A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees Part 8

Luncheon past, we walk up the long, easy incline that leads from Hendaye station into its town; and with a turn to the left find our way through its streets down again to the river bank. Here are boats and boatmen, and we have to run the customary gauntlet of compet.i.tion, as vociferous at Hendaye as at Killarney or the Crossmon. We elect two of the compet.i.tors as allies, and the rest become our sworn enemies forthwith.

The tide is low, the water still and shallow; and we are sculled smoothly out into the stream, restful in the soft sunshine, the full blue of the afternoon sky. The voices of our hundred enemies recede; the sounds from the town yield to the dripping oars; soon the stream stretches its silent width about us. Close-grouped on the opposite sh.o.r.e we see the dark walls of Fuenterrabia, domineered by the castle. The railway whistle begins to seem a memory of another existence, the bustle of travel a thing remote. The quiet of the river, unlike Lethe, turns us to the past, and clouds the present in a dreamy haze.

"In that sunny corner where the waves of the Bay of Biscay wash over a sandy barrier and mingle with the waters of the Bida.s.soa stream,"--thus runs the legend so charmingly recounted in _The Sun-Maid_,--"they tell the ancient story that a favored mortal won from the G.o.ds permission to ask three blessings for Spain.

"He asked that her daughters might be beautiful, that her sons might be brave, and that her government might be good.

"The first two requests were granted,--the beauty of a Spanish woman is of world-wide renown; and if the men are rash, pa.s.sionate, and revengeful, at least they are brave; but the last request was refused.

"'Impossible!' was the answer; 'impossible! Already she is an earthly paradise, and were this last blessing hers, the very G.o.ds themselves would desert Elysium and come down to dwell in Spain.'"

Of this we think, winding among the shallows, as the Spanish bank comes nearer, and the boat at last grounds lightly on its soil. Before us is the old town we are seeking,--a type perhaps of the nation itself, in its courtly unthrift, its proud misgovernance.

III.

There is a little custom-house on the bank, but our _impedimenta_ are safe in Hendaye. I think our pa.s.sports are there as-well, so bold does one grow upon familiarity.

We have scarcely traversed a hundred yards before we come upon the middle centuries. There will be no caviling at the satisfying antiquity of Fuenterrabia. We have pa.s.sed in between the lichened walls which still guard the city, and a few steps bring us into the town and to the foot of the main street. We pause to look, and the sight is certainly striking. Beyond a doubt Fuenterrabia is old. It has a true Spanish tint, and one dyed in the wool; one might probably travel far in Spain before meeting a truer. This street seems utterly unmodified by modern formulae. Wavering and narrow and sombre, it stretches upward on a gradual incline until it meets the cathedral stepping out from the line of the old houses and closing the vista. Even in the short perspective, the huge, blackened eaves of the opposite roofs seem almost to meet.

Balconies, a.s.sociated with moonlight and mandolins, serenades and senoritas, jut out from every window; dark bosses of escutcheons mark the fronts; and below, along the edging of sidewalk, are the dim little shops, curtained by yellow canvas, intensely and delightfully local, and wholly unknowing of outside demand or compet.i.tion. One of these places does indeed cater to visitors with a humble supply of photographs and of clicking sets of varnished wooden castanets paired by colored worsteds; but the others of the store-keepers and the inhabitants in the streets are clearly unhardened to foreigners, and regard us solely with a deep and artless curiosity,--tempered, I hope, by admiration. As the town has been, so it is. It is an epitome of Spain and her past.

IV.

At the head of the street we enter the cool cathedral, and find, as always, wealth created by poverty. In places such as these one realizes the hold of the Romish system on mediaeval Europe. One realizes its power also. No matter what the size of a town, it boasts its costly church; oftener, as here, its cathedral. Villages, houses, people, may be poor, their church stands rich; they may be unlearned in art and in culture, their church stands a model of both. There was their shrine, their finality,--in religion not merely, but in art and wisdom and authority.

At least, the Catholic system held its followers firmly in leash.

Condemn its errors and excesses, yet, these apart, it was marvelously adapted to its mission. As an engine of unification it was almost omnipotent. Through the ups and downs of restless migrations and invasions,--of feudalisms and governments and the soberer commercial spirit,--it has kept its hold unbroken upon the ma.s.s of European humanity. Its priests and popes might sink out of respect; the Church did not sink. In the fiercest civil feuds, its abbeys were held inviolate. To the most brutal, the Church had an odor of sanct.i.ty. Its threats terrified; its mandates were obeyed; it was the one persistent, binding principle; it held men in check from a relapse into tribalism.

And its hold is firm to-day. Go into a Romish church, you shall find worshipers at every hour. Worn housewives, seamed and aged market-women, a chance workingman, an awed and tiptoeing child,--they are there in their silence. They kneel, they pray, their eyes are fixed on the altar.

Formalism or not, a sincerity underlies it,--a belief and obedience absorbed from centuries of environment; implicit and unquestioning, and making for good.

V.

Beyond the cathedral is the broad square or plaza, and the half-alive streets wandering from this are even more Fuenterrabian than the one just past, for they are less well-to-do. The poorer houses may reveal the traits and traditions of a town far more faithfully than the richer.

The latter can draw their models from a wider field. The former copy only the local and long-followed pattern.

Here at our right stands the castle. It is stern in its decrepitude; its very aspect is historic. It was built by a king of Navarre, Sancho Abarca, known as the Strong, so long ago as the tenth century; the facade facing the square is somewhat later, and the other facade was rebuilt by Charles V. We pa.s.s through the entrance-way and across a murky, earthen-floored atrium, and stand in silence in the roofless central hall.

It is at this point that our nascent impressions are brusquely shocked.

Fuenterrabia is not all steeped in dreams of the past. It has waked for once into the business present as well. Its proud reserve has been broken. There is a rift in the lute. Here by the mossy courtyard, enclosed by historic walls and the spirit of an unworldly past, we are met by a sign-board, with the following English inscription:

[Ill.u.s.tration: For Sale]

FOR SALE!

THIS ROYAL PALACE AND CASTLE OF THE EMPEROR CHARLES V.

appli for informations to PRIMO FERNANDEZ, FUENTERRABIA.

A preceding traveler saw this sign when here, and quotes it in part in a recent book.[11] It still hangs, as we see it now, two years after his visit, still pathetically but vainly invoking the spirit of a worldly present.

[11] FIELD: _Old Spain and New Spain._

For the lover of day dreams, given to designing his _chateaux en Espagne_, I seriously recommend this purchase in Fuenterrabia. The castillo is a real one and the most accessible in Spain, and all its surroundings are gratefully in harmony. It is presumably a bargain, and one might either hold it for a rise, or turn grandee and live in it.

Within the court, the daylight comes in over the dismantled walls. The ivy green climbs along the grey stones. We trace the old hearth and the outline of the stone staircase scarred upon the wall. We conjure up the rest of the structure, but the Northern Wizard is not with us here, as at Kenilworth, to repeople it with life and merrymaking, and it strains the imagination to depart far from the dull, dead present of Fuenterrabia. Perchance of old there came hither knights and ladies, p.r.i.c.king o'er the plaine, perchance here was dancing and wa.s.sail. We close our eyes and would fain image the scene. We banish the ruined walls, the sunlight creeping among the ivy. We see the sheen of cloth of gold and the gleam of greaves and breastplates. We catch the tale of battle, the pa.s.sing of the loving-cup, the stately treading of slow Spanish measures. We hear,--we hear,--what is it that we hear?--the melodious sound of woman's soft voice, gently whispering: "Five sous each for the party, monsieur."

And as we awake and pay and depart, we turn and see again the disillusionizing legend:

[Ill.u.s.tration: For Sale]

CHAPTER VII.

AN ERA IN TWILIGHT.

"_Pour faire comprendre le caractere d'un peuple, je conterais trente anecdotes et je supprimerais toutes les theories philosophiques sur le sujet_,"

--STENDHAL.

Returning to Hendaye, a train takes us again to Bayonne, connecting there for Orthez and Pau. The ride to Bayonne needs an hour or less, and from thence to Orthez calls for two. It is not many decades since much of this journey had to be made by the diligence. Railways and highways have pushed rapidly toward the Pyrenees. When in the approaching fortnight we shall come to traverse the Route Thermale, the great carriage-way along the chain, we shall see modern road-making in its perfection; and the rail will keep anxious watch, over the road, running parallel along the distant plain and reaching helpful arms up the valleys to uphold it.

Toward Pau especially, the railroads converge. That city, a social capital for centuries, is a social capital still, and its winter influx of invalids and pleasure-seekers stimulates every facility of approach.

Then, too, it lies on the way crossing southern France from the Bida.s.soa to the Rhone, and no line linking these rivers could omit from its chain the Gave[12] de Pau.

[12] _Gave_ is the generic name among the Pyrenees for a mountain stream or torrent.

From Bayonne, the train at first traverses an edge of a singular region.

It is a part of the _Landes_. This great savanna, which flattens the entire s.p.a.ce from Bordeaux to Bayonne, was crossed in coming southward from Bordeaux, and now as we strike eastward and inland we but briefly skirt its southerly portion. A sandy, marshy waste, infertile, unhealthful and poor, it lies in utter contrast with the fields and slopes of neighboring provinces. It is anomalous, incongruous,--

"A bare strand Of hillocks heaped with ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds."

Its inhabitants are meagre and stunted; it scants them both in food and drink. Its miserliness is deep-set: artesian wells sunk a thousand feet through its dull grey sands bring up only a brackish yellow water; a precarious rye and barley grow grudgingly.

The low stretches of furze and heath and fern are fringed only by mournful horizons of pines or broken by long files of gashed and wounded firs. This extensive tree-growth, however, which is comparatively recent, has at least lessened one terror of the Landes: sand-storms and snow-storms, which once swept across the wastes, have been shorn of their strength. Honor for this is due almost alone to one man, a M.

Bremontier. Before his time, forest-making had here been deemed impossible; pine seeds planted in the lax hold of these sands had hitherto been unable even to take root, against the unbroken sweep of the winds. M. Bremontier, after many experiments, conceived the idea of planting with the pine seeds the seeds of the common broom, whose hardy tuft should protect the tiny sapling until it could stand by itself.

The result surpa.s.sed hope; pine forests, protecting in their turn, have sprung up and endured throughout the Landes; they have broken forever the power of the wind-storms; and their pitch and timber are even a source of some riches to the Department.

Still it remains a region unsmiling and melancholy. A monochrome of sand, darkened everywhere by long blotches of sickly undergrowth or the dull reach of the pines; here and there are cork-trees and alders. The sheen of some slow lagoon is caught in the distance. There is a charm in the very charmlessness of the scene, as in some sombre-toned etching.