Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 16

I had come again upon a real city, almost the first since leaving Madrid; whence accommodations, while in no sense lacking, were high in price. In the course of an hour of prowling, however, I was apprised of the existence of a modest casa eta huespedes in a canyon-like side street. I rang the great doorbell below several times in vain; which was as I had expected, for foolish indeed would have been the Spaniard who remained within doors on such a night, while the band played and the city strolled in the Alameda. I dropped my bundle at my feet and leaned against the lintel of the ma.s.sive doorway.

Within an hour there arrived another seeker after quarters, a slender Spaniard in the early summer of life, who carried two heavy portmanteaus and a leather swordcase. Almost at the opening of our conversation he surprised me by inquiring, "You are a foreigner, verdad, senor?" I commended his penetration and, as we chatted, sought for some sign of his profession or place in society. All at once the long, slender swordcase caught my eye.

"Ah! Es usted torero, senor," I observed with a.s.surance.

The youth awakened the echoes of the narrow street with his laughter.

"Bullfighter! No, indeed! I am happy to say no. I am a student in the national cavalry school here, just returned from my month's furlough.

But your error is natural," he went on, "and my fault. I have really no right to appear in civilian garb. It would mean a month of bread and water at least if one of our officers caught a glimpse of me. But carajo! The family above may not be back by midnight. We can leave our baggage with the portier next door."

We strolled slowly back to the brilliantly lighted Plaza de la Const.i.tution. Suddenly the youth interrupted an anecdote of the tan-bark to exclaim in a calm but earnest voice:

"Caramba! There come my commandante and the first lieutenant."

Two men of forty-five or fifty, in resplendent uniforms and tall red caps, their swords clinking along the pavement, were sauntering down upon us. I stepped quickly to the opposite side of my companion, being taller--and likewise curious.

"Hombre!" he protested sharply, stepping back again. "No tenga V.

cuidado. It is not our way to hide from our officers."

With head erect and military stride he marched straight on before him.

Luckily the officers were so engrossed in conversation that neither glanced up as they pa.s.sed.

We drifted into a cafe and ordered "helado," that Spanish imitation of ice-cream the calling of which in the streets had so frequently caused me to whirl about in astonishment, so much does it sound like our "h.e.l.lo." Over it we fell to discussing things American, in which we were gradually joined by several well-dressed men at the adjoining marble tables. In the course of the evening I chanced to remark that one of the surprises of my summer's trip had been to find so little resentment against the United States.

"Senor," said the youth, while each and all of our companions gave signs of agreement, "nothing more fortunate has befallen our country in a century than the loss of Cuba and the Philippines. Not only has it taken a load off the Spanish people; it has brought more relief than you can guess to us of the army. The colonies were the dumping-ground of our profession. Once let an officer show ability and he was forthwith shipped off to the islands to die. Now they are taken away, Spain has already begun to regain her lost place among the nations. No, senor; we of the army at least think nothing but kindness to your people for the relief."

Returned to the casa de huespedes, the student and I were given adjoining rooms and saw much of Valladolid together before I took train the second morning after to Burgos. There, were regulation "sights" in abundance; on every hand memories of the Cid Campeador, even the spot where stood his dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks of Jerusalem. Two miles or more out along the shallow mill-race that Burgos calls a river I visited the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims for its distinction never in its centuries of existence to have admitted to the veil less than a daughter of the n.o.bility. The stroll is pleasant, but the place, n.o.ble though it be, unexciting--at least outwardly. Of the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be said--that has been often said before.

It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what I might have seen earlier and frequently had my tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery.

More exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside in which hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed for future reference, with the name and a charitably indulgent characterization of the deceased on the end of his coffin. The Spaniard, with his superst.i.tions, prefers this style of tomb for much the same reason, it seems, that the Arab seals his graves with cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular regions may not bear away the departed before the agents of the better and hence slower realm put in an appearance.

The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was the view from the summit of the hot, dry Cerro de San Miguel. Not merely does it offer a mighty and comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of Castilla Vieja, but a bird's-eye view as it were of all Spain and her history. Of the city spread out at one's feet fully three-fourths the s.p.a.ce is taken up by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas de misericordia, the vast bulk of the castle, the barracks, the bullring,--all the countless buildings of non-producers; while between them in the nooks and corners wherever a crack offers are packed and huddled the hovels of the mere inhabitants. There, in plain sight, is Spain's malady. She is a land of non-producers. Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by the omnivorous priesthood that mendicancy is an honorable profession, make up almost the bulk of her population of productive age. Not without reason does nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail against "Batuschca."

There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that she shoot her priests and set her soldiers to work. As isolated individuals the merry, dissolute fellows of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they have, and suffer the natural end of such living. But as a cla.s.s they are beyond reform; their point of view is so utterly warped and incorrigible, they have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft"

that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro remedio" as the Spaniard himself would say could his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of superst.i.tion and cant for one clear thought. Let him who protests that they are teachers of the youth go once and see what they teach,--the vapid, senseless lies about "saints" so far from truth as to be an abomination, so far above the possible aspirations and attainments of real humanity as to force the rising generations from very hopelessness of imitation to lose heart and sink to iniquity as the priesthood has done before them. Or are there some who still credit them with feeding the poor? A high praise, indeed, exactly equal to that due the footpad who refunds his victim carfare that he may be the more quickly rid of him.

Therein lies the chief weakness of Spain. It is not because she is ruled by a slender youth chosen by the accident of birth rather than by a more portly man chosen more or less by his fellow-citizens; not because her religion happens to be that of Rome rather than the austerities of Calvin or the fatalism of Mohammed; not because her national sport is a bit more dramatically brutal than that of other lands; not because her soil is dry and stony and her rains and rivers slight; not because her people are decadent, her human stock run down--I have plowed in the sea in the foregoing pages if I have not made it clear that her real manhood, the workman, the peasant, the arriero, the muscle and sinew of the nation, are as hardy, toilsome and all-enduring as the world harbors. But in the long centuries of warfare her attention was drawn away from internal affairs, she fell among thieves within, and the force of example, the helplessness of the individual drove her people in the line of least resistance,--to become thieves too, nationally, officially, until mad grab-what-you-can-and-the-devil-grab-the-ungrabbing has her by the throat gasping for life. If she is not to sink down for the vultures of the nations to pick clean of her meager sc.r.a.ps of flesh there must arise within her boundaries a man, a movement, a sweeping change that shall cast off the burden of precedent and turn her officials to doing honestly with all their might what now they do with all their might dishonestly. She must regain confidence in the necessity and prevalence of honesty. She must learn that patent yet rarely comprehended truth that work and work only is the real source of life; she must cease to be the sworn enemy of the innovator, thinking her ways best and those of the rest of the world abnormal, unable to see a yard beyond her national boundaries, scorning all ideas and arguments from the outside like the most hide-bound of Orientals.

The next afternoon found me in Vitoria, in the land of the Basque; yet another kind of Spain. Vitoria is a city of to-day, clean, bustling, almost American in her streets and architecture and the wide-awake air of the _Vascongado_. The _boina_--round cap without visor and the end of a string for ta.s.sel--had all at once become universal, worn, like the fez in Damascus, by every age and grade of man from bootblack to mayor.

So pleasing was this prosaic city that even though her prices were high I loitered in her shade until the next afternoon before seeking out the highway to Bilbao.

There lay sixty-seven kilometers to the seaport, a half of which I hoped to cover before halting for the night. For on the following day Bilbao was to celebrate in honor of the king. The way led me through a country fertile for all its stoniness, made so by the energy and diligence of the Basque, whose strong features, bold curved nose, piercing eyes and st.u.r.dy form was to be seen on every hand. With the southern Spaniard this new race had almost nothing in common, and though as serious of deportment as the gallego there was neither his bashfulness nor stupidity. The Castilian spoken in the region was excellent, the farming implements of modern manufacture and the methods of the husbandman thousands of years ahead of Andalusia.

