AN OLD SPANISH MINIATURE.
"When Charlemain with all his peerage fell,
By Fontarabia."
--MILTON.
The next day an indolent morning train draws us back to the frontier.
The landscape is rather shadeless; "a Spaniard hates a tree." It should
be but a twenty-minute ride, and so, it being short at the longest, we
do not have time to grudge the additional twenty consumed in
"indolencing." The time-table allowed for that, and so prepared us. It
is when larger times are involved,--when a four-hour ride is inflated to
eight, and an eight-hour trip to fifteen, as in going to Burgos,--that
the corporate deliberateness of the Spanish railways ceases to be a
curiosity, and becomes a crime.
We are soon in Irun once more, and after change of cars, cross to
Hendaye, and baggage is inspected for France. The train goes on its way
north, but we stay in Hendaye, to lunch, and to make our projected
excursion to Fuenterrabia.
In terms of logic, San Sebastian the modern has in Fuenterrabia the
ancient its full "contradictory." The one, the resort, is affirmative
and universal; the other, the old, strange town, is negative and
individual. The one has told us little of old Spain; we turn hopefully
to the other.
Fuenterrabia lies near the mouth of the Bidassoa, on the Spanish side of
the stream, below Irun. It is but two miles, from Irun, and readily
reached from that place by carriage; from Hendaye, on the French side,
one reaches it by row-boat in about the same time, with the additional
zest and boast of recrossing the river and of entering and leaving Spain
once more.
II.
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 competition, as vociferous
at Hendaye as at Killarney or the Crossmon. We elect two of the
competitors 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 shore
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 Bidassoa stream,"--thus
runs the legend so charmingly recounted in _The Sun-Maid_,--"they tell
the ancient story that a favored mortal won from the gods 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, passionate, 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 gods 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 passports 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 passed 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
formulæ. 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, associated with moonlight and mandolins, serenades and
señoritas, 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 competition. 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 mediæval 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 mass 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 sanctity. 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
façade facing the square is somewhat later, and the other façade was
rebuilt by Charles V. We pass 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:
[Illustration: 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 _châteaux 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,
pricking o'er the plaine, perchance here was dancing and wassail. 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 passing 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:
[Illustration: For Sale]