Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 5

"Seno-o-o-res viajeros al tre-e-e-en."

"Gentlemen travelers to the train" is all it means in mere words; but rolling from the lips of one of these forlorn captives it seems to carry with it all the history of Spain, and sinks into the soul like a voice from the abysmal past.

Among my fellow-pa.s.sengers was the first Spanish priest with whom I came into conversational contact. In the retrospect that fact is all but effaced by the memory that he was not merely the first but the only Spaniard who ever declined my proffer of a cigarette. To one eager to find the prevailing estimation of the priesthood of Spain false or vastly overdrawn, this first introduction to the gown augured well. He was neither fat nor sensual: rather the contrary, with the lineaments of a man sincere in his work and beneficent in his habits. His manner was affable, without a hint of that patronizing air and pose of sanct.i.ty frequently to be observed among Protestant clergy, his att.i.tude of equality toward the laity peculiarly reminiscent of the priests of Buddha.

At the station of San Francisco half the pa.s.sengers descended. The building was perched on a shelf of rock that fell away behind it into a stony gulf. Surrounding all the station precinct ran a weather-warped and blackened fence, ten feet high, along the top of which screamed and jostled fully two score women and girls, offering for sale every species of ware from cuc.u.mbers to turkeys. Hucksters and beggars swarm down--or rather up--on San Francisco in such mult.i.tudes that the railway company was forced to build the fence for the protection of its patrons. But the women, not to be so easily outdone, carry each a ladder to surmount the difficulty. As the train swung on around a pinnacle of rock, we caught a long enduring view of the source of the uproar--the populous and pauperous city of Loja, lodged in a trough-like hillside across the valley.

Not far beyond there burst suddenly on the sight the snow-cowled Sierra Nevada, and almost at the same moment the train halted at Puente Pinos.

I recalled the village as the spot where Columbus saw the ebbing tide of his fortunes checked by the messengers of "Ysabel la Catolica"; but not so the priest.

"One of our great industries, senor," he said, pointing to several smoke-belching chimneys near at hand. "Puente Pinos produces the best sugar in Spain."

"The cane is harvested early?" I observed, gazing away across the flat fields.

"No, no," laughed the priest, "betabel (sugar beets)."

Spanish railways are as p.r.o.ne as those of Italy to repudiate the printed promise of their tickets. We descended toward sunset at a station named Granada only to find that the geographical Granada was still some miles distant. The priest had offered to direct me to an inn or I should perhaps have escaped entirely the experience of riding in a Spanish street-car. It crawled for an hour through an ocean of dust, anchoring every cable-length to take aboard some floundering pedestrian. Many of these were priests; and as they gathered one by one on either side of my companion, the hope I had entertained of discovering more of virtue beneath the Spanish sotana than the world grants oozed unrestrainably away. For they were, almost without exception, pot-bellied, self-satisfied, cynical, with obscenity and the evidences of unnatural vice as plainly legible on their countenances as the words on a printed page.

We reached at last the central plaza, where my guide pointed out a large modern building bearing across the front of its third story the inscription, "Gran Casa de Viajeros de la Viuda Robledo." As I alighted, a band of valets de place swept down upon me. I gave them no attention; which did not, of course, lessen the impertinence with which they danced about me. Having guessed my goal, one of them dashed before me up the stairs, shouting to the senora to be prepared to receive the guest he was bringing.

The widow Robledo was a serene-visaged woman in the early fifties; her house a species of family hotel never patronized by foreigners. We came quickly to terms, however; I was a.s.signed a room overhanging the culinary regions, for which, with the customary two and a half meals a day, I engaged to pay four pesetas.

At the mention of money, the tout, who during all the transaction had not once withdrawn the light of his simian countenance, demanded a peseta for having found me a lodging. I reminded him of the real facts of the case and invited him to withdraw. He followed me instead into my new quarters, repeating his demands in a bullying voice, and for the only time in my Spanish experience I was compelled to resort to physical coercion. Unfortunate indeed is the tourist who must daily endure and misjudge the race from these pests, so exactly the ant.i.thesis of the courteous, uncovetous Spaniard of the working cla.s.s.

I had not yet removed the outer stain of travel when a vast excitement descended upon Granada,--it began to rain. On every hand sounded the slamming of doors, the creaking of unused shutters; from below came up the jangling of pans and the agitated voices of servants. The shower lasted nearly ten minutes, and was chronicled at length next day in all the newspapers of Spain.

