Romantic Spain Volume I Part 1

Romantic Spain.

by John Augustus O'Shea.

VOL 1.

PREFACE.

This simple recital of personal haps and mishaps in perturbed Spain from the abdication of Amadeus to the entry of Don Carlos, puts forward no claim to the didactic or dogmatic. Its chief aim is to amuse. Of course, if I succeed in conveying knowledge and dispelling illusions--in Ta.s.so's words, if I administer a pill under a coating of jam--I shall be c.o.c.k-a-hoop with delight. But I warn the reader I am not an unprejudiced witness. I am pa.s.sionately fond of Spain and her people. Although years have elapsed since the events dealt with occurred, I fancy the narrative will not be hackneyed, for in Spain public life repeats itself with a fidelity which is never monotonous. I do not pretend to cast the horoscope of the poor little monarch who is in the nurse's arms, but Heaven guard him! 'Twere better for him that he had been born in a Highland shieling.

Should there be much individualism in these pages, it is intentional, and to be ascribed to the instance of friends. They said, "Bother history; give us plenty of your own experiences." It is to be hoped they have not led me astray by their well-meant advice.

ROMANTIC SPAIN.

CHAPTER I.

Which, being non-essential, treats partly of Spain, but princ.i.p.ally of the Writer.

The sun was shining with a Spanish l.u.s.tre--a l.u.s.tre as of glowing sarcasm--seeing that on that very day a Fire-Worshipper, Dadabhai Naoroji, was over-shadowed in his attempt to become a Member of Parliament for Holborn. The sun, I repeat, was shining with a Spanish l.u.s.tre while the inquisition was being held. The tribunal was in the open air, under the mid plane-tree in Camberwell Green, the trimmest public garden in London. Conscience was the inquisitor, and the charge I had brought against myself was that of harbouring a vagrom spirit. I should have been born in a gipsy caravan or under a Bedaween's tent.

Nature intended me to have become a traveller, a showman, or a knight-errant; and had Nature been properly seconded, I should have been doing something Burnabyish, Barnumesque, or Quixotic this afternoon, instead of sitting down on a bench between a tremulous old man in almshouse livery and a small boy fanning himself with a cap. Yes; I fear I must plead guilty. I am possessed by a demon of unrest; my soul chafes at inaction, calls aloud for excitement. Had I the ordering of my own fortune I should spread the white wings of a yacht to woo the faint wind (but it may be blowing freshly off the Foreland), or should vault on the back of a neighing barb with bushy mane and tail. But I am Ixion-lashed to the wheel of duty, leg-hampered by the log of necessity.

What is a gentle-born vagabond to do?

The law will not permit him to pink with his sword-stick the first smug fellow he meets on the side-path, self-respect debars him from highway-robbery which can be perpetrated without fear of the law, and it is idle to expect a revolution in this humdrum country within any reasonable period. A General Election which is going on, with its paltry show of coloured strips of calico, its printed appeals to the gullible, its occasional bits of ribbon and bursts of cheering, its egotisms, its stupidities, its self-seekings, its shabby intrigues and simulated fire, its dull, dreary, drivelling floods of witless substance in ungrammatical form--that, surely, is no satisfying subst.i.tute for the tumult of real political strife.

Motion is the sovereign remedy for the vagabond's disease, and lo!

through the leafy barrier of the pollarded limes bordering the Green, jingle the bells of the tram-car with its trotting team of three abreast. Three mules, which bring my thoughts to Spain, and to a letter I have had from my publishers, satirically asking how soon they might expect the last pages of a promised book on the land of the Dons, the first line of which is not yet committed to paper. I must think over that book as I jog along the grooves of the street rails, and survey the prospect from the roof. How do those mules on the flanks manage to avoid knocking their hoofs against the metal-ruts, and tripping themselves up? What a stand-and-deliver air the conductor has as he presents his snip-snap apparatus, like the brutal key of the primitive dentist, and viciously punches an orifice in your ticket! For these conductors, as for letter-carriers, I have a profound sympathy; they are over-worked and under-paid; and yet they enjoy motion in abundance. But there is a poetry of motion, as when charging squadrons skim the plain, or a graceful girl with dainty ankles trips across the beeswaxed floor; and there is a prose of motion, as of a policeman plodding over his beat, or the Sisyphus-toil of the treadmill. I ask myself, Will a tram-conductor ever write a poem? Hardly, I think; and yet, why not? Was not Edward Capern, who achieved some smooth verses, a letter-carrier?

New Cross, our terminus so far. Over the way is another tram, which will take us to Greenwich for the outlay of another twopence. Shortly it will be one continuous avenue of pretentious masonry, from the Thames at Blackfriars to the Thames by the naval palace, instead of the former pleasant drive through Surrey fields. With what a fever they are building, terrace upon terrace, street upon street, interminable rows of villas in line or semi-detached! The patches of verdure, so refreshing to the jaded city eye, are diminishing in size and lessening in number.

I like Greenwich; but they should never have removed the veterans of the ocean from it. Dear to the soul of youth, hankering for the strange and the stirring, were their three-cornered hats, their wooden stumps, their withered monkey-jaws puffed with quids, and their hoa.r.s.e, squall-tearing voices. What a consuming thirst they had, and with what heroic industry they did tell lies! Peter of Russia was right: the sovereigns of England, the sea-rulers, should hold court in Greenwich. The Park with its fallow-deer is regal; the Painted Hall is eloquent with historic memories; the initial meridian is an imposing address; and then the Thames--but here, we are at it. A steamer awaits, and will carry us to the heart of London for a groat.

How dingy, dirty, despicable most of those steamers are! with their low-roofed, grimy cabins; their irritating hawkers of hat-strings and small beer; their stale stock of mawkish refections; their job-lot orchestras of wheeze and pipe and sc.r.a.pe and tootle; their smell of bilge and oil, sweat and cheap cigars, overtopped at holiday-times by the sulphurous oath or the rank obscenity of some reeling pa.s.senger. And yet how skilfully they thread their way through the crowded Pool; how readily they answer the wheel; with what ease they slow or quicken their run, and dart hither and thither; and with what nicety they are brought alongside the floating wharf! I wonder do the skippers of these boats move their hands in their dreams. Is the finger-sign for "Back her,"

that they use at home when they wish to replenish their pipes?

Collisions there may be, explosions there have been; but the career of the mariner who plies between Chelsea Pier and the port of Woolwich must be singularly free from such vicissitudes as shipwreck or failure of provisions; he is seldom caught in a tornado, or banged into by a privateer; he rarely knocks up against an iceberg, or gets a glimpse of the Flying Dutchman; sharks he may not study, except, perhaps, in the Westminster Aquarium, and when he dies he is trenched in commonplace clay. I cannot picture such a mariner to myself as having the spirit to e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e, "Shiver my timbers!"

The sight of a vessel from Seville laden with fruit and wine recalls me to that letter from the publishers and the book anent Spain. Not a word of it written yet. _They_ will be shivering _my_ timbers if I have it not ready in season. But I am not of those, like Anthony Trollope, who can sit down to their desks and turn out so many pages of copy at a stretch mechanically, much as a tinglary with its rotating handle grinds out a series of tunes. I cannot write unless I am in the mood, and that, I find, depends on the state of health and the absence of mental worry.

The brain with some people refuses to become a piece of machinery. Of motion is often born inspiration--Hermes, G.o.d of oratory, is represented with _petasus_ and _talaria_--and I am enjoying motion.

"Ease her--stop her!" Blackfriars Bridge, and here I quit the steamer's deck for the tram that will take me back to the place whence I came, and so enable me to have made a diversified circular tour by land and water for the expenditure of tenpence. Who would waste his substance on coach-men and high-steppers; who would envy Sir Thomas Bra.s.sey his lordly pleasure-craft, when this round of travel, with its buoyant sense of independence at the end, can be accomplished for tenpence? And now I shall hie me to a bar I wot of, and with the two pence that remain of my splendid shilling, I shall cheer the inner man with a clear, cool, mantling gla.s.s of foam-crowned bitter beer.

The beer ought to be good in Camberwell, for here Mrs. Thrale lived of yore, and the ponderous lexicographer took his walks, and mused on the vanity of human wishes. We have breweries still, and we have groves, even groves of Academus, where one may laugh; for are they not sacred to the shades of the two Hoods and Jeff Prowse, the "Nicholas" of _Fun_, as to Nick Woods, the Napier-recorder of Inkermann, and to a.s.sociations with William Black, Henry Bessemer, and John Ruskin, master of art, which is something more, and more significant, than that _Magister Artium_ which persons doubtful of their gifts or station ostentatiously affix to their names? And in our groves we have such variety of arborescent prizes as no other district of London can boast, extending to the arbutus or strawberry-tree, and the liriodendron or tulip-tree.

