in the other
continental cities it mostly dwells in a flat. This is because
the population has fallen from two hundred thousand to twenty
thousand, and the houses have not shared its decay, but remain
habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the households.
In the summer the family inhabits the first floor which the
patio and the subterranean damp from the rains keep cool;
in the winter it retreats to the upper chambers which the sun is
supposed to warm, and which are at any rate dry even on cloudy
days. The rents would be thought low in New York: three dollars a
month get a fair house in Toledo; but wages are low, too; three
dollars a month for a manservant and a dollar and a half for a
maid. If the Toledans from high to low are extravagant in
anything it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the inside,
which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. They
scrimp themselves in food and they pay the penalty in lessened
vitality; there is not so much fever as one might think; but
there is a great deal of consumption; and as we could not help
seeing everywhere in the streets there were many blind, who
seemed oftenest to have suffered from smallpox. The beggars were
not so well dressed as the other classes, but I saw no such
delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the other hand, there were
no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no men or women who
looked great-world.
138
AN ANCIENT CORNER OF
THE CITY
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
Perhaps if the
afternoon had kept the sunny promise of the forenoon they might
have been driving in the Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like
every Spanish city; but it rained and we did not stop at the
Paseo which looked so pleasant.
The city, as so many
have told and as I hope the reader will imagine, is a network of
winding and crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish, but
which are medieval like those of every old city. They nowhere
lend themselves to walking for pleasure, and the houses do not
open their patios to the passer with Andalusian
expansiveness; they are in fact of a quite Oriental reserve. I
remember no dwellings of the grade, quite, of hovels; but neither
do there seem to be many palaces or palatial houses in my hurried
impression. Whatever it may be industrially or ecclesiastically,
Toledo is now socially provincial and tending to extinction. It
is so near Madrid that if I myself were living in Toledo I would
want to live in Madrid, and only return for brief sojourns to
mourn my want of a serious object in life; at Toledo it must be
easy to cherish such an object.
Industrially, of
course, one associates it with the manufacture of the famous
Toledo blades, which it is said are made as wonderful as ever,
and I had a dim idea of getting a large one for decorative use in
a, New York flat. But the foundry is a mile out of town, and I
only got so far as to look at the artists who engrave the smaller
sort in shops open to the public eye; and my purpose dwindled to
the purchase of a little pair of scissors, much as a high resolve
for the famous marchpane of Toledo ended in a piece of that
pastry about twice the size of a silver dollar. Not all of the
twenty thousand people of Toledo could be engaged in these
specialties, and I owe myself to blame for not /span>
139
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
asking more about
the local industries; but it is not too late for the reader, whom
I could do no greater favor than sending him there, to repair my
deficiency. In self-defense I urge my knowledge of a military
school in the Alcazar, where and in the street leading up to it
we saw some companies of the comely and kindly-looking cadets. I
know also that there are public night schools where those so
minded may study the arts and letters, as our guide was doing in
certain directions. Now that there are no longer any Jews in
Toledo, and the Arabs to whom they betrayed the Gothic capital
have all been Christians or exiles for many centuries, we felt
that we represented the whole alien element of the place; there
seemed to be at least no other visitors of our lineage or
language.
VI
We were going to
spend the rest of the day driving out through the city into the
country beyond the Tagus, and we drove off in our really splendid
turnout through swarms of beggars whose prayers our horses' bells
drowned when we left them to their despair at the hotel door. At
the moment of course we believe that it was a purely dramatic
misery which the wretched creatures represented; but sometimes I
have since had moments of remorse in which I wish I had thrown
big and little dogs broadcast among them. They could not all have
been begging for the profit or pleasure of it; some of them were
imaginably out of work and worthily ragged as I saw them, and
hungry as I begin to fear them. I am glad now to think that many
of them could not see with their poor blind eyes the face which I
hardened against them, as we whirled away to the music of our
horses' bells.
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A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
The bells pretty
well covered our horses from their necks to their haunches, a
pair of gallant grays urged to their briskest pace by the driver
whose short square face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy
whenever we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those drivers
who know everybody; he passed the time of day with all the men we
met, and he had a joking compliment for all the women, who
gladdened at sight of him from the thresholds where they sat
sewing or knitting: such a driver as brings a gay world to
home-keeping souls and leaves them with the feeling of having
been in it. I would have given much more than I gave the beggars
in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal
acquaintance bantered each other; but the terms might sometimes
have been rather rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air,
which I fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint
recurrent odor, as if in testimony of the driver's derivation
from those old rancid Christians, as the Spaniards used to call
them, whose lineage had never been crossed with Moorish blood. If
it was merely something the carriage had acquired from the
stable, still it was to be valued for its distinction in a
country of many smells; and I would not have been without
it.
When we crossed the
Tagus by a bridge which a company of workmen willingly paused
from mending to let us by, and remained standing absent-mindedly
aside some time after we had passed, we found ourselves in a
scene which I do not believe was ever surpassed for
spectacularity in any theater. I hope this is not giving the
notion of something fictitious in it; I only mean that here
Nature was in one of her most dramatic moods. The yellow torrent
swept through a deep gorge of red earth, which on the farther
side
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
climbed in
precipitous banks, cleft by enormous fissures, or chasms rather,
to the wide plateau where the gray city stood. The roofs of
mellow tiles formed a succession of levels from which the
irregular towers and pinnacles of the churches stamped themselves
against a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear that
their beautiful irregularities and differences showed to one very
noble effect. The city still looked the ancient capital of the
two hundred thousand souls it once embraced, and in its stony
repair there was no hint of decay.
On our right, the
road mounted through country wild enough at times, but for the
most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost
homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were
sometimes mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain
orchard nooks there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn,
with red-brown withered grasses tangling under them. Men were
gathering the fruit of the abounding cactuses in places, and in
one place a peasant was bearing an arm-load of them to a wide
stone pen in the midst of which stood a lordly black pig, with
head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses, toward Toledo.
His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more imaginative
tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of the
past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those
prehistoric ages
When wild in woods the
noble savage ran,
pursuing or pursued
by his tusked and bristled ancestor, and then slowly reverting
through the different invasions and civilizations to that signal
moment when, after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became
Christian again forever, and pork resumed its primacy
at
142
i
THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE
YELLOW TAGUS
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
the table. Dark,
mysterious, fierce, the proud pig stood, a figure made for
sculpture; and if he had been a lion, with the lion's royal ideal
of eating rather than feeding the human race, the reader would
not have thought him unworthy of literature; I have seldom seen a
lion that looked worthier of it.
We must have met
farmer-folk, men and women, on our way and have seen their white
houses farther or nearer. But mostly the landscape was lonely and
at times nightmarish, as the Castilian landscape has a trick of
being, and remanded us momently to the awful entourage of our run
from Valladolid to Madrid. We were glad to get back to the Tagus,
which if awful is not grisly, but wherever it rolls its yellow
flood lends the landscape such a sublimity that it was no
esthetic descent from the high perch of that proud pig to the
mighty gorge through which, geologically long ago, the river had
torn its way. When we drove back the bridge-menders stood aside
for us while we were yet far off, and the women came to their
doorways at the sound of our bells for another exchange of jokes
with our driver. By the time a protracted file of mules had
preceded us over the bridge, a brisk shower had come up, and
after urging our grays at their topmost speed toward the famous
church of San Juan de los Reyes Catolicos, we still had to run
from our carriage door through the rain.
Happily the portal
was in the keeping of one of those authorized beggars who guard
the gates of heaven everywhere in that kind country, and he
welcomed us so eagerly from the wet that I could not do less than
give him a big dog at once. In a moment of confusion I turned
about, and taking him for another beggar, I gave him another big
dog; and when we came out of the
church he had put off his cap and ar-
143
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
ranged so complete a
disguise with the red handkerchief bravely tied round his head,
that my innocence was again abused, and once more a big dog
passed between us. But if the merit of the church might only be
partially attributed to him, he was worth the whole three. The
merit of the church was incalculable, for it was meant to be the
sepulcher of the Catholic Kings, who were eventually more fitly
buried in the cathedral at Granada, in the heart of their great
conquest; and it is a most beautiful church, of a mingled
Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the guide-books remind me, and
extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I personally recall
also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy gallery wandering
far aloof in the upper gloom, which remains overhead with me
still, and the yet fainter sense of the balconies crowning like
capitals the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry
for our haste, but one has not so much time for enjoying such
churches in their presence as for regretting them in their
absence. One should live near them, and visit them daily, if one
would feel their beauty in its recondite details; to have come
three thousand miles for three minutes of them is no way of
making that beauty part of one's being, and I will not pretend
that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is that I
had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the fagade
of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian
captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic
Kings in their conquest of Granada. They were not only the
memorials of the most sorrowful fact, but they represented the
misery of a thousand years of warfare in which the prisoners on
either side suffered in chains for being Moslems or being
Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the church front are
merely decorative to the glance, but
144
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
to the eye that
reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man's inhumanity to
man! How heavily they had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly
they had eaten through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they were
very, very decorative, as the flowers are that bloom on
battle-fields.
Even with only a few
minutes of a scant quarter-hour to spare, I would not have any
one miss seeing the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings used
to enter the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, but
which the common American must now see by going outside the
church. The cloister is turned to the uses of an industrial
school, as we were glad to realize because our guide, whom we
liked so much, was a night student there. It remains as beautiful
and reverend as if it were of no secular use, full of gentle
sculptures, with a garden in the middle, raised above the
pavement with a border of thin tiles, and flower-pots standing on
their coping, all in the shadow of tall trees, overhanging a deep
secret-keeping well. From this place, where you will be partly
sheltered from the rain, your next profitable sally through the
storm will be to Santa Maria la Blanca, once the synagogue of the
richest Jews of Toledo, but now turned church in spite of its
high authorization as a place of Hebrew worship. It was permitted
them to build it because they declared they were of that tribe of
Israel which, when Caiaphas, the High Priest, sent round to the
different tribes for their vote whether Jesus should live or die,
alone voted that He should live. Their response, as Theophile
Gautier reports from the chronicles, is preserved in the Vatican
with a Latin version of the Hebrew text. The fable, if it is a
fable, has its pathos; and I for one can only lament the
religious zeal to which the preaching of a fanatical monk roused
the Christian
145
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
neighborhood in the
fifteenth century, to such excess that these kind Jews were
afterward forbidden their worship in the place. It is a very
clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith,
with a retablo attributed to Berruguete, and much
plateresque Gothic detail mingled with Byzantine ornament, and
Moorish arabesquing and the famous stucco honeycombing which we
were destined at Seville and Granada to find almost sickeningly
sweet. Where the Rabbis read the law from their pulpit the high
altar stands, and the pious populace has for three hundred years
pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where they had so
humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest they should rouse
the jealousy of their sleepless enemies.
VII
When we had visited
this church there remained only the house of the painter known as
El Greco, for whom we had formed such a distaste, because of the
long features of the faces in his pictures, that our guide could
hardly persuade us his house was worth seeing. Now I am glad he
prevailed with us, for we have since come to find a peculiar
charm in these long features and the characteristic coloring of
El Greco's pictures. The little house full of memorials and the
little garden full of flowers, which ought to have been all
forget-me-nots, were entirely delightful. As every one but I
knew, and even I now know, he was born a Greek with the name of
Theotocopuli, and studied tinder Titian till he found his account
in a manner of his own, making long noses and long chins and high
narrow foreheads in ashen gray, and at last went mad in the
excess of his manner. The house has been restored by the Marquis
de la Vega, according to his notion of
146
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
an old Spanish
house, and has the pleasantest small patio in the world,
looked down into from a carved wooden gallery, with a pavement of
red tiles interset with Moorish tiles of divers colors. There are
interesting pictures everywhere, and on one wall the certificate
of the owner's membership in the Hispanic Society of America,
which made me feel at home because it was signed with the name of
an American friend of mine, who is repressed by prosperity from
being known as a poet and one of the first Spanish scholars of
any time.
The whole place is
endearingly homelike and so genuinely hospitable that we almost
sat down to luncheon in the kitchen with the young Spanish king
who had lunched with the Marquis there a few weeks before. There
was a veranda outside where we could linger till the rain held
up, and look into the garden where the flowers ought to have been
forget-me-nots, but were as usual mostly marigolds and zinnias.
They crowded round tile-edged pools, and other flowers bloomed in
pots on the coping of the garden-seats built up of thin tiles
carved on their edges to an inward curve. It is strongly believed
that there are several stories under the house, and the Marquis
is going some day to dig them up or out to the last one where the
original Jewish owner of the house is supposed to have hid his
treasure. In the mean time we could look across the low wall that
belted the garden in, to a vacant ground a little way off where
some boys were playing with a wagon they had made. They had made
it out of an oblong box, with wheels so rudely and imperfectly
rounded, that they wabbled fearfully and at times gave way under
the body; just as they did with the wagons that the boys I knew
seventy years ago used to make.
147
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
I became so
engrossed in the spectacle, so essentially a part of the drama,
that I did not make due account of some particulars of the
subterranean six stories of El Greco's house. There must have
been other things worth seeing in Toledo, thousands of others,
and some others we saw, but most we missed, and many I do not
remember. It was now coming the hour to leave Toledo, and we
drove back to our enchanted castle for our bill, and for the
omnibus to the station. I thought for some time that there was no
charge for the fire, or even the smoke we had the night before,
but my eyes were holden from the item which I found later, by
seeing myself addressed as Milor. I had never been addressed as a
lord in any bill before, but I reflected that in the proud old
metropolis of the Goths I could not be saluted as less, and I
gladly paid the bill, which observed a golden mean between
cheapness and dearness, and we parted good friends with our host,
and better with our guide, who at the last brought out an English
book, given him by an English friend, about the English
cathedrals. He was fine, and I could not wish any future traveler
kinder fortune than to have his guidance in Toledo. Some day I am
going back to profit more fully by it, and to repay him the
various fees which he disbursed for me to different doorkeepers
and custodians and which I forgot at parting and he was too
delicate to remind me of.
When all leaves were
taken and we were bowed out and away our horses, covered with
bells, burst with the omnibus through a solid mass of beggars
come to give us a last chance of meriting heaven by charity to
them, and dashed down the hill to the station. There we sat a
long half-hour in the wet evening air, wondering how we had been
spared seeing those wretches trampled under our horses' feet, or
how the long train of goats
148
A NIGHT AND DAY IN
TOLEDO
climbing to the city
to be milked escaped our wheels. But as we were guiltless of
inflicting either disaster, we could watch with a good conscience
the quiescent industry of some laborers in the brickyard beyond
the track. Slowly and more slowly they worked, wearily,
apathetically, fetching, carrying, in their divided skirts of
cross-barred stuff of a rich Velasquez dirt color. One was
especially worthy of admiration from his wide-brimmed black hat
and his thoughtful indifference to his task, which was stacking
up a sort of bundles of long grass; but I dare say he knew what
it all meant. Throughout I was tormented by question of the
precise co-racial quality of some English-speaking folk who had
come to share our bone-breaking return to Madrid in the train so
deliberately waiting there to begin afflicting us. English
English they certainly were not; American English as little. If
they were Australian English, why should not it have been a
convention of polite travel for them to come up and say so, and
save us that torment of curiosity? But perhaps they were not
Australians.
VII THE GREAT
GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE
IT seems a duty
every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see how dismally the
arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the
palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded
tourist shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he
will repent afterward in vain. The Escorial is, for its
plainness, one of the two or three things worthiest seeing among
the two or three hundred things worth seeing in Spain. Yet we
feigned meaning to miss it after we returned to Madrid from
Toledo, saying that everybody went to the Escorial and that it
would be a proud distinction not to go. All the time we knew we
should go, and we were not surprised when we were chosen by one
of our few bright days for the excursion, though we were taken
inordinately early, and might well have been started a little
later.
I
Nothing was out of
the common on the way to the station, and our sense of the
ordinary was not relieved when we found ourselves in a car of the
American open-saloon pattern, well filled with other Americans
bent upon the same errand as ourselves; though I am bound to say
that the backs of the transverse seats
150
THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF
ST. LAWRENCE
rose well toward the
roof of the car with a certain originality.
When we cleared the
city streets and houses, we began running out into the country
through suburbs vulgarly gay with small, bright brick villas, so
expressive of commuting that the eye required the vision of young
husbands and fathers going in at the gates with gardening tools
on their shoulders and under their arms. To be sure, the time of
day and the time of year were against this; it was now morning
and autumn, though there was a vernal brilliancy in the air; and
the grass, flattered by the recent rains, was green where we had
last seen it gray. Along a pretty stream, which, for all I know
may have been the Manzanares, it was so little, files of Lombardy
poplars followed away very agreeably golden in foliage; and
scattered about were deciduous-looking evergreens which we
questioned for live-oaks. We were going northward over the track
which had brought us southward to Madrid two weeks before, and by
and by the pleasant levels broke into rough hills and hollows,
strewn with granite boulders which, as our train mounted, changed
into the savage rock masses of New Castile, and as we drew near
the village of Escorial gave the scene the look of that very
desolate country. But it could not be so gloomy in the kind
sunlight as it was when lashed by the savage storm which we had
seen it cowering under before; and at the station we lost all
feeling of friendlessness in the welcome of the thronging guides
and hotel touters.
Our ideal was a
carriage which we could keep throughout the day and use for our
return to the train in the afternoon; and this was so exactly the
ideal of a driver to whom we committed ourselves that we were
somewhat surprised to have his vehicle develop into a
motor-omnibus, and himself into a conductor.
151
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
When we arrived at
the palace some miles off, up a winding way, he underwent another
change, and became our guide to the Escorial. In the event he
proved a very intelligent guide, as guides go, and I really
cannot now see how we could have got on without him. He adapted
the Spanish names of things to our English understanding by
shortening them; a patio became a pat', and an old
master an old mast'; and an endearing quality was imparted to the
grim memory of Philip II. by the diminutive of Philly. We
accepted this, but even to have Charles V. brought nearer our
hearts as Charley Fif, we could not bear to have our guide
exposed to the mockery of less considerate travelers. I
instructed him that the emperor's name was Charles, and that only
boys and very familiar friends of that name were called Charley
among us. He thanked me, and at once spoke again of Charley Fif;
which I afterward found was the universally accepted style of the
great emperor among the guides of Spain. In vain I tried to
persuade them out of it at Cordova, at Seville, at Granada, and
wherever else they had to speak of an emperor whose memory really
seems to pervade the whole land.
II
The genuine village
of Escorial lies mostly to the left of the station, but the
artificial town which grew up with the palace is to the right.
Both are called after the slag of the iron-smelting works which
were and are the vital industry of the first Escorial; but the
road to the palace takes you far from the slag, with a
much-hoteled and garden-walled dignity, to the plateau,
apparently not altogether natural, where the massive triune
edifice stands in the keeping of a throng
152
THE GEEAT GRIDIRON OF
ST. LAWRENCE
of American women
wondering how they are going to see it, and lunch, and get back
to their train in time. Many were trying, the day of our visit,
to see the place with no help but that of their bewildering
Baedekers, and we had constant reason to be glad of our guide as
we met or passed them in the measureless courts and endless
corridors.
At this distance of
time and place we seem to have hurried first to the gorgeous
burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each one
shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of
the circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church
they have the advantage of all the masses said above them. But on
the way we must have passed through the church, immense, bare,
cold, and sullener far than that sepulcher; and I am sure that we
visited last of all the palace, where it is said the present
young king comes so seldom and unwillingly, as if shrinking from
the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining with gold and
polished marble.
It is of death, not
life, that the Escorial preaches, and it was to eternal death,
its pride and gloom, and not life everlasting, that the dark
piety of Philip voluntarily, or involuntarily, consecrated the
edifice. But it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest
achievements of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too
wholly, upon this gloomy ideal. The Escorial has been many times
described; I myself forbear with difficulty the attempt to
describe it, and I satisfy my longing to set it visibly before
the reader by letting an earlier visitor of my name describe it
for me. I think he does it larger justice than modern observers,
because he escapes the cumulative obligation which time has laid
upon them to find the subjective rather than the objective
fulfilment of its founder's intention in it. At
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
any rate, in March,
1623, James Howell, waiting as secretary of the romantic mission
the bursting of the iridescent love-dream which had brought
Charles Stutart, Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister
of the Spanish king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his
most delightful "familiar letters" concerning the Esco-rial to a
friend in London.
"I was yesterday at
the Escorial to see the monastery of St. Lawrence, the eighth
wonder of the world; and truly considering the site of the place,
the state of the thing, the symmetry of the structure, with
diverse other rareties, it may be called so; for what I have seen
in Italy and other places are but baubles to it. It is built
among a company of craggy hills, which makes the air the hungrier
and wholesomer; it is all built of freestone and marble, and that
with such solidity and moderate height that surely Philip the
Second's chief design was to make a sacrifice of it to eternity,
and to contest with the meteors and time itself. It cost eight
millions; it was twenty-four years abuilding, and the founder
himself saw it furnished and enjoyed it twelve years after, and
carried his bones himself thither to be buried. The reason that
moved King Philip to waste so much treasure was a vow he had made
at the battle of St. Quentin, where he was forced to batter a
monastery of St. Lawrence friars, and if he had the victory he
would erect such a monument to St. Lawrence that the world had
not the like; therefore the form of it is like a gridiron, the
handle is a huge royal palace, and the body a vast monastery or
assembly of quadrangular cloisters, for there are as many as
there be months of the year. There be a hundred monks, and every
one hath his man and his mule, and a multitude of officers;
besides there are three libraries
there full of the choicest books for all
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sciences. It is
beyond all expression what grots, gardens, walks, and aqueducts
there are there, and what curious fountains in the upper
cloisters, for there be two stages of cloisters. In fine, there
is nothing that is vulgar there. To take a view of every room in
the house one must make account to go ten miles; there is a vault
called the Pantheon under the high altar, which is all paved,
walled, and arched with marble; there be a number of huge silver
candlesticks taller than I am; lamps three yards compass, and
diverse chalices and crosses of massive gold; there is one choir
made all of burnished brass; pictures and statues like giants;
and a world of glorious things that purely ravished me. By this
mighty monument it may be inferred that Philip the Second, though
he was a little man, yet he had vast gigantic thoughts in him, to
leave such a huge pile for posterity to gaze upon and admire in
his memory."
III
Perhaps this
description is not very exact, but precision of statement is not
to be expected of a Welshman; and if Howell preferred to say
Philip built the place in fulfilment of that vow at the battle of
St. Quentin, doubtless he believed it; many others did; it has
only of late been discovered that Philip was not at St. Quentin,
and did not "batter a monastery of St. Lawrence friars" there. I
like to think the rest is all as Howell says down to the man and
mule for every monk. If there are no men and mules left, there
are very few monks either, after the many suppressions of
convents. The gardens are there of an unquestionable symmetry and
beauty, and the "company of craggy hills" abides all round the
prodigious edifice, which is
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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at once so
prodigious, and grows larger upon you in the
retrospect.
Now that I am this
good distance away, and cannot bring myself to book by a second
experience, I feel it safe to say that I had a feeling of St.
Peter's-like immensity in the church of the Escorial, with more
than St. Peter's-like bareness. The gray colorlessness of the
architecture somberly prevails in memory over the frescoes of the
painters invited to relieve it in the roof and the
retablo, and thought turns from the red-and-yellow jasper
of altar and pulpit, and the bronze-gilt effigies of kneeling
kings and queens to that niche near the oratory where the little
terrible man who imagined and realized it all used to steal in
from his palace, and worship next the small chamber where at last
he died. It is said he also read despatches and state papers in
this nook, but doubtless only in the intervals of
devotion.
Every one to his
taste, even in matters of religion; Philip reared a temple to the
life beyond this, and as if with the splendor of the mausoleum
which it enshrines he hoped to overcome the victorious grave; the
Caliph who built the mighty mosque at Cordova, which outlasts
every other glory of his capital, dedicated it to the joy of this
life as against the gloom of whose who would have put it under
the feet of death. "Let us build," he said to his people, "the
Kaaba of the West upon the site of a Christian temple, which we
will destroy, so that we may set forth how the Cross shall fall
and become abased before the True Prophet. Allah will never place
the world beneath the feet of those who make themselves the
slaves of drink and sensuality while they preach penitence and
the joys of chastity, and while extolling poverty enrich
themselves to the loss of their neighbors. For these the sad and
silent
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cloister; for us,
the crystalline fountain and the shady grove; for them, the rude
and unsocial life of dungeon-like strongholds; for us, the charm
of social life and culture; for them, intolerance and tyranny;
for us, a ruler who is our father; for them, the darkness of
ignorance; for us, letters and instruction as wide-spread as our
creed; for them, the wilderness, celibacy, and the doom of the
false martyr; for us, plenty, love, brotherhood, and eternal
joy."
In spite of the
somewhat vaunting spirit of his appeal, the wager of battle
decided against the Arab; it was the Crescent that fell, the
Cross that prevailed; in the very heart of Abderrahman's mosque a
Christian cathedral rises. Yet in the very heart of Philip's
temple to the spirit of the cloister, the desert, the martyrdom,
one feels that a great deal could be said on Abderrahman's side.
This is a world which will not be renounced, in fact, and even in
Christian Spain it has triumphed in the arts and sciences beyond
its earlier victories in Moslem Spain. One finds Philip himself,
with his despatches in that high nook, rather than among the
bronze-gilt royalties at the high altar, though his statue is
duly there with those of his three wives. The group does not
include that poor Bloody Mary of England, who should have been
the fourth there, for surely she suffered enough for his faith
and him to be of his domestic circle forever.
IV
IT is the distinct
merit of the Escorial that it does not, and perhaps cannot take
long in doing; otherwise the doer could not bear it. A look round
the sumptuous burial chamber of the sovereigns below the high
altar of the church; a glance at the lesser sepulchral
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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glories of the
infantes and infantas in their chapels and corridors, suffices
for the funereal third of the trinity of tomb and temple and
palace; and though there are gayer constituents of the last,
especially the gallery of the chapter-house, with its
surprisingly lively frescoes and its sometimes startling
canvases, there is not much that need really keep you from the
royal apartments which seem the natural end of your visit. Of
these something better can be said than that they are no worse
than most other royal apartments; our guide led us to them
through many granite courts and corridors where we left groups of
unguided Americans still maddening over their Baedekers; and we
found them hung with pleasing tapestries, some after such designs
of Goya's as one finds in the basement of the Prado. The
furniture was in certain rooms cheerily upholstered in crimson
and salmon without sense of color, but as if seeking relief from
the gray of the church; and there are battle-pieces on the walls,
fights between Moors and Christians, which interested me. The
dignified consideration of the custodian who showed us through
the apartments seemed to have adapted to our station a manner
left over from the infrequent presence of royalty; as I have
said, the young king of Spain does not like coming to the
Escorial.
I do not know why
any one comes there, and I search my consciousness in vain for a
better reason than the feeling that I must come, or would be
sorrier if I did not than if I did. The worthy Howell does not
commit himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting in
having done the Escorial. But the good Theophile Gautier, who
visited the place more than two hundred years after, owns frankly
that he is "excessively embarrassed in giving his opinion" of it.
"So many people," he says, "serious and well-conditioned, who,
I
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THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF
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prefer to think,
have never seen it, have spoken of it as a chef d'oeuvre,
and a supreme effort of the human spirit, so that I should have
the air, poor devil of a facilletoniste errant, of wishing
to play the original and taking pleasure in my
contrary-mindedness; but still in my soul and conscience I cannot
help finding the Escorial the most tiresome and the most stupid
monument that could bo imagined, for the mortification of his
fellow-beings, by a morose monk and a suspicious tyrant. I know
very well that the Escorial had a serious and religious aim; but
gravity is not dryness, melancholy is not marasm, meditation is
not ennui, and beauty of forms can always be happily wedded to
elevation of ideas." This is the Frenchman's language as he goes
into the Escorial; he does not cheer up as he passes through the
place, and when he comes out he has to say: "I issued from that
desert of granite, from that monkish necropolis with an
extraordinary feeling of release, of exultation; it seemed to me
I was born into life again, that I could be young once more, and
rejoice in the creation of the good God, of which I had lost all
hope in those funeral vaults. The bland and luminous air wrapt me
round like a soft robe of fine wool, and warmed my body frozen in
that cadaverous atmosphere; I was saved from that architectural
nightmare, which I thought never would end. I advise people who
are so fatuous as to pretend that they are ever bored to go and
spend three or four days in the Escorial; they will learn what
real ennui is and they will enjoy themselves all the rest of
their lives in reflecting that they might be in the Escorial and
that they are not."
That was well toward
a century ago. It is not quite like that now, but it is something
like it; the human race has become inured to the Escorial; more
tourists have
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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visited the place
and imaginably lightened its burden by sharing it among their
increasing number. Still there is now and then one who is
oppressed, crushed by it, and cannot relieve himself in such
ironies as Gautier's, but must cry aloud in suffering like that
of the more emotional De Amicis: "You approach a courtyard and
say, 'I have seen this already.' No. You are mistaken; it is
another. . . . You ask the guide where the cloister is and he
replies, 'This is it,' and you walk on for half an hour. You see
the light of another world: you have never seen just such a
light; is it the reflection from the stone, or does it come from
the moon? No, it is daylight, but sadder than darkness. As you go
on from corridor to corridor, from court to court, you look ahead
with misgivings, expecting to see suddenly, as you turn a corner,
a row of skeleton monks with hoods over their eyes and crosses in
their hands; you think of Philip II. . . . You remember all that
you have read about him, of his terrors and the Inquisition; and
everything becomes clear to your mind's eye with a sudden light;
for the first time you understand it all; the Escorial is Philip
II. ... He is still there alive and terrible, with the image of
his dreadful God. . . . Even now, after so long a time, on rainy
days, when I am feeling sad, I think of the Escorial, and then
look at the walls of my room and congratulate myself. ... I see
again the courtyards of the Escorial. ... I dream of wandering
through the corridors alone in the dark, followed by the ghost of
an old friar, crying and pounding at all the doors without
finding a way of escape."
I am of another race
both from the Frenchman and the Italian, and I cannot pretend to
their experiences,
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THE PANTHEON OF THE
KINGS AND QUEENS OF SPAIN, UNDER THE HIGH ALTAR OF THE CHURCH,
E.SCORIAL
THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF
ST. LAWRENCE
their inferences,
and their conclusions; but I am not going to leave the Escorial
to the reader without trying to make him feel that I too was
terribly impressed by it. To be sure, I had some light moments in
it, because when gloom goes too far it becomes ridiculous; and I
did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the
chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around
majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my
prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that
bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am,
through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.;
perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly
called Philly by our guide.
Yet I will not say
but I was glad to get out of the Escorial alive; and that I
welcomed even the sulkiness of the landlord of the hotel where
our guide took us for lunch. To this day I do not know why that
landlord should have been so sour; his lunch was bad, but I paid
his price without murmuring; and still at parting he could
scarcely restrain his rage; the Escorial might have entered into
his soul. On the way to his hotel the street was empty, but the
house bubbled over with children who gaped giggling at his guests
from the kitchen door, and were then apparently silenced with
food, behind it. There were a great many flies in the hotel, and
if I could remember its name I would warn the public against
it.
After lunch our
guide lapsed again to our conductor and reappeared with his
motor-bus and took us to the station, where he overcame the
scruples of the lady in the ticket-office concerning our wish to
return to Madrid by the Sud-Express instead of the ordinary
train. The trouble was about the supplementary fare which we
easily paid on board; in fact,
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there is never any
difficulty in paying a supplementary fare in Spain; the
authorities meet you quite half-way. But we were nervous because
we had already suffered from the delays of people at the last
hotel where our motor-bus stopped to take up passengers; they
lingered so long over lunch that we were sure we should miss the
Sud-Express, and we did not see how we could live in Escorial
till the way-train started; yet for all their delays we reached
the station in time and more. The train seemed strangely reduced
in the number of its cars, but we confidently started with others
to board the nearest of them; there we were waved violently away,
and bidden get into the dining-car at the rear of the train. In
some dudgeon we obeyed, but we were glad to get away from
Escorial on any terms, and the dining-car was not bad, though it
had a somewhat disheveled air. We could only suppose that all the
places in the two other cars were taken, and we resigned
ourselves to choosing the least coffee-stained of the
coffee-stained tables and ordered more coffee at it. The waiter
brought it as promptly as the conductor collected our
supplementary fare; he even made a feint of removing the stains
from our table-cloth with a flourish of his napkin, and then he
left us to our conjectures and reflections till he came for his
pay and his fee just before we ran into Madrid.
VI
The mystery
persisted and it was only when our train paused in the station
that it was solved. There, as we got out of our car, we perceived
that a broad red velvet carpet was laid from the car in front
into the station; a red carpet such as is used to keep the feet
of
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distinguished
persons from their native earth the world over, but more
especially in Europe. Along this carpet were loosely grouped a
number of solemnly smiling gentlemen in frock-coats with their
top-hats genteelly resting in the hollows of their left arms, and
without and beyond the station in the space usually filled by
closed and open cabs was a swarm of automobiles. Then while our
spirits were keyed to the highest pitch, the Queen of Spain
descended from the train, wearing a long black satin cloak and a
large black hat, very blond and beautiful beyond the report of
her pictures. By each hand she led one of her two pretty boys,
Don Jaime, the Prince of Asturias, heir apparent, and his younger
brother. She walked swiftly, with glad, kind looks around, and
her ladies followed her according to their state; then ushered
and followed by the gentlemen assembled to receive them, they
mounted to their motors and whirred away like so many persons of
a histrionic pageant: not least impressive, the court attendants
filled a stage drawn by six mules, and clattered
after.
From hearsay and
reasonable surmise we learned that we had not come from Escorial
in the Sud-Express at all, but in the Queen's special train
bringing her and her children from their autumn sojourn at La
Granja, and that we had been for an hour a notable feature of the
royal party without knowing it, and of course without getting the
least good of it. We had indeed ignorantly enjoyed no less of the
honor than two other Americans, who came in the dining-car with
us, but whether the nice-looking Spanish couple who sat in the
corner next us were equally ignorant of their advantage I shall
never know. It was but too highly probable that the messed
condition of the car was due to royal luncheon in it just before
we came aboard; but why
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we were suffered to
come aboard, or why a supplementary fare should have been
collected from us remains one of those mysteries which I should
once have liked to keep all Spain.
We had to go quite
outside of the station grounds to get a cab for our hotel, but
from this blow to our dignity I recovered a little later in the
day, when the king, attended by as small a troop of cavalry as I
suppose a king ever has with him, came driving by in the street
where I was walking. As he sat in his open carriage he looked
very amiable, and handsomer than most of the pictures make him.
He seemed to be gazing at me, and when he bowed I could do no
less than return his salutation. As I glanced round to see if
people near me were impressed by our exchange of civilities, I
perceived an elderly officer next me. He was smiling as I was,
and I think he was in the delusion that the king's bow, which I
had so promptly returned, was intended for him.
VIII
CORDOVA AND THE WAY
THERE
I SHOULD be sorry if
I could believe that Cordova experienced the disappointment in
us, which I must own we felt in her; but our disappointment was
unquestionable, and I will at once offer it to the reader as an
inducement for him to go to Cordova with less lively expectations
than ours. I would by no means have him stay away; after all,
there is only one Cordova in the world which the capital of the
Caliphate of the West once filled with her renown; and if the
great mosque of Abderrahman is not so beautiful as one has been
made to fancy it, still it is wonderful, and could not be missed
without loss.
I
Better, I should
say, take the rapido which leaves Madrid three times a
week at nine-thirty in the morning, than the night express which
leaves as often at the same hour in the evening. Since there are
now such good day trains on the chief Spanish lines, it is flying
in the face of Providence not to go by them; they might be
suddenly taken off; besides, they have excellent restaurant-cars,
and there is, moreover, always the fascinating and often the
memorable landscape which they pass through. By no fault of ours
that I can
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remember, our train
was rather crowded; that is, four or five out of the eight places
in our corridor compartment were taken, and we were afraid at
every stop that more people would get in, though I do not know
that it was our anxieties kept them out. For the matter of that,
I do not know why I employed an interpreter at Madrid to get my
ticket stamped at the ticket-office; it required merely the
presentation of the ticket at the window; but the interpreter
seemed to wish it and it enabled him to practise his English with
me, and I realized that he must live. In a peseta's worth of
gratitude he followed us to our carriage, and he did not molest
the mozo in putting our bags into the racks, though he
hovered about the door till the train started; and it just now
occurs to me that he may have thought a peseta was not a
sufficient return for his gratitude; he had rendered us no
service.
At Aranjuez the
wheat-lands, which began to widen about us as soon as we got
beyond the suburbs of Madrid, gave way to the groves and gardens
of that really charming pleasaunce, charming quite from the
station, with grounds penetrated by placid waters overhung by the
English elms which the Castilians are so happy in having
naturalized in their treeless waste. Multitudes of nightingales
are said to sing among them, but it was not the season for
hearing them from the train; and we made what shift we could with
the strawberry and asparagus beds which we could see plainly, and
the peach trees and cherry trees. One of these had committed the
solecism of blossoming in October, instead of April or May, when
the nobility came to their villas.
We had often said
during our stay in Madrid that we should certainly come for a day
at Aranjuez; and here we were, passing it with a five minutes'
stop. I
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am sure it merited
much more, not only for its many proud memories, but for its
shameful ones, which are apt to be so much more lasting in the
case of royal pleasaunces. The great Catholic King Ferdinand
inherited the place with the Mastership of the Order of Santiago;
Charles V. used to come there for the shooting, and Philip II.,
Charleses III. and IV., and Ferdinand VII. built and rebuilt its
edifices. But it is also memorable because the wretched Godoy
fled there with the king, his friend, and the queen, his
paramour, and there the pitiable king abdicated in favor of his
abominable son Ferdinand VII. It is the careful Murray who
reminds me of this fact; Gautier, who apparently fails to get
anything to his purpose out of Aranjuez, passes it with the
remark that Godoy built there a gallery from his villa to the
royal palace, for his easier access to the royal family in which
he held a place so anomalous. From Mr. Martin Hume's Modern
Spain I learn that when the court fled to Aranjuez from
Madrid before the advance of Murat, and the mob, civil and
military, hunted Godoy's villa through for him, he jumped out of
bed and hid himself under a roll of matting, while the king and
the queen, to save him, decreed his dismissal from all his
offices and honors.
But here just at the
most interesting moment the successive bells and whistles are
screeching, and the rapido is hurrying me away from
Aranjuez. We are leaving a railway station, but presently it is
as if we had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell
such as we remembered from Old Castile. These innumerable
pastures and wheat-fields are in New Castile, and before long
more distinctively they are in La Mancha, the country dear to
fame as the home of Don Quixote. I must own at once it does not
look it, or
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at least look like
the country I had read out of his history in my boyhood. For the
matter of that, no country ever looks like the country one reads
out of a book, however really it may be that country. The trouble
probably is that one carries out of one's reading an image which
one had carried into it. When I read Don Quixote and read
and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the map of southern
Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven or eight
years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his
adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my
earlier and later boyhood. There was then always something soft
and mild in the Don Quixote country, with a blue river and
gentle uplands, and woods where one could rest in the shade, and
hide one's self if one wished, after easily rescuing the
oppressed. Now, instead, a treeless plain unrolled itself from
sky to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure tops dimmed the
clear line of the western horizon, how could I have got them into
my early picture when I had never yet seen a mountain in my life?
I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels
where they should not have got a mile from home without discovery
and arrest. I tried to think of them jogging along in talk of the
adventures which the knight hoped for; but I could not make it
work. I could have done better before we got so far from
Aranjuez; there were gardens and orchards and a very suitable
river there, and those elm trees overhanging it; but the prospect
in La Mancha had only here and there a white-availed white
farmhouse to vary its lonely simplicity, its desert fertility;
and I could do nothing with the strips and patches of vineyard.
It was all strangely African, strangely Mexican, and not at all
American, not Ohioan, enough to be anything like the
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THERE
real La Mancha of my
invention. To be sure, the doors and windows of the nearer houses
were visibly netted against mosquitoes and that was something,
but even that did not begin to be noticeable till we were drawing
near the Sierra Morena. Then, so long before we reached the
mighty chain of mountains which nature has stretched between the
gravity of New Castile and the gaiety of Andalusia, as if they
could not bear immediate contact, I experienced a moment of
perfect reconciliation to the landscape as really wearing the
face of that La Mancha familiar to my boyish vision. Late in the
forenoon, but early enough to save the face of La Mancha, there
appeared certain unquestionable shapes in the nearer and farther
distance which I joyously knew for those windmills which Don
Quixote had known for giants and spurred at, lance in rest. They
were waving their vans in what he had found insolent defiance,
but which seemed to us glad welcome, as of windmills waiting that
long time for a reader of Cervantes who could enter into their
feelings and into the friendly companionship they were
offering.
II
Our train did not
pass very near, but the distance was not bad for them; it kept
them sixty or sixty-five years back in the past where they
belonged, and in its dimness I could the more distinctly see Don
Quixote careering against them, and Sancho Panza vainly warning,
vainly imploring him, and then in his rage and despair, "giving
himself to the devil," as he had so often to do in that master's
service; I do not know now that I would have gone nearer them if
I could. Sometimes in the desolate plains where the
windmills
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stood so well aloof
men were lazily, or at least leisurely, plowing with their
prehistoric crooked sticks. Here and there the clean levels were
broken by shallow pools of water; and we were at first much
tormented by expanses, almost as great as these pools, of a
certain purple flower, which no curiosity of ours could prevail
with to yield up the secret of its name or nature. It was one of
the anomalies of this desert country that it was apparently
prosperous, if one might guess from the comfortable-looking
farmsteads scattered over it, inclosing house and stables in the
courtyard framed by their white walls. The houses stood at no
great distances from one another, but were nowhere grouped in
villages. There were commonly no towns near the stations, which
were not always uncheerful; sometimes there were flower-beds,
unless my memory deceives me. Perhaps there would be a passenger
or two, and certainly a loafer or two, and always of the sex
which in town life does the loafing; in the background or through
the windows the other sex could be seen in its domestic
activities. Only once did we see three girls of such as stay for
the coming and going of trains the world over; they waited arm in
arm, and we were obliged to own they were plain, poor
things.
Their whitewash
saves the distant towns from the effect of sinking into the
earth, or irregularly rising from it, as in Old Castile, and the
landscape cheered up more and more as we ran farther south. We
passed through the country of the Valdepenas wine, which it is
said would so willingly be better than it is; there was even a
station of that name, which looked much more of a station than
most, and had, I think I remember, buildings necessary to the
wine industry about it. Murray, indeed, emboldens me in this
halting conjecture with the declaration that the neighboring
town
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THERE
of Valdepenas is
"completely undermined by wine-cellars of very ancient date"
where the wine is "kept in caves in huge earthen jars," and when
removed is put into goat or pig skins in the right Don Quixote
fashion.
The whole region
begins to reek of Cervantean memories. Ten miles from the station
of Argamasilla is the village where he imagined, and the
inhabitants believe, Don Quixote to have been born. Somewhere
among these little towns Cervantes himself was thrown into prison
for presuming to attempt collecting their rents when the people
did not want to pay them. This is what I seem to remember having
read, but heaven knows where, or if. What is certain is that
almost before I was aware we were leaving the neighborhood of
Valdepenas, where we saw men with donkeys gathering grapes and
letting the donkeys browse on the vine leaves. Then we were
mounting among the foothills of the Sierra Morena, not without
much besetting trouble of mind because of those certain circles
and squares of stone on the nearer and farther slopes which we
have since somehow determined were sheep-folds. They abounded
almost to the very scene of those capers which Don Quixote cut on
the mountainside to testify his love for Dulcinea del Toboso, to
the great scandal of Sancho Panza riding away to give his letter
to the lady, but unable to bear the sight of the knight skipping
on the rocks in a single garment.
III
In the forests
about befell all those adventures with the mad Cardenio and the
wronged Dorothea, both self-banished to the wilderness through
the perfidy of the
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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same false friend
and faithless lover. The episodes which end so well, and which
form, I think, the heart of the wonderful romance, have, from the
car windows, the fittest possible setting; but suddenly the scene
changes, and you are among aspects of nature as savagely wild as
any in that new western land where the countrymen of Cervantes
found a New Spain, just as the countrymen of Shakespeare found a
New England. Suddenly, or if not suddenly, then startlingly, we
were in a pass of the Sierra called (for some reason which I will
leave picturesquely unexplained) the Precipice of Dogs, where
bare sharp peaks and spears of rock started into the air, and the
faces of the cliffs glared down upon us like the faces of Indian
warriors painted yellow and orange and crimson, and every other
warlike color. With my poor scruples of moderation I cannot give
a just notion of the wild aspects; I must leave it to the reader,
with the assurance that he cannot exaggerate it, while I employ
myself in noting that already on this awful summit we began to
feel ourselves in the south, in Andalusia. Along the mountain
stream that slipped silverly away in the valley below, there were
oleanders in bloom, such as we had left in Bermuda the April
before. Already, north of the Sierra the country had been
gentling. The upturned soil had warmed from gray to red;
elsewhere the fields were green with sprouting wheat; and there
were wide spaces of those purple flowers, like crocuses, which
women were gathering in large baskets. Probably they were not
crocuses; but there could be no doubt of the vineyards increasing
in their acreage; and the farmhouses which had been without
windows in their outer walls, now sometimes opened as many as two
to the passing train. Flocks of black sheep and goats, through
the optical illusion frequent in the Span-
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ish air, looked
large as cattle in the offing. Only in one place had we seen the
tumbled boulders of Old Castile, and there had been really no
greater objection to La Mancha than that it was flat, stale, and
unprofitable and wholly unimaginable as the scene of even Don
Quixote's first adventures.
But now that we had
mounted to the station among the summits of the Sierra Morena, my
fancy began to feel at home, and rested in a scene which did all
the work for it. There was ample time for the fancy to rest in
that more than co-operative landscape. Just beyond the first
station the engine of a freight-train had opportunely left the
track in front of us, and we waited there four hours till it
could be got back. It would be inhuman to make the reader suffer
through this delay with us after it ceased to be pleasure and
began to be pain. Of course, everybody of foreign extraction got
out of the train and many even, went forward to look at the
engine and see what they could do about it; others went partly
forward and asked the bolder spirits on their way back what was
the matter. Now and then our locomotive whistled as if to scare
the wandering engine back to the rails. At moments the
station-master gloomily returned to the station from somewhere
and diligently despaired in front of it. Then we backed as if to
let our locomotive run up the siding and try to butt the
freight-train off the track to keep its engine
company.
About this time the
restaurant-car bethought itself of some sort of late-afternoon
repast, and we went forward and ate it with an interest which we
prolonged as much as possible. We returned to our car which was
now pervaded by an extremely bad smell. The smell drove us out,
and we watched a public-spirited peasant beating the acorns from
a live-oak near the
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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station with a long
pole. He brought a great many down, and first filled his
sash-pocket with them; then he distributed them among the
children of the third-class passengers who left the train and
flocked about him. But nobody seemed to do anything with the
acorns, though they were more than an inch long, narrow, and very
sharp-pointed. As soon as he had discharged his self-assumed duty
the peasant lay down on the sloping bank under the tree, and with
his face in the grass, went to sleep for all our stay, and for
what I know the whole night after.
It did not now seem
likely that we should ever reach Gordova, though people made
repeated expeditions to the front of the train, and came back
reporting that in an hour we should start. We interested
ourselves as intensely as possible in a family from the next
compartment, London-tailored, and speaking either Spanish or
English as they fancied, who we somehow understood lived at
Barcelona; but nothing came of our interest. Then as the day
waned we threw ourselves into the interest taken by a
fellow-passenger in a young Spanish girl of thirteen or fourteen
who had been in the care of a youngish middle-aged man when our
train stopped, and been then abandoned by him for hours, while he
seemed to be satisfying a vain curiosity at the head of the
train. She owned that the deserter was her father, and while we
were still poignantly concerned for her he came back and relieved
the anxiety which the girl herself had apparently not shared even
under pressure of the whole compartment's sympathy.
IV
The day waned more and
more; the sun began to sink, and then it sank with that sudden
drop which
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the sun has at last.
The sky flushed crimson, turned mauve, turned gray, and the
twilight thickened over the summits billowing softly westward.
There had been a good deal of joking, both Spanish and English,
among the passengers; I had found particularly cheering the
richness of a certain machinist's trousers of bright golden
corduroy; but as the shades of night began to embrown the scene
our spirits fell; and at the cry of a lonesome bird, far off
where the sunset had been, they followed the sun in its sudden
drop. Against the horizon a peasant boy leaned on his staff and
darkled against the darkening sky.
Nothing lacked now
but the opportune recollection that this was the region where the
natives had been so wicked in times past that an ingenious
statesman, such as have seldom been wanting to Spain, imagined
bringing in a colony of German peasants to mix with them and
reform them. That is what some of the books say, but others say
that the region had remained unpeopled after the first exile of
the conquered Moors. All hold that the notion of mixing the
colonists and the natives worked the wrong way; the natives were
not reformed, but the colonists were depraved and stood in with
the local brigands, ultimately, if not immediately. This is the
view suggested, if not taken, by that amusing emissary, George
Borrow, who seems in his Bible in Spain to have been
equally employed in distributing the truths of the New Testament
and collecting material for the most dramatic study of Spanish
civilization known to literature. It is a delightful book, and
not least delightful in the moments of misgiving which it imparts
to the reader, when he does not know whether to prize more the
author's observation or his invention, whichever it may be.
Borrow reports a conversation with an innkeeper and his wife of
the
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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Colonial German
descent, who gave a good enough account of themselves, and then
adds the dark intimation of an Italian companion that they could
not be honestly keeping a hotel in that unfrequented place. It
was not just in that place that our delay had chosen to occur,
but it was in the same colonized region, and I am glad now that I
had not remembered the incident from my first reading of Borrow.
It was sufficiently uncomfortable to have some vague association
with the failure of that excellent statesman's plan, blending
creepily with the feeling of desolation from the gathering dark,
and I now recall the distinct relief given by the unexpected
appearance of two such Guardias Civiles as travel with every
Spanish train, in the space before our lonely station.
These admirable
friends were part of the system which has made travel as safe
throughout Spain as it is in Connecticut, where indeed I
sometimes wonder that road-agents do not stop my Boston express
in the waste expanse of those certain sand barrens just beyond
New Haven. The last time I came through that desert I could not
help thinking how nice it would be to have two Guardias Civiles
in our Pullman car; but of course at the summit of the Sierra
Morena, where our rapido was stalled in the deepening
twilight, it was still nicer to see that soldier pair, pacing up
and down, trim, straight, very gentle and polite-looking, but
firm, with their rifles lying on their shoulders which they kept
exactly together. It is part of the system that they may use
those rifles upon any evil-doer whom they discover in a deed of
violence, acting at once as police, court of law, and
executioners; and satisfying public curiosity by pinning to the
offender's coat their official certificate that he was shot by
such and such a civil guard for such and such a reason, and then
notify-
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ing the nearest
authorities. It is perhaps too positive, too peremptory, too
precise; and the responsibility could not be intrusted to men who
had not satisfied the government of their fitness by two years'
service in the army without arrest for any offense, or even any
question of misbehavior. But these conditions once satisfied, and
their temperament and character approved, they are intrusted with
what seem plenary powers till they are retired for old age; then
their sons may serve after them as Civil Guards with the same
prospect of pensions in the end. I suppose they do not always
travel first class, but once their silent, soldierly presence
honored our compartment between stations; and once an officer of
their corps conversed for long with a fellow-passenger in that
courteous ease and self-respect which is so Spanish between
persons of all ranks.
It was not very long
after the guards appeared so reassuringly before the station,
when a series of warning bells and whistles sounded, and our
locomotive with an impatient scream began to tug at our train. We
were really off, starting from Santa Elena at the very time when
we ought to have been stopping at Oordova, with a good stretch of
four hours still before us. As our fellow-travelers quitted us at
one station and another we were finally left alone with the
kindly-looking old man who had seemed interested in us from the
first, and who now made some advances in broken English.
Presently he told us in Spanish, to account for the English
accent on which we complimented him, that he had two sons
studying some manufacturing business in Manchester, where he had
visited them, and acquired so much of our tongue as we had heard.
He was very proud and glad to speak of his sons, and he valued us
for our English and the strangeness which commends people to one
another in travel. When he
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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got out at a station
obscured past identification by its flaring lamps, he would not
suffer me to help him with his hand-baggage; while he deplored my
offered civility, he reassured me by patting my back at parting.
Yet I myself had to endure the kindness which he would not when
we arrived at Cordova, where two young fellows, who had got in at
a suburban station, helped me with our bags and bundles quite as
if they had been two young Americans.
V.
Somewhere at a
junction our train had been divided and our car, left the last of
what remained, had bumped and threatened to beat itself to pieces
during its remaining run of fifteen miles. This, with our long
retard at Santa Elena, and our opportune defense from the
depraved descendants of the reforming German colonists by the
Guardias Civiles, had given us a day of so much excitement that
we were anxious to have it end tranquilly at midnight in the
hotel which we had chosen from, our Baedeker. I would not have
any reader of mine choose it again from my experience of it,
though it was helplessly rather wilfully bad; certainly the fault
was not the hotel's that it seemed as far from the station as
Cordova was from Madrid. It might, under the circumstances, have,
been a merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling
of the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the patio
which had formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally
napkined waiter welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up
to our rooms with the young interpreter who met us at the
station, but was obscure as to
their location. When we refused them because they
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were over that
loud-echoing alley, the interpreter made himself still more our
friend and called mandatorially down the speaking-tube that we
wished interiores and would take nothing else, though he
must have known that no such rooms were to be had. He even
abetted us in visiting the rooms on the patio and
satisfying ourselves that they were all dismantled; when the
waiter brought up the hot soup which was the only hot thing in
the house beside our tempers, he joined with that poor fellow in
reconciling us to the inevitable. They declared that the people
whom we heard uninterruptedly clattering and chattering by in the
street below, and the occasional tempest of wheels and bells and
hoofs that clashed up to us would be the very last to pass
through there that night, and they gave such good and sufficient
reasons for their opinion that we yielded as we needs must. Of
course, they were wrong; and perhaps they even knew that they
were wrong; but I think we were the only people in that
neighborhood who got any sleep that night or the next. We slept
the sleep of exhaustion, but I believe those Cordovese preferred
waking outdoors to trying to sleep within. It was apparently
their custom to walk and talk the night away in the streets, not
our street alone, but all the other streets of Cordova; the
laughing which I heard may have expressed the popular despair of
getting any sleep. The next day we experimented in listening from
rooms offered us over another street, and then we remained
measurably contented to bear the ills we had. This was after an
exhaustive search for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but
there remained in the Paseo del Gran Capitan one house unvisited
which has ever since grown upon my belief as embracing every
comfort and advantage lacking to our hotel. I suppose I am the
stronger in this be-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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lief because when we
came to it we had been so disappointed with the others that we
had not the courage to go inside. Smell for smell, the interior
of that hotel may have harbored a worse one than the odor of
henhouse which pervaded ours, I hope from the materials for
calcimining the rooms on the patio.
By the time we
returned we found a guide waiting for us, and we agreed with him
for a day's service. He did not differ with other authorities as
to the claims of Cordova on the tourist's interest. From being
the most brilliant capital of the Western world in the time of
the Caliphs it is now allowed by all the guides and guide-books
and most of the travelers, to be one of the dullest of provincial
towns. It is no longer the center of learning; and though it
cannot help doing a large business in olives, with the orchards
covering the hills around it, the business does not seem to be a
very active one. "The city once the abode of the flower of
Andalusian nobility," says the intelligent O'Shea in his Guide
to Spain, "is inhabited chiefly by administradores of the
absentee senorio; their 'solares' are desert and wretched, the
streets ill paved though clean, and the whitewashed houses
unimportant, low, and denuded of all art and meaning, either past
or present." Baedeker gives like reasons for thinking "the
traveler whose expectation is on tiptoe as he enters the ancient
capital of the Moors will probably be disappointed in all but the
cathedral." Cook's Guide, latest but not least commendable
of the authorities, is of a more divided mind and finds the means
of trade and industry and their total want of visible employment
at the worst anomalous.
Vacant, narrow
streets where the grass does not grow, and there is only an
endless going and coming of aimless feet; a market without buyers
or sellers to speak
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THE ANCIENT CITY OF
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of, and a tangle of
squat white houses, abounding in lovely patios, sweet and
bright with flowers and fountains: this seems to be Cordova in
the consensus of the manuals, and with me in the retrospect a
sort of puzzle is the ultimate suggestion of the dead capital of
the Western Caliphs. Gautier thinks, or seventy-two years ago he
thought (and there has not been much change since), that "Cordova
has a more African look than any other city of Andalusia; its
streets, or rather its lanes, whose tumultuous pavement resembles
the bed of dry torrents, all littered with straw from the loads
of passing donkeys, have nothing that recalls the manners and
customs of Europe. The Moors, if they came back, would have no
great trouble to reinstate themselves. . . . The universal use of
lime-wash gives a uniform tint to the monuments, blunts the lines
of the architecture, effaces the ornamentation, and forbids you
to read their age. . . . You cannot know the wall of a century
ago from the wall of yesterday. Cordova, once the center of Arab
civilization, is now a huddle of little white houses with
corridors between them where two mules could hardly pass abreast.
Life seems to have ebbed from the vast body, once animated by the
active circulation of Moorish blood; nothing is left now but the
blanched and calcined skeleton. ... In spite of its Moslem air,
Cordova is very Christian and rests under the special protection
of the Archangel Raphael." It is all rather contradictory; but
Gautier owns that the great mosque is a "monument unique in the
world, and novel even for travelers who have had the fortune to
admire the wonders of Moorish architecture at Granada or
Seville."
De Amicis, who
visited Cordova nearly forty-five years later, and in the heart
of spring, brought letters which opened something of the intimate
life of that
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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apparently blanched
and calcined skeleton. He meets young men and matches Italian
verses with their Spanish; spends whole nights sitting in their
cafes or walking their plazas, and comes away with his mouth full
of the rapturous verses of an Arab poet: "Adieu, Cordova! Would
that my life were as long as Noah's, that I might live forever
within thy walls! Would that I had the treasures of Pharaoh, to
spend them upon wine and the beautiful women of Cordova, with tho
gentle eyes that invite kisses!" He allows that the lines may be
"a little too tropical for the taste of a European," and it seems
to me that there may be a golden mean between scolding and
flattering which would give the truth about Cordova. I do not
promise to strike it; our hotel still rankles in my heart; but I
promise to try for it, though I have to say that the very moment
we started for the famous mosque it began to rain, and rained
throughout the forenoon, while we weltered from wonder to wonder
through the town. We were indeed weltering in a closed carriage,
which found its way not so badly through the alleys where two
mules could not pass abreast. The lime-wash of the walls did not
emit the white heat in which tho other tourists have basked or
baked; the houses looked wet and chill, and if they had those
flowered and fountained patios which people talk of they
had taken them in out of the rain.
VI
At the mosque the
patio was not taken in only because it was so large, but I
find by our records that it was much molested by a beggar who
followed us when we dismounted at the gate of the Court of
Oranges, and all but took our minds off the famous
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Moorish fountain in
the midst. It was not a fountain of the plashing or gushing sort,
but a noble great pool in a marble basin. The women who clustered
about it were not laughing and chattering, or singing, or even
dancing, in the right Andalusian fashion, but stood silent in
statuesque poses from which they seemed in no haste to stir for
filling their water jars and jugs. The Moorish tradition of
irrigation confronting one in all the travels and histories as a
supreme agricultural advantage which the Arabs took back to
Africa with them, leaving Spain to thirst and fry, lingers here
in the circles sunk round the orange trees and fed by little
channels. The trees grew about as the fancy took them, and did
not mind the incongruous palms towering as irregularly above
them. While we wandered toward the mosque a woman robed in white
cotton, with a lavender scarf crossing her breast, came in as
irrelevantly as the orange trees and stood as stably as the
palms; in her night-black hair she alone in Cordova redeemed the
pledge of beauty made for all Andalusian women by the reckless
poets and romancers, whether in ballads or books of
travel.
One enters the court
by a gate in a richly yellow tower, with a shrine to St. Michael
over the door, and still higher at the lodging of the keeper a
bed of bright flowers. Then, however, one is confronted with the
first great disappointment in the mosque. Shall it be whispered
in awe-stricken undertone that the impression of a bull-ring is
what lingers in the memory of the honest sight-seer from his
first glance at the edifice? The effect is heightened by the
filling of the arcades which encircle it, and which now confront
the eye with a rounded wall, where the Saracenic horseshoe
remains distinct, but the space of yellow masonry below seems to
forbid the outsider stealing knowledge of the spec-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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tacle inside. The
spectacle is of course no feast of bulls (as the Spanish
euphemism has it), but the first amphitheatrical impression is
not wholly dispersed by the sight of the interior. In order that
the reader at his distance may figure this, he must imagine an
indefinite cavernous expanse, with a low roof supported in
vaulted arches by some thousand marble pillars, each with a
different capital. There used to be perhaps half a thousand more
pillars, and Charles V. made the Cordovese his reproaches for
destroying the wonder of them when they planted their proud
cathedral in the heart of the mosque. He held it a sort of
sacrilege, but I think the honest traveler will say that there
are still enough of those rather stumpy white marble columns
left, and enough of those arches, striped in red and white with
their undeniable suggestion of calico awnings. It is like a
grotto gaudily but dingily decorated, or a vast circus-tent
curtained off in hangings of those colors.
One sees the
sanctuary where the great Caliph said his prayers, and the Koran
written by Othman and stained with his blood was kept; but I know
at least one traveler who saw it without sentiment or any sort of
reverent emotion, though he had not the authority of the "old
rancid Christianity" of a Castilian for withholding his homage.
If people would be as sincere as other people would like them to
be, I think no one would profess regret for the Arab civilization
in the presence of its monuments. Those Moors were of a religion
which revolts all the finer instincts and lifts the soul with no
generous hopes; and the records of it have no appeal save to the
love of mere beautiful decoration. Even here it mostly fails, to
my thinking, and I say that for my part I found nothing so grand
in the great mosaue of Cordova as the cathedral which
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rises in the heart
of it. If Abderrahman boasted that he would rear a shrine to the
joy of earthly life and the hope of an earthly heaven, in the
place of the Christian temple which he would throw down, I should
like to overhear what his disembodied spirit would have to say to
the saint whose shrine he demolished. I think the saint would
have the better of him in any contention for their respective
faiths, and could easily convince the impartial witness that his
religion then abiding in medieval gloom was of promise for the
future which Islam can never be. Yet it cannot be denied that
when Abderraham built his mosque the Arabs of Cordova were a
finer and wiser people than the Christians who dwelt in
intellectual darkness among them, with an ideal of gloom and
self-denial and a zeal for aimless martyrdom which must have been
very hard for a gentleman and scholar to bear. Gentlemen and
scholars were what the Arabs of the Western Caliphate seem to
have become, with a primacy in medicine and mathematics beyond
the learning of all other Europe in their day. They were tolerant
skeptics in matters of religion; polite agnostics, who disliked
extremely the passion of some Christians dwelling among them for
getting themselves put to death, as they did, for insulting the
popularly accepted Mohammedan creed. Probably people of culture
in Cordova were quite of Abderrahman's mind in wishing to
substitute the temple of a cheerfuler ideal for the shrine of the
medieval Christianity which he destroyed; though they might have
had their reserves as to the taste in which his mosque was
completed. If they recognized it as a concession to the general
preference, they could do so without the discomfort which they
must have suffered when some new horde of Berbers, full of faith
and fight, came over from Africa to push back the
encroach-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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ing Spanish
frontier, and give the local Christians as much martyrdom as they
wanted.
It is all a
conjecture based upon material witness no more substantial than
that which the Latin domination left long centuries before the
Arabs came to possess the land. The mosque from which you drive
through the rain to the river is neither newer nor older looking
than the beautiful Saracenic bridge over the Guadalquivir which
the Arabs themselves say was first built by the Romans in the
time of Augustus; the Moorish mill by the thither shore might
have ground the first wheat grown in Europe. It is intensely,
immemorially African, flat-roofed, white-walled; the mules
waiting outside in the wet might have been drooping there ever
since the going down of the Flood, from which the river could
have got its muddy yellow.
If the reader will
be advised by me he will not go to the Archaeological Museum,
unless he wishes particularly to contribute to the support of the
custodian; the collection will not repay him even for the time in
which a whole day of Cordova will seem so superabundant. Any
little street will be worthier his study, with its type of
passing girls in white and black mantillas, and its shallow shops
of all sorts, their fronts thrown open, and their interiors
flung, as it were, on the sidewalk. It is said that the streets
were the first to be paved in Europe, and they have apparently
not been repaved since 850. This indeed will not Hold quite true
of that thoroughfare, twenty feet wide at least, which led from
our hotel to the Paseo del Gran Capitan. In this were divers
shops of the genteeler sort, and some large cafes, standing full
of men of leisure, who crowded to their doors and windows, with
their hats on and their hands in their pockets, as at a club, and
let no fact of the passing world escape their
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CORDOVA AND THE WAY
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hungry eyes. Their
behavior expressed a famine of incident in Cordova which was
pathetic.
VII
The people did not
look very healthy as to build or color, and there was a sound of
coughing everywhere. To be sure, it was now the season of the
first colds, which would no doubt wear off with the coming of
next spring; and there was at any rate not nearly so much begging
as at Toledo, because there could not be anywhere. I am sorry I
can contribute no statistics as to the moral or intellectual
condition of Cordova; perhaps they will not be expected or
desired of me; I can only say that the general intelligence is
such that no one will own he does not know anything you ask him
even when he does not; but this is a national rather than a local
trait, which causes the stranger to go in many wrong directions
all over the peninsula. I should not say that there was any
noticeable decay of character from the north to the south such as
the attributive pride of the old Castilian in the Sheridan
Knowlesian drama would teach; the Cordovese looked no more
shiftless than the haughtiest citizens of Burgos.
They had decidedly
prettier patios and more of them, and they had many public
carriages against none whatever in that ancient capital. Rubber
tires I did not expect in Cordova and certainly did not get in a
city where a single course over the pavements of 850 would have
worn them to tatters: but there seems a good deal of public
spirit if one may judge from the fact that it is the municipality
which keeps Abderrahman's mosque in repair. There are public
gardens, far pleasanter than those of Valladolid, which we
visited
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in an interval of
the afternoon, and there is a very personable bull-ring to which
we drove in the vain hope of seeing the people come out in a
typical multitude. But there had been no feast of bulls; and we
had to make what we could out of the walking and driving in the
Paseo del Gran Capitan toward evening. In its long, discouraging
course there were some good houses, but not many, and the
promenaders of any social quality were almost as few. Some ladies
in private carriages were driving out, and a great many more in
public ones as well dressed as the others, but with no pretense
of state in the horses or drivers. The women of the people all
wore flowers in their hair, a dahlia or a marigold, whether their
hair was black or gray. No ladies were walking in the Paseo,
except one pretty mother, with her nice-looking children about
her, who totaled the sum of her class; but men of every class
rather swarmed. High or low, they all wore the kind of hat which
abounds everywhere in Andalusia and is called a Cordovese: flat,
stiff, squat in crown and wide in brim, and of every shade of
gray, brown, and black.
I ought to have had
my associations with the great Captain Gonsalvo in the promenade
which the city has named after him, but I am not sure that I had,
though his life was one of the Spanish books which I won my way
through in the middle years of my pathless teens. A comprehensive
ignorance of the countries and histories which formed the setting
of his most dramatic career was not the best preparation for
knowledge of the man, but it was the best I had, and now I can
only look back at my struggle with him and wonder that I came off
alive. It is the hard fate of the self-taught that their learning
must cost them twice as much labor as it would if they were
taught by others;
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the very books they
study are grudging friends if not insidious foes. Long afterward
when I came to Italy, and began to make the past part of my
present, I began to untangle a little the web that the French and
the Aragonese wove in the conquest and reconquest of the wretched
Sicilies; but how was I to imagine in the Connecticut Western
Reserve the scene of Gon-salvo's victories in Calabria? Even
loath Ferdinand the Catholic said they brought greater glory to
his crown than his own conquest of Granada; I dare say I took
some unintelligent pride in his being Viceroy of Naples, and I
may have been indignant at his recall and then his retirement
from court by the jealous king. But my present knowledge of these
facts, and of his helping put down the Moorish insurrection in
1500, as well as his exploits as commander of a Spanish armada
against the Turks is a recent debt I owe to the Encyclopedia
Britannica and not to my boyish researches. Of like actuality
is my debt to Mr. Cal-vert's Southern Spain, where he
quotes the accounting which the Great Captain gave on the greedy
king's demand for a statement of his expenses in the
Sicilies.
"Two hundred
thousand seven hundred and thirty-six ducats and 9 reals paid to
the clergy and the poor who prayed for the victory of the army of
Spain.
"One hundred
millions in pikes, bullets, and intrenching tools; 10,000 ducats
in scented gloves, to preserve the troops from the odor of the
enemies' dead left on the battle-field; 100,000 ducats, spent in
the repair of the bells completely worn out by every-day
announcing fresh victories gained over our enemies; 50,000 ducats
in 'aguardiente' for the troops on the eve of battle. A million
and a half for the safeguarding prisoners and wounded.
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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"One million for
Masses of Thanksgiving; 700,494 ducats for secret service,
etc.
"And one hundred
millions for the patience with which I have listened to the king,
who demands an account from the man who has presented him with a
Kingdom."
It seems that
Gonsalvo was one of the greatest hu-morists, as well as captains
of his age, and the king may very well have liked his fun no
better than his fame. Now that he has been dead nearly four
hundred years, Ferdinand would, if he were living, no doubt join
Cordova in honoring Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de Cordova.
After all he was not born in Cordova (as I had supposed till an
hour ago), but in the little city of Montilla, five stations away
on the railroad to the Malaga, and now more noted for its
surpassing sherry than for the greatest soldier of his time. To
have given its name to Amontillado is glory enough for Montilla,
and it must be owned that Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de
Montilla would not sound so well as the title we know the hero
by, when we know him at all. There may be some who will say that
Cordova merits remembrance less because of him than because of
Columbus, who first came to the Catholic kings there to offer
them not a mere kingdom, but a whole hemisphere. Cordova was then
the Spanish headquarters for the operations against Granada, and
one reads of the fact with a luminous sense which one cannot have
till one has seen Cordova.
VIII
After our visits to the
mosque and the bridge and the museum there remained nothing of
our forenoon,
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THERE
and we gave the
whole of the earlier afternoon to an excursion which strangers
are expected to make into the first climb of hills to the
eastward of the city. The road which reaches the Huerto de los
Arcos is rather smoother for driving than the streets of Cordova,
but the rain had made it heavy, and we were glad of our good
horses and their owner's mercy to them. He stopped so often to
breathe them when the ascent began that we had abundant time to
note the features of the wayside; the many villas, piously named
for saints, set on the incline, and orcharded about with orange
trees, in the beginning of that measureless forest of olives
which has no limit but the horizon.
From the gate to the
villa which we had come to see it was a stiff ascent by terraced
beds of roses, zinneas, and purple salvia beside walls heavy with
jasmine and trumpet creepers, in full bloom, and orange trees,
fruiting and flowering in their desultory way. Before the villa
we were to see a fountain much favored by our guide who had a
passion for the jets that played ball with themselves as long as
the gardener let him turn the water on, and watched with joy to
see how high the balls would go before slipping back. The
fountain was in a grotto-like nook, where benches of cement
decked with scallop shells were set round a basin with the
figures of two small boys in it bestriding that of a lamb, all
employed in letting the water dribble from their mouths. It was
very simple-hearted, as such things seem mostly obliged to be,
but nature helped art out so well with a lovely abundance of leaf
and petal that a far more exacting taste than ours must have been
satisfied. The garden was in fact very pretty, though whether it
was worth fifteen pesetas and three hours coming to see the
reader must decide for himself when he does it. I think it was,
myself, and I would
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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like to be there
now, sitting in a shell-covered cement chair at the villa steps,
and letting the landscape unroll itself wonderfully before me. We
were on a shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain
washes far up the mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances,
and which we were to skirt more and more in bay and inlet and
widening and narrowing expanses throughout Andalusia. Before we
left it we wearied utterly of it, and in fact the olive of Spain
is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though I should think it a
much more practical and profitable tree. It is not planted so
much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its mass
looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its
regular succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon
or the hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in
the season of the olive harvest, and throughout the month of
October its nearer lines showed the sturdy trees weighed down by
the dense fruit, sometimes very small, sometimes as large as
pigeon eggs. There were vineyards and wheat-fields in that vast
prospect, and certainly there were towns and villages; but what
remains with me is the sense of olives and ever more olives,
though this may be the cumulative effect of other such prospects
as vast and as monotonous.
While we looked away
and away, the gardener and a half-grown boy were about their
labors that Sunday afternoon as if it were a week-day, though for
that reason perhaps they were not working very hard. They seemed
mostly to be sweeping up the fallen leaves from the paths, and
where the leaves had not fallen from the horse-chestnuts the boy
was assisting nature by climbing the trees and plucking them. We
tried to find out why he was doing this, but to this day I do not
know why he was doing it, and I must be content
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THERE
to contribute the
bare fact to the science of arboriculture. Possibly it was in the
interest of neatness, and was a precaution against letting the
leaves drop and litter the grass. There was apparently a passion
for neatness throughout, which in the villa itself mounted to
ecstasy. It was in a state to be come and lived in at any moment,
though I believe it was occupied only in the late spring and the
early autumn; in winter the noble family went to Madrid, and in
summer to some northern watering-place. It was rather small, and
expressed a life of the minor hospitalities when the family was
in residence. It was no place for house-parties, and scarcely for
week-end visits, or even for neighborhood dinners. Perhaps on
that terrace there was afternoon ice-cream or chocolate for
friends who rode or drove over or out; it seemed so possible that
we had to check in ourselves the cozy impulse to pull up our
shell-covered cement chairs to some central table of like
composition.
Within, the villa
was of a spick-and-spanness which I feel that I have not
adequately suggested; and may I say that the spray of a
garden-hose seemed all that would be needed to put the place in
readiness for occupation? Not that even this was needed for that
interior of tile and marble, so absolutely apt for the climate
and the use the place would be put to. In vain we conjectured,
and I hope not impertinently, the characters and tastes of the
absentees; the sole clue that offered itself was a bookshelf of
some Spanish versions from authors scientific and metaphysical to
the verge of agnosticism. I would not swear to Huxley and Herbert
Spencer among the English writers, but they were such as these,
not in their entire bulk, but in extracts and special essays. I
recall the slightly tilted row of the neat paper copies; and I
wish I knew
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
who it was liked to
read them. The Spanish have a fondness for such dangerous ground;
from some of their novels it appears they feel it rather chic to
venture on it.
IX
We came away from
Cordova with a pretty good conscience as to its sights. Upon the
whole we were glad they were so few, when once we had made up our
minds about the mosque. But now I have found too late that we
ought to have visited the general market in the old square where
the tournaments used to take place; we ought to have seen also
the Chapel of the Hospital del Cardenal, because it was part of
the mosque of Al-Manssour; we ought to have verified the remains
of two baths out of the nine hundred once existing in the Calle
del Bagno Alta; and we ought finally to have visited the remnant
of a Moorish house in the Plazuela de San Nicolas, with its
gallery of jasper columns, now unhappily whitewashed. The Campo
Santo has an unsatisfied claim upon my interest because it was
the place where the perfervid Christian zealots used to find the
martyrdom they sought at the hands of the unwilling Arabs; and
where, far earlier, Julius Caesar planted a plane tree after his
victory over the forces of Pompeii at Munda. The tree no longer
exists, but neither does Caesar, or the thirty thousand enemies
whom he slew there, or the sons of Pompeii who commanded them.
These were so near beating Casar at first that he ran among his
soldiers "asking them whether they were not ashamed to deliver
him into the hands of boys." One of the boys escaped, but two
days after the fight the head of the elder was brought to Caesar,
who was not liked
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CORDOVA AND THE WAY
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for the triumph he
made himself after the event in Rome, where it was thought out of
taste to rejoice over the calamity of his fellow-countrymen as if
they had been foreign foes; the Romans do not seem to have minded
his putting twenty-eight thousand Cordovese to death for their
Pompeian politics. If I had remembered all this from my Plutarch,
I should certainly have gone to see the place where Caesar
planted that plane tree. Perhaps some kind soul will go to see it
for me. I myself do not expect to return to Cordova.
IX FIRST DAYS IN
SEVILLE
CORDOVA seemed to
cheer up as much as we at our going. We had undoubtedly had the
better night's sleep; as often as we woke we found Cordova awake,
walking and talking, and coughing more than the night before,
probably from fresh colds taken in the rain. From time to time
there were church-bells, variously like tin pans and iron pots in
tone, without sonorousness in their noise, or such wild clangor
as some Italian church-bells have. But Cordova had lived through
it, and at the station was lively with the arriving and departing
trains. The morning was not only bright; it was hot, and the
place babbled with many voices. We thought one voice crying
"Agua, agua!" was a parrot's and then we thought it was a girl's,
but really it was a boy with water for sale in a stone bottle. He
had not a rose, white or red, in his hair, but if he had been a
girl, old or young, he would have had one, white or red. Some of
the elder women wore mantillas, but these wore flowers too, and
were less pleasing than pathetic for it; one very massive matron
was less pleasing and more pathetic than the rest. Peasant women
carried bunches of chickens by the legs, and one had a turkey in
a rush bag with a narrow neck to put its head out of for its
greater convenience in gobbling. At the door of the station a
donkey tried to bite a fly on its back; but even a Spanish donkey
cannot do everything. There was
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FIRST DAYS IN
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no attempt to cheat
us in the weight of our trunks, as there often is in Italy, and
the mozo who put us and our hand-bags into the train was
content with his reasonable fee. As for the pair of Civil Guards
who were to go with us, they were of an insurpassable beauty and
propriety, and we felt it a peculiar honor when one of them got
into the compartment beside ours.
We were to take the
mail-train to Seville; and in Spain the correo is next to
the Sud-Express, which is the last word in the vocabulary of
Peninsular railroading. Our correo had been up all night
on the way from Madrid, and our compartment had apparently been
used as a bedchamber, with moments of supper-room. It seemed to
have been occupied by a whole family; there were frowsy pillows
crushed into the corners of the seats, and, though a porter
caught these away, the cigar stubs, and the cigarette ashes
strewing the rug and fixed in it with various liquids, as well as
some scattering hair-pins, escaped his care. But when it was
dried and aired out by windows opened to the sunny weather, it
was by no means a bad compartment. The broad cushions were
certainly cleaner than the carpet; and it was something--it was a
great deal--to be getting out of Cordova on any terms. Not that
Cordova seems at this distance so bad as it seemed on the ground.
If we could have had the bright Monday of our departure instead
of the rainy Sunday of our stay there we might have wished to
stay longer. But as it was the four hours' run to Seville was
delightful, largely because it Was the run from
Cordova.
We were running at
once over a gentle ground-swell which rose and sank in larger
billows now and then, and the yellow Guadalquivir followed us all
the way, in a valley that
sometimes widened to the blue moun-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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tains always walling
the horizon. We had first entered Andalusia after dark, and the
scene had now a novelty little staled by the distant view of the
afternoon before. The olive orchards then seen afar were
intimately realized more and more in their amazing extent. None
of the trees looked so old, so world-old, as certain trees in the
careless olive groves of Italy. They were regularly planted, and
most were in a vigorous middle life; where they were old they
were closely pollarded; and there were young trees, apparently
newly set out; there were holes indefinitely waiting for others.
These were often, throughout Andalusia, covered to their first
fork with cones of earth; and we remained in the dramatic
superstition that this was to protect them against the omnivorous
hunger of the goats, till we were told that it was to save their
roots from being loosened by the wind. The orchards filled the
level foregrounds and the hilly backgrounds to the
vanishing-points of the mountainous perspectives; but when I say
this I mean the reader to allow for wide expanses of pasturage,
where lordly bulls were hoarding themselves for the feasts
throughout Spain which the bulls of Andalusia are happy beyond
others in supplying. With their devoted families they paraded the
meadows, black against the green, or stood in sharp arrest, the
most characteristic accent of the scene. In the farther rather
than the nearer distance there were towns, very white, very
African, keeping jealously away from the stations, as the custom
of most towns is in Spain, beyond the wheat-lands which disputed
the landscape with the olive orchards.
One of these towns
lay white at the base of a hill topped by a yellow Moorish castle
against the blue sky, like a subject waiting for its painter and
conscious of its wonderful adaptation to water-color. The
railroad-
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FIRST DAYS IN
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banks were hedged
with Spanish bayonet, and in places with cactus grown into trees,
all knees and elbows, and of a diabolical uncouthness. The air
was fresh and springlike, and under the bright sun, which we had
already felt hot, men were plowing the gray fields for wheat.
Other men were beginning their noonday lunch, which, with the
long nap to follow, would last till three o'clock, and perhaps be
rashly accounted to them for sloth by the industrious tourist who
did not know that their work had begun at dawn and would not end
till dusk. Indolence may be a vice of the towns in Spain, but
there is no loafing in the country, if I may believe the
conclusions of my note-book. The fields often looked barren
enough, and large spaces of their surface were covered by a sort
of ground palm, as it seemed to be, though whether it was really
a ground palm or not I know no more than I know the name or
nature of the wild flower which looked an autumn crocus, and
which with other wild flowers fringed the whole course of the
train. There was especially a small yellow flower, star-shaped,
which we afterward learned was called Todos Santos, from its
custom of blooming at All Saints, and which washed the sward in
the childlike enthusiasm of buttercups. A fine white narcissus
abounded, and clumps of a mauve flower which swung its tiny bells
over the sward washed by the Todos Santos. There were other
flowers, which did what they could to brighten our way, all
clinging to the notion of summer, which the weather continued to
flatter throughout our fortnight in Seville.
I could not honestly
say that the stations or the people about them were more
interesting than in La Mancha. But at one place, where some
gentlemen in linen jackets dismounted with their guns, a group of
men with dogs leashed in pairs and saddle-horses be-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
hind them, took me
with the sense of something peculiarly native where everything
was so native. They were slim, narrow-hipped young fellows,
tight-jerkined, loose-trousered, with a sort of divided apron of
leather facing the leg and coming to the ankle; and all were of a
most masterly Velasquez coloring and drawing. As they stood
smoking motionlessly, letting the smoke drift from their
nostrils, they seemed somehow of the same make with the slouching
hounds, and they leaned forward together, giving the hunters no
visible or audible greeting, but questioning their will with one
quality of gaze. The hunters moved toward them, but not as if
they belonged together, or expected any sort of demonstration
from the men, dogs, and horses that were of course there to meet
them. As long as our train paused, no electrifying spark kindled
them to a show of emotion; but it would have been interesting to
see what happened after we left them behind; they could not have
kept their attitude of mutual indifference much longer. These
peasants, like the Spaniards everywhere, were of an intelligent
and sagacious look; they only wanted a chance, one must think, to
be a leading race. They have sometimes an anxiety of appeal in
their apathy, as if they would like to know more than they
do.
There was some
livelier thronging at the station where the train stopped for
luncheon, but secure with the pretty rush-basket which the head
waiter at our hotel, so much better than the hotel, had furnished
us at starting, we kept to our car; and there presently we were
joined by a young couple who were unmistakably a new married
couple. The man was of a rich brown, and the woman of a dead
white with dead black hair. They both might have been
better-looking than they were, but apparently not better
otherwise, for at Seville the groom helped us out of the car with
our hand-bags.
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FIRST DAYS IN
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I do not know what
polite offers from him had already brought out the thanks in
which our speech bewrayed us; but at our outlandish accents they
at once became easier. They became frankly at home with
themselves, and talked in their Andalusian patter with no fear of
being understood. I might, indeed, have been far apter in Spanish
without understanding their talk, for when printed the Andalusian
dialect varies as far from the Castilian as, say, the Venetian
varies from the Tuscan, and when spoken, more. It may then be
reduced almost wholly to vowel sounds, and from the lips of some
speakers it is really no more consonantal than if it came from
the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft c or the
z, as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the
s instead, as the readerwill find amusingly noted in the
Sevillian chapters of The Sister of San Sulpice, which are
the most charming chapters of that most charming novel. At the
stations there were sometimes girls and sometimes boys with water
for sale from stone bottles, who walked by the cars crying it;
and there were bits of bright garden, or there were flowers in
pots. There were also poor little human flowers, or call them
weeds, if you will, that suddenly sprang up beside our windows,
and moved their petals in pitiful prayer for alms. They always
sprang up on the off side of the train, so that the trainmen
could not see them, but I hope no trainman in Spain would have
had the heart to molest them. As a matter of taste in vegetation,
however, we preferred an occasional effect of mixed orange and
pomegranate trees, with their perennial green and their autumnal
red. We were, in fact, so spoiled by the profusion of these
little human flowers, or weeds, that we even liked the change to
the dried stalk of an old man, flowering at top into a flat
basket of pale-pink shrimps. He gave us our first sight of
sea-fruit,
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when we had got,
without knowing it, to Seville Junction. There was, oddly enough,
no other fruit for sale there; but there was a very
agreeable-looking booth at the end of the platform placarded with
signs of Puerto Rico coffee, cognac, and other drinks; and
outside of it there were wash-basins and clean towels. I do not
know how an old woman with a blind daughter made herself
effective in the crowd, which did not seem much preoccupied with
the opportunities of ablution and refection at that booth; but
perhaps she begged with her blind daughter's help while the crowd
was busy in assorting itself for Cadiz and Seville and Malaga and
Cordova and other musically syllabled mothers of history and
romance.
II
A few miles and a
few minutes more and we were in the embrace of the loveliest of
them, which was at first the clutch on the octroi. But the octroi
at Seville is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who
looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded
eighteen-sixties, eased us--not very swiftly, but softly
--through the local customs, and then we drove neither so swiftly
nor so softly to the hotel, where we had decided we would have
rooms on the patio. We had still to learn that if there is
a patio in a Spanish hotel you cannot have rooms in it,
because they are either in repair or they are occupied. In the
present case they were occupied; but we could have rooms over the
street, which were the same as in the patio, and which
were perfectly quiet, as we could perceive from the trolley-cars
grinding and squealing under their windows. The manager (if that
was the quality of the patient and amiable old official who
received us) seemed surprised
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FIRST DAYS IN
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to see the cars
there, perhaps because they were so inaudible; but he said we
could have rooms in the annex, fronting on the adjoining plaza
and siding on an inoffensive avenue where there were absolutely
no cars. The interior, climbing to a lofty roof by a succession
of galleries, was hushed by four silent senoras, all in black,
and seated in mute ceremony around a table in chairs from which
their little feet scarcely touched the marble pavement. Their
quiet confirmed the manager's assurance of a pervading
tranquillity, and though the only bath in the annex was
confessedly on the ground floor, and we were to be two floors
above, the affair was very simple: the chambermaid would always
show us where the bath was.
With misgiving, lost
in a sense of our helplessness, we tried to think that the avenue
under us was then quieting down with the waning day; and
certainly it was not so noisy as the plaza, which, resounded with
the whips and quips of the cabmen, and gave no signs of
quiescence. Otherwise the annex was very pleasant, and we took
the rooms shown us, hoping the best and fearing the worst. Our
fears were wiser than our hopes, but we did not know this, and we
went as gaily as we could for tea in the patio of our
hotel, where a fountain typically trickled amidst its
water-plants and a noiseless Englishman at his separate table
almost restored our lost faith in a world not wholly racket. A
young Spaniard and two young Spanish girls helped out the
illusion with their gentle movements and their muted gutturals,
and we looked forward to dinner with fond expectation. To tell
the truth, the dinner, when we came back to it, was not very
good, or at least not very winning, and the next night it was no
better, though the head waiter had then, made us so much favor
with himself as to promise
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us a side-table for
the rest of our stay. He was a very friendly head waiter, and the
dining-room was a long glare of the encaustic tiling which all
Seville seems lined with, and of every Moorish motive in the
decoration. Besides, there was a young Scotch girl, very
interestingly pale and delicate of face, at one of the tables,
and at another a Spanish girl with the most wonderful fire-red
hair, and there were several miracles of the beautiful obesity
which abounds in Spain.
When we returned to
the annex it did seem, for the short time we kept our windows
shut, that the manager had spoken true, and we promised ourselves
a tranquil night, which, after our two nights in Cordova, we
needed if we did not merit. But we had counted without the spread
of popular education in Spain. Under our windows, just across the
way, there proved to be a school of the "Royal Society of Friends
of their Country," as the Spanish inscription in its front
proclaimed; and at dusk its pupils, children and young people of
both sexes, began clamoring for knowledge at its doors. About ten
o'clock they burst from them again with joyous exultation in
their acquirements; then, shortly after, every manner of vehicle
began to pass, especially heavy market wagons overladen and drawn
by horses swarming with bells. Their succession left scarcely a
moment of the night unstunned; but if ever a moment seemed to be
escaping, there was a maniacal bell in a church near by that
clashed out: "Hello! Here's a bit of silence; let's knock it on
the head!"
We went promptly the
next day to the gentle old manager and told him that he had been
deceived in thinking he had given us rooms on a quiet street, and
appealed to his invention for something, for anything, different.
His invention had probably never been put
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FIRST DAYS IN
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to such stress
before, and he showed us an excess of impossible apartments,
which we subjected to a consideration worthy of the greatest
promise in them. Our search ended in a suite of rooms on the top
floor, where we could have the range of a flat roof outside if we
wanted; but as the private family living next door kept hens, led
by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we were sorrowfully forced to
forego our peculiar advantage. Peculiar we then thought it,
though we learned afterward that poultry-farming was not uncommon
on the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling how we
might have prospered if we had taken those rooms and stocked our
roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes. At the moment, however,
we thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses
to the manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not
whose patience, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem
and regret.
Our own grief was
sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic chambermaid of the
annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was so hopeful
that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock in
the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already. Her
zeal made the hot water she brought for the baths really hot,
" Caliente, caliente," and her voice would have quieted
the street under our windows if music could have soothed it. At a
friendly word she grew trustful, and told us how it was hard,
hard for poor people in Seville; how she had three dollars a
month and her husband four; and how they had to toil for it. When
we could not help telling her, cruelly enough, what they singly
and jointly earn in New York, she praised rather than coveted the
happier chance impossible to them. They would like to go, but
they could not go! She was gay with it all, and after we had
left
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the hotel and come
back for the shawl which had been forgotten, she ran for it,
shouting with laughter, as if we must see it the great joke she
did; and she took the reward offered with the self-respect never
wanting to the Spanish poor. Very likely if I ransacked my memory
I might find instances of their abusing those advantages over the
stranger which Providence puts in the reach of the native
everywhere; but on the spur of the moment, I do not recall any.
In Spain, where a woman earns three dollars a month, as in
America where she earns thirty, the poor seem to abound in the
comparative virtues which the rich demand in return for the
chances of Heaven which they abandon to them. There were few of
those rendering us service there whom we would not willingly have
brought away with us; but very likely we should have found they
had the defects of their qualities.
When we definitely
turned our backs on the potential poultry-farm offered us at our
hotel, we found ourselves in as good housing at another,
overlooking the length and breadth of the stately Plaza San
Fernando, with its parallelogram of tall palms, under a full moon
swimming in a cloudless heaven by night and by day. By day, of
course, we did not see it, but the sun was visibly there, rather
blazing hot, even in mid-October, and showing more distinctly
than the moon the beautiful tower of the Giralda from the waist
up, and the shoulder of the great cathedral, besides features of
other noble, though less noble, edifices. Our plaza was so full
of romantic suggestion that I am rather glad now I had no
association with it. I am sure I could not have borne at the time
to know, as I have only now learned by recurring to my Baedeker,
that in the old Franciscan cloister once there had stood the
equestrian statue of the Comendador who dismounts and
comes
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unbidden to the
supper of Don Giovanni in the opera. That was a statue which,
seen in my far youth, haunted my nightmares for many a year, and
I am sure it would have kept me from sleep in the conditions, now
so perfect, of our new housing if I had known, about
it.
III
The plaza is named,
of course, for King Fernando, who took Seville from the Moors six
hundred years ago, and was canonized for his conquests and his
virtues. But I must not enter so rashly upon the history of
Seville, or forget the arrears of personal impression which I
have to bring up. The very drive from the station was full of
impressions, from the narrow and crooked streets, the houses of
yellow, blue, and pink stucco, the flowered and fountained
patios glimpsed passingly, the half-lengths of
church-towers, and the fleeting facades of convents and palaces,
all lovely in the mild afternoon light. These impressions soon
became confluent, so that without the constant witness of our
note-books I should now find it impossible to separate them. If
they could be imparted to the reader in their complexity, that
would doubtless be the ideal, though he would not believe that
their confused pattern was a true reflex of Seville; so I recur
to the record, which says that the morning after our arrival we
hurried to see the great and beautiful cathedral. It had failed,
in our approach the afternoon before, to fulfil the promise of
one of our half-dozen guide-books (I forget which one) that it
would seem to gather Seville about it as a hen gathers her
chickens, but its vastness grew upon us with every moment of our
more intimate acquaintance. Our acquaintance quick-
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ly ripened into the
affectionate friendship which became a tender regret when we
looked our last upon it; and vast as it was, it was never too
large for our embrace. I doubt if there was a moment in our
fortnight's devotion when we thought the doughty canons, its
brave-spoken founders, "mad to have undertaken it," as they said
they expected people to think, or any moment when we did not
revere them for imagining a temple at once so beautiful and so
big.
Our first visit was
redeemed from the commonplace of our duty-round of the
side-chapels by two things which I can remember without the help
of my notes. One, and the great one, was Murillo's "Vision of St.
Anthony," in which the painter has most surpassed himself, and
which not to have seen, Gautier says, is not to have known the
painter. It is so glorious a masterpiece, with the Child joyously
running down from the clustering angels toward the kneeling saint
in the nearest corner of the foreground, that it was distinctly a
moment before I realized that the saint had once been cut out of
his corner and sent into an incredible exile in America, and then
munificently restored to it, though the seam in the canvas only
too literally attested the incident. I could not well say how
this fact then enhanced the interest of the painting, and then
how it ceased from the consciousness, which it must always recur
to with any remembrance of it. If one could envy wealth its
chance of doing a deed of absolute good, here was the occasion,
and I used it. I did envy the mind, along with the money, to do
that great thing. Another great thing which still more swelled my
American heart and made it glow with patriotic pride was the
monument to Columbus, which our suffering his dust to be
translated from Havana has made possible in Seville. There may be
other noble results of
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our war on Spain for
the suzerainty of Cuba and the conquest of Puerto Rico and the
Philippines, but there is none which matches in moral beauty the
chance it won us for this Grand Consent. I suppose those effigies
of the four Spanish realms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Navarre,
which bear the coffin of the discoverer in stateliest
processional on their shoulders, may be censured for being too
boldly superb, too almost swagger, but I will not be the one to
censure them. They are painted the color of life, and they
advance colossally, royal-robed and mail-clad, as if marching to
some proud music, and would tread you down if you did not stand
aside. It is perhaps not art, but it is magnificent; nothing less
stupendously Spanish would have sufficed; and I felt that the
magnanimity which had yielded Spain this swelling opportunity had
made America her equal in it.
We went to the
cathedral the first morning after our arrival in Seville, because
we did not know how soon we might go away, and then we went every
morning or every afternoon of our fortnight there. Habitually we
entered by that Gate of Pardon which in former times had opened
the sanctuary to any wickedness short of heresy; but, as our need
of refuge was not pressing, we wearied of the Gate of Pardon,
with its beautiful Saracenic arch converted to Christianity by
the Renaissance bas-relief obliterating the texts from the Koran.
We tried to form the habit of going in by other gates, but the
Gate of Pardon finally prevailed; there was always a gantlet of
cabmen to be run beside it, which brought our sins home to us. It
led into the badly paved Court of Oranges, where the trees seem
planted haphazard and where there used also to be fountains. Gate
and court are remnants of the mosque, patterned upon that of
Cordova by one of the proud Moorish kings
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of Seville, and
burned by the Normans when they took and sacked his city. His
mosque had displaced the early Christian basilica of San Vicente,
which the still earlier temple to Venus Salambo had become. Then,
after the mosque was rebuilt, the good San Fernando in his turn
equipped it with a Gothic choir and chapels and turned it into
the cathedral, which was worn out with pious uses when the
present edifice was founded, in their folie des grandeurs,
by those glorious madmen in the first year of the fifteenth
century.
IV
Little of this
learning troubled me in my visits to the cathedral, or even the
fact that, next to St. Peter's, it was the largest church in the
world. It was sufficient to itself by mere force of architectural
presence, without the help of incidents or measurements. It was a
city in itself, with a community of priests and sacristans
dwelling in it, and a floating population of sightseers and
worshipers always passing through it. The first morning we had
submitted to make the round of the chapels, patiently paying to
have each of them unlocked and wearily wondering at their
wonders, but only sympathizing really with the stern cleric who
showed the ceremonial vestments and jewels of the cathedral, and
whose bitter face expressed, or seemed to express, abhorrence of
our whole trivial tourist tribe. After that morning we took our
curiosity into our own keeping and looked at nothing that did not
interest us, and we were interested most in those fellow-beings
who kept coming and going all day long.
Chiefly, of course,
they were women. In Catholic countries women have either more
sins to be forgiven
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than the men, or
else they are sorrier for them; and here, whether there was
service or not, they were dropped everywhere in veiled and
motionless prayer. In Seville the law of the mantilla is
rigorously enforced. If a woman drives, she may wear a hat; but
if she walks, she must wear a mantilla under pain of being
pointed at by the finger of scorn. If she is a young girl she may
wear colors with it (a cheerful blue seems the favorite), but by
far the greater number came to the cathedral in complete black.
Those somber figures which clustered before chapel, or singly
dotted the pavement everywhere, flitted in and out like shadows
in the perpetual twilight. For far the greater number, their
coming to the church was almost their sole escape into the world.
They sometimes met friends, and after a moment, or an hour, of
prayer they could cheer their hearts with neighborly gossip. But
for the greater part they appeared and disappeared silently and
swiftly, and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their
history. Many of them would have first met their husbands in the
cathedral when they prayed, or when they began to look around to
see who was looking at them. It might have been their
trysting-place, safeguarding them in their lovers' meetings, and
after marriage it had become their social world, when their
husbands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They could not go
at night, of course, except to some special function, but they
could come by day as often as they liked. I do not suppose that
the worshipers I saw habitually united love or friendship with
their devotions in the cathedral, but some certainly joined
business with devotion; at a high function one day an American
girl felt herself sharply nudged in the side, and when she turned
she found the palm of her kneeling neighbor stretched toward her.
They must all have had their
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parish churches
besides the cathedral, and a devotee might make the day a social
whirl by visiting one shrine after another. But I do not think
that many do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and are
expected to keep at home by the men who expect to keep
abroad.
I do not know just
how it is in the parish churches; they must each have its special
rite, which draws and holds the frequenter; but the cathedral
constantly offers a drama of irresistible appeal. We
non-Catholics can feel this even at the distance to which our
Protestantism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the
Seville cathedral during mass you cannot help a moment of
recreant regret when you wish that a part in the mystery enacting
was your birthright. The esthetic emotion is not denied you; the
organ-tide that floods the place bears you on it, too; the
priests perform their rites before the altar for you; they come
and go, they bow and kneel, for you; the censer swings and smokes
for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and
mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your
behalf as much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more. The
whole unstinted hospitality of the service is there for you, as
well as for the children of the house, and the heart must be rude
and the soul ungrateful that would refuse it. For my part, I
accepted it as far as I knew how, and when I left the worshipers
on their knees and went tiptoeing from picture to picture and
chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the unscrupulous
sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I, ought
to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over. I
call him sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of
guides in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place and some
in civil dress, willing to supplement our hotel
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interpreter, or
lying in wait for us when we came alone. I wish now I had taken
them all, but at the time they tired me, and I denied
them.
Though not a day
passed but we saw it, I am not able to say what the cathedral was
like. The choir was planted in the heart of it, as it might be a
celestial refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great in
girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing to a
Gothic firmament horizoned round as with sunset light from near a
hundred painted windows. The chapels on each side, the most
beautiful in Spain, abound in riches of art and pious memorials,
with chief among them the Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were,
of the ship which the cathedral has been likened to, keeping the
bones not only of the sainted hero, King Fernando, but also,
among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and of his unwedded
love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life, if not
quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint's
body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker
will tell you, "the troops of the garrison march past and lower
their colors" outside the cathedral. We were there on none of
these dates, and, far more regretably, not on the day of Corpus
Christi, when those boys whose effigies in sculptured and painted
wood we had seen in the museum at Valladolid pace in their mystic
dance before the people at the opposite portal of the cathedral.
But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and witness the rite
some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is destined to
endure through the device practised in defeating the pope who
proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only
as long as the boys' actual costumes lasted; but by renewing
these carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become
practically imperishable.
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If we missed this
attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good fortune to
witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less
popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from
earthquakes, and on the awful day, dies irae, of the great
Lisbon earthquake, during mass and at the moment of the elevation
of the Host, when the worshipers were on their knees, there came
such a mighty shock in sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that
the people started to their feet and ran out of the cathedral. If
the priests ran after them, as soon as the apparent danger was
past they led the return of their flock and resumed the
interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that the temple
was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville had
escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should
be dramatized in a perpetual observance. Every year now, on the
1st of November, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen
moment of the mass, with much more stateliness than in the
original event, and lead the people out of one portal, to return
with them by another for the conclusion of the
ceremonial.
We waited long for
the climax, but at last we almost missed it through the
overeagerness of the guide I had chosen out of many that
petitioned. He was so politely, so forbearingly insistent in his
offer to see that we were vigilantly cared for, that I must have
had a heart harder than Peter the Cruel's to have denied him, and
he planted us at the most favorable point for the function in the
High Chapel, with instructions which portal to hurry to when the
movement began, and took his peseta and went his way. Then, while
we confidingly waited,
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he came rushing back
and with a great sweep of his hat wafted us to the door which he
had said the procession would go out by, but which he seemed to
have learned it would come in by, and we were saved from what had
almost been his fatal error. I forgave him the more gladly
because I could rejoice in his returning to repair his error,
although he had collected his money; and with a heart full of
pride in his verification of my theory of the faithful Spanish
nature, I gave myself to the shining gorgeousness of the
procession that advanced chanting in the blaze of the Sevillian
sun. There was every rank of clergy, from the archbishop down, in
robes of ceremonial, but I am unable honestly to declare the
admiration for their splendor which I would have willingly felt.
The ages of faith in which those vestments were designed were
apparently not the ages of taste; yet it was the shape of the
vestments and not the color which troubled the eye of unfaith, if
not of taste. The archbishop in crimson silk, with his train
borne by two acolytes, the canons in their purple, the dean in
his gold-embroidered robes, and the priests and choristers in
their black robes and white surplices richly satisfied it; and if
some of the clerics were a little frayed and some of the acolytes
were spotted with the droppings of the candles, these were
details which one remembered afterward and that did not matter at
the time.
When the procession
was housed again, we went off and forgot it in the gardens of the
Alcazar. But I must not begin yet on the gardens of the Alcazar.
We went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but we did
not see them until our second morning in Seville. We gave what
was left from the first morning in the cathedral to a random
exploration of the streets and places of the city. There was, no
doubt, everywhere
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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some touch of the
bravery of our square of San Fernando, where the public windows
were hung with crimson tapestries and brocades in honor of St.
Raphael; but his holiday did not make itself molestively felt in
the city's business or pleasure. Where we could drive we drove,
and where we must we walked, and we walked of course through the
famous Calle de las Sierpes, because no one drives there. As a
rule no woman walks there, and naturally there were many women
walking there, under the eyes of the popular cafes and
aristocratic clubs which principally abound in Las Sierpes, for
it is also the street of the principal shops, though it is not
very long and is narrower than many other streets of Seville. It
has its name from so commonplace an origin as the sign over a
tavern door, with some snakes painted on it; but if the example
of sinuosity had been set it by prehistoric serpents, there were
scores of other streets which have bettered its instruction.
There were streets that crooked away everywhere, not going
anywhere, and breaking from time to time into irregular angular
spaces with a church or a convent or a nobleman's house looking
into them.
VI
The noblemen's
houses often showed a severely simple facade to the square or
street, and hid their inner glories with what could have been
fancied a haughty reserve if it had not been for the frankness
with which they opened their patios to the gaze of the
stranger, who, when he did not halt his carriage before them,
could enjoy their hospitality from a sidewalk sometimes eighteen
inches wide. The passing tram-car might grind him against the
tall grilles which were the only barriers
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to the
patios, but otherwise there would be nothing to spoil his
enjoyment of those marble floors and tiled walls and fountains
potted round with flowering plants. In summer he could have seen
the family life there; and people who are of such oriental
seclusion otherwise will sometimes even suffer the admiring
traveler to come as well as look within. But one who would not
press their hospitality so far could reward his forbearance by
finding some of the patios too new-looking, with rather a
glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron pillars,
and their glass roofs which the rain comes through in the winter.
The ladies sit and sew there, or talk, if they prefer, and
receive their friends, and turn night into day in the fashion of
climates where they are so easily convertible. The patio
is the place of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the
tertulia, and the family nightly meets its next of kin and
then its nearer and farther friends there with that Latin
regularity which may also be monotony. One patio is often
much like another, though none was perhaps of so much public
interest as the patio of the lady who loved a bull-fighter
and has made her patio a sort of shrine to him. The famous
espada perished in his heroic calling, no worse if no
better than those who saw him die, and now his bust is in plain
view, with a fit inscription recognizing his worth and prowess,
and with the heads of some of the bulls he slew.
Under that clement
sky the elements do not waste the works of man as elsewhere, and
many of the houses of Seville are said to be such as the Moors
built there. We did not know them from the Christian houses; but
there are no longer any mosques, while in our wanderings we had
the pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they
are still in the keeping of their sisterhoods and brotherhoods,
remain monuments of the
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medieval piety of
Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to secular uses,
attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution and
reform. It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately
Alameda de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth
of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of
the Serpents by the Street of the Love of God, and are then
startled by the pagan presence of two mighty columns lifting
aloft the figures of Caesar and of the titular demigod. Statues
and pillars are alike antique, and give you a moment of the
Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of an
unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which the Roman
Forum used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is
shady, but I do not remember the trees--only those glorious
columns climbing the summer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and
proclaiming the imperishable memory of the republic that
conquered and the empire that ruled the world, and have never
loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly from the
grass-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and in this other
Iberian land we were always meeting the witnesses of the grandeur
which no change short of some universal sea change can wholly
sweep from the earth. Before it Goth and Arab shrink, with all
their works, into the local and provisional; Rome remains for all
time imperial and universal.
To descend from this
high-horsed reflection, as I must, I have to record that there
did not seem to be so many small boys in Seville as in the
Castillian capitals we had visited; in the very home of the
bull-feast we did not see one mimic corrida given by the
torreros of the future. Not even in the suburb of Triana,
where the small boys again consolingly superabounded, was
the
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great national game
played among the wheels and hoofs of the dusty streets to which
we crossed the Guadalquivir that afternoon. To be sure, we were
so taken with other things that a boyish bull-feast might have
rioted unnoticed under our horses' very feet, especially on the
long bridge which gives you the far upward and downward stretch
of the river, so simple and quiet and empty above, so busy and
noisy and thronged with shipping below. I suppose there are
lovelier rivers than that--we ourselves are known to brag of our
Pharpar and Abana--but I cannot think of anything more nobly
beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace in her bed,
where she has had so many bad dreams of Carthaginian and Roman
and Gothic and Arab and Norman invasion. Now her waters redden,
for the time at least, only from the scarlet hulls of the tramp
steamers lying in long succession beside the shore where the
gardens of the Delicias were waiting to welcome us that afternoon
to our first sight of the pride and fashion of Seville. I never
got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers; and in
thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching
or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I
had some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold
which rose from the midst of them. It was built in the last
century of the Moorish dominion to mark the last point to which
the gardens of the Moorish palace of the Alcazar could stretch,
but they were long ago obliterated behind it; and though it was
so recent, no doubt it would have had its pathos if I could ever
have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem power in Spain. As
it was, I found the tramp steamers more moving, and it was these
that my eye preferably sought whenever I crossed the Triana
bridge.
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VII
We were often
crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were especially
going to see the gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes with
that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable.
Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward
visit the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were
possible I would willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville.
All Triana is pretty squalid, though it has merits and charms to
which I will try eventually to be just, and I must even now
advise the reader to visit the tile potteries there. If he has
our good-fortune he may see in the manager of one a type of that
fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly and vainly
struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was
beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of
manner; his classically regular face was as swarthy as the
darkest mulatto's, but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the
sense of his fine decency with me when we drove away from his
warerooms, and suddenly whirled round the corner of the street
into the gipsy quarter, and made it my prophylactic against the
human noisomeness which instantly beset our course. Let no Romany
Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing sentimentalist, ever
pretend to me hereafter that those persistent savages have even
the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to the
interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally
and physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated,
and treated with insecticides and put away in mothballs. Our own
settled order of things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks
and it smells, especially in Spain,
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when you get down to
its lower levels; but it does not assail the senses with such
rank offense as smites them in the gipsy quarter with sights and
sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well as nose, were all
stenches.
Low huts lined the
street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged children running
beside us and after us and screaming, "Minny, niooney,
money!" in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned
against the door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and
fat, sat on the thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes;
younger women ranged the sidewalks and offered to dance. They all
had flowers in their hair, and some were of a horrible beauty,
especially one in a green waist, with both white and red flowers
in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the road a troop of
children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented a hapless ass
colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could persuade our
cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street in
reserve which made us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled
the river, and into the center of it every manner of offal had
been cast from the beginning of time to reek and fester and
juicily ripen and rot in unspeakable corruption. It was such a
thoroughfare as Dante might have imagined in his Hell, if people
in his time had minded such horrors; but as it was we could only
realize that it was worse than infernal, it was medieval, and
that we were driving in such putrid foulness as the gilded
carriages of kings and queens and the prancing steeds and
palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through whenever
they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I
scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent
waterside, and then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of
the
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Guadalquivir,
painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp
steamers.
After that abhorrent
home of indolence, which its children never left except to do a
little fortune-telling and mule and donkey trading, eked out with
theft in the country round, any show of honest industry looked
wholesome and kind. I rejoiced almost as much in the machinery as
in the men who were loading the steamers; even the huge casks of
olives, which were working from the salt-water poured into them
and frothing at the bung in great white sponges of spume, might
have been examples of toil by which those noisome vagabonds could
well have profited. But now we had come to see another sort of
leisure--the famous leisure of fortune and fashion driving in the
Delicias, but perhaps never quite fulfilling the traveler's fond
ideal of it. We came many times to the Delicias in hope of it,
with decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last without
entire fruition. For our first visit we could not have had a
fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening from a streak of
sunset beyond Triana, and we arrived in appropriate circumstance,
round the immense circle of the bull-ring and past the palace
which the Duc de Montpensier has given the church for a
theological seminary, with long stretches of beautiful gardens.
Then we were in the famous Paseo, a drive with footways on each
side, and on one side dusky groves widening to the river. The
paths were lit with gleaming statues, and among the palms and the
eucalyptuses were orange trees full of their golden globes, which
we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were of that
bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, not because they
are in accord with the acrid nature of man there, but that they
may be wrought into marmalade. On the other hand stretched less
formal woods,
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with fields for such
polite athletics as tennis, which the example of the beloved
young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant favor
with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was
badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done
it is expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of
dust and every evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of
watering a street is to soak it into a slough. But nothing can
spoil the Paseo, and that evening we had it mostly to ourselves,
though there were two or three carriages with ladies in hats, and
at one place other ladies dismounted and courageously walking,
while their carriages followed. A magnate of some sort was shut
alone in a brougham, in the care of footman and coachman with
deeply silver-banded hats; there were a few military and civil
riders, and there was distinctly a young man in a dog-cart with a
groom, keeping abreast the landau of three ladies in mantillas,
with whom he was improving what seemed a chance acquaintance.
Along the course the public park gave way at times to the grounds
of private villas; before one of these a boy did what he could
for us by playing ball with a priest. At other points there were
booths with chairs and tables, where I am sure interesting
parties of people would have been sitting if they could have
expected us to pass.
VIII
The reader, pampered
by the brilliant excitements of our American promenades, may
think this spectacle of the gay world of Seville dull; but he
ought to have been with us a colder, redder, and sadder evening
when we had the Delicias still more to ourselves.
After-
223
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
ward the Delicias
seemed to cheer up, and the place was fairly frequented on a
holiday, which we had not suspected was one till our cabman
convinced us from his tariff that we must pay him double, because
you must always do that in Seville on holidays. By this time we
knew that most of the Sevillian rank and riches had gone to
Madrid for the winter, and we were the more surprised by some
evident show of them in the private turnouts where by far most of
the turnouts were public. But in Spain a carriage is a carriage,
and the Sevillian cabs are really very proper and sometimes even
handsome, and we felt that our own did no discredit to the
Delicias. Many of the holiday-makers were walking, and there were
actually women on foot in hats and hobble-skirts without being
openly mocked. On the evening of our last resort to the Delicias
it was quite thronged far into the twilight, after a lemon sunset
that continued to tinge the east with pink and violet. There were
hundreds of carriages, fully half of them private, with coachmen
and footmen in livery. With them it seemed to be the rule to stop
in the circle at a turning-point a mile off and watch the going
and coming. It was a serious spectacle, but not solemn, and it
had its reliefs, its high-lights. It was always pleasant to see
three Spanish ladies on a carriage seat, the middle one
protruding because of their common bulk, and oftener in
umbrella-wide hats with towering plumes than in the charming
mantilla. There were no top-hats or other formality in the men's
dress; some of them were on horseback, and there were two women
riding.
Suddenly, as if it
had come up out of the ground, I perceived a tram-car keeping
abreast of the riding and walking and driving, and through all I
was agreeably aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing
don-
224
FIRST DAYS IN
SEVILLE
keys on Jhe
bridle-path next the tram. I confess that they interested me more
than my social equals and superiors; I should have liked to talk
with those fathers and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on
the cruppers of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially
to know what passed in the mind of one dear little girl who sat
before her father with her bare brown legs tucked into the
pockets of the pannier.
X
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
IT is always a
question how much or little we had better know about the history
of a strange country when seeing it. If the great mass of
travelers voted according to their ignorance, the majority in
favor of knowing next to nothing would be overwhelming, and I do
not say they would be altogether unwise. History itself is often
of two minds about the facts, or the truth from them, and when
you have stored away its diverse conclusions, and you begin to
apply them to the actual conditions, you are constantly
embarrassed by the misfits. What did it avail me to believe that
when the Goths overran the north of Spain the Vandals overran the
south, and when they swept on into Africa and melted away in the
hot sun there as a distinctive race, they left nothing but the
name Vandalusia, a letter less, behind them? If the Vandals were
what they are reported to have been, the name does not at all
characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, the very
next history told me that they took even their name with them,
and forbade me the simple and apt etymology which I had pinned my
indolent faith to.
I
Before I left
Seville I convinced a principal bookseller, much against his
opinions, that there must be
226
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
some such brief
local history of the city as I was fond of finding in Italian
towns, and I took it from his own reluctant shelf. It was a very
intelligent little guide, this Seville in the Hand, as it
calls itself, but I got it too late for use in exploring the
city, and now I can turn to it only for those directions which
will keep the reader from losing his way in the devious past. The
author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight in, and
holds with historians who accept the Phosnicians as the
sufficiently remote founders of Seville. This does not put out of
commission those Biblical "ships of Tarshish" which Dr. Edward
Everett Hale, in his graphic sketch of Spanish history, has
sailing to and from the neighboring coasts. Very likely they came
up the Guadalquivir, and lay in the stream where a few thousand
years later I saw those cheerful tramp-steamers lying. At any
rate, the Phoenicians greatly flourished there, and gave their
colony the name of Hispalis, which it remained content with till
the Romans came and called the town Julia Romula, and Julius
Ctesar fenced it with the strong walls which the Moorish
conquerors, after the Goths, reinforced and have left plain to be
seen at this day. The most casual of wayfaring men must have read
as he ran that the Moorish power fell before the sword of San
Fernando as the Gothic fell before their own, and the Roman
before the Gothic. But it is more difficult to realize that
earlier than the Gothic, somewhere in between the Vandals and the
Romans, had been the Carthaginians, whose great general Hamilcar
fancied turning all Spain into a Carthaginian province. They were
a branch of the Phoenicians as even the older, unadvertised
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica will tell, and the
Phoenicians were a sort of Hebrews. Whether they remained to
flourish with the other Jews under the
227
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TKAVELS
Moors, my Sevilla
en la Mano does not say; and I am not sure whether they
survived to share the universal exile into which Islam and Israel
were finally driven. What is certain is, that the old Phoenician
name of Hispalis outlived the Roman name of Julia Romula and
reappeared in the Arabic as Ishbiliya (I know it from my
Baedeker) and is now permanently established as
Seville.
Under the Moors the
city was subordinate to Cordova, though I can hardly bear to
think so in my far greater love of Seville. But it was the seat
of schools of science, art, and agriculture, and after the
Christians had got it back, Alfonso the Learned founded other
schools there for the study of Latin and Arabic. But her greatest
prosperity and glory came to Seville with the discovery of
America. Not Columbus only, but all his most famous
contemporaries, sailed from the ports of her coasts; she was the
capital of the commerce with the new world, ruling and regulating
it by the oldest mercantile tribunal in the world, and becoming
the richest city of Spain. Then riches flowered in the letters
and arts, especially the arts, and Herrera, Pacheco, Velasquez,
Murillo, and Zurburan were born and flourished in Seville. In
modern times she has taken a prominent part in political events.
She led in the patriotic war to drive out the armies of Napoleon,
and she seems to have been on both sides in the struggle for
liberal and absolutist principles, the establishment of the brief
republic of 1868, and the restoration of the present
monarchy.
Through all the many
changes from better to Worse, from richer to poorer, Seville
continued faithful to the ideal of religious unity which the wise
Isabel and the shrewd Ferdinand divined was the only means of
consolidating the intensely provincial kingdoms of
Spain
228
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
into one nation of
Spaniards. Andalusia not being Gothic had never been Aryan, and
it was one of her kings who carried his orthodoxy to Castile and
established it inexpugnably at Toledo after he succeeded his
heretical father there. When four or five hundred years later it
became a political necessity of the Catholic Kings to expel their
Jewish and Moorish subjects and convert their wealth to pious and
patriotic uses, Andalusia was one of the most zealous provinces
in the cause. When presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office
began, some five hundred heretics were burned alive at Seville
before the year was out; many others, who were dead and buried,
paid the penalty of their heresy in effigy; in all more than two
thousand suffered in the region round about. Before he was in
Valladolid, Torquemada was in Seville, and there he drew up the
rules that governed the procedure of the Inquisition throughout
Spain. A magnificent quemadero, or crematory, second only
to that of Madrid, was built: a square stone platform where
almost every day the smoke of human sacrifice ascended. This
crematory for the living was in the meadow of San Sebastian, now
a part of the city park system which we left on the right that
first evening when we drove to the Delicias. I do not know why I
should now regret not having visited the place of this dreadful
altar and offered my unavailing pity there to the memory of those
scores of thousands of hapless martyrs who suffered there to no
end, not even to the end of confirming Spain in the faith one and
indivisible, for there are now, after so many generations of
torment, two Protestant churches in Seville. For one thing I did
not know where the place of the quemadero was; and I do
not yet know where those Protestant churches are.
229
FAMILIAR SPANISH
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II
If I went again to
Seville I should try to visit them--but, as it was, we gave our
second day to the Alcazar, which is merely the first in the
series of palaces and gardens once stretching from the flank of
the cathedral to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir. A
rich sufficiency is left in the actual Alcazar to suggest the
splendor of the series, and more than enough in the gardens to
invite our fatigue, day after day, to the sun and shade of its
quiet paths and seats when we came spent with the glories and the
bustling piety of the cathedral. In our first visit we had the
guidance of a patriotic young Granadan whose zeal for the
Alhambra would not admit the Alcazar to any comparison, but I
myself still prefer it after seeing the Alhambra. It is as purely
Moorish as that and it is in better repair if not better taste.
The taste in fact is the same, and the Castilian kings consulted
it as eagerly as their Arabic predecessors in the talent of the
Moslem architects whom they had not yet begun to drive into
exile. I am not going to set up rival to the colored picture
postals, which give a better notion than I could give of the
painted and gilded stucco decoration, the ingenious geometrical
designs on the walls, and the cloying sweetness of the
honeycombing in the vaulted roofs. Every one will have his
feeling about Moorish architecture; mine is that a little goes a
great way, and that it is too monotonous to compete with the
Gothic in variety, while it lacks the dignity of any form of the
Greek or the Renaissance. If the phrase did not insult the sex
which the faith of the Moslem insufferably insults, one might sum
up one's slight for it in the word effeminate.
230
GARDENS OP THE
ALCAZAR
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
The Alcazar gardens
are the best of the Alcazar. But I would not ignore the homelike
charm of the vast court by which you enter from the street
outside to the palace beyond. It is planted casually about with
rather shabby orange trees that children were playing under, and
was decorated with the week's wash of the low, simple dwellings
which may be hired at a rental moderate even for Seville, where a
handsome and commodious house in a good quarter rents for sixty
dollars a year. One of those two-story cottages, as we should
call them, in the ante-court of the Alcazar had for the student
of Spanish life the special advantage of a lover close to a
ground-floor window dropping tender nothings down through the
slats of the shutter to some maiden lurking within. The nothings
were so tender that you could not hear them drop, and, besides,
they were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served any
purpose for the stranger to listen for them. Once afterward we
saw the national courtship going on at another casement, but that
was at night, and here the precious first sight of it was offered
at ten o'clock in the morning. Nobody seemed to mind the lover
stationed outside the shutter with which the iron bars forbade
him the closest contact; and it is only fair to say that he
minded nobody; he was there when we went in and there when we
came out, and it appears that when it is a question of
love-making time is no more an object in Spain than in the United
States. The scene would have been better by moonlight, but you
cannot always have it moonlight, and the sun did very well; at
least, the lover did not seem to miss the moon.
He was only an
incident, and I hope the most romantic reader will let me revert
from him to the Alcazar gardens. We were always reverting to them
on any pretext or occasion, and we
mostly had them to ourselves
231
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
in the gentle
afternoons when we strayed or sat about at will in them. The
first day we were somewhat molested by the instruction of our
patriotic Granadan guide, wtho had a whopper-jaw and grayish blue
eyes, but coal-black hair for all his other blondness. He smoked
incessant cigarettes, and he showed us especially the pavilion of
Charles the Fifth, whom, after that use of all English-speaking
Spanish guides, he called Charley Fift. It appeared that the
great emperor used this pavilion for purposes of meditation; but
he could not always have meditated there, though the frame of a
brazier standing in the center intimated that it was tempered for
reflection. The first day we found a small bird in possession,
flying from one bit of the carved wooden ceiling to another, and
then, taking our presence in dudgeon, out into the sun. Another
day there was a nursery-girl there with a baby that cried; on
another, still more distractingly, a fashionable young French
bride who went kodaking round while her husband talked with an
archaeological official, evidently Spanish. In his own time,
Charley probably had the place more to himself, though even then
his thoughts could not have been altogether cheerful, whether he
recalled what he had vainly done to keep out of Spain and yet to
take the worst of Spain with him into the Netherlands, where he
tried to plant the Inquisition among his Flemings; he was already
much soured with a world that had cloyed him, and was perhaps
considering even then how he might make his escape from it to the
cloister.
III
We did not know as
yet how almost entirely dramatic the palace of the Alcazar was,
how largely it was representative of what the Spanish successors
of the Moorish
232
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
kings thought those
kings would have made it if they had made it; and it was prohably
through an instinct for the genuine that we preferred the gardens
after our first cries of wonder. What remains to me of our many
visits is the mass of high borders of box, with roses, jasmine,
and orange trees, palms, and cypresses. The fountains dribbled
rather than gushed, and everywhere were ranks and rows of plants
in large, high earthen pots beside or upon the tiled benching
that faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit on if
you had not had to supply the back yourself. The flowers were not
in great profusion, and chiefly we rejoiced in the familiar
quaintness of clumps of massive blood-red coxcombs and strange
yellow ones. The walks were bordered with box, and there remains
distinctly the impression of marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid
with tiles; all Seville seems inlaid with tiles. One afternoon we
lingered longer than usual because the day was so sunnily warm in
the garden paths and spaces, without being hot. A gardener whom
we saw oftenest hung about his flowers in a sort of vegetable
calm, and not very different from theirs except that they were
not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle or falter in his
apparently unseeing gaze; but when one of us picked a seed from
the ground and wondered what it was he said it was a magnolia
seed, and as if he could bear no more went away. In one wilding
place which seemed set apart for a nursery several men were idly
working with many pauses, but not so many as to make the
spectator nervous. As the afternoon waned and the sun sank, its
level rays dwelt on the galleries of the palace which Peter the
Cruel built himself and made so ugly with harsh brown stucco
ornament that it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic
frescos exaggerated from the Italian, and very coarse and
rank.
233
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
It was this savage
prince who invented much of the Alcazar in the soft Moorish
taste; but in those hideous galleries he let his terrible nature
loose, though as for that some say he was no crueler than certain
other Spanish kings of that period. This is the notion of my
unadvertised Encyclopaedia Britannica, and perhaps we
ought to think of him leniently as Peter the Ferocious. He was
kind to some people and was popularly known as the Justiciary; he
especially liked the Moors and Jews, who were gratefully glad,
poor things, of being liked by any one under the new Christian
rule. But he certainly killed several of his half-brothers, and
notably he killed his half-brother Don Fadrique in the Alcazar.
That is, if he had no hand in the butchery himself he had him
killed after luring him to Seville for the tournaments and
forgiving him for all their mutual injuries with every caressing
circumstance. One reads that after the king has kissed him he
sits down again to his game of backgammon and Don Fadrique goes
into the next room to Maria do Padilla, the lovely and gentle
lady whom Don Pedro has married as much as he can with a wedded
wife shut up in Toledo. She sits there in terror with her damsels
and tries with looks and signs to make Don Fadrique aware of his
danger. But he imagines no harm till the king and his companions,
with their daggers drawn, come to the curtains, which the king
parts, commanding, "Seize the Master of Santiago!" Don Fadrique
tries to draw his sword, and then he turns and flies through the
halls of the Alcazar, where he finds every door bolted and
barred. The king's men are at his heels, and at last one of them
fells him with a blow of his mace. The king goes back with a face
of sympathy to Maria, who has fallen to the floor.
334
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
The treacherous
keeping is all rather in the taste of the Italian Renaissance,
but the murder itself is more Roman, as the Spanish atrocities
and amusements are apt to be. Murray says it was in the beautiful
Hall of the Ambassadors that Don Fadrique was killed, but the
other manuals are not so specific. Wherever it was, there is a
blood-stain in the pavement which our Granadan guide failed to
show us, possibly from a patriotic pique that there are no
blood-stains in the Alhambra with personal associations. I cannot
say that much is to be made of the vaulted tunnel where poor
Maria de Padilla used to bathe, probably not much comforted by
the courtiers afterward drinking the water from the tank; she
must have thought the compliment rather nasty, and no doubt it
was paid her to please Don Pedro.
We found it
pleasanter going and coming through the corridor leading to the
gardens from the public court. This was kept at the outer end by
an "old rancid Christian" smoking incessant cigarettes and not
explicitly refusing to sell us picture postals after taking our
entrance fee; the other end was held by a young, blond,
sickly-looking girl, who made us take small nosegays at our own
price and whom it became a game to see if we could escape. I have
left saying to the last that the king and queen of Spain have a
residence in the Alcazar, and that when they come in the early
spring they do not mind corning to it through that plebeian
quadrangle. I should not mind it myself if I could go back there
next spring.
IV
We had refused with
loathing the offer of those gipsy jades to dance for us in their
noisome purlieu at Triana,
235
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
but we were not
proof against the chance of seeing some gipsy dancing in a
cafe-theater one night in Seville. The decent place was filled
with the "plain people," who sat with their hats on at rude
tables smoking and drinking coffee from tall glasses. They were
apparently nearly all working-men who had left nearly all their
wives to keep on working at home, though a few of these also had
come. On a small stage four gipsy girls, in unfashionably and
untheatrically decent gowns of white, blue, or red, with flowers
in their hair, sat in a semicircle with one subtle, silent,
darkling man among them. One after another they got up and did
the same twisting and posturing, without dancing, and while one
posed and contorted the rest unenviously joined the spectators in
their clapping and their hoarse cries of "Ole!" It was all
perfectly proper except for one high moment of indecency thrown
in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house its money's
worth. But the real, overflowing compensation came when that
little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet and
stormed the audience with a dance of hands and arms, feet and
legs, head, neck, and the whole body, which Mordkin in his finest
frenzy could not have equaled or approached. Whatever was
fiercest and wildest in nature and boldest in art was there, and
now the house went mad with its hand-clappings and
table-hammerings and deep-throated "Oles!"
Another night we
went to the academy of the world-renowned Otero and saw the
instruction of Sevillian youth in native dances of the haute
ecole. The academy used to be free to a select public, but
now the chosen, who are nearly always people from the hotels,
must pay ten pesetas each for their pleasure, and it is not too
much for a pleasure so innocent and charming. The academy is on
the ground floor of the maestro's unpre-
236
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
tentious house, and
in a waiting-room beyond the shoemaker's shop which filled the
vestibule sat, patient in their black mantillas, the mothers and
nurses of the pupils. These were mostly quite small children in
their every-day clothes, but there were two or three older girls
in the conventional dancing costume which a lady from one of the
hotels had emulated. Everything was very simple and friendly;
Otero found good seats among the aficionados for the
guests presented to him, and then began calling his pupils to the
floor of the long, narrow room with quick commands of
"Venga!" A piano was tucked away in a corner, but the
dancers kept time now with castanets and now by snapping their
fingers. Two of the oldest girls, who were apparently graduates,
were "differently beautiful" in their darkness and fairness, but
alike picturesquely Spanish in their vivid dresses and the black
veils fluttering from their high combs. A youth in green velvet
jacket and orange trousers, whose wonderful dancing did him
credit as Otero's prize pupil, took part with them; he had the
square-jawed, high-cheek-boned face of the lower-class Spaniard,
and they the oval of all Spanish women. Here there was no mere
posturing and contortioning among the girls as with the gipsies;
they sprang like flames and stamped the floor with joyous
detonations of their slippers. It was their convention to catch
the hat from the head of some young spectator and wear it in a
figure and then toss it back to him. One of them enacted the part
of a torero at a bull-fight, stamping round first in a
green satin cloak which she then waved before a man's felt hat
thrown on the ground to represent the bull hemmed about with
banderillas stuck quivering into the floor. But the
prettiest thing was the dancing of two little girl pupils, one
fair and thin and of an angelic gracefulness, and the other plump
and dark,
237
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
who was as dramatic
as the blond was lyrical. They accompanied themselves with
castanets, and, though the little fatling toed in and wore a
common dress of blue-striped gingham, I am afraid she won our
hearts from her graceful rival. Both were very serious and gave
their whole souls to the dance, but they were not more childishly
earnest than an older girl in black who danced with one of the
gaudy graduates, panting in her anxious zeal and stopping at last
with her image of the Virgin she resembled flung wildly down her
back from the place where it had hung over her heart.
V
We preferred walking
home from Senor Otero's house through the bright, quiescing
street, because in driving there we had met with an adventure
which we did not care to repeat. We were driving most
unaggressively across a small plaza, with a driver and a friend
on the box beside him to help keep us from harm, when a
trolley-car came wildly round a corner at the speed of at least
two miles an hour and crossed our track. Our own speed was such
that we could not help striking the trolley in a collision which
was the fault of no one apparently. The front of the car was
severely banged, one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and our
conversation was interrupted. Immediately a crowd assembled from
the earth or the air, but after a single exchange of reproaches
between the two drivers nothing was said by any one. No policeman
arrived to constater the facts, and after the crowd had
silently satisfied or dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it
silently dispersed. The car ambled grumbling off and we drove on
with some vague murmurs from our driver, whose
238
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
nerves seemed
shaken, but who was supported in a somewhat lurching and devious
progress by the caressing arm of the friend on the seat beside
him.
All this was in
Seville, where the popular emotions are painted in travel and
romance as volcanic as at Naples, where no one would have slept
the night of our accident and the spectators would be debating it
still. In our own surprise and alarm we partook of the
taciturnity of the witnesses, which I think was rather fine and
was much decenter than any sort of utterance. On our way home we
had occasion to practise a like forbearance toward the lover whom
we passed as he stood courting through the casement of a ground
floor. The soft air was full of the sweet of jasmine and orange
blossoms from the open patios. Many people besides
ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark
figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than
the invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and
if at some period of their lives people must make love I do not
believe there is a more inoffensive way of doing it.
By the sort of echo
notable in life's experience we had a reverberation of the
orange-flower perfume of that night in the orange-flower honey at
breakfast next morning. We lived to learn that our own bees
gather the same honey from the orange flowers of Florida; but at
the time we believed that only the bees of Seville did it, and I
still doubt whether anywhere in America the morning wakes to
anything like the long, rich, sad calls of the Sevillian street
hucksters. It is true that you do not get this plaintive music
without the accompanying note of the hucksters' donkeys, which,
if they were better advised, would not close with the sort of
inefficient sifflication which they now use in
spoiling
239
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
an otherwise most
noble, most leonine roar. But when were donkeys of any sort ever
well advised in all respects? Those of Seville, where donkeys
abound, were otherwise of the superior intelligence which
throughout Spain leaves the horse and even the mule far behind,
and constitutes the donkeys, far beyond the idle and useless
dogs, the friends of man. They indefinitely outnumber the dogs,
and the cats are of course nowhere in the count. Yet I would not
misprize the cats of Seville, which apparently have their money
price. We stopped to admire a beautiful white one, on our way to
see the market one day, praising it as intelligibly as we could,
and the owner caught it up, when we had passed and ran after us,
and offered to sell it to us.
That might have been
because it was near the market where we experienced almost the
only mercantile zeal we had known in Spain. Women with ropes and
garlands of onions round their necks invited us to buy, and we
had hopeful advances from the stalls of salads and fruits, where
there was a brave and beautiful show of lettuces and endives,
grapes, medlars, and heaps of melons, but no oranges; I do not
know why, though there were shining masses of red peppers and
green, peppers, and vast earthen bowls with yellow peas soaking
in them. The flowers were every gay autumnal sort, especially
dahlias, sometimes made into stiff bouquets, perhaps for church
offerings. There were mounds of chestnuts, four or five feet high
and wide; and these flowers and fruits filled the interior of the
market, while the stalls for the flesh and fish were on the
outside. There seemed more sellers than buyers; here and there
were ladies buying, but it is said that the mistresses commonly
send their maids for the daily provision.
Ordinarily I should
say you could not go amiss for your profit and pleasure in
Seville, but there are certain
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SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
imperative objects
of interest like the Casa de Pilatos which you really have to do.
Strangely enough, it is very well worth doing, for, though it is
even more factitiously Moorish than the Alcazar, it is of almost
as great beauty and of greater dignity. Gardens, galleries,
staircases, statues, paintings, all are interesting, with a
mingled air of care and neglect which is peculiarly charming,
though perhaps the keener sensibilities, the morbider nerves may
suffer from the glare and hardness of the tiling which render the
place so wonderful and so exquisite. One must complain of
something, and I complain of the tiling; I do not mind the house
being supposed like the house of Pontius Pilate in
Jerusalem.
It belongs to the
Duke of Medina-Celi, who no more comes to it from Madrid than the
Duke of Alva comes to his house, which I somehow perversely
preferred. For one thing, the Alva palace has eleven
patios, all far more forgotten than the four in the House
of Pilate, and I could fully glut my love of patios
without seeing half of them. Besides, it was in the charge of a
typical Spanish family: a lean, leathery, sallow father, a fat,
immovable mother, and a tall, silent daughter. The girl showed us
darkly about the dreary place, with its fountains and orange
trees and palms, its damp, Moresque, moldy walls, its damp,
moldy, beautiful wooden ceilings, and its damp, moldy staircase
leading to the family rooms overhead, which we could not see. The
family stays for a little time only in the spring and fall, but
if ever they stay so late as we had come the sunlight lying so
soft and warm in the patio and the garden out of it must
have made them as sorry to leave it as we were.
I am not sure but I
valued the House of Alva somewhat for the chance my visit to it
gave me of seeing a Sevillian tenement-house such as I had hoped
I might
241
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
see. One hears that
such houses are very scrupulously kept by the janitors who compel
the tenants to a cleanliness not perhaps always their nature. At
any rate, this one, just across the way from the Alva House, was
of a surprising neatness. It was built three stories high, with
galleries looking into an open court and doors giving from these
into the several tenements. As fortune, which does not
continually smile on travel, would have it that morning, two
ladies of the house were having a vivid difference of opinion on
an upper gallery. Or at least one was, for the other remained
almost as silent as the spectators who grouped themselves about
her or put their heads out of the windows to see, as well as
hear, what it was about. I wish I knew and I would tell the
reader. The injured party, and I am sure she must have been
deeply injured, showered her enemy with reproaches, and each time
when she had emptied the vials of her wrath with much shaking of
her hands in the wrong-doer's face she went away a few yards and
filled them up again and then returned for a fresh discharge. It
was perfectly like a scene of Goldoni and like many a passage of
real life in his native city, and I was rapt in it across fifty
years to the Venice I used to know. But the difference in Seville
was that there was actively only one combatant in the strife, and
the witnesses took no more part in it than the passive
resistant.
VI
As a contrast to
this violent scene which was not so wholly violent but that it
was relieved by a boy teasing a cat with his cap in the
foreground, and the sweet singing of canaries in the windows of
the houses near, I may commend the Casa de los Venerables,
ecclesi-
242
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
astics somehow
related to the cathedral and having their tranquil dwelling not
far from it. The street we took from the Duke of Alva's palace
was so narrow and crooked that we scraped the walls in passing,
and we should never have got by one heavily laden donkey if he
had not politely pushed the side of his pannier into a doorway to
make room for us. When we did get to the Casa de los Venerables
we found it mildly yellow-washed and as beautifully serene and
sweet as the house of venerable men should be. Its distinction in
a world of patios was a patio where the central
fountain was sunk half a story below the entrance floor, and
encircled by a stairway by which the humble neighbor folk freely
descended to fill their water jars. I suppose that gentle mansion
has other merits, but the fine staircase that ended under a
baroque dome left us facing a bolted door, so that we had to
guess at those attractions, which I leave the reader to imagine
in turn.
I have kept the
unique wonder of Seville waiting too long already for my
recognition, though in its eight hundred years it should have
learned patience enough for worse things. From its great
antiquity alone, if from nothing else, it is plain that the
Giralda at Seville could not have been studied from the tower of
the Madison Square Garden in New York, which the American will
recall when he sees it. If the case must be reversed and we must
allow that the Madison Square tower was studied from the Giralda,
we must still recognize that it is no servile copy, but in its
frank imitation has a grace and beauty which achieves
originality. Still, the Giralda is always the Giralda, and,
though there had been no Saint-Gaudens to tip its summit with
such a flying-footed nymph as poises on our own tower, the figure
of Faith which crowns it is at least
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
a good weather-vane,
and from its office of turning gives the mighty bell-tower its
name. Long centuries before the tower was a belfry it served the
mosque, which the cathedral now replaces, as a minaret for the
muezzin to call the faithful to prayer, but it was then only
two-thirds as high. The Christian belfry which continues it is
not in offensive discord with the structure below; its other
difference in form and spirit achieves an impossible harmony. The
Giralda, however, chiefly works its enchantment by its color, but
here I must leave the proof of this to the picture postal which
now everywhere takes the bread out of the word-painter's mouth.
The time was when with a palette full of tinted adjectives one
might hope to do an unrivaled picture of the Giralda; but that
time is gone; and if the reader has not a colored postal by him
he should lose no time in going to Seville and seeing the
original. For the best view of it I must advise a certain
beautifully irregular small court in the neighborhood, with
simple houses so low that you can easily look up over their roofs
and see the mighty bells of the Giralda rioting far aloof,
flinging themselves beyond the openings of the belfry and
deafeningly making believe to leap out into space. If the
traveler fails to find this court (for it seems now and then to
be taken in and put away), he need not despair of seeing the
Giralda fitly. He cannot see Seville at all without seeing it,
and from every point, far or near, he sees it grand and
glorious.
I remember it
especially from beyond the Guadalquivir in the drive we took
through Triana to the village of Italica, where three Roman
emperors were born, as the guide-books will officiously hasten to
tell, and steal away your chance of treating your reader with any
effect of learned research. These emperors (I will not be stopped
by any guide-book from saying) were
244
THE COURT OF FLAGS AND
TOWER OF THE GIRALDA
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
Trajan, Hadrian, and
Theodosius; and Triana is named for the first of them.
Fortunately, we turned to the right after crossing the bridge and
so escaped the gipsy quarter, but we paused through a long street
so swarming with children that we wondered to hear whole
schoolrooms full of them humming and droning their lessons as we
made our way among the tenants. Fortunately, they played mostly
in the gutters, the larger looking after the smaller when their
years and riches were so few more, with that beautiful care which
childhood bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe. To say that
those Spanish children were as tenderly watchful of these Spanish
babies as English children is to say everything. Now and then a
mother cared for a babe as only a mother can in an ofB.ce which
the pictures and images of the Most Holy Virgin consecrate and
endear in lands where the sterilized bottle is unknown, but
oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms and
crooned whatever was the Spanish of--
Rack back, baby,
daddy shot a b'ar; Rack back, baby, see it hangin'
thar.
For there are no
rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods,
and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind
legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with
seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned
into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles
III., when he came to the Spanish throne from Naples, full of
beneficent projects and ideals, bestowed upon his unwilling and
ungrateful subjects. These roads were made about the middle of
the eighteenth century, and they have been gathering dust ever
since, so that the white powder now lies in the one beyond Triana
five or six inches deep. Along the sides oc-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
casional shade-trees
stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened away,
though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with
flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens,
and the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats. In some of
the foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards
with olives heaped under them and peasants still resting from
their midday breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully
fringed the wayside; our driver said it had no name, and later an
old peasant said it was "bad."
VII
We passed a convent
turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we met a troop
of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and very
effective in their black robes against the white road. When we
came to the village that was a municipium under Augustus
and a colonia under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and
poor, but very neat and self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy
to have been founded by Scipio Africanus two hundred years before
Christ. Such cottage interiors as we glimpsed seemed cleaner and
cozier than some in Wales; men in wide flat-brimmed hats sat like
statues at the doors, absolutely motionless, but there were women
bustling in and out in their work, and at one place a little girl
of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing it
joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. We did
not meet with universal favor as we drove by; some groups of
girls mocked our driver; when we said one of them was pretty he
answered that he had seen prettier.
246
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
At the entrance to
the ruins of the amphitheater which forms the tourist's chief
excuse for visiting Italica the popular manners softened toward
us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus
flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They
followed us into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless
old custodian who took possession of us as his proper prey and
led us through the moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats
which form the amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the
masonry are broken off from the mass and lie detached, but the
mass keeps the form and dignity of the original design; and in
the lonely fields there it had something august and proud beyond
any quality of the Arena at Verona or the Colosseum at Rome. It
is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced the interior,
and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth, but near
the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them
which restored the vision of the "grandeur that was Rome" pretty
well over the known world when this great work was in its prime.
Our custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any
old Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own
Spanish was so slight and his patois was so dense that the
best we could do was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On
this his one word of English, repeated as we passed through the
subterranean doors, "Lion, lion, lion," cast a gleam of
intelligence which brightened into a vivid community of ideas
when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell us some of
the small Roman coins which formed his stock in trade. The poor
place was beautifully neat, and from his window he made us free
of a sight of Seville, signally the cathedral and the Giralda,
such as could not be bought for money in New York.
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
Then we set out on
our return, leaving unvisited to the left the church of San
Isidore de Campo, with its tombs of Guzman the Good and that
Better Lady Dona Urraca Osorio, whom Peter the Cruel had burned.
I say better, because I hold it nobler in Urraca to have rejected
the love of a wicked king than in Guzman to have let the Moors
slay his son rather than surrender a city to them. But I could
only pay honor to her pathetic memory and the memory of that
nameless handmaid of hers who rushed into the flames to right the
garments on the form which the wind had blown them away from, and
so perished with her. We had to take on trust from the
guide-books all trace of the Roman town where the three emperors
were born, and whose "palaces, aqueducts, and temples and circus
were magnificent." We had bought some of the "coins daily dug
up," but we intrusted to the elements those "vestiges of
vestiges" left of Trajan's palaces after an envious earthquake
destroyed them so lately as 1755.
The one incident of
our return worthy of literature was the dramatic triumph of a
woman over a man and a mule as we saw it exhibited on the parapet
of a culvert over a dry torrent's bed. It was the purpose of this
woman, standing on the coping in statuesque relief and showing
against the sky the comfortable proportions of the Spanish
housewife, to mount the mule behind the man. She waited patiently
while the man slowly and as we thought faithlessly urged the mule
to the parapet; then, when she put out her hands and leaned
forward to take her seat, the mule inched softly away and left
her to recover her balance at the risk of a fall on the other
side. We were too far for anything but the dumb show, but there
were, no doubt, words which conveyed her opinions unmistakably to
both man and mule. With our hearts in our mouths we witnessed the
scene and its
248
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
repetitions till we
could bear it no longer, and we had bidden our cabman drive on
when with a sudden spring the brave woman launched herself
semicircularly forward and descended upon the exact spot which
she had been aiming at. There solidly established on the mule,
with her arms fast round the man, she rode off; and I do not
think any reader of mine would like to have been that mule or
that man for the rest of the way home.
We met many other
mules, much more exemplary, in teams of two, three, and four,
covered with bells and drawing every kind of carryall and stage
and omnibus. These vehicles were built when the road was, about
1750, and were, like the road, left to the natural forces for
keeping themselves in repair. The natural forces were not wholly
adequate in either case, but the vehicles were not so thick with
dust as the road, because they could shake it off. They had each
two or four passengers seated with the driver; passengers
clustered over the top and packed the inside, but every one was
in the joyous mood of people going home for the day. In a plaza
not far from the Triana bridge you may see these decrepit
conveyances assembling every afternoon for their suburban
journeys, and there is no more picturesque sight in Seville, more
homelike, more endearing. Of course, when I say this I leave out
of the count the bridge over the Guadalquivir at the morning or
evening hour when it is covered with brightly caparisoned
donkeys, themselves covered with men needing a shave, and
gay-kerchiefed women of every age, with boys and dogs underfoot,
and pedestrians of every kind, and hucksters selling sea-fruit
and land-fruit and whatever else the stranger would rather see
than eat. Very little outcry was needed for the sale of these
things, which in Naples or even in Venice
249
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
would have been
attended by such vociferation as would have sufficed to proclaim
a city in flames.
On a day not long
after our expedition to Italica we went a drive with a young
American friend living in Seville, whom I look to for a book
about that famous city such as I should like to write myself if I
had the time to live it as he has done. He promised that he would
show us a piece of the old Roman wall, but he showed us ever so
much more, beginning with the fore court of the conventual church
of Santa Paula, where we found the afternoon light waiting to
illumine for us with its tender caress the Luca della Robbia-like
colored porcelain figures of the portal and the beautiful octagon
tower staying a moment before taking flight for heaven: the most
exquisite moment of our whole fortnight in Seville. Tall pots of
flowers stood round, and the grass came green through the
crevices of the old foot-worn pavement. When we passed out a
small boy scuffled for our copper with the little girl who opened
the gate for us, but was brought to justice by us, and joined
cheerfully in the chorus of children chanting "Mo-ney, mo-ney!"
round us, but no more expecting an answer to their prayer than if
we had been saints off the church door.
We passed out of the
city by a gate where in a little coign of vantage a cobbler was
thoughtfully hammering away in the tumult at a shoe-sole, and
then suddenly on our right we had the Julian wall: not a mere
fragment, but a good long stretch of it. The Moors had built upon
it and characterized it, but had not so masked it as to hide the
perdurable physiognomy of the Roman work. It was vastly more
Roman wall than you see at Rome; but far better than this heroic
image of war and waste was the beautiful old aqueduct, perfectly
Roman still, with no visible touch from Moor, or from
Christian.
250
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
before or after the
Moor, and performing its beneficent use after two thousand years
as effectively as in the years before Christ came to bless the
peacemakers. Nine miles from its mountain source the graceful
arches bring the water on their shoulders; and though there is
now an English company that pipes other streams to the city
through its underground mains, the Roman aqueduct, eternally
sublime in its usefulness, is constant to the purpose of the
forgotten men who imagined it. The outer surfaces of the channel
which it lifted to the light and air were tagged with weeds and
immemorial mosses, and dripped as with the sweat of its
twenty-centuried toil.
We followed it as
far as it went on our way to a modern work of peace and use which
the ancient friend and servant of man would feel no unworthy
rival. Beyond the drives and gardens of the Delicias, where we
lingered our last to look at the pleasurers haunting them, we
drove far across the wheat-fields where a ship-canal five miles
long is cutting to rectify the curve of the Guadalquivir and
bring Seville many miles nearer the sea than it has ever been
before; hitherto the tramp steamers have had to follow the course
of the ships of Tarshish in their winding approach. The canal is
the notion of the young king of Spain, and the work on it goes
forward night and day. The electric lights were shedding their
blinding glare on the deafening clatter of the excavating
machinery, and it was an unworthy relief to escape from the
intense modernity of the scene to that medieval retreat nearer
the city where the aficionados night-long watch the bulls
coming up from their pastures for the fight or the feast,
whichever you choose to call it, of the morrow. These amateurs,
whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk in the wayside cafe
over their cups of chocolate and wait till in
251
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
that darkest hour
before dawn, with irregular trampling and deep bellowing, these
hapless heroes of the arena pass on to their doom. It is a great
thing for the aficionados who may imagine in that
bellowing the the gladiator's hail of Morituri salutant.
At any rate, it is very chic; it gives a man standing in Seville,
which disputes with Madrid the primacy in bull-feasting. If the
national capital has bull-feasting every Sunday of the year, all
the famous torreros come from Andalusia, with the. bulls,
their brave antagonists, and in the great provincial capital
there are bull-feasts of insurpassable, if not incomparable,
splendor.
Before our pleasant
drive ended we passed, as we had already passed several times,
the scene of the famous Feria of Seville, the cattle show which
draws tens of thousands to the city every springtime for business
and pleasure, but mostly pleasure. The Feria focuses in its
greatest intensity at one of the entrances to the Delicias, where
the street is then so dense with every sort of vehicle that
people can cross it only by the branching viaduct, which rises in
two several ascents from each footway, intersecting at top and
delivering their endless multitudes on the opposite sidewalk.
Along the street are gay pavilions and cottages where the
nobility live through the Feria with their families and welcome
the public to the sight of their revelry through the open doors
and windows. Then, if ever, the stranger may see the dancing, and
hear the singing and playing which all the other year in Seville
disappoints him of.
VIII
On the eve of All
Saints, after we had driven over the worst road in the world
outside of Spain or Amer-
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SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
ica, we arrived at
the entrance of the cemetery where Baedeker had mysteriously said
"some sort of fair was held." Then we perceived that we were
present at the preparations for celebrating one of the most
affecting events of the Spanish year. This was the visit of
kindred and friends bringing tokens of remembrance and affection
to the dead. The whole long, rough way we had passed them on
foot, and at the cemetery gate we found them arriving in public
cabs, as well as in private carriages, with the dignity and
gravity of smooth-shaven footmen and coachmen. In Spain these
functionaries look their office more solemnly even than in
England and affect you as peculiarly correct and
eighteenth-century. But apart from their looks the occasion
seemed more a festivity than a solemnity. The people bore
flowers, mostly artificial, as well as lanterns, and within the
cemetery they were furbishing up the monuments with every
appliance according to the material, scrubbing the marble,
whitewashing the stucco, and repainting the galvanized iron. The
lanterns were made to match the monuments and fences
architecturally, and the mourners were attaching them with a
gentle satisfaction in their fitness; I suppose they were to be
lighted at dark and to burn through the night. There were men
among the mourners, but most of them were women and children;
some were weeping, like a father leading his two little ones, and
an old woman grieving for her dead with tears. But what prevailed
was a community of quiet resignation, almost to the sort of
cheerfulness which bereavement sometimes knows. The scene was
tenderly affecting, but it had a tremendous touch of tragic
setting in the long, straight avenue of black cypresses which
slimly climbed the upward slope from the entrance to the farther
bound of the cemetery. Otherwise
there was only the patience of entire faith
253
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
in this annually
recurring visit of the living to the dead: the fixed belief that
these should rise from the places where they lay. and they who
survived them for yet a little more of time should join them from
whatever end of the earth in the morning of the Last
Day.
All along I have
been shirking what any right-minded traveler would feel almost
his duty, but I now own that there is a museum in Seville, the
Museo Provincial, which was of course once a convent and is now a
gallery, with the best, but not the very best, Murillos in it,
not to speak of the best Zurburans. I will not speak at all of
those pictures, because I could in no wise say what they were, or
were like, and because I would not have the reader come to them
with any opinions of mine which he might bring away with him in
the belief that they were his own. Let him not fail to go to the
museum, however; he will be the poorer beyond calculation if he
does not; but he will be a beggar if he does not go to the
Hospital de la Caridad, where in the church he will find six
Murillos out-Murilloing any others excepting always the
incomparable "Vision of St. Anthony" in the cathedral. We did not
think of those six Murillos when we went to the hospital; we knew
nothing of the peculiar beauty and dignity of the church; but we
came because we wished to see what the repentance of a man could
do for others after a youth spent in wicked riot. The gentle,
pensive little Mother who received us carefully said at once that
the hospital was not for the sick, but only for the superannuated
and the poor and friendless who came to pass a night or an
indefinite time in it, according to the pressure of their need;
and after showing us the rich little church, she led us through
long, clean corridors where old men lay in their white beds or
sat beside them eating their breakfasts, very savory-looking, out
of ample
254
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
white bowls. Some of
them saluted us, but the others we excused because they were so
preoccupied. In a special room set apart for them were what we
brutally call tramps, but who doubtless are known in Spain for
indigent brethren overtaken on their wayfaring without a lodging
for the night. Here they could come for it and cook their supper
and breakfast at the large circular fireplace which filled one
end of their room. They rose at our entrance and bowed; and how I
wish I could have asked them, every one, about their
lives!
There was nothing
more except the doubt of that dear little Mother when I gave her
a silver dollar for her kindness. She seemed surprised and
worried, and asked, "Is it for the charity or for me?" What could
I do but answer, "Oh, for your Grace," and add another for the
charity. She still looked perplexed, but there was no way out of
our misunderstanding, if it was one, and we left her with her
sweet, troubled face between the white wings of her cap, like
angel's wings mounting to it from her shoulders. Then we went to
look at the statue of the founder bearing a hapless stranger in
his arms in a space of flowers before the hospital, where a
gardener kept watch that no visitor should escape without a bunch
worth at least a peseta. He had no belief that the peseta could
possibly be for the charity, and the poverty of the poor
neighborhood was so much relieved by the mere presence of the
hospital that it begged of us very little as we passed
through.
IX
We had expected to
go to Granada after a week in Seville, but man is always
proposing beyond his disposing in strange lands as well as at
home, and we
255
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
were fully a
fortnight in the far lovelier capital. In the mean time we had
changed from our rooms in the rear of the hotel to others in the
front, where we entered intimately into the life of the Plaza San
Fernando as far as we might share it from our windows. It was not
very active life; even the cabmen whose neat victorias bordered
the place on three sides were not eager for custom; they invited
the stranger, but they did not urge; there was a continual but
not a rapid passing through the ample oblong; there was a good
deal of still life on the benches where leisure enjoyed the
feathery shadow of the palms, for the sun was apt to be too hot
at the hour of noon, though later it conduced to the slumber
which in Spain accompanies the digestion of the midday meal in
all classes. As the afternoon advanced numbers of little girls
came into the plaza and played children's games which seemed a
translation of games familiar to our own country. One evening a
small boy was playing with them, but after a while he seemed to
be found unequal to the sport; he was ejected from the group and
went off gloomily to grieve apart with his little thumb in his
mouth. The sight of his dignified desolation was insupportable,
and we tried what a copper of the big-dog value would do to
comfort him. He took it without looking up and ran away to the
peanut-stand which is always steaming at the first corner all
over Christendom. Late in the evening--in fact, after the night
had fairly fallen--we saw him making his way into a house
fronting on the plaza. He tried at the door with one hand and in
the other he held an unexhausted bag of peanuts. He had wasted no
word of thanks on us, and he did not now. When he got the door
open he backed into the interior still facing us and so fading
from our sight and knowledge.
He had the touch of
comedy which makes pathos
256
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
endurable, but
another incident was wholly pathetic. As we came out of an
antiquity shop near the cathedral one afternoon we found on the
elevated footway near the Gate of Pardon a mother and daughter,
both of the same second youth, who gently and jointly pronounced
to us the magical word encajes. Rather, they questioned us
with it, and they only suggested, very forbearingly, that we
should come to their house with them to see those laces, which of
course were old laces; their house was quite near. But that one
of us twain who was singly concerned in encajes had
fatigued and perhaps overbought herself at the antiquity shop,
and she signified a regret which they divined too well was
dissent. They looked rather than expressed a keen little
disappointment; the mother began a faint insistence, but the
daughter would not suffer it. Here was the pride of poverty, if
not poverty itself, and it was with a pang that we parted from
these mutely appealing ladies. We could not have borne it if we
had not instantly promised ourselves to come the next day and
meet them and go home with them and buy all their encajes
that we had money for. We kept our promise, and we came the next
day and the next and every day we remained in Seville, and
lingered so long that we implanted in the cabmen beside the
curbing the inextinguishable belief that we were in need of a
cab; but we never saw those dear ladies again.
These are some of
the cruel memories which the happiest travel leaves, and I
gratefully recall that in the case of a custodian of the
Columbian Museum, which adjoins the cathedral, we did not inflict
a pang that rankled in our hearts for long. I gave him a handful
of copper coins which I thought made up a peseta, but his eyes
were keener, and a sorrow gloomed his brow which projected its
shadow so darkly over
257
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
us when we went into
the cathedral for one of our daily looks that we hastened to
return and make up the full peseta with another heap of coppers;
a whole sunburst of smiles illumined his face, and a rainbow of
the brightest colors arched our sky and still arches it whenever
we think of that custodian and his rehabilitated trust in
man.
This seems the
crevice where I can crowd in the fact that bits of family wash
hung from the rail of the old pulpit in the Court of Oranges
beside the cathedral, and a pumpkin vine lavishly decorated an
arcade near a doorway which perhaps gave into the dwelling of
that very custodian. At the same time I must not fail to urge the
reader's seeing the Columbian Museum, which is richly interesting
and chiefly for those Latin and Italian authors annotated by the
immortal admiral's own hand. These give the American a sense of
him as the discoverer of our hemisphere which nothing else could,
and insurpassably render the New World credible. At the same time
they somehow bring a lump of pity and piety into the throat at
the thought of the things he did and suffered. They bring him
from history and make him at home in the beholder's heart, and
there seems a mystical significance in the fact that the volume
most abounding in marginalia should be Seneca's
Prophecies.
The frequent passing
of men as well as women and children through our Plaza San
Fernando and the prevalence of men asleep on the benches; the
immense majority of boys everywhere; the moralized
abattoir outside the walls where the humanity dormant at
the bull-feast wakes to hide every detail of slaughter for the
market; a large family of cats basking at their ease in a sunny
doorway; trains of milch goats with wicker muzzles, led by a
milch cow from door to door through
258
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
the streets; the
sudden solemn beauty of the high altar in the cathedral, seen by
chance on a brilliant day; the bright, inspiriting air of
Seville; a glorious glimpse of the Giralda coming home from a
drive; the figure of a girl outlined in a lofty window; a
middle-aged Finnish pair trying to give themselves in murmured
talk to the colored stucco of the Hall of the Ambassadors in what
seems their wedding journey; two artists working near with
sketches tilted against the wall; a large American lady who
arrives one forenoon in traveling dress and goes out after
luncheon in a mantilla with a fan and high comb; another American
lady who appears after dinner in the costume of a Spanish
dancing-girl; the fact that there is no Spanish butter and that
the only good butter comes from France and the passable butter
from Denmark; the soft long veils of pink cloud that trail
themselves in the sky across our Plaza, and then dissolve in the
silvery radiance of the gibbous moon; the yellowish-red electric
Brush lights swinging from palm to palm as in the decoration of
some vast ballroom; a second drive through Triana, and a failure
to reach the church we set out for; the droves of brown pigs and
flocks of brown sheep; the goatherds unloading olive boughs in
the fields for the goats to browse; a dirty, kind, peaceful
village, with an English factory in it, and a mansion of
galvanized iron with an automobile before it; a pink villa on a
hillside and a family group on the shoulder of a high-walled
garden; a girl looking down from the wall, and a young man
resting his hand on the masonry and looking up at her; the good
faces of the people, men and women; boys wrestling and frolicking
in the village streets; the wide dust-heap of a road, full of
sudden holes; the heat of the sun in the first November week
after touches of cold; the tram-cars that wander from
259
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
one side of the city
street to the other, and then barely miss scraping the house
walls; in our drive home from our failure for that church, men
with trains of oxen plowing and showing against the round red
rayless sun; a stretch of the river with the crimson-hulled
steamers, and a distant sail-boat seen across the fields; the
gray moon that burnishes itself and rides bright and high for our
return; people in balconies, and the air full of golden dust shot
with bluish electric lights; here is a handful of suggestions
from my note-book which each and every one would expand into a
chapter or a small volume under the intensive culture which the
reader may well have come to dread. But I fling them all down
here for him to do what he likes with, and turn to speak at more
length of the University, or, rather the University Church, which
I would not have any reader of mine fail to visit.
X
With my desire to
find likeness rather than difference in strange peoples, I was
glad to have two of the students loitering in the patio
play just such a trick on a carter at the gate as school-boys
might play in our own land. While his back was turned they took
his whip and hid it and duly triumphed in his mystification and
dismay. We did not wait for the catastrophe, but by the
politeness of another student found the booth of the custodian,
who showed us to the library. A noise of recitation from the
windows looking into the patio followed us up-stairs; but
maturer students were reading at tables in the hushed library,
and at a large central table a circle of grave authorities of
some sort were smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One,
who
260
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
seemed chief among
them, rose and bowed us into the freedom of the place, and again
rose and bowed when we went out. We did not stay long, for a
library is of the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the
books or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There are
eighty thousand volumes in that library, but we had to come away
without examining half of them. The church was more appreciable,
and its value was enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff
old sacristan to unlock it. We found it rich in a most wonderful
retablo carved in wood and painted. Besides the excellent
pictures at the high altar, there are two portrait brasses which
were meant to be recumbent, but which are stood up against the
wall, perhaps to their surprise, without loss of impressiveness.
Most notable of all is the mural tomb of Pedro Enriquez de Ribera
and his wife: he who built the Casa de Pilatos, and as he had
visited the Holy Land was naturally fabled to have copied it from
the House of Pilate. Now, as if still continuing his travels, he
reposes with his wife in a sort of double-decker monument, where
the Evil One would have them suggest to the beholder the notion
of passengers in the upper and lower berths of a Pullman
sleeper.
Of all the Spanish
cities that I saw, Seville was the most charming, not for those
attributive blandishments of the song and dance which the tourist
is supposed to find it, but which we quite failed of, but for the
simpler and less conventional amiabilities which she was so rich
in. I have tried to hint at these, but really one must go to
Seville for them and let them happen as they will. Many happened
in our hotel where we liked everybody, from the kindly, most
capable Catalonian head waiter to the fine-headed little
Napoleonic-looking waiter who had identified us at San Sebastian
as Ameri-
261
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
cans, because we
spoke "quicklier" than the English, and who ran to us when we
came into the hotel and shook hands with its as if we were his
oldest and dearest friends. There was a Swiss concierge who could
not be bought for money, and the manager was the mirror of
managers. Fancy the landlord of the Waldorf-Astoria, or the St.
Regis, coming out on the sidewalk and beating down a taxicabman
from a charge of fifteen pesetas to six for a certain drive! It
is not thinkable, and yet the like of it happened to xis in
Seville from our manager. It was not his fault, when our rear
apartment became a little too chill, and we took a parlor in the
front and came back on the first day hoping to find it stored
full of the afternoon sun's warmth, but found that the
camerera had opened the windows and closed the shutters in
our absence so that our parlor was of a frigidity which no
glitter of the electric light could temper. The halls and public
rooms were chill in anticipation and remembrance of any cold
outside, but in otir parlor there was a hole for the sort of
stove which we saw in the reading-room, twice as large as an
average teakettle, with a pipe as big around as the average
rain-pipe. I am sure this apparatus would have heated us
admirably, but the weather grew milder and milder and we never
had occasion to make the successful experiment. Meanwhile the
moral atmosphere of the hotel was of a blandness which would have
gone far to content us with any meteorological perversity. When
we left it we were on those human terms with every one who ruled
or served in it which one never attains in an American hotel, and
rarely in an English one.
At noon on the 4th
of November the sun was really hot in our plaza; but we were
instructed that before the winter was over there would be cold
enough, not
262
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
of great frosty
severity, of course, but nasty and hard to bear in the summer
conditions which prevail through the year. I wish I could tell
how the people live then in their beautiful, cool houses, but I
do not know, and I do not know how they live at any season except
from the scantiest hearsay. The women remain at home except when
they go to church or to drive in the Delicias --that is to say,
the women of society, of the nobility. There is no society in our
sense among people of the middle classes; the men when they are
not at business are at the cafe; the women when they are not at
mass are at home. That is what we were told, and yet at a
moving-picture show we saw many women of the middle as well as
the lower classes. The frequent holidays afford them an outlet,
and indoors they constantly see their friends and kindred at
their tertulias.
The land is in large
holdings which are managed by the factors or agents of the noble
proprietors. These, when they are not at Madrid, are to be found
at their clubs, where their business men bring them papers to be
signed, often unread. This sounds a little romantic, and perhaps
it is not true. Some gentlemen take a great interest in the
bull-feasts and breed the bulls and cultivate the bull-fighters;
what other esthetic interests they have I do not know. All
classes are said to be of an Oriental philosophy of life; they
hold that the English striving and running to and fro and seeing
strange countries comes in the end to the same thing as sitting
still; and why should they bother? There is something in that,
but one may sit still too much; the Spanish ladies, as I many
times heard, do overdo it. Not only they do not walk abroad; they
do not walk at home; everything is carried to and from them; they
do not lift hand or foot. The consequence is that they have very
small hands and feet; Gautier, who
263
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
seems to have grown
tired when he reached Seville, and has comparatively little to
say of it, says that a child may hold a Sevillian lady's foot in
its hand; he does not say he saw it done. What is true is that no
child could begin to clasp with both hands the waist of an
average Sevillian lady. But here again the rule has its
exceptions and will probably have more. Not only is the English
queen-consort stimulating the Andalusian girls to play tennis by
her example when she comes to Seville, but it has somehow become
the fashion for ladies of all ages to leave their carriages in
the Delicias and walk up and down; we saw at least a dozen doing
it.
Whatever flirting
and intriguing goes on, the public sees nothing of it. In the
street there is no gleam of sheep's-eying or any manner of
indecorum. The women look sensible and good, and I should say the
same of the men; the stranger's experience must have been more
unfortunate than mine if he has had any unkindness from them. One
heard that Spanish women do not smoke, unless they are
cigarreras and work in the large tobacco factory, where
the "Carmen" tradition has given place to the mother-of-a-family
type, with her baby on the floor beside her. Even these may
prefer not to set the baby a bad example and have her grow up and
smoke like those English and American women. The strength of the
Church is, of course, in the women's faith, and its strength is
unquestionable, if not quite unquestioned. In Seville, as I have
said, there are two Spanish Protestant churches, and their
worship, is not molested. Society does not receive their members;
but we heard that with most Spanish people Protestantism is a
puzzle rather than offense. They know we are not Jews, but
Christians; yet we are not Catholics; and what, then, are we?
With the Protes-
264
SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND
INCIDENTS
tants, as with the
Catholics, there is always religious marriage. There is civil
marriage for all, but without the religious rite the pair are not
well seen by either sect.
It is said that the
editor of the ablest paper in Madrid, which publishes a local
edition at Seville, is a Protestant. The queen mother is
extremely clerical, though one of the wisest and best women who
ever ruled; the king and queen consort are as liberal as
possible, and the king is notoriously a democrat, with a dash of
Haroun al Rashid. lie likes to take his governmental subordinates
unawares, and a story is told of his dropping in at the
post-office on a late visit to Seville, and asking for the chief.
He was out, and so were all the subordinate officials down to the
lowest, whom the king found at his work. The others have since
been diligent at theirs. The story is characteristic of the king,
if not of the post-office people.
Political freedom is
almost grotesquely unrestricted. In our American republic we
should scarcely tolerate a party in favor of a monarchy, but in
the Spanish monarchy a republican party is recognized and
represented. It holds public meetings and counts among its
members many able and distinguished men, such as the novelist
Perez Galdos, one of the most brilliant novelists not only in
Spain but in Europe. With this unbounded liberty in Andalusia, it
is said that the Spaniards of the north are still more
radical.
Though the climate
is most favorable for consumptives, the habits of the people are
so unwholesome that tuberculosis prevails, and there are two or
three deaths a day from it in Seville. There is no avoidance of
tuberculous suspects; they cough, and the men spit everywhere in
the streets and on the floors and carpets of the clubs. The women
suffer for want of fresh air,
265
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
though now with the
example of the English queen before them and the young girls who
used to lie abed till noon getting up early ta play tennis, it
will be different. Their mothers and aunts still drive to the
Delicias to prove that they have carriages, but when there they
alight and walk up and down by their doctor's advice.
I only know that
during our fortnight in Seville I suffered no wound to a
sensibility which has been kept in full repair for literary, if
not for humanitarian purposes. The climate was as kind as the
people. It is notorious that in summer the heat is that of a
furnace, but even then it is bearable because it is a dry heat,
like that of our indoor furnaces. The 5th of November was our
last day, and then it was too hot for comfort in the sun, but one
is willing to find the November sun too hot; it is an agreeable
solecism; and I only wish that we could have found the sun too
hot during the next three days in Granada. If the 5th of November
had been worse for heat than it was it must still remain dear in
our memory, because in the afternoon we met once more these
Chilians of our hearts whom we had met in San Sebastian and
Burgos and Vallado-lid and Madrid. We knew we should meet them in
Seville and were not the least surprised. They were as glad and
gay as ever, and in our common polyglot they possessed us of the
fact that they had just completed the eastern hemicycle of their
Peninsular tour. They were latest from Malaga, and now they were
going northward. It was our last meeting, but better friends I
could not hope to meet again, whether in the Old World or the
New, or that Other World which we hope will somehow be the
summation of all that is best in both.
XI
TO AND IN
GRANADA
THE train which
leaves Seville at ten of a sunny morning is supposed to arrive in
Granada at seven of a moonlight evening. This is a mistake; the
moonlight is on time, but the train arrives at a quarter of nine.
Still, if the day has been sunny the whole way and the moonlight
is there at the end, no harm has really been done; and measurably
the promise of the train has been kept.
I
There was not a
moment of the long journey over the levels of Andahisia which was
not charming; when it began to be over the uplands of the last
Moorish kingdom, it was richly impressive. The only thing that I
can remember against the landscape is the prevalence of olive
orchards. I hailed as a relief the stubble-fields immeasurably
spread at times, and I did not always resent the roadside
planting of some sort of tall hedges which now and then hid the
olives. But olive orchards may vary their monotony by the
spectacle of peasants on ladders gathering their fruit into
wide-mouthed sacks, and occasionally their ranks of symmetrical
green may be broken by the yellow and red of poplars and
pomegranates around the pleasant farmsteads. The nearer we drew
to Granada the pleasanter
18 267
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
these grew, till in
the famous Vega they thickly dotted the landscape with their
brown roofs and white walls.
We had not this
effect till we had climbed the first barrier of hills and began
to descend on the thither side; but we had incident enough to
keep us engaged without the picturesqueness. The beggars alone,
who did not fail us at any station, were enough; for what could
the most exacting tourist ask more than to be eating his luncheon
under the eyes of the children who besieged his car windows and
protested their famine in accents which would have melted a heart
of stone or of anything less obdurate than travel? We had always
our brace of Civil Guards, who preserved us from bandits, but
they left the beggars unmolested by getting out on the train next
the station and pacing the platform, while the rabble of hunger
thronged us on the other side. There was especially a hoy who,
after being compassionated in money for his misfortune, continued
to fling his wooden leg into the air and wave it at our window by
some masterly gymnastics; and there was another boy who kept
lamenting that he had no mother, till, having duly feed and fed
him, I suggested, "But you have a father?" Then, as if he had
never seen the case in that light before, he was silent, and
presently went away without further insistence on his
bereavement.
The laconic fidelity
of my note-book enables me to recall here that the last we saw of
Seville was the Cathedral and the Giralda, which the guide-books
had promised us we should see first; that we passed some fields
of alfalfa which the Moors had brought from Africa and the
Spanish have carried to America; that in places men were plowing
and that the plowed land was red; that the towns on the uplands
in the distance were white and not gray, or mud-colored, as in
Castile;
268
TO AND IN
GRANADA
that the morning sky
was blue, with thin, pale clouds; that the first station out was
charmingly called Two Brothers, and that the loungers about it
were plain, but kind-looking men-folk with good faces, some
actually clean-shaven, and a woman with a white rose in her hair;
that Two Brothers is a suburb of Seville, frequented in the
winter, and has orange orchards about it; that farther on at one
place the green of the fields spread up to the walls of a white
farm with a fine sense of color; that there were hawks sailing in
the blue air; that there were grotesque hedges of cactus and
piles of crooked cactus logs; that there were many eucalyptus
trees; that there were plantations of young olives, as if never
to let that all-pervading industry perish; that there were
irregular mountain ranges on the right, but never the same kind
of scenery on both sides of the track; that there was once a
white cottage on a yellow hill and a pink villa with two towers;
that there was a solitary fig tree near the road, and that there
were vast lonely fields when there were not olive
orchards.
Taking breath after
one o'clock, much restored by our luncheon, my note-book
remembers a gray-roofed, yellow-walled town, very suitable for a
water-color, and just beyond it the first vineyard we had come
to. Then there were pomegranate trees, golden-leaved, and tall
poplars pollarded plume fashion as in southern France; and in a
field a herd of brown pigs feeding, which commended itself to
observance, doubtless, as color in some possible word-painting.
There now abounded pomegranates, figs, young corn, and more and
more olives; and as if the old olives and young olives were not
enough, the earth began to be pitted with holes dug for the
olives which had not yet been planted.
269
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
II
At Bobadilla, the
junction where an English railway company begins to get in its
work and to animate the Spanish environment to unwonted
enterprise, there was a varied luncheon far past our capacity.
But when. a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, "Tea, sir?" I
gladly closed with the proposition. "But you've put hot milk into
it!" I protested. "I know it, sir. We 'ave no cold milk at
Bobadilla," and instantly a baleful suspicion implanted itself
which has since grown into a upas tree of poisonous conviction:
goat's milk does not keep well, and it was not only hot milk, but
hot goat's milk which they were serving us at Bobadilla.
However, there were admirable ham sandwiches, not of goat's
flesh, at the other end of the room, and with these one could
console oneself. There was also a commendable pancake whose
honored name I never knew, but whose acquaintance I should be
sorry not to have made; and all about Bobadilla there was an
agreeable bustle, which we enjoyed the more when we had made sure
that we had changed into the right train for Granada and found in
our compartment the charming young Swedish couple who had come
with us from Seville.
Thoroughly refreshed
by the tea with hot goat's milk in it, by the genuine ham
sandwiches and the pancakes, my note-book takes up the tale once
more. It dwells upon the rich look of the land and the comfort of
the farms contrasting with the wild irregularity of the mountain
ranges which now began to serrate the horizon; and I have no
doubt that if I had then read that most charming of all
Washington Irving's Spanish studies, the story, namely, of his
journey over quite
270
TO AND IN
GRANADA
the same way we had
come seventy-five years later, my note-book would abound in
lively comment on the changed aspect of the whole landscape. Even
as it is, I find it exclamatory over the wonder of the mountain
coloring which it professes to have found green, brown, red,
gray, and blue, but whether all at once or not it does not say.
It is more definite as to the plain we were traversing, with its
increasing number of white cottages, cheerfully testifying to the
distribution of the land in small holdings, so different from the
vast estates abandoned to homeless expanses of wheat-fields and
olive orchards which we had been passing through. It did not
appear on later inquiry that these small holdings were of peasant
ownership, as I could have wished; they were tenant farms, but
their neatness testified to the prosperity of the tenants, and
their frequency cheered our way as the evening waned and the
lamps began to twinkle from their windows. At a certain station,
I am reminded by my careful mentor, the craggy mountain-tops were
softened by the sunset pink, and that then the warm afternoon air
began to grow cooler, and the dying day to empurple the uplands
everywhere, without abating the charm of the blithe cottages. It
seems to have been mostly a very homelike scene, and where there
was a certain stretch of woodland its loneliness was relieved by
the antic feat of a goat lifting itself on its hind legs to
browse the olive leaves on their native bough. The air was
thinner and cooler, but never damp, and at times it relented and
blew lullingly in at our window. We made such long stops that the
lights began to fade out of the farm-windows, but kept bright in
the villages, when at a station which we were so long in coming
to that we thought it must be next to Granada, a Spanish
gentleman got in with us; and though the prohibitory
notice
271
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
of No
Fumadores stared him in the face, it did not stare him out of
countenance; for he continued to smoke like a locomotive the
whole way to our journey's end. From time to time I meditated a
severe rebuke, but in the end I made him none, and I am now
convinced that this was wise, for he probably would not have
minded it, and as it was, when I addressed him some commonplace
as to the probable time of our arrival he answered in the same
spirit, and then presently grew very courteously communicative.
He told me for one thing, after we had passed the mountain gates
of the famous Vega and were making our way under the moonlight
over the storied expanse, drenched with the blood of battles long
ago, that the tall chimneys we began to see blackening the air
with their volumed fumes were the chimneys of fourteen beet-root
sugar factories belonging to the Duke of Wellington. Then I
divined, as afterward I learned, that the lands devoted to this
industry were part of the rich gift which Spain bestowed upon the
Great Duke in gratitude for his services against the Napoleonic
invasion. His present heir has imagined a benevolent use of his
heritage by inviting the peasantry of the Vega to the culture of
the sugar-beet; but whether the enterprise was prospering I could
not say; and I do not suppose any reader of mine will care so
much for it as I did in the pour of the moonlight over the roofs
and towers that were now becoming Granada, and quickening my slow
old emotions to a youthful glow. At the station, which, in spite
of Boabdil el Chico and Ferdinand and Isabel, was quite like
every other railway station of southern Europe, we parted friends
with our Spanish fellow-traveler, whom we left smoking and who is
probably smoking still. Then we mounted with our Swedish friends
into the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen
272
TO AND IN
GRANADA
and which began,
after discreet delays, to climb the hill town toward the Alhambra
through a commonplace-looking town gay with the lights of cafes
and shops, and to lose itself in the more congenial darkness of
narrower streets barred with moonlight. It was drawn by four
mules, covered with bells and constantly coaxed and cursed by at
least two drivers on the box, while a vigorous boy ran alongside
and lashed their legs without ceasing till we reached the shelf
where our hotel perched.
III
I had taken the
precaution to write for rooms, and we got the best in the house,
or if not that then the best we could wish at a price which I
could have wished much less, till we stepped out upon our
balcony, and looked down and over the most beautiful, the most
magnificent scene that eyes, or at least my eyes, ever dwelt on.
Beside us and before us the silver cup of the Sierra Nevada,
which held the city in its tiled hollow, poured it out over the
immeasurable Vega washed with moonshine which brightened and
darkened its spread in a thousand radiances and obscurities of
windows and walls and roofs and trees and lurking gardens.
Because it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may say now
that this was our supreme moment of Granada. There were other
fine moments, but none unmixed with the reservations which truth
obliges honest travel to own. Now, when from some secret spot
there rose the wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to
another who caught it dying up and breathed new life into it and
sent it echoing on till it had made the round of the whole fairy
city, the heart shut with a pang of pure ecstasy. One could bear
no more; we stepped within,
273
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
and closed the
window behind us. That is, we tried to close it, but it would not
latch, and we were obliged to ring for a camerero to come
and see what ailed it.
The infirmity of the
door-latch was emblematic of a temperamental infirmity in the
whole hotel. The promises were those of Madrid, but the
performances were those of Segovia. There was a glitter, almost a
glare, of Ritz-like splendor, and the rates were Ritz-like, but
there the resemblance ceased. The porter followed us to our rooms
on our arrival and told us in excellent English (which excelled
less and less throughout our stay) that he was the hall porter
and that we could confidently refer all our wants to him; but
their reference seemed always to close the incident. There was a
secretary who assured us that our rooms were not dear, and who
could not out of regard to our honor and comfort consider cheaper
ones; and then ceased to be until he receipted our bill when we
went away. There was a splendid dining-room with waiters of such
beauty and dignity, and so purple from clean shaving, that we
scarcely dared face them, and there were luncheons and dinners of
rich and delicate superabundance in the menu, but of an exquisite
insipidity on the palate, and of a swiftly vanishing Barmecide
insubstantiality, as if they were banquets from the Arabian
Nights imagined under the rule of the Moors. Everywhere shone
silver-bright radiators, such as we had not seen since we left
their like freezing in Burgos; but though the weather presently
changed from an Andalusian softness to a Castilian severity after
a snowfall in the Sierra, the radiators remained insensible to
the difference and the air nipped the nose and fingers wherever
one went in the hotel. The hall porter, who knew everything, said
the boilers were out of order, and a traveler who had been there
the winter before confirmed him with
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the testimony that
they were out of order even in January. There may not have been
any fire under them then, as there was none now; but if they
needed repairing now it was clearly because they needed repairing
then. In the corner of one of our rooms the frescoed plastering
had scaled off, and we knew that if we came back a year later the
same spot would offer us a familiar welcome.
But why do I gird at that hotel in Granada as if I knew of no faults in American hotels? I know of many and like faults, and I do not know of a single hotel of ours with such a glorious outlook and downlook as that hotel in Granada. The details which the sunlight of the morrow revealed to us when we had mastered the mystery of our window-catch and stood again on our balcony took nothing from the loveliness of the moonlight picture, but rather added to it, and, besides a more incredible scene of mountain and plain and city, it gave us one particular tree in a garden almost under us which my heart clings to still with a rapture changing to a fond regret. At first the tree, of what name or nature I cannot tell, stood full and perfect, a mass of foliage all yellow as if made up of "patines of bright gold." Then day by day, almost hour by hour, it darkened and the tree shrank as if huddling its leaves closer about it in the cold that fell from the ever-snowier Sierra. On the last morning we left its boughs shaking in the rain against the cold,
Bare, ruined choir where late the sweet birds sang.
IV
But we anticipate, as I
should say if I were still a romantic
novelist. Many other trees in and about Gra-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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nada were yellower
than that one, and the air hung dim with a thin haze as of Indian
summer when we left our hotel in eager haste to see the Alhambra
such as travelers use when they do not want some wonder of the
world to escape them. Of course there was really no need of
haste, and we had to wait till our guide could borrow a match to
light the first of the cigarettes which he never ceased to smoke.
He was commended to us by the hall porter, who said he could
speak French, and so he could, to the extreme of constantly
saying, with a wave of his cigarette, "N'est ce pas?" For
the rest he helped himself out willingly with my small Spanish.
At the end he would have delivered us over to a dealer in
antiquities hard by the gate of the palace if I had not prevented
him, as it were, by main force; he did not repine, but we were
not sorry that he should be engaged for the next day.
Our way to the gate,
which was the famous Gate of Justice and was lovely enough to be
the Gate of Mercy, lay through the beautiful woods, mostly elms,
planted there by the English early in the last century. The birds
sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their feet, and it
was somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense shade, so that we
were glad to get out of it, and into the sunshine where the old
Moorish palace lay basking and dreaming. At once let me confide
to the impatient reader that the whole Alhambra, by which he must
understand a citadel, and almost a city, since it could, if it
never did, hold twenty thousand people within its walls, is only
historically and not artistically more Moorish than the Alcazar
at Seville. Far nobler and more beautiful than its Arabic
decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun by Charles
V., after a design in the spirit of the supreme hour of the
Italian Renaissance. It is not a ruin in its long arrest,
and
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one hears with
hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some day to complete
it. To be sure, the world is, perhaps, already full enough of
royal palaces, but since they return sooner or later to the
people whose pockets they come out of, one must be willing to
have this palace completed as the architect imagined
it.
We were followed
into the Moorish palace by the music of three blind minstrels who
began to tune their guitars as soon as they felt us: see us they
could not. Then presently we were in the famous Court of the
Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile
in conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of
a graveled court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted
ornamentation of the Moors.
The place was
disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much of his
leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor is
not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but
the environing architecture and decoration are of a faded
prettiness which cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing,
equally Moorish, of the Alcazar at Seville. Was this indeed the
place where the Abencerrages were brought in from supper one by
one and beheaded into the fountain at the behest of their royal
host? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de Vera, coming to
demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of tribute due them
from the Moor, "paused to regard its celebrated fountain" and
"fell into discourse with the Moorish courtiers on certain
mysteries of the Christian faith"? So Washington Irving says, and
so I once believed, with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I
read how "this most Christian knight and discreet ambassador
restrained himself within the limits of lofty gravity, leaning on
the pommel of his sword and look-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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ing down with
ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists around him. The quick and
subtle Arabian witlings redoubled their light attacks on the
stately Spaniard, but when one of them, of the race of the
Abencerrages dared to question, with a sneer, the immaculate
conception of the blessed Virgin, the Catholic knight could no
longer restrain his ire. Elevating his voice of a sudden, he told
the infidel he lied, and raising his arm at the same time he
smote him on the head with his sheathed sword. In an instant the
Court of Lions glistened with the flash of arms," insomuch that
the American lady whom we saw writing a letter beside a friend
sketching there must have been startled from her opening words,
"I am sitting here with my portfolio on my knees in the beautiful
Court of the Lions," and if Muley Aben Hassan had not "overheard
the tumult and forbade all appeal to force, pronouncing the
person of the ambassador sacred," she never could have gone
on.
V
I did not doubt the
fact when I read of it under the level boughs of the beechen tree
with J. W., sixty years ago, by the green woodland light of the
primeval forest which hemmed our village in, and since I am well
away from the Alhambra again I do not doubt it now. I doubt
nothing that Irving says of the Alhambra; he is the gentle genius
of the place, and I could almost wish that I had paid the ten
pesetas extra which the custodian demanded for showing his
apartment in the palace. On the ground the demand of two dollars
seemed a gross extortion; yet it was not too much for a devotion
so rich as mine to have paid, and I advise other travelers to buy
themselves off from a vain regret by
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giving it. If ever a
memory merited the right to levy tribute on all comers to the
place it haunts, Washington Irving's is that memory. His
Conquest of Granada is still the history which one would
wish to read; his Tales of the Alhambra embody fable and
fact in just the right measure for the heart's desire in the
presence of the monuments they verify or falsify. They belong to
that strange age of romance which is now so almost pathetic and
to which one cannot refuse his sympathy without sensible loss.
But for the eager make-believe of that time we should still have
to hoard up much rubbish which we can now leave aside, or accept
without bothering to assay for the few grains of gold in it.
Washington Irving had just the playful kindness which sufficed
best to deal with the accumulations of his age; if he does not
forbid you to believe, he does not oblige you to disbelieve, and
he has always a tolerant civility in his humor which comports
best with the duty of taking leniently a history impossible to
take altogether seriously. Till the Spaniards had put an end to
the Moorish misrule, with its ruthless despotism and bloody civil
brawls, the Moors deserved to be conquered; it was not till their
power was broken forever that they became truly heroic in their
vain struggles and their unavailing sorrows. Then their pathetic
resignation to persecution and exile lent dignity even to their
ridiculous religion; but it was of the first and not the second
period that Irving had to treat.
VI
The Alhambra is not
so impressive by its glory or grandeur as by the unparalleled
beauty of its place. If it is not very noble as an effect of art,
the inspira-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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tion of its founders
is affirmed by their choice of an outlook which commands one of
the most magnificent panoramas in the whole world. It would be
useless to rehearse the proofs by name. Think of far-off
silver-crested summits and of a peopled plain stretching away
from them out of eye-shot, dense first with roofs and domes and
towers, and then freeing itself within fields and vineyards and
orchards and forests to the vanishing-point of the perspective;
think of steep and sudden plunges into chasms at the foot of the
palace walls, and one crooked stream stealing snakelike in their
depths; think of whatever splendid impossible dramas of
topography that you will, of a tremendous map outstretched in
colored relief, and you will perhaps have some notion of the
prospect from the giddy windows of the Alhambra; and perhaps not.
Of one thing we made memorably sure beyond the gulf of the Darro,
and that was the famous gipsy quarter which the traveler visits
at the risk of his life in order to have his fortune told. At the
same moment we made sure that we should not go nearer it, for
though we knew that it was insurpassably dirty as well as
dangerous, we remembered so distinctly the loathsomeness of the
gipsy quarter at Seville that we felt no desire to put it to the
comparison.
We preferred rather
the bird's-eye study of the beautiful Generalife which our
outlook enabled us to make, and which we supplemented by a visit
the next day. We preferred, after the Barmecide lunch at our
hotel, taking the tram-car that noisily and more noisily clambers
up and down, and descending into the town by it. The ascent is so
steep that at a certain point the electric current no longer
suffices, and the car bites into the line of cogs with its sort
of powerful under-jaw and so arrives. Yet it is a kindly little
vehicle,
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with a conductor so
affectionately careful in transporting the stranger that I felt
after a single day we should soon become brothers, or at least
step-brothers. Whenever we left or took his car, after the
beginning or ending of the cogway, he was alert to see that we
made the right change to or from it, and that we no more overpaid
than underpaid him. Such homely natures console the traveler for
the thousand inhospitalities of travel, and bind races and
religions together in spite of patriotism and piety.
We were going first
to the Cartuja, and in the city, which we found curiously much
more modern, after the Latin notion, than Seville, with freshly
built apartment-houses and business blocks, we took a cab, not so
modern as to be a taxicab, and drove through the quarter said to
have been assigned to the Moors after the fall of Granada. The
dust lay thick in the roadway where filthy children played, but
in the sunny doorways good mothers of families crouched taking
away the popular reproach of vermin by searching one another's
heads. Men bestriding their donkeys rode fearlessly through the
dust, and one cleanly-looking old peasant woman, who sat hers
plumply cushioned and framed in with a chair-back and arms,
showed a patience with the young trees planted for future shade
along the desperate avenue which I could wish we had emulated.
When we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, long
since suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong force of
beggarmen waited for us, but a modest beggar-woman, old and sad,
had withdrawn to the church door, where she shared in our
impartial alms. We were admitted to the cloister, rather oddly,
by a young girl, who went for one of the remaining monks to show
us the church. He came with a newspaper (I hope of clerical
politics) in his hand, and distracted himself
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
from it only long
enough to draw a curtain, or turn on a light, and point out a
picture or statue from time to time. But he was visibly anxious
to get back to it, and sped us more eagerly than he welcomed us
in a church which upon the whole is richer in its peculiar
treasures of painting, sculpture, especially in wood, costly
marble, and precious stones than any other I remember. According
to my custom, I leave it to the guide-books to name these, and to
the abounding critics of Spanish art to celebrate the pictures
and statues; it is enough for me that I have now forgotten them
all except those scenes of the martyrdom inflicted by certain
Protestants on members of the Carthusian brotherhood at the time
when all sorts of Christians felt bound to correct the opinions
of all other sorts by the cruelest tortures they could invent.
When the monk had put us to shame by the sight of these paintings
(bad as their subjects), he put us out, letting his eyes fall
back upon his newspaper before the door had well closed upon
us.
The beggarmen had
waited in their places to give us another chance of meriting
heaven; and at the church door still crouched the old
beggarwoinan. I saw now that the imploring eyes she lifted were
sightless, and I could not forbear another alms, and as I put my
copper big-dog in her leathern palm I said, "Adios,
madre." Then happened something that I had long desired. I
had heard and read that in Spain people always said at parting,
"Go with God," but up to that moment nobody had said it to me,
though I had lingeringly given many the opportunity. Now, at my
words and at the touch of my coin this old beggarwoman smiled
beneficently and said, "Go with God," or, as she put it in her
Spanish, "Vaya vested con Dios." Immediately I ought to
have pressed another coin in her palm,
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with a "Gracias,
madre; muchas gracias," out of regard to the literary climax;
but whether I really did so I cannot now remember; I can only
hope I did.
VII
I think that it was
while I was still in this high satisfaction that we went a drive
in the promenade, which in all Spanish cities is the Alameda,
except Seville, where it so deservedly is the Delicias. It was in
every way a contrast to the road we had come from the Cartuja: an
avenue of gardened paths and embowered driveways, where we hoped
to join the rank and fashion of Granada in their afternoon's
outing. But there was only one carriage besides our own with
people in it, who looked no greater world than ourselves, and a
little girl riding with her groom. On one hand were pretty
villas, new-looking and neat, which I heard could sometimes be
taken for the summer at rents so low that I am glad I have
forgotten the exact figures lest the reader should doubt my word.
Nothing but the fact that the winter was then hanging over us
from the Sierras prevented my taking one of them for the summer
that had passed, the Granadan summer being notoriously the most
delightful in the world. On the other hand stretched the
wonderful Vega, which covers so many acres in history and
romance, and there, so near that we look down into them at times
were "the silvery windings of the Xenil," which glides through so
many descriptive passages of Irving's page; only now, on account
of recent rain, its windings were rather coppery.
At the hotel on the
terrace under our balcony we found on our return a party of
Spanish ladies and
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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gentlemen taking
tea, or whatever drink stood for it in their custom: no doubt
chocolate; but it was at least the afternoon-tea hour. The
women's clothes were just from Paris, and the men's from London,
but their customs, I suppose, were national; the women sat on one
side of the table and talked across it to the men, while they ate
and drank, and then each sex grouped itself apart and talked to
its kind, the women in those hardened vowels of a dialect from
which the Andalusians for conversational purposes have eliminated
all consonants. The sun was setting red and rayless, with a play
of many lights and tints, over the landscape up to the snow-line
on the Sierra. The town lay a stretch of gray roofs and white
walls, intermixed with yellow poplars and black cypresses, and
misted over with smoke from the chimneys of the sugar factories.
The mountains stood flat against the sky, purple with wide
stretches of brown, and dark, slanting furrows. The light became
lemon-yellow before nightfall, and then a dull crimson under pale
violet.
The twitter of the
Spanish women was overborne at times by the voices of an American
party whose presence I was rather proud of as another American.
They were all young men, and they were making an educational tour
of the world in the charge of a professor who saw to it that they
learned as much of its languages and history and civilization as
possible on the way. They ranged in their years from about
fifteen to twenty and even more, and they were preparing for
college, or doing what they could to repair the loss of
university training before they took up the work of life. It
seemed to me a charming notion, and charming the seriousness with
which they were fulfilling it. They were not so serious in
everything as to miss any incidental pleasure; they had a large
table to themselves in our Barme-
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cide banquet-hall,
where they seemed always to be having a good time, and where once
they celebrated the birthday of one of them with a gaiety which
would have penetrated, if anything could, the shining chill of
the hostelry. In the evening we heard them in the billiard-room
below lifting their voices in the lays of our college muse, and
waking to ecstasy the living piano in the strains of our national
ragtime. They were never intrusively cheerful; one might remain,
in spite of them, as dispirited as the place would have one; but
as far as the genius loci would let me, I liked them; and
so far as I made their acquaintance I thought that they were very
intelligently carrying out the enterprise imagined for
them.
VIII
I wish now that I
had known them well enough to ask them what they candidly thought
of the city of which I felt the witchery under the dying day I
have left celebrating for the moment in order to speak of them.
It seems to me at this distance of time and space that I did not
duly reflect that in places it was a city which smelled very
badly and was almost as dirty as New York in others, and very ill
paved. The worst places are in the older quarters, where the
streets are very crooked and very narrow, so narrow that the
tram-car can barely scrape through them. They are old enough to
be streets belonging to the Moorish city, like many streets in
Cordova and Seville, but no fond inquiry of our guides could
identify this lane or that alley as of Moorish origin. There is
indeed a group of picturesque shops clearly faked to look
Moorish, which the lover of that period may pin his faith to, and
for a moment I did so, but upon second thought I unpinned
it.
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We visited this
plated fragment of the old Moorish capital when we descended from
our hotel with a new guide to see the great, the stupendous
cathedral, where the Catholic kings lie triumphantly entombed in
the heart of their conquest. It is altogether unlike the other
Spanish cathedrals of my knowledge; for though the cathedral of
Valladolid is of Renaissance architecture in its austere
simplicity, it is somehow even less like that of Granada than the
Gothic fanes of Burgos or Toledo or Seville. All the detail at
Granada is classicistic, but the whole is often of Gothic effect,
especially in the mass of those clustered Corinthian columns that
lift its domes aloof on their prodigious bulk, huge as that of
the grouped pillars in the York Minster. The white of the marble
walls, the gold of altars, the colors of painted wooden sculpture
form the tones of the place, subdued to one bizarre richness
which I may as well leave first as last to the reader's fancy;
though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that
gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and
the music of stringed instruments and the shrill voices of
choir-boys pierced the spaces here and there, but no more filled
them than the immemorable plastic and pictorial facts: than a
certain very lively bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like
George Washington; or than a St. Jerome in the Desert,
outwrinkling age, with his lion curled cozily up in his mantle;
or than the colossal busts of Adam and Eve and the praying
figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, richly gilded in the exquisite
temple forming the high altar; or than the St. James on
horseback, with his horse's hoof planted on the throat of a Moor;
or than the Blessed Virgins in jeweled crowns and stomachers and
brocaded skirts; or than that unsparing decapitation of John the
Baptist bloodily falling forward with his
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severed gullet
thrusting at the spectator. Nothing has ever been too terrible in
life for Spanish art to represent; it is as ruthlessly veracious
as Russian literature; and of all the painters and sculptors who
have portrayed the story of Christianity as a tale of torture and
slaughter, the Spaniards seem to have studied it closest from the
fact; perhaps because for centuries the Inquisition lavished the
fact upon them.
The supreme interest
of the cathedral is, of course, the Royal Chapel, where in a
sunken level Ferdinand and Isabel lie, with their poor mad
daughter Joan and her idolized unfaithful husband Philip the
Fair, whose body she bore about with her while she lived. The
picture postal has these monuments in its keeping and can show
them better than my pen, which falters also from the tremendous
retablo of the chapel dense with the agonies of martyrdom
and serene with the piety of the Catholic Kings kneeling placidly
amid the horrors. If the picture postal will not supply these, or
reproduce the many and many relics and memorials which abound
.there and in the sacristy--jewels and vestments and banners and
draperies of the royal camp-altar--there is nothing for the
reader but to go himself and see. It is richly worth his while,
and if he cannot believe in a box which will be shown him as the
box Isabel gave Columbus her jewels in merely because he has been
shown a reliquary as her hand-glass, so much the worse for him.
He will not then merit the company of a small choir-boy who
efficiently opens the iron gate to the crypt and gives the
custodian as good as he sends in back-talk and defiantly pockets
the coppers he has earned. Much less will he deserve to witness
the homely scene in an area outside of the Royal Chapel, where
many milch goats are assembled, and when a customer comes,
preferably a little girl with a tin cup, one of the
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mothers of the
flock is pinioned much against her will by a street boy
volunteering for the office, and her head held tight while the
goatherdess milks the measure full at the other end.
IX
Everywhere about the
cathedral beggars lay in wait, and the neighboring streets were
lively with bargains of prickly pears spread open on the ground
by old women who did not care whether any one bought or not.
There were also bargains in palmistry; and at one place a
delightful humorist was selling clothing at auction. He allured
the bidders by having his left hand dressed as a puppet and
holding a sparkling dialogue with it; when it did not respond to
his liking he beat it with his right hand, and every now and then
he rang a little bell. He had a pleased crowd about him in the
sunny square; but it seemed to me that all the newer part of
Granada was lively with commerce in ample, tram-trodden streets
which gave the shops, larger than any we had seen out of Madrid,
a chance uncommon in the narrow ways of other Spanish cities. Yet
when I went to get money on my letter of credit, I found the bank
withdrawn from the modernity in a seclusion reached through a
lovely patio. We were seated in old-fashioned welcome,
such as used to honor a banker's customers in Venice, and all
comers bowed and bade us good day. The bankers had no such
question of the different signatures as vexed those of
Val-ladolid, and after no more delay than due ceremony demanded,
I went away with both my money and my letter, courteously seen to
the door.
The guide, to whom
we had fallen in the absence of our French-speaking guide of the
day before, spoke a lit-
TO AND IN
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tle English, and he
seemed to grow in sympathetic intelligence as the morning passed.
He made our sightseeing include visits to the church of St. John
of God, and the church of San Geronimo, which was built by
Gonsalvo de Cordova, the Great Captain, and remains now a
memorial to him. We rang at the door, and after long delay a
woman came and let us into an interior stranger ever than her
being there as custodian. It was frescoed from floor to ceiling
everywhere, except the places of the altars now kept by the
painted retablos and the tombs and the statues of the
various saints and heroes. The retablo of the high altar
is almost more beautiful than wonderful, but the chief glory of
the place is in the kneeling figures of the Great Captain and his
wife, one on either side of the altar, and farther away the
effigies of his famous oompanions-in-arms, and on the walls above
their heraldic blazons and his. The church Was unfinished when
the Great Captain died in the displeasure of his ungrateful king,
and its sumptuous completion testifies to the devotion of his
wife and her taste in choosing the best artists for the
work.
I have still the
sense of a noonday quiet that lingered with us after we left this
church and which seemed to go with us to the Hospital of St. John
of God, founded, with other hospitals, by the pious Portuguese,
who, after a life of good works, took this name on his
well-merited canonization. The hospital is the monument of his
devotion to good works, and is full of every manner of religious
curio. I cannot remember to have seen so many relics under one
roof, bones of both holy men and women, with idols of the heathen
brought from Portuguese possessions in the East which are now
faded from the map, as well as the body of St. John of God
shrined in silver in the midst of all.
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I do not know why I
should have brought away from these two places a peacefulness of
mind such as seldom follows a visit to show-places, but the fact
is so; perhaps it was because we drove to and from them, and were
not so tired as footworn sight-seers are, or so rebellious. One
who had seen not only the body of St. John of God, but his cane
with a whistle in it to warn the charitable of his coming and
attune their minds to alms-giving, and the straw basket in which
he collected food for the poor, now preserved under an
embroidered satin covering, and an autograph letter of his framed
in glass and silver, might even have been refreshed by his
experience. At any rate, we were so far from tired that after
luncheon we walked to the Garden of the Generalife, and then
walked all over it. The afternoon was of the very mood for such a
visit, and we passed it there in these walks and bowers, and the
black cypress aisles, and the trees and vines yellowing to the
fall of their leaves. The melancholy laugh of water chasing down
the steep channels and gurgling through the stone rails of
stairways was everywhere, and its dim smile gleamed from pools
and tanks. In the court where it stretched in a long basin an
English girl was painting and another girl was sewing, to whom I
now tardily offer my thanks for adding to the charm of the place.
Not many other people were there to dispute our afternoon's
ownership. I count a peasant family, the women in black shawls
and the men wearing wide, black sashes, rather as our guests than
as strangers; and I am often there still with no sense of
molestation. Even the reader who does not conceive of a garden
being less flowers and shrubs than foun-
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Copyright by H. C.
White Co.
LOOKING NORTHWEST FROM
THE GENERALIFE OVER GRANADA
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tains and pavilions
and porches and borders of box and walls of clipped evergreens,
will scarcely follow me to the Generalife or outstay me
there.
The place is
probably dense with history and suffocating with association, but
I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where my own
ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a
summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in
proof, but otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which
it might photograph itself without blurring any earlier record.
This, perhaps, is why I love so much to dwell there on that
never-ending afternoon of late October. It was long past the hour
of its summer bloom, but the autumnal air was enriching it beyond
the dreams of avarice with the gold which prevails in the Spanish
landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could look out of
its yellowing bowers over a landscape immeasurable in beauty. Of
course, we tried to master the facts of the Generalife's past,
but we really did not care for them and scarcely believed that
Charles V. had doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who
had it from Ferdinand of Aragon, and so withheld it from his
heirs for four generations until they could ripen to a genuine
Christianity at Genoa, whither they withdrew and became the
patrician family now its proprietors. The arms of this family
decorate the roof and walls of the colonnaded belvedere from
which you look out over the city and the plain and the mountains;
and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many places, but
otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian as the noble
Pallavicini who possess it. There were plenty of flower-beds,
box-bordered, but there were no flowers in them; the flowers
preferred standing about in tall pots. There was an arbor
overhung with black forgotten grapes before the keeper's
door
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and in the corner of
it dangled ropes of fire-red peppers.
This detail is what,
with written help, I remember of the Generalife, but no
loveliness of it shall fade from, my soul. From its embowered and
many-fountained height it looks over to the Alhambra, dull red,
and the city wall climbing the opposite slope across the Darro to
a church on the hilltop which was once a mosque. The precipice to
which the garden clings plunges sheer to the river-bed with a
downlook insurpassably thrilling; but the best view of the city
is from the flowery walk that runs along the side of the
Alcazaba, which was once a fortress and is now a garden, long
forgetful of its office of defending the Alhambra palace. From
this terrace Granada looks worthy of her place in history and
romance. We visited the Alcazaba after the Generalife, and were
very critical, but I must own the supremacy of this prospect. I
should not mind owning its supremacy among all the prospects in
the world.
XI
Meanwhile our
shining hotel had begun to thrill with something besides the cold
which nightly pierced it from the snowy Sierra. This was the
excitement pending from an event promised the next day, which was
the production of a drama in verse, of peculiar and intense
interest for Granada, where the scene of it was laid in the
Alhambra at one of the highest moments of its history, and the
persons were some of those dearest to its romance. Not only the
company to perform it (of course the first company in Spain) had
been in the hotel overnight, and the ladies of it had gleamed and
gloomed through the cold corridors, but the poet had
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TO AND IN
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been conspicuous at
dinner, with his wife, young and beautiful and blond, and
powdered so white that her blondness was of quite a violet cast.
There was not so much a question of whether we should take
tickets as whether we could get them, but for this the powerful
influence of our guide availed, and he got tickets providentially
given up in the morning for a price so exorbitant I should be
ashamed to confess it. They were for the afternoon performance,
and at three o'clock we went with the rest of the gay and great
world of Granada to the principal theater.
The Latin conception
of a theater is of something rather more barnlike than ours, but
this theater was of a sufficiently handsome presence, and when we
had been carried into it by the physical pressure exerted upon us
by the crowd at the entrance we found its vastness already
thronged. The seats in the orchestra were mostly taken; the
gallery under the roof was loud with the impatience for the play
which the auditors there testified by cries and whistlings and
stampings until the curtain lifted; the tiers of boxes rising all
round the theater were filled with family parties. The fathers
and mothers sat in front with the children between them of all
ages down to babies in their nurses' arms. These made themselves
perfectly at home, in one case reaching over the edge of the box
and clawing the hair of a gentleman standing below and openly
enjoying the joke. The friendly equality of the prevailing spirit
was expressed in the presence of the family servants at the back
of the family boxes, from which the latest fashions showed
themselves here and there, as well as the belated local versions
of them. In the orchestra the men had promptly lighted their
cigars and the air was blue with smoke. Friends found one
another, to their joyful amaze, not having met since morning; and
especially young girls
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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were enraptured to
recognize young men; one girl shook hands twice with a young man,
and gurgled with laughter as long as he stood near
her.
As a lifelong lover
of the drama and a boyish friend of Granadan romance, I ought to
have cared more for the play than the people who had come to it,
but I did not. The play was unintentionally amusing enough; but
after listening for two hours to the monotonous cadences of the
speeches which the persons of it recited to one another, while
the ladies of the Moorish world took as public a part in its
events as if they had been so many American Christians, we came
away. We had already enjoyed the first entr'acte, when the men
all rose and went out, or lighted fresh cigars and went to talk
with the Paris hats and plumes or the Spanish mantillas and high
combs in the boxes. The curtain had scarcely fallen when the
author of the play was called before it and applauded by the
generous, the madly generous, spectators. He stood bowing and
bowing on tiptoe, as if the wings of his rapture lifted him to
them and would presently fly away with him. He could not drink
deep enough of the delicious draught, put brimming to his lips,
and the divine intoxication must have lasted him through the
night, for after breakfast the next morning I met him in our
common corridor at the hotel smiling to himself, and when I could
not forbear smiling in return he smiled more; he beamed, he
glowed upon me as if I were a crowded house still cheering him to
the echo. It was a beautiful moment and I realized even better
than the afternoon before what it was to be a young poet and a
young Spanish poet, and to have had a first play given for the
first time in the city of Granada, where the morning papers
glowed with praise so ardent that the print all but smoked with
it. We were alone in the corridor where we met, and our
eyes
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TO AND IN
GRANADA
confessed us kindred
spirits, and I hope he understood me better than if I had taken
him in my arms and kissed him on both cheeks.
I really had no time
for that; I was on my way down-stairs to witness the farewell
scene between the leading lady and the large group of young
Granadans who had come up to see her off. When she came out to
the carriage with her husband, by a delicate refinement of homage
they cheered him, and left him to deliver their devotion to her,
which she acknowledged only with a smile. But not so the leading
lady's lady's-maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our
omnibus window to the assembled upper servants of the hotel. She
put her head out and said in a voice hoarse with excitement and
good-fellowship, "Adios, hombres!" ("Good-by, men!"), and
vanished with us from their applausive presence.
With us, I say, for
we, too, were leaving Granada in rain which was snow on the
Sierra and so cold that we might well have seemed leaving
Greenland. The brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash
of the running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with us the
moonlight night of our coming, now felt their anxious way down in
the dismal drizzle of that last morning, and brought us at last
to the plaza before the station. It was a wide puddle where I
thought our craft should have floundered, but it made its way to
the door, and left us dry shod within and glad to be quitting the
city of my young dreams.
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THE rain that pelted
sharply into the puddle before the station at Granada was snow on
the Sierra, and the snow that fell farther and farther down the
mountainsides resolved itself over the Vega into a fog as white
and almost as cold. Half-way across the storied and fabled plain
the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and then we saw by day, as
we had already seen by night, how the Vega was plentifully dotted
with white cottages amid breadths of wheat-land where the
peasants were plowing. Here and there were fields of Indian corn,
and in a certain place there was a small vineyard; in one of the
middle distances there spread a forest of Lombardy poplars,
yellow as gold, and there was abundance of this autumn coloring
in the landscape, which grew lonelier as we began to mount from
the level. Olives, of course, abounded, and there were oak woods
and clumps of wild cherry trees. The towns were far from the
stations, which we reached at the rate of perhaps two miles an
hour as we approached the top of the hills; and we might have got
out and walked without fear of being left behind by our train,
which made long stops, as if to get its breath for another climb.
Before this the sole companion of our journey, whom we decided to
be a landed proprietor coming out in his riding-gear to inspect
his possessions, had left us, but at the first station after our
descent began other pas-
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sengers got in, with
a captain of Civil Guards among them, very loquacious and very
courteous, and much deferred to by the rest of us. At Bobadilla,
where again we had tea with hot goat's milk in it, we changed
cars, and from that on we had the company of a Rock-Scorpion pair
whose name was beautifully Italian and whose speech was
beautifully English, as the speech of those born at Gibraltar
should rightfully be.
I
It was quite dark at
Ronda when our omnibus drove into the gardened grounds of one of
those admirable inns which an English company is building in
Spain, and put us down at the door of the office, where a typical
English manageress and her assistant appointed us pleasant rooms
and had fires kindled in them while we dined. There were already
fires in the pleasant reading-room, which did not diffuse a heat
too great for health but imparted to the eye a sense of warmth
such as we had experienced nowhere else in Spain. Over all was
spread a quiet and quieting British influence; outside of the
office the nature of the service was Spanish, but the character
of it was English; the Spanish waiters spoke English, and they
looked English in dress and manner; superficially the chambermaid
was as English as one could have found her in the United Kingdom,
but at heart you could see she was as absolutely and
instinctively a Spanish camerera as any in a hotel of
Madrid or Seville. In the atmosphere of insularity the few
Spanish guests were scarcely distinguishable from Anglo-Saxons,
though a group of magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by
the duenna-like correctness of their mother, looked
with
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
their exaggerated
hair and eyes like Spanish ladies made up for English parts in a
play.
We had our breakfast
in the reading-room where all the rest were breakfasting and
trying not to see that they were keeping one another from the
fire. It was very cold, for Ronda is high in the mountains which
hem it round and tower far above it. We had already had our first
glimpse of their summits from our own windows, but it was from
the terrace outside the reading-room that we felt their grandeur
most after we had drunk our coffee: we could scarcely have borne
it before. In their presence, we could not realize at once that
Ronda itself was a mountain, a mere mighty mass of rock, cleft in
twain, with chasmal depths where we saw pygmy men and mules
creeping out upon the valley that stretched upward to the foot of
the Sierra. Why there should ever have been a town built there in
the prehistoric beginning, except that the rock was so impossible
to take, and why it should have therefore been taken by that
series of invaders who pervaded all Spain --by the Phoenicians,
by the Carthaginians, by the Romans, by the Goths, by the Moors,
by the Christians, and after many centuries by the French, and
finally by the Spaniards again--it would not be easy to say.
Among its many conquerors, the Moors left their impress upon it,
though here as often as elsewhere in Spain their impress is
sometimes merely a decoration of earlier Roman work. There
remains a Roman bridge which the Moors did not make over into the
likeness of their architecture, but built a bridge of their own
which also remains and may be seen from the magnificent structure
with which the Spaniards have arched the abyss where the river
rushes writhing and foaming through the gorge three hundred feet
below. There on the steps that lead from the brink, the eye of
pity may
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still see the files
of Christian captives bringing water up to their Moslem masters;
but as one cannot help them now, even by the wildest throe, it is
as well to give a vain regret to the architect of the Spanish
bridge, who fell to his death from its parapet, and then push on
to the market hard by.
II
You have probably
come to see that market because you have read in your guide-books
that the region round about Ronda is one of the richest in Spain
for grapes and peaches and medlars and melons and other fruits
whose names melt in the mouth. If you do not find in the market
the abundance you expect of its picturesqueness you must blame
the lateness of the season, and go visit the bull-ring, one of
the most famous in the world, for Ronda is not less noted for its
toreros and aficionados than for its vineyards and
orchards. But here again the season will have been before you
with the glory of those corridas which you have still
hoped not to witness but to turn from as an example to the
natives before the first horse is disemboweled or the first bull
slain, or even the first banderillero tossed over the
barrier.
The bull-ring seemed
fast shut to the public when we approached it, but we found
ourselves smilingly welcomed to the interior by the kindly mother
in charge. She made us free of the whole vast place, where eight
thousand people could witness in perfect comfort the dying
agonies of beasts and men, but especially she showed us the
chamber over the gate, full of bullfighting properties: the
pikes, the little barbed pennons, the long sword by which the
bull suffers and dies, as well as the cumbrous saddles and
bridles and spears
20 299
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
for the unhappy
horses and their riders. She was especially compassionate of the
horses, and she had apparently no pleasure in any of the cruel
things, though she was not critical of the sport. The King of
Spain is president of the Ronda bull-fighting association, and
she took us into the royal box, which is the worthier to be seen
because under it the bulls are shunted and shouted into the ring
from the pen where they have been kept in the dark. Before we
escaped her husband sold us some very vivid postal cards
representing the sport; so that with the help of a large black
cat holding the center of the ring, we felt that we had seen as
much of a bull-fight as we could reasonably wish.
We were seeing the
wonders of the city in the guidance of a charming boy whom we had
found in wait for us at the gate of the hotel garden when we came
out. He offered his services in the best English he had, and he
had enough of it to match my Spanish word for word throughout the
morning. He led us from the bull-ring to the church known to few
visitors, I believe, where the last male descendant of Montezuma
lies entombed, under a fit inscription, and then through the
Plaza past the college of Montezuma, probably named for this heir
of the Aztec empire. I do not know why the poor prince should
have come to die in Ronda, but there are many things in Ronda
which I could not explain: especially why a certain fruit is sold
by an old woman on the bridge. Its berries are threaded on a
straw and look like the most luscious strawberries but taste like
turpentine, though they may be avoided under the name of
madrones. But on no account would I have the reader avoid
the Church of Santa Maria Mayor. It is so dark within that he
will not see the finely carved choir seats without the
help
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of matches, or the
pictures at all; but it is worth realizing, as one presently may,
that the hither part of the church is a tolerably perfect mosque
of Moorish architecture, through which you must pass to the
Renaissance temple of the Christian faith.
Near by is the Casa
de Mondragon which he should as little miss if he has any
pleasure in houses with two patios perching on the
gardened brink of a precipice and overlooking one of the most
beautiful valleys in the whole world, with donkey-trains climbing
up from it over the face of the cliff. The garden is as charming
as red geraniums and blue cabbages can make a garden, and the
house is fascinatingly quaint and unutterably Spanish, with the
inner patio furnished in bright-colored cushions and
wicker chairs, and looked into by a brown wooden gallery. A
stately lemon-colored elderly woman followed us silently about,
and the whole place was pervaded by a smell that was impossible
at the time and now seems incredible.
III
I here hesitate
before a little adventure which I would not make too much of nor
yet minify: it seems to me so gentle and winning. I had long
meant to buy a donkey, and I thought I could make no fitter
beginning to this end than by buying a donkey's head-stall in the
country where donkeys are more respected and more brilliantly
accoutred than anywhere else in the whole earth. When I ventured
to suggest my notion, or call it dream, to our young guide, he
instantly imagined it in its full beauty, and he led us directly
to a shop in the principal street which for the richness and
variety of the coloring in its display might have been a
florist's
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
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shop. Donkeys'
trappings in brilliant yellow, vermillion, and magenta hung from
the walls, and head-stalls, gorgeously woven and embroidered,
dangled from the roof. Among them and under them the donkeys'
harness-maker sat at his work, a short, brown, handsome man with
eyes that seemed the more prominent because of his close-shaven
head. We chose a headstall of such splendor that no heart could
have resisted it, and while he sewed to it the twine muzzle which
Spanish donkeys wear on their noses for the protection of the
public, our guide expatiated upon us, and said, among other
things to our credit, that we were from America and were going to
take the head-stall back with us.
The harness-maker
lifted his head alertly. "Where, in America?" and we answered for
ourselves, "From New York."
Then the
harness-maker rose and went to an inner doorway and called
through it something that brought out a comely, motherly woman as
alert as himself. She verified our statement for herself, and
having paved the way firmly for her next question she asked, "Do
you know the Escuela Mann?"
As well as our
surprise would let us, we said that we knew the Mann School, both
where and what it was.
She waited with a
sort of rapturous patience before saying, "My son, our eldest
son, was educated at the Escuela Mann, to be a teacher, and now
he is a professor in the Commercial College in Puerto
Rico."
If our joint
interest in this did not satisfy her expectation I for my part
can never forgive myself; certainly I tried to put as much
passion into my interest as I could, when she added that his
education at the Escuela Mann was without cost to him. By this
time, in fact, I was so proud of the Escuela Mann that
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THE SURPRISES OF
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could not forbear
proclaiming that a member of my own family, no less than the
father of the grandson for whose potential donkey I was buying
that headstall, was one of the architects of the Escuela Mann
building.
She now vanished
within, and when she came out she brought her daughter, a gentle
young girl who sat down and smiled upon us through the rest of
the interview. She brought also an armful of books, the
Spanish-English Ollendorff which her son had used in studying our
language, his dictionary, and the copy-book where he had written
his exercises, with two photographs of him, not yet too
Americanized; and she showed us not only how correctly but how
beautifully his exercises were done. If I did not admire these
enough, again I cannot forgive myself, but she seemed satisfied
with what I did, and she talked on about him, not too
loquaciously, but lovingly and lovably as a mother should, and
proudly as the mother of such a boy should, though without
vainglory; I have forgotten to say that she had a certain
distinction of face, and was appropriately dressed in black. By
this time we felt that a head-stall for such a donkey as I was
going to buy was not enough to get of such people, and I added a
piece of embroidered leather such as goes in Spain on the front
of a donkey's saddle; if we could not use it so, in final defect
of the donkey, we could put it on a veranda chair. The saddler
gave it at so low a price that we perceived he must have tacitly
abated something from the visual demand, and when we did not try
to beat him down, his wife went again into that inner room and
came out with an iron-holder of scarlet flannel backed with
canvas, and fringed with magenta, and richly inwrought with a
Moorish design. in white, yellow, green, and purple. I say
Moorish,
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
because one must say
something, but if it was a pattern of her own invention the gift
was the more precious when she bestowed it on the sister of one
of the architects of the Escuela Mann. That led to more
conversation about the Escuela Mann, and about the graduate of it
who was now a professor in Puerto Rico, and we all grew such
friends, and so proud of one another, and of the country so wide
open to the talents without cost to them, that when I asked her
if she would not sometime be going to America, her husband
answered almost fiercely in his determination, "I am going when I
have learned English!" and to prove that this was no idle boast,
he pronounced some words of our language at random, but very
well. We parted in a glow of reciprocal esteem and I still think
of that quarter-hour as one of my happiest; and whatever others
may say, I say that to have done such a favor to one Spanish
family as the Escuela Mann had been the means of our nation doing
this one was a greater thing than to have taken Cuba from Spain
and bought the Philippines when we had seized them already and
had led the Filipinos to believe that we meant to give their
islands to them.
IV
Suddenly, on the way
home to our very English hotel, the air of Ronda seemed charged
with English. We were already used to the English of our young
guide, which so far as it went, went firmly and courageously
after forethought and reflection for each sentence, but we were
not quite prepared for the English of two polite youths who
lifted their hats as they passed us and said, "Good afternoon."
The general English lasted quite overnight and far into the next
day when
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LOOKING ACROSS THE
NEW BRIDGE (300 FEET HIGH) OVER THE GUADA-LAVIAR GORGE,
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THE SURPRISES OF
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we found several
natives prepared to try it on us in the pretty Alameda, and
learned from one, who proved to be the teacher of it in the
public school, that there were some twenty boys studying it
there: heaven knows why, but the English hotel and its success
may have suggested it to them as a means of prosperity. The
students seem each prepared to guide strangers through Ronda, but
sometimes they fail of strangers. That was the case with the
pathetic young hunchback whom we met in Alameda, and who owned
that he had guided none that day. In view of this and as a
prophylactic against a course of bad luck, I made so bold as to
ask if I might venture to repair the loss of the peseta which he
would otherwise have earned. He smiled wanly, and then with the
countenance of the teacher, he submitted and thanked me in
English which I can cordially recommend to strangers knowing no
Spanish.
All this was at the
end of another morning when we had set out with the purpose of
seeing the rest of Ronda for ourselves. We chose a back street
parallel to the great thoroughfare leading to the new bridge, and
of a squalor which we might have imagined but had not. The
dwellers in the decent-looking houses did not seem to mind the
sights and scents of their street, but these revolted us, and we
made haste out of it into the avenue where the greater world of
Ronda was strolling or standing about, but preferably standing
about. In the midst of it, at the entrance of the new bridge we
heard ourselves civilly saluted and recognized with some
hesitation the donkey's harness-maker who, in his Sunday dress
and with his hat on, was not just the work-day presence we knew.
He held by the hand a pretty boy of eleven years, whom he
introduced as his second son, self-destined to follow the elder
brother to America, and duly take up the profession of teaching
in Puerto
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TEAVELS
Rico after
experiencing the advantages of the Escuela Mann. His father said
that he already knew some English, and he proposed that the boy
should go about with us and practise it, and after polite demur
and insistence the child came with us, to our great pleasure. He
bore himself with fit gravity, in his cap and long linen pinafore
as he went before us, and we were personally proud of his fine,
long face and his serious eyes, dark and darkened yet more by
their long lashes. He knew the way to just such a book store as
we wanted, where the lady behind the desk knew him and willingly
promised to get me some books in the Andalusian dialect, and send
them to our hotel by him at half past twelve. Naturally she did
not do so, but he came to report her failure to get them. We had
offered to pay him for his trouble, but he forbade us, and when
we had overcome his scruple he brought the money back, and we had
our trouble over again to make him keep it. To this hour I do not
know how we ever brought ourselves to part with him; perhaps it
was his promise of coming to America next year that prevailed
with us; his brother was returning on a visit and then they were
going back together.
V
Our search for
literature in Ronda was not wholly a failure. At another
bookstore, I found one of those local histories which I was
always vainly trying for in other Spanish towns, and I can praise
the Historia de Ronda par Federico Lozano Gutierrez as
well done, and telling all that one would ask to know about that
famous city. The author's picture is on the cover, and with his
charming letter dedicating the book to his father goes far to win
the reader's heart. Outside the
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bookseller's a blind
minstrel was playing the guitar in the care of a small boy who
was selling, not singing, the ballads. They celebrated the
prowess of Spain in recent wars, and it would not be praising
them too highly to say that they seemed such as might have been
written by a drum-major. Not that I think less of them for that
reason, or that I think I need humble myself greatly to the
historian of Ronda for associating their purchase with that of
his excellent little book. If I had bought some of the blind
minstrel's almanacs and jest-books I might indeed apologize, but
ballads are another thing.
After we left the
bookseller's, our little guide asked us if we would like to see a
church, and we said that we would, and he took us into a white
and gold interior, with altar splendors out of proportion to its
simplicity, all in the charge of a boy no older than himself, who
was presently joined by two other contemporaries. They followed
us gravely about, and we felt that it was an even thing between
ourselves and the church as objects of interest equally ignored
by Baedeker. Then we thought we would go home and proposed going
by the Alameda.
That is a beautiful
place, where one may walk a good deal, and drive, rather less,
but not sit down much unless indeed one likes being swarmed upon
by the beggars who have a just priority of the benches. There
seemed at first to be nobody walking in the Alameda except a
gentleman pacing to and from the handsome modern house at the
first corner, which our guide said was this cavalier's house. He
interested me beyond any reason I could give; he looked as if he
might represent the highest society in Ronda, but did not find it
an adequate occupation, and might well have interests and
ambitions beyond it. I make him my excuses for in-
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
truding my print
upon him, but I would give untold gold if I had it to know all
about such a man in such a city, walking up and down under the
embrowning trees and shrinking flowers of its Alameda, on a
Sunday morning like that.
Our guide led us to
the back gate of our hotel garden, where we found ourselves in
the company of several other students of English. There was our
charming young guide of the day before and there was that sad
hunchback already mentioned, and there was their teacher who
seemed so few years older and master of so little more English.
Together we looked into the valley into which the vision makes
its prodigious plunge at Ronda before lifting again over the
fertile plain to the amphitheater of its mighty mountains; and
there we took leave of that nice boy who would not follow us into
our garden because, as he showed us by the sign, it was forbidden
to any but guests. He said he was going into the country with his
family for the afternoon, and with some difficulty he owned that
he expected to play there; it was truly an admission hard to make
for a boy of his gravity. We shook hands at parting with him, and
with our yesterday's guide, and with the teacher and with the
hunchback; they all offered it in the bond of our common English;
and then we felt that we had parted with much, very much of what
was sweetest and best in Ronda.
VI
The day had been so
lovely till now that we said we would stay many days in Ronda,
and we loitered in the sun admiring the garden; the young
landlady among her flowers said that all the soil had to be
brought for
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RONDA
it in carts and
panniers, and this made us admire its autumn blaze the more. That
afternoon we had planned taking our tea on the terrace for the
advantage of looking at the sunset light on the mountains, but
suddenly great black clouds blotted it out. Then we lost courage;
it appeared to us that it would be both brighter and , warmer by
the sea and that near Gibraltar we could more effectually prevent
our steamer from getting away to New York without us. We called
for our bill, and after luncheon the head waiter who brought it
said that the large black cat which had just made friends with us
always woke him if he slept late in the morning and followed him
into the town like a dog when he walked there.
It was hard to part
with a cat like that, but it was hard to part with anything in
Ronda. Yet we made the break, and instead of ruining over the
precipitous face of the rock where the city stands, as we might
have expected, we glided smoothly down the long grade into the
storm-swept lowlands sloping to the sea. They grew more fertile
as we descended and after we had left a mountain valley where the
mist hung grayest and chillest, we suddenly burst into a region
of mellow fruitfulness, where the haze was all luminous, and
where the oranges hung gold and green upon the trees, and the
women brought grapes and peaches and apples to the train. The
towns seemed to welcome us southward and the woods we knew
instantly to be of cork trees, with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
under their branches anywhere we chose to look.
Otherwise, the
journey was without those incidents which have so often rendered
these pages thrilling. Just before we left Ronda a couple,
self-evidently the domestics of a good family, got into our
first-class carriage though they had unquestionably only
third-class
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TKAVELS
tickets. They had
the good family's dog with them, and after an unintelligible
appeal to us and to the young English couple in the other corner,
they remained and banished any misgivings they had by cheerful
dialogue. The dog coiled himself down at my feet and put his nose
close to my ankles, so that without rousing his resentment I
could not express in Spanish my indignation at what I felt to be
an outrageous intrusion: servants, we all are, but in traveling
first class one must draw the line at dogs, I said as much to the
English couple, but they silently refused any part in the
demonstration. Presently the conductor came out to the window for
our fares, and he made the Spanish pair observe that they had
third-class tickets and their dog had none. He told them they
must get out, but they noted to him the fact that none of us had
objected to their company, or their dog's, and they all remained,
referring themselves to us for sympathy when the conductor left.
After the next station the same thing happened with little
change; the conductor was perhaps firmer and they rather more
yielding in their disobedience. Once more after a stop the
conductor appeared and told them that when the train halted
again, they and their dog must certainly get out. Then something
surprising happened: they really got out, and very amiably;
perhaps it was the place where they had always meant to get out;
but it was a great triumph for the railway company, which owed
nothing in the way of countenance to the young English couple;
they had done nothing but lunch from their basket and bottle. We
ourselves arrived safely soon after nightfall at Algeciras, just
in time for dinner in the comfortable mother-hotel whose pretty
daughter had made us so much at home in Ronda.
XIII ALGECIRAS AND
TARIFA
WHEN we walked out
on the terrace of our hotel at Algeciras after breakfast, the
first morning, we were greeted by the familiar form of the Rock
of Gibraltar still advertising, as we had seen it three years
before, a well-known American insurance company. It rose beyond
five miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every
other day for three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until
we sailed from it at last for New York.
Meanwhile Algeciras
was altogether delightful not only because of our Kate-Greenaway
hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened ground, with
walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses, beside
beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all
in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to
meet the stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and
then hop away with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims
which it urged day after day more winningly upon us as the last
place where we should feel the charm of Spain unbroken in the
tradition which reaches from modern fact far back into antique
fable. I will not follow it beyond the historic clue, for I think
the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing that the Moors held
it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the thirteen
hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured
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it and their kings
became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and remain
so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these
kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the
inimical English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again,
haunted only by "a deep dream of peace" till the European
diplomats, rather unexpectedly assisted by an American envoy,
made it the scene of their famous conference for settling the
Morocco question in. 1906.
I think this is my
whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras, and until I
come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself
altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of
history. I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city
again from the Christians, after twenty-five years, and
demolished it, for I prefer to remember it as it has been rebuilt
and lies white by its bay, a series of red-tiled levels of roof
with a few church-towers topping them. It is a pretty place, and
remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with a minority of
industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who live in
agreeable little houses, with patios open to the passer,
and with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring,
enviously closed during our stay, and it has one of the
pleasantest Alamedas and the best swept in Spain, where some nice
boys are playing in the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming
out of one of the villas bordering on it, is courteously
interested in the two strangers whom he sees sitting on a bench
beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane trees dropping
round them in the still air.
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ALGECIRAS AND
TARIFA
The Alameda is quite
at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next our hotel, but
with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and faced by
summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train usually
ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not
know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling
about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them
as if they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a
sufficiently attractive hotel here for transients, and as an
allurement to the marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, "The
Picnic Restaurant," and "The Cabin Tea Room," where no doubt
there is something to be had beside sandwiches and tea. Here also
is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, with the Spanish
custom-house which their passengers must pass through and have
their packages and persons searched for contraband. One heard of
wild caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties
which were sometimes made to pass the prime cost of the goods in
Gibraltar. I myself only carried in books which after the first
few declarations were recognized as of no imaginable value and
passed with a genial tolerance, as a sort of joke, by officers
whom I saw feeling the persons of their fellow-Spaniards
unsparingly over.
We had, if anything,
less business really in Algeciras than in Gibraltar, but we went
into the town nearly every afternoon, and wantonly bought things.
By this means we proved that the Andalusian shopmen had not the
proud phlegm of the Castilians across their counters. In the
principal dry-goods store two salesmen rivaled each other in
showing us politeness, and sent home our small purchases as
promptly as if we had done them a favor in buying. We were indeed
the wonder of our fellow-customers who were not buying; but our
pride
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TRAVELS
was brought down in
the little shop where the proprietress was too much concerned in
cooking her dinner (it smelled delicious) to mind our wish for a
very cheap green vase, inestimably Spanish after we got it home.
However, in another shop where the lady was ironing her week's
wash on the counter, a lady friend who was making her an
afternoon call got such a vase down for us and transacted the
negotiation out of pure good will for both parties to
it.
Parallel with the
railway was a channel where small fishing-craft lay, and where a
leisurely dredging-machine was stirring up the depths in a stench
so dire that I wonder we do not smell it across the Atlantic.
Over this channel a bridge led into the town, and offered the
convenient support of its parapet to the crowd of spectators who
wished to inhale that powerful odor at their ease, and who hung
there throughout the working-day; the working-day of the
dredging-machine, that is. The population was so much absorbed in
this that when we first crossed into the town, we found no beggar
children even, though there were a few blind beggarmen, but so
few that a boy who had one of them in charge was obliged to leave
off smelling the river and run and hunt him up for us. Other boys
were busy in street-sweeping and b-r-r-r-r-ing to the donkeys
that carried off the sweepings in panniers; and in the fine large
plaza before the principal church of Algeciras there was a boy
who had plainly nothing but mischief to do, though he did not
molest us farther than to ask in English, "Want to see the
cathedral?" Then he went his way swiftly and we went into the
church, which we found very whitewashed and very Moorish in
architecture, but very Spanish in the Blessed Virgins on most of
the altars, dressed in brocades and jewels. A sacristan was
brushing and dusting the place, but he
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did not bother us,
and we went freely about among the tall candles standing on the
floor as well as on the altars, and bearing each a placard
attached with black ribbon, and dedicated in black letters on
silver "To the Repose of This or That" one among the
dead.
The meaning was
evident enough, but we sought something further of the druggist
at the corner, who did his best for us in such English as he had.
It was not quite the English of Ronda; but he praised his grammar
while he owned that his vocabulary was in decay from want of
practise. In fact, he well-nigh committed us to the purchase of
one of those votive candles, which he understood we wished to
buy; he all but sent to the sacristan to get one. There were
several onlookers, as there always are in Latin pharmacies, and
there was a sad young mother waiting for medicine with a sick
baby in her arms. The druggist said it had fever of the stomach;
he seemed proud of the fact, and some talk passed between him and
the bystanders which related to it. We asked if he had any of the
quince jelly which we had learned to like in Seville, but he
could only refer us to the confectioner's on the other corner.
Here was not indeed quince jelly, but we compromised on quince
cheese, as the English call it; and we bought several boxes of it
to take to America, which I am sorry to say moulded before our
voyage began, and had to be thrown away. Near this confectioner's
was a booth where boiled sweet-potatoes were sold, with oranges
and joints of sugar-cane, and, spitted on straws, that terrible
fruit of the strawberry tree which we had tasted at Honda without
wishing to taste it ever again. Yet there was a boy boldly buying
several straws of it and chancing the intoxication which
over-indulgence in it is said to cause. Whether the excitement of
these events was too great or not, we
21
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TRAVELS
found ourselves
suddenly unwilling, if not unable, to walk back to our hotel, and
we took a cab of the three standing in the plaza. One was without
a horse, another without a driver, but the third had both, as in
some sort of riddle, and we had no sooner taken it than a horse
was put into the first and a driver ran out and got on the box of
the second, as if that was the answer to the riddle.
II
It was then too late
for them to share our custom, but I am not sure that it was not
one of these very horses or drivers whom we got another day for
our drive about the town and its suburbs, and an excursion to a
section of the Moorish aqueduct which remains after a thousand
years. You can see it at a distance, but no horse or driver in
our employ could ever find the way to it; in fact, it seemed to
vanish on approach, and we were always bringing up in our hotel
gardens without having got to it; I do not know what we should
have done with it if we had. We were not able to do anything
definite with the new villas built or building around Algeciras,
though they looked very livable, and seemed proof of a prosperity
in the place for which I can give no reason except the great
natural beauty of the nearer neighborhood, and the magnificence
of the farther, mountain-walled and skyed over with a September
blue in November. I think it would be a good place to spend the
winter if one liked each day to be exactly like every other. I do
not know whether it is inhabited by English people from
Gibraltar, where there are of course those resources of sport and
society which an English colony always carries with
it.
The popular
amusements of Algeciras in the off
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season for
bull-feasts did not readily lend themselves to observance.
Chiefly we noted two young men with a graphophone on wheels
which, being pushed about, wheezed out the latest songs to the
acceptance of large crowds. We ourselves amused a large crowd
when one of us attempted to sketch the yellow facade of a church
so small that it seemed all facade; and another day when that one
of us who held the coppers, commonly kept sacred to blind
beggars, delighted an innumerable multitude of mendicants having
their eyesight perfect. They were most of them in the vigor of
youth, and they were waiting on a certain street for the monthly
dole with which a resident of Algeciras may buy immunity for all
the other days of the month. They instantly recognized in the
stranger a fraudulent tax-dodger, and when he attempted tardily
to purchase immunity they poured upon him; in front, behind, on
both sides, all round, they boiled up and bubbled about him; and
the exhaustion of his riches alone saved him alive. It must have
been a wonderful spectacle, and I do not suppose the like of it
was ever seen in Algeciras before. It was a triumph over charity,
and left quite out of comparison the organized onsets of the
infant gang which always beset the way to the hotel under a
leader whose battle-cry, at once a demand and a promise, was
"Penny-go-way, Penny-go-way!"
Along that pleasant
shore bare - legged fishermen spread their nets, and going and
coming by the Gibraltar boats were sometimes white-hosed,
brown-cloaked, white-turbaned Moors, who occasionally wore
Christian boots, but otherwise looked just such Moslems as landed
at Algeciras in the eighth century; people do not change much in
Africa. They were probably hucksters from the Moorish market in
Gibraltar, where they had given their geese and turkeys the
holiday they were taking
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
themselves. They
were handsome men, tall and vigorous, but they did not win me to
sympathy with their architecture or religion, and I am not sure
but, if there had been any concerted movement against them on the
landing at Algeciras, I should have joined in driving them out of
Spain. As it was I made as much Africa as I could of them in
defect of crossing to Tangier, which we had firmly meant to do,
but which we forbore doing till the plague had ceased to rage
there. By this time the boat which touched at Tangier on the way
to Cadiz stopped going to Cadiz, and if we could not go to Cadiz
we did not care for going to Tangier. It was something like this,
if not quite like it, and it ended in our seeing Africa only from
the southernmost verge of Europe at Tarifa. At that little
distance across it looked dazzlingly white, like the cotton
vestments of those Moorish marketmen, but probably would have
been no cleaner on closer approach.
III
As a matter of fact,
we were very near not going even to Tarifa, though we had
promised ourselves going from the first. But it was very charming
to linger in the civilization of that hotel; to wander through
its garden paths in the afternoon after a forenoon's writing and
inhale the keen aromatic odors of the eucalyptus, and when the
day waned to have tea at an iron table on the seaward terrace. Or
if we went to Gibraltar, it was interesting to wonder why we had
gone, and to be so glad of getting back, and after dinner joining
a pleasant international group in the long reading-room with the
hearth-fires at either end which, if you got near them, were so
comforting against the
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evening chill.
Sometimes the pleasure of the time was heightened by the rain
pattering on the glass roof of the patio, where in the
afternoon a bulky Spanish mother sat mute beside her basket of
laces which you could buy if you would, but need not if you would
rather not; in either case she smiled placidly.
At last we did get
together courage enough to drive twelve miles over the hills to
Tarifa, but this courage was pieced out of the fragments of the
courage we had lost for going to Cadiz by the public automobile
which runs daily from Algeciras. The road after you passed Tarifa
was so bad that those who had endured it said nobody could endure
it, and in such a case I was sure I could not, but now I am sorry
I did not venture, for since then I have motored over some of the
roads in the state of Maine and lived. If people in Maine had
that Spanish road as far as Tarifa they would think it the superb
Massachusetts state road gone astray, and it would be thought a
good road anywhere, with the promise of being better when the
young eucalyptus trees planted every few yards along it grew big
enough to shade it. But we were glad of as much sun as we could
get on the brisk November morning when we drove out of the hotel
garden and began the long climb, with little intervals of level
and even of lapse. We started at ten o'clock, and it was not too
late in that land of anomalous hours to meet peasants on their
mules and donkeys bringing loads of stuff to market in Algeciras.
Men were plowing with many yoke of oxen in the wheat-fields;
elsewhere there were green pastures with herds of horses grazing
in them, an abundance of brown pigs, and flocks of sheep with
small lambs plaintively bleating. The pretty white farmhouses,
named each after a favorite saint, and gathering at
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FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
times into villages,
had grapes and figs and pomegranates in their gardens; and when
we left them and climbed higher, we began passing through long
stretches of cork woods.
The trees grew wild,
sometimes sturdily like our oaks, and sometimes gnarled and
twisted like our seaside cedars, and in every state of
excoriation. The bark is taken from them each seventh year, and
it begins to be taken long before the first seventh. The tender
saplings and the superannuated shell wasting to its fall yield
alike their bark, which is stripped from the roots to the highest
boughs. Where they have been flayed recently they look literally
as if they were left bleeding, for the sap turns a red color; but
with time this changes to brown, and the bark begins to renew
itself and grows again till the next seventh year. Upon the whole
the cork-wood forest is not cheerful, and I would rather frequent
it in the pages of Don Quixote than out; though if the
trees do not mind being barked it is mere sentimentality in me to
pity them.
The country grew
lonelier and drearier as we mounted, and the wind blew colder
over the fields blotched with that sort of ground-palm, which
lays waste so much land in southern Spain. When we descended the
winding road from the summit we came in sight of the sea with
Africa clearly visible beyond, and we did not lose sight of it
again. Sometimes we met soldiers possibly looking out for
smugglers but, let us hope, not molesting them; and once we met a
brace of the all-respected Civil Guards, marching shoulder to
shoulder, with their cloaks swinging free and their carbines on
their arms, severe, serene, silent. Now and then a mounted
wayfarer came toward us looking like a landed proprietor in his
own equipment and that of his steed, and there were peasant women
solidly perched
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TARIFA
on donkeys, and
draped in long black cloaks and hooded in white
kerchiefs.
IV
The landscape
softened again, with tilled fields and gardened spaces around the
cottages, and now we had Tarifa always in sight, a stretch of
white walls beside the blue sea with an effect of vicinity which
it was very long in realizing. We had meant when we reached the
town at last to choose which fonda we should stop at for
our luncheon, but our driver chose the Fonda de Villanueva
outside the town wall, and I do not believe we could have chosen
better if he had let us. He really put us down across the way at
the venta where he was going to bait his horses; and in
what might well have seemed the custody of a little policeman
with a sword at his side, we were conducted to the fonda
and shown up into the very neat icy cold parlor where a young
girl with a yellow flower in her hair received us. We were chill
and stiff from our drive and we hoped for something warmer from
the dining-room, which we perceived must face southward, and must
be full of sun. But we reckoned without the ideal of the girl
with the yellow flower in her hair: in the little saloon, shining
round with glazed tiles where we next found ourselves, the sun
had been carefully screened and scarcely pierced the scrim
shades. But this was the worst, this was all that was bad, in
that fonda. When the breakfast or the luncheon, or
whatever corresponds in our usage to the Spanish almuerzo,
began to come, it seemed as if it never would stop. An original
but admirable omelette with potatoes and bacon in it was followed
by fried fish flavored with saffron. Then there was brought in
fried kid with a dish of
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kidneys; more fried
fish came after, and then boiled beef, with a dessert of small
cakes. Of course there was wine, as much as you would, such as it
was, and several sorts of fruit. I am sorry to have forgotten how
little all this cost, but at a venture I will say forty cents, or
fifty at the outside; and so great kindness and good will went
with it from the family who cooked it in the next room and served
it with such cordial insistence that I think it was worth quite
the larger sum. It would not have been polite to note how much of
this superabundance was consumed by the three Spanish gentlemen
who had so courteously saluted us in sitting down at table with
us. I only know that they made us the conventional acknowledgment
in refusing our conventional offer of some things we had brought
with us from our hotel to eat in the event of famine at
Tarifa.
When we had come at
last to the last course, we turned our thoughts somewhat
anxiously to the question of a guide for the town which we felt
so little able to explore without one; and it seemed to me that I
had better ask the policeman who had brought us to our
fonda. He was sitting at the head of the stairs where we
had left him, and so far from being baffled by my problem, he
instantly solved it by offering himself to be our guide. Perhaps
it was a profession which he merely joined to his civic function,
but it was as if we were taken into custody when he put himself
in charge of us and led us to the objects of interest which I
cannot say Tarifa abounds in. That is, if you leave out of the
count the irregular, to and fro, up and down, narrow lanes,
passing the blank walls of low houses, and glimps-
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ing leafy and
flowery patios through open gates, and suddenly expanding
into broader streets and unexpected plazas, with shops and cafes
and churches in them.
Tarifa is perhaps
the quaintest town left in the world, either in or out of Spain,
but whether it is more Moorish than parts of Cordova or Seville I
could not say. It is at least pre-eminent in a feature of the
women's costume which you are promised at the first mention of
the place, and which is said to be a survival of the Moslem
civilization. Of course we were eager for it, and when we came
into the first wide street, there at the principal corner three
women were standing, just as advertised, with black skirts caught
up from their waists over their heads and held before their faces
so that only one eye could look out at the strangers. It was like
the women's costtime at Chiozza on the Venetian lagoon, but there
it is not claimed for Moorish and here it was authenticated by
being black. "Moorish ladies," our guide proudly proclaimed them
in his scanty English, but I suspect they were Spanish; if they
were really Orientals, they followed us with those eyes single as
daringly as if they had been of our own Christian
Occident.
The event was so
perfect in its way that it seemed as if our guiding policeman
might have especially ordered it; but this could not have really
been, and was no such effect of his office as the immunity from
beggars which we enjoyed in his charge. The worst boy in Tarifa
(we did not identify him) dared not approach for a big-dog or a
little, and we were safe from the boldest blind man, the hardiest
hag, however pockmarked. The lanes and the streets and the plazas
were clean as though our guide had them newly swept for us, and
the plaza of the principal church (no guide-
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book remembers its
name) is perhaps the cleanest in all Spain.
VI
The church itself we
found very clean, and of an interest quite beyond the promise of
the rather bare outside. A painted window above the door cast a
glare of fresh red and blue over the interior, and over the
comfortably matted floor; and there was a quite freshly carved
and gilded chapel which the pleasant youth supplementing our
policeman for the time said was done by artists still living in
Tarifa. The edifice was of a very flamboyant Gothic, with
clusters of slender columns and a vault brilliantly swirled over
with decorations of the effect of peacock feathers. But above all
there was on a small side altar a figure of the Child Jesus
dressed in the corduroy suit and felt hat of a Spanish shepherd,
with a silver crook in one hand and leading a toy lamb by a
string in the other. Our young guide took the image down for us
to look at, and showed its shepherd's dress with peculiar
satisfaction; and then he left it on the ground while he went to
show us something else. When we came back we found two small boys
playing with the Child, putting its hat off and on, and feeling
of its clothes. Our guide took it from them, not unkindly, and
put it back on the altar; and whether the reader will agree with
me or not, I must own that I did not find the incident irreverent
or without a certain touchingness, as if those children and He
were all of one family and they were at home with Him
there.
Rather suddenly,
after we left the church, by way of one of those unexpectedly
expanding lanes, we found ourselves on the shore of the purple
sea where the
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Moors first
triumphed over the Goths twelve hundred years before, and five
centuries later the Spaniards heat them back from their attempt
to reconquer the city. There were barracks, empty of the Spanish
soldiers gone to fight the same old battle of the Moors on their
own ground in Africa, and there was the castle which Alfonso
Perez de Guzman held against them in 1292, and made the scene of
one of those acts of self-devotion which the heart of this time
has scarcely strength for. The Moors when they had vainly
summoned him to yield brought out his son whom they held captive,
and threatened to kill him. Guzman drew his knife and flung it
down to them, and they slew the boy, but Tarif a was saved. His
king decreed that thereafter the father should be known as Guzman
the Good, and the fact has gone into a ballad, but the name
somehow does not seem quite to fit, and one wishes that the
father had not won it that way.
We were glad to go
away from the dreadful place, though Tangier was so plain across
the strait, and we were almost in Africa there, and hard by, in
the waters tossing free, the great battle of Trafalgar was
fought. From the fountains of my far youth, when I first heard of
Guzman's dreadful heroism, I endeavored to pump up an adequate
emotion; I succeeded somewhat better with Nelson and his pathetic
prayer of "Kiss me, Hardy," as he lay dying on his bloody deck;
but I did not much triumph with either, and I was grateful when
our good little policeman comfortably questioned the deed of
Guzman which he said some doubted, though he took us to the very
spot where the Moors had parleyed with Guzman, and showed us the
tablet over the castle gate affirming the fact.
We liked far better
the pretty Alameda rising in terraces from it with beds of
flowers beside the prome-
325
FAMILIAR SPANISH
TRAVELS
nade, and boys
playing up and down, and old men sitting in the sun, and trying
to ignore the wind that blew over them too freshly for us. Our
policeman confessed that there was nothing more worth seeing in
Tarifa, and we entreated of him the favor of showing us a shop
where we could buy a Cordovese hat; a hat which we had seen
nourishing on the heads of all men in Cordova and Seville and
Granada and Ronda, and had always forborne to buy because we
could get it anywhere; and now we were almost leaving Spain
without it. We wanted one brown in color, as well as stiff and
flat of brim, and slightly conical in form; and our policeman
promptly imagined it, and took us to a shop abounding solely in
hats, and especially in Cordoveses. The proprietor came out
wiping his mouth from an inner room, where he had left his family
visibly at their almuerzo; and then we were desolated
together that he should only have Cordoveses that were black. But
passing a patio where there was a poinsettia in brilliant
bloom against the wall, we found ourselves in a variety store
where there were Cordoveses of all colors; and we chose one of
the right brown, with the picture of a beautiful Spanish girl,
wearing a pink shawl, inside the crown which was fluted round in
green and red ribbon. Seven pesetas was the monstrous asking
price, but we beat it down to five and a half, and then came a
trying moment: we could not carry a Cordovese in tissue-paper
through the streets of Tarifa, but could we ask our guide, who
was also our armed escort, to carry it? He simplified the
situation by taking it himself and bearing it back to the
fonda as proudly as if he had not also worn a sword at his
side; and we parted there in a kindness which I should like to
think he shared equally with us.
326
ALGECIRAS AND
TARIFA
He was practically
the last of those Spaniards who were always winning my heart
(save in the bank at Valladolid where they must have
misunderstood me), and whom I remember with tenderness for their
courtesy and amiability. In little things and large, I found the
Spaniards everywhere what I heard a Piedmontese commercial
traveler say of them in Venice fifty years ago: "They are the
honestest people in Europe." In Italy I never began to see the
cruelty to animals which English tourists report, and in Spain I
saw none at all. If the reader asks how with this gentleness,
this civility and integrity, the Spaniards have contrived to
build up their repute for cruelty, treachery, mendacity, and
every atrocity; how with their love of bull-feasts and the
suffering to man and brute which these involve, they should yet
seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know. I do not
know how the Americans are reputed good and just and law-abiding,
although they often shoot one another, and upon mere suspicion
rather often burn negroes alive.
THE END
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