As the day was fading I began to clamber my way upward into the mountains that rose high in the darkening sky ahead. The night grew to one of the blackest, the heavens being overcast; but he who marches on into the darkness without contact with artificial light may still see almost plainly. It was two hours, perhaps, after nightfall, and the road was winding ever higher around the shoulder of a mammoth peak, its edge a sheer precipice above unfathomable depths, when suddenly I saw a man, a denser blackness against the sea of obscurity, standing stock-still on the utmost edge of the highway.

"Buenos tardes," I greeted in a low voice, almost afraid that a hearty tone would send him toppling backward to his death.

He neither answered nor moved. I stepped closer.

"You have rather a dangerous position, verdad, senor?"

Still he stared motionless at me through the darkness. Could he be some sleep-walker? I moved quietly forward and, thrusting out a hand, touched him on the sleeve. It was hard as if frozen! For an instant I recoiled, then with a sudden instinctive movement pa.s.sed a hand quickly and lightly over his face. Was I dreaming? That, too, was hard and cold. I sprang back and, rummaging hastily through my pockets, found one broken match. The wind was rushing up from the bottomless gulf below. I struck a light, holding it in the hollow of my hand, and in the instant before it was blown out I caught a few words of an inscription on a pedestal:

"ERECTED TO THE MEM-- THROWN OVER THIS PRECIPICE-- BANDITS--NIGHT OF--"

and before I had made out date or name I was again in darkness.

Over the summit, on a lower, less wind-swept level, I came upon a long mining town scattered on either side of the highway. I dropped in at a wineshop and bespoke supper and lodging. A dish of the now omnipresent bacalao was set before me, but for a time the keeper showed strong disinclination to house a wandering stranger falling upon him at this advanced hour.

The young woman who served me at table and answered the demands for wine of the half-dozen youthful miners about me seemed strangely out of place in such surroundings. Nothing was plainer than that she was not of the barmaid type. One would have said rather the convent-reared daughter of some well-to-do merchant or large farmer. This surmise turned out to be close to the truth. When the carousing miners had drifted into the night and I, by dint of talking and acting my best Castilian, had found my way into the good graces of the family, I heard the girl's story--for rightly approached the Spaniard is easily led to talk of his private affairs. Her father had been the princ.i.p.al shop-keeper of the mining town, and had died a few weeks before. His debts were heavy and when all claims had been settled there remained to his orphaned daughter five hundred pesetas.

"But," I cried, "five hundred pesetas! It is a fortune, senorita, in Spain. You could have started a shop, or lived well until the novio appeared."

"Jesus Maria!" cried the girl, looking at me with wondering eyes. "Do you forget purgatory? For the repose of my father's soul five hundred ma.s.ses must be said; no less, the cura himself told me; and each ma.s.s costs a peseta. Then I have come to work here."

There was that in the air next morning that reminded me, as I wound down into a wooded, well-peopled valley, that summer was drawing toward its close. The day grew quickly warm, however. In the knowledge that the king was sojourning in the city upon which I was marching, I was fully prepared to endure long catechizing and examination by guardias civiles.

My wonder was not slight, therefore, when I was suffered to pa.s.s through one, two, three villages without being once challenged.

But the expected meeting came at last and quite made up for the lack of others. The third village lay already behind me when I heard an authoritative shout and, turning around, saw a bareheaded man of thirty, dressed half in peasant, half in village garb, beckoning to me with a commanding gesture to return. Fancying him some wily shop-keeper, I swung on my heel and set off again. He shouted loudly, and racing after me, caught me by an arm. I shook him off with an indignation that sent him spinning half across the highway. Instead of retreating he sprang at me again and we should certainly have been soon entangled in a crude performance of the manly art had he not cried out in a voice quaking with anger:

"Have a care, senor, in resisting the law. I am a minon."

"Minon!" I cried, recalling suddenly that in the Basque provinces the national guardias are reenforced by local officers thus named. "Then why the devil don't you wear your uniform? How shall I know you are not a footpad?"

"I shall prove that soon enough," he replied, still visibly shaking with the rage of a Spaniard whose "pundonor" has been sullied.

I returned with him to the casa de ayuntamiento, in the doorway of which he halted, and, examining me for concealed weapons, demanded that I untie my knapsack. Never before had this been more than superficially inspected, but the thoroughness with which the angry minon overhauled it, examining even my letters and fingering my clothes-brush over and over as if convinced that it could be opened by some secret spring, fully made up for any possible carelessness of his fellow-officers elsewhere. When he had lost hope of finding evidence of treason he handed back my possessions reluctantly and bade me with a scowl the conventional "Go with G.o.d;" to which I answered, "Queda V. con el mismisimo diablo"--but the thrust was too subtle for his bullet-headed intellect.

Toward noon the green slopes and cool forests turned to a cindered soil and the sooty aspect of a factory town. I mounted a last hill and descended quickly through a smoke-laden atmosphere into Bilbao. Here was the first entirely modern city I had seen in Spain; one might easily have fancied one's self in Newcastle or Seattle. The Spanish casa de huespedes seemed not even known by name, and in its place were only boisterous taverns, smacking of sea-faring custom and overrun with the touts that feed on the simple mariner.

As I sat toward evening in one of these establishments, there entered a man something over thirty-five, dressed in boina and workingman's garb that showed but slight wear. I noted him only half consciously, being at that moment expressing to the landlord my surprise that the king, instead of being in Bilbao as he was reported by the newspapers, was ten or twelve miles away on his yacht at the mouth of the river. The keeper, a stocky Basque of much better parts than the average of his guild, glanced up from his spigots and replied in a smooth and pleasant voice:

"Porque, senor, no quiere morir tan joven--Because he does not care to die so young."

"Y con mujer tan bella y fresca--And with a wife so beautiful and fresh," added a thick-set fellow at a neighboring table without looking up from his cards.

Love for Alfonso is not one of the characteristics of the ma.s.ses in this section of the country.

Meanwhile the newcomer, whose eye had been wandering leisurely over the a.s.sembly, threaded his way half across the room to sit down at my table.

I wondered a bit at the preference, but certain he was no tout, gave him the customary greeting. By the time I had accepted a gla.s.s and treated in turn we were exchanging personal information. He announced himself a cobbler, and even before I had broached the subject suggested that he could find me a lodging with an old woman above his shop. This workroom, when we reached it, proved to be nothing but a kit of tools and a few strips of leather scattered about the small hallway at the foot of the stairs. I found above the hospitality he had promised, however, and paying two night's lodging in an unusually pleasant room, descended.

The shoemaker appeared more obliging than industrious, for he at once laid aside the shoe he was hammering and announced that he was going to give himself the pleasure of spending the evening with me and of finding me the best place to take in the fireworks that were to be set off in honor of the king. I explained that it was rather my plan to attend the city theater, where I might both see that remarkable personage in the flesh and hear one of Moliere's best comedies in Spanish.

"There is more than time for both," replied the cobbler, and forthwith fell to extolling the coming spectacle so highly that he came near to arousing within me, too, an interest in the fireworks.

At the end of an hour's stroll we found ourselves on the summit of a knoll in the outskirts, in a compact sea of Bilbaoans watching a tame imitation of a Fourth of July celebration on the slope of one of the surrounding hills. The display was, as I have said, in honor of the king; though it turned out that his indifferent majesty was at that moment dining and wining a company of fellow-sportsmen on board the _Giralda_ twelve miles away.

The cobbler set a more than leisurely pace back to the city, but we regained at length the bank of the river and, crossing the wooded Paseo Arenal, approached the theater. Before it, was packed a vast and compact mult.i.tude through which I struggled my way to the entrance, only to be informed in the customary box-office tones that there was not another ticket to be had. The shoemaker was no theater-goer, and as my own disappointment was not overwhelming, we set out to fight our way back to the Paseo.