The liriodendron has been planted in Palace Yard, in the hope that the breath of wholesomeness, genial to its native America, shall permeate the badly-ventilated atmosphere of the adjacent House of Commons. I love trees as if I were suckled by a hamadryad. May he who cuts them down to build whereon they stood taste the bitterness of Acheron!

And Camberwell Green, which I dearly affect, is it not replete with every modern convenience, as those ambitious amateurs who write the auction-bills are wont to phrase it? There is a bank where you may cash a cheque; two public-houses where you may spend great part of it fuddling yourself; a police-station where you may sleep the fuddle off; a pillar-box where a letter may be posted summoning a bail to your aid; a drinking-fountain where you may slake your thirst when you come out penitent from the police-office; a Turkish-bath, with a crescent-and-star daubed piece of bunting over it, where you may knead your frame into sobriety; a hairdresser's where you may make yourself presentable; a stationer's where my friend Morris will lavishly dose you with the tonic of moral apothegm; and, right opposite, a horse-trough where you may give yourself the ducking you deserve.

Inside the tavern, where I sought the beer, I met a financier, a shrewd fellow of a gross habit of body and a dry wit. He is accountant to a firm of book-makers, and can hold his own with the tongue; he married into the family of a late eminent prizefighter, and, with the connection, seems to have acquired the talent of holding his own with the fist. I like Wat much, and have obtained various sc.r.a.ps of desultory information from him which are useful.

Imprimis, that a penny ticket on a river-steamer on a Sunday const.i.tutes a man as _bona fide_ a traveller as Henry M. Stanley, and endows him with the privilege of getting liquid comfort within prohibited hours.

Item, that the cigars on the outside of a bundle, and therefore indented with the tape, are generally the best.

Item, that if there is hide or pelt on a carcase before a butcher's stall, you may take for granted it is a British carcase. Foreign meat has to be skinned to avoid the risk of importation of cattle-disease.

And, ultimately, that if you are about to drown yourself in the Thames, and are anxious to avert identification, the best spot to throw yourself off is in the neighbourhood of a ship at moorings, as then you are likely to be drawn under her and kept in the chains for months.

Some readers who are unaware that there were no gentlemen with coat-armour in the College of Apostles, may object that in presenting them to Wat I am introducing them to low society; but I can a.s.sure them that I have seen a very respectable Duke hail-fellow-well-met with a jockey, and my friend Wat has a far fuller education than the primest of jockeys. He is apt and accurate in quotations from English literature; and if you venture to make Greeks "meet" Greeks in his presence, or talk of fresh "fields" and pastures new, or attribute the tempering of the wind to the shorn lamb to Holy Writ, he will lay you ten to one in sovereigns you are wrong, and win your money. He is also a champion orthographist, and will back himself to spell English words against any man in the British Empire for 500, bar words technical.

"Ah," he said, "my n.o.ble! is it true you are going on a lecturing-tour next winter?"

"If G.o.d but spare me health and lung-power I am," was my reply.

"And wherefore, may I ask? Can you not do better at the desk?"

"The desk is monotonous; besides, I yearn for change, and I may be able to freshen up my ideas, and set down some notes in my tables. 'Twill improve intellectual and physical health."

"It will, of course," agreed Wat. "For instance, it will be perfectly delightful journeying to Inverness, say, in the depth of December."

"As it so happens, I am booked for Inverness on a date in that month."

Wat stared at me. "Do you know," he said, "'tis a far cry to Loch Awe, and Inverness is at the other side of Loch Awe? Thither and back from where we stand is eleven hundred and ninety miles."

I was surprised; I had not entered into these details; but I held my peace.

"Have you got many engagements?"

"Yes; the first was from Dollar, which I accept as a good omen; and, curiously enough, 'tis not in the United States."

"No," said Wat; "'tis between Edinburgh and Stirling. What fee do they tender you there?"

I told him.

"Ahem!" he continued, fondling his chin as he spoke. "If you don't c.u.mber yourself with luggage--a courier-bag will do--and if you bus it to King's Cross, and stop at a temperance hotel in 'Auld Reekie,' and give servants no tips, and condescend to all invitations, with a wise economy, I take it, you won't drop more than five-and-twenty shillings on that transaction."

"How! What do you mean? You surely are not serious?"

"Why, the railway return fare to Edinburgh alone is five-pun-nine-and-six; and that will burn a hole in your fee."

"Perhaps," I ventured, not to look foolish, "I may have means of getting to Edinburgh for nothing."

"Ah!" said Wat, with a sigh and a sorrowful sententiousness, "if you think you can try on that, well and good; but I'm getting so precious fat that I can no longer hide myself under a seat!"