From the edge of Granada city a long green aisle between exotic elms leads easily upward to the domain of the Alhambra. In its deep-shaded groves, so near yet seeming so far removed from the stony face of thirsty Spain, reigns a dream-inviting stillness, a quiet enhanced rather than broken by the murmur of captive brooks. For this, too, remains in memory of the Moor, that the waters of the Genii and Darro are still brought to play through a score of little stone channels beneath the trees. There I drifted each morning, other plans notwithstanding, to idle away the day on the gra.s.sy headland before and below which spreads the vastness of the province of Granada, or distressing the guardians of the ancient palace with my untourist-like loiterings. But for her fame the traveler would surely pa.s.s the Alhambra by as a half-ruined nest of bats and beggars. Yet within she retains much of her voluptuous splendor, despite the desolating of time and her prost.i.tution to a gaping-stock of tourists. Like so much of the Mussulman's building, the overshadowed palace is effeminate, seeming to speak aloud of that luxury and wantonness of the Moor in his decadent days before the iron-fisted reyes catolicos came to thrust him forth from his last European kingdom. In this she resembles the Taj Mahal; yet the difference is great. For the effeminacy of the Alhambra is the unrobustness of woman, while the Taj, like the Oriental man, is effeminate outwardly, superficially, beneath all which shows sound masculinity.

In the city below is only enough to be seen to give contrast to the half-effaced traces of magnificence on the hill. He who comes to Granada trusting to read in her the last word of the degradation of the once regal and all powerful must continue his quest. Of squalor and beggars she is singularly free--for Spain. Something of both remains for him who will wander through the Albaicin, peering into its cave-dwellings, wherein, and at times before which romp brown gypsy children garbed in the costume in which the reputed ancestor of us all set forth from the valley of Eden, or occasional jade-eyed hoydens of the grotto sunning their blacker tresses and mumbling crones plying their _bachi_ in conspicuous places. But even this seems rather a misery of parade than a reality, a theatrical lying-in-wait for the gullible _Busne_ from foreign sh.o.r.es.

By night there is life and movement in Granada; a strolling to and fro along the Alameda to the strains of a military band, the droning of the water-carriers who bring down lump by lump the ice-fields of the Sierra Nevada, and a dancing away of the summer night to the clatter of the castanet. But by day--once only during my stay was the languid pulse of the city stirred during the sunlit hours. A conscript regiment thundered in upon us, blocking all traffic and filling the air with a fog of dust that dispelled for a time my eagerness to seek again the open road; a dust that thick-shrouded beneath its drab the very color of caisson and uniform, dry-blanketing the panting horses, and streaking the faces of men and officers with figures like unto the ornamental writing on the inner walls of the Alhambra.

CHAPTER IV

THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR

Granada was sleeping a fitful Sunday siesta when I repacked my knapsack in the Casa Robledo. In the streets were only the fruit-sellers from the surrounding country, still faintly chanting over the half-empty baskets on the backs of their lolling a.s.ses. I paused to spend two "perros gordos" for as many pounds of cherries--for he who has once tasted the cherries of Granada has no second choice--and trudged away through the northern suburb leaving a trail of pits behind me.

The highway surmounted the last crest and swung down to the level of the plain. Like a sea of heat mist diked by the encircling mountains stretched the vega, looking across which one saw at a glance no fewer than a score of villages half concealed by an inundation of sunshine so physically visible that one observed with astonishment that the snow lay still unmelted on the peak of Mulhacen behind.

Yet for all the heat I would not have been elsewhere nor doing else than striking across the steaming vega of Granada. In such situations, I confess, I like my own company best. With the finest companion in the world a ten-mile tramp through this heat and dust would have been a labor like the digging of a ditch. Alone, with the imagination free to take color from the landscape, each petty inconvenience seemed but to put me the more in touch with the real Spain.

Just here lies the advantage of traveling in this half-tramp fashion.

The "personally conducted" traveler, too, sees the Alhambra; yet how slight is that compared with sharing the actual life of the Spanish people, which the tourist catches if at all in vagrant, posing fragments? To move through a foreign country shut up in a moving room, carrying with one the modern luxuries of home, is not travel; we call it so by courtesy and for lack of an exact term. "Il faut payer de sa personne." He who will gather the real honey of travel must be on the scene, a "super" at least on the stage itself, not gossiping with his fellows in a box.

With all its aridity the vega was richly productive. Olive-trees hung heavy, on either hand spread broad fields of grain in which peasants were toiling swelteringly as if they had never heard of the common sense inst.i.tution of Sunday. When sun and tree-tops met, the highway began to wind, leaving the vega behind and wandering through low hills among which appeared no villages, only an occasional rough-hewn house by the way. Toward twilight there opened a more verdant valley, and a stream, rising somewhere near at hand, fell in with the carretera and capered prattling along with it into the night.

It was ten perhaps when I came upon a lonely little venta by the wayside, a one-story building older than the modern world, serving both for dwelling and stable. The master of the house and her husband were both of that light-hearted gentry to whom life means nothing more than to be permitted good health and a place to eat an occasional _puchero_.

With these and a pair of mountain arrieros I gossiped until my eyelids grew heavy, and turned in on a husk mattress spread, like that of my hosts, on the kitchen floor.

At the first hint of dawn I was off and had set the sun a handicap of three miles or more before he began to ruddy the jagged chain to the eastward. The family was already at work, the arrieros wending on their southward way singing savage fragments of song; for like the Arab the rural andaluz sleeps full-dressed and springs instantly from bed to labor.

A country lightly populated continued. At high noon I reached a bath-inviting irrigating stream that wound through a grove of willows offering protection enough from the sun for a brief siesta. Soon after, the landscape grew savage and untenanted, and the carretera more and more constricted until it pa.s.sed, like a thread through the eye of a needle, through a short tunnel, built, said the inscription, by Isabel II--an example of exaggerated Spanish courtesy evidently, for history shouts a.s.surance that the activities of that lady were rather exclusively confined to less enduring works. Once released, the gorge expanded to a rambling valley with many orchards of apricots and plums, still walled, however, by hills so lofty that the sun deserted it early and gave the unusual sight of a lingering twilight.

From sunset until well into the night I kept sharp lookout for a public hostelry; but only a few peasants' hovels appeared, and with fifty-six kilometers in my legs I gave up the search and made my bed of a bundle of straw on a little nose of meadow above the highway. All through the night the tramp of a.s.ses and the cursing or singing of their drivers pa.s.sing below drifted into my dreams. The weather was not cold, yet in the most silent hour a chilliness half-arousing crept over me, and it was with a sense of relief that I awoke at last entirely and wandered on.

By daylight the hills receded somewhat, flattening themselves out to rolling uplands; the stream grew broad and noisy in its strength. Then suddenly at the turning of an abrupt hill Jaen rose before me, a city pitched on a rocky summit like the capping over a hayc.o.c.k, in the center the vast cathedral; the whole radiant with the flush of morning and surrounded by a soil as red as if the blood of all the Moorish wars were gathered here and mixed with the clay. The highway, catching sight of its goal, abandoned unceremoniously the guidance of the river and climbed with great strides up the red hillside into the town.

I had been so long up that the day seemed already far advanced. But Jaen was still half abed. I drifted into what was outwardly a little _cantina_, with zinc bar and shining spigots, but domestically the home of an amiable couple. The _cantinero_, lolling in the customary fat-man's att.i.tude behind the bar, woke with a start from the first of that day's siestas when I requested breakfast, while his spouse ceased her sweeping to cry out, "Como! Tan temprano! Why, it is scarcely eight o'clock!" The lady, however, gave evidence of an un-Spanish adaptability by rising to the occasion. While Senor Corpulence was still shaking his head condolingly, she called to the driver of a pa.s.sing flock of goats, one of which, under her watchful eye, yielded up a foaming cupful that tided me over until I sat down in the family dining-room to a breakfast such as is rarely forthcoming in Spain before high noon.

The cantina was no more a lodging-house than a restaurant. But so charming a couple was not to be lost sight of, and before the meal was ended I expressed a hope of making my home with them during my stay.

The landlord was taking breath to express his regrets when the matron, after a moment of hesitation, admitted that even that might be possible, adding however, with an air of mystery, that she could not be certain until toward night. I left my bundle and sauntered out into the city.

Jaen is a town of the Arab, a steep town with those narrow, sun-dodging streets that to the utilitarian are inexcusable but to all others give evidence of the wisdom of the Moor. Content, perhaps, with its past history, it is to-day a slow, serenely peaceful place riding at anchor in the stream of time and singularly free from that dread disease of doing something always. Unusually full it seemed of ingenuous, unhurrying old men engaged only in watching life glide by under the blue sky. I spent half the day chatting with these in the thirsting, dust-blown park in the center of the town. Their language was still a dialect of Andalusia, a bit more Castilian perhaps than on the southern coast, at any rate now grown as familiar as my own.

Each conversation was punctuated with cigarette smoke. Nothing in Spain is more nearly incessant than the rolling and burning of what Borrow dubbed in the days before the French word had won a place in our language "paper cigars." We of America are inclined to look upon indulgence in this form of the weed as a failing of youth, undignified at least in old men. Not so the Spaniard. Whatever his age or station in life--the policeman on his beat, the engineer at his throttle, the boy at his father's heels, the priest in his gown, puff eternally at their cigarillo. The express-check cashed in a Spanish bank is swallowed up in a cloud of smoke as thick as the fog that hovers over the Grand Banks; the directors who should attempt to forbid smoking in their establishment would in all probability be invited to hump over their own ledgers. The Spaniard is strikingly the ant.i.thesis of the American in this, that his "pleasures," his addictions come first and his work second. Let the two conflict and his work must be postponed or left undone. In contrast to his ceaseless smoking the Spaniard never chews tobacco; his language has no word for that habit.

To the foreigner who smokes Spain is no Promised Land. The ready-made cigarettes are an abomination, the tobacco a stringy s.h.a.g that grows endurable only with long enduring. Matches, like tobacco, are a fabrication--and a snare--of the government monopoly. Luckily, fire was long before matches were. These old men of Jaen one and all carried flint and steel and in lieu of tinder a coil of fibrous rope fitted with a nickled ring as extinguisher. Few peoples equal the Spaniard in eagerness and ability to "beat" the government.

I returned at evening to the wineshop to be greeted as a member of the household.

"You wondered," laughed the senora, "why I could not answer you this morning. It is because the spare room is rented to Don Luis, here, who works at night on the railroad. Meet Don Luis, who has just risen and given permission that you sleep in his bed, which I go now to spread with clean sheets."

The railway man was one of nature's satisfactions, a short solid fellow of thirty-five, overflowing with contagious cheerfulness. The libation incidental to our introduction being drained, the landlord led the way, chair in hand, to the bit of level flagging before the shop. As we sat "al fresco" drinking into our lungs the refreshing air of evening, we were joined by a well-dressed man whom I recalled having seen somewhere during the day. He was a lawyer, speaking a pure Castilian with scarcely a trace of the local patois, in short, one whom the caste rules of any other land of Europe would have forbidden to spend an evening in company with a tavern-keeper, a switchman, and a wandering unknown.

"How does it happen, senor," I asked, when our acquaintance had advanced somewhat, "that I saw you in the cathedral this morning?"

"The domain of women, priests and tourists?" he laughed. "Because, senor, it is the one place in town where I can get cool."

Truly the heat of a summer day in Jaen calls for some such drastic measure, for it grows estival, gigantic, weighing down alike on mind and body until one feels imperative necessity of escaping from it somehow, of running away from it somewhere; and there is no surer refuge than the cavernous cathedral.

This as well as the fact that the edifice contains considerable that is artistic led me back to it the next morning. But this time it was in the turmoil of a personally conducted party. When I had taken refuge in a shaded seat across the way, the flock poured out upon the broad stone steps and, falling upon a beggar, checked their flight long enough to bestow upon him a shower of pity and copper coins.

The mendicant was blind and crippled, outwardly a personification of grat.i.tude and humility, and attended by a gaunt-bellied urchin to whom might fittingly have been applied the Spanish appellation "child of misery." Long after the hubbub of the pa.s.sing tourists had died away in the tortuous city his meekly cadenced voice drifted on after them:

"Benditos sean, caballeros. Que Dios se lo pagara mil veces al cielo!"

A curiosity to know whether such gentleness were genuine held me for a time in my place across the way. Silence had settled down. Only a shopkeeper wandering by to a day of drowsing pa.s.sed now and then; within the great cathedral stillness reigned. The urchin ran after each pa.s.serby, wailing the familiar formula, only to be as often ordered off.

At length he ascended the steps stealthily and, creeping within a few feet of his master, lay down and was instantly lost in sleep, a luxury he had evidently not tasted for a fortnight.

The beggar rocked to and fro on his worthless stumps, now and again uttering as mournful a wail as if his soul had lost not one but all save a scattered half-dozen of its strings. Gradually the surrounding silence drew his attention. He thrust a hand behind one of his unhuman ears and listened intently. Not a sound stirred. He groped with his left hand along the stones, then with the right and, suddenly touching the sleeping child, a tremor of rage shivered through his misshapen carca.s.s. Feeling with his finger tips until he had located the boy's face, he raised his fist, which was ma.s.sive as that of a horsesh.o.e.r, high above his head and brought it down three times in quick succession.

They were blows to have shattered the panel of a door; but the boy uttered only a little stifled whine and, springing to his feet, took up again his task, now and then wiping away with a sleeve the blood that dripped from his face down along his tattered knees.

Before the sun had reached its full strength, I struck off to explore the barren bluff that overlooks Jaen on the south and east. Barely had I gained the first crest, however, before the inexorable leaden heat was again upon me, and the rest of the day was a perspiring labor. Only the reflection that real travel and sight-seeing is as truly work as any life's vocation lent starch to my wilted spirits.