“almost ran mad with joy and with astonishment. Especially the
evolutions and the leaps it made into the air moved him to admiration,
and going down upon all fours he leaped about and neighed.” Then, tired
with this practical manifestation of his joy and his astonishment, he
asked the Spanish name of the mysterious animal. When he learned that it
was caballo, he forthwith renounced his name, and from that day this
silly infidel was known as Caballito. Then when the soul-cleansing water
had been poured upon his head, he took the name of Pedro, and to his
dying day all the world called him “Don Pedro Caballito, for he was born
a Chief.”
This curious and pathetic little circumstance, by means of which a brand
was snatched red-hot from the eternal flames, lighted for those who have
deserved hell-fire by never having heard of it, might, one would think,
have shown the missionaries that the poor Indians were but children,
easier to lead than drive.
It only fired their zeal, and yet all their solicitude to save the
Indians’ souls was unavailing, and the hard-hearted savages, dead to the
advantages that baptism has ever brought with it, clave to their images.
The good Franciscans made several more attempts to move the people’s
hearts by preaching ceaselessly. All failed, and then they went to
several islands in the lake, in one of which Father Orbieta hardly had
begun to preach, when, as Lopez Cogulludo {114a} tells us, an Indian
seized him by the throat and nearly strangled him, leaving him senseless
on the ground.
At times, seated in church listening to what the Elizabethans called “a
painful preacher,” even the elect have felt an impulse to seize him by
the throat. Still, it is usually restrained; but these poor savages,
undisciplined in body and in mind, were perhaps to be excused, for the
full flavour of a sermon had never reached them in their Eden by the
lake. Moreover, after he was thus rudely cast from the pulpit to the
ground, Father Fuensalida, nothing daunted by his fate, stepped forward
and took up his parable. He preached to them this time in their own
language, in which he was expert, with fervid eloquence and great
knowledge of the Scriptures, {114b} explaining to them the holy mystery
of the incarnation of the eternal Word. {115} The subject was well
chosen for a first attempt upon their hearts; but it, too, proved
unfruitful, and the two friars were forced to re-embark.
As the canoe in which they sat moved from the island and launched out
into the lake, the infidels who stood and watched them paddling were
moved to fury, and, rushing to the edge, stoned them whole-heartedly till
they were out of reach.
It is a wise precaution, and one that the “conquistadores” usually
observed, to have the spiritual well supported by the secular arm when
missionaries, instinct with zeal and not weighed down with too much
common sense, preach for the first time to the infidel.
This first reverse was but an incident, and by degrees the friars, this
time accompanied by soldiers, explored more of the islands in the lake.
At last they came to one called Tayasal, which was so full of idols that
they took twelve hours to burn and to destroy them all.
One island still remained to be explored, and in it was a temple with an
idol much reverenced by the Indians. At last they entered it, and on a
platform about the height of a tall man they saw the figure of a horse
rudely carved out of stone.
The horse was seated on the ground resting upon his quarters, his hind
legs bent and his front feet stretched out. The barbarous infidels
{116a} adored the abominable and monstrous beast under the name of
Tziunchan, God of the Thunder and the Lightning, and paid it reverence.
Even the Spaniards, who, as a rule, were not much given to inquiring into
the history of idols, but broke them instantly, _ad majorem Dei gloriam_,
were interested and amazed. Little by little they learned the history of
the hippomorphous god, which had been carefully preserved. It appeared
that when Cortes had left his horse, so many years ago, the Indians,
seeing he was ill, took him into a temple to take care of him. Thinking
he was a reasoning animal, {116b} they placed before him fruit and
chickens, with the result that the poor beast—who, of course, was
reasonable enough in his own way—eventually died.
The Indians, terrified and fearful that Cortes would take revenge upon
them for the death of the horse that he had left for them to care for and
to minister to all his wants, before they buried him, carved a rude
statue in his likeness and placed it in a temple in the lake.
The devil, who, as Villagutierre observes, is never slack to take
advantage when he can, seeing the blindness and the superstition (which
was great) of those abominable idolaters, induced them by degrees to make
a God of the graven image they had made. Their veneration grew with
time, just as bad weeds grow up in corn, as Holy Writ sets forth for our
example, and that abominable statue became the chiefest of their gods,
though they had many others equally horrible.
As the first horses that they saw were ridden by the Spaniards in the
chase of the tame deer, and many shots were fired, the Indians not
unnaturally connected the explosions and the flames less with the rider
than the horse. Thus in the course of years the evolution of the great
god Tziunchan took place, and, as the missionaries said, these heathen
steeped in ignorance adored the work of their own hands.
Father Orbieta, not stopping to reflect that all of us adore what we have
made, but “filled with the spirit of the Lord and carried off with
furious zeal for the honour of our God,” {118} seized a great stone and
in an instant cast the idol down, then with a hammer he broke it into
bits.
When Father Orbieta had finished his work and thus destroyed one of the
most curious monuments of the New World, which ought to have been
preserved as carefully as if it had been carved by Praxiteles, “with the
ineffable and holy joy that filled him, his face shone with a light so
spiritual that it was something to praise God for and to view with
delight.” Most foolish actions usually inspire their perpetrators with
delight, although their faces do not shine with spiritual joy when they
have done them; so when one reads the folly of this muddle-headed friar,
it sets one hoping that several of the stones went home upon his back as
he sat paddling the canoe.
The Indians broke into lamentations, exclaiming, “Death to him, he has
killed our God”; but were prevented from avenging his demise by the
Spanish soldiers who prudently had accompanied the friar.
Thus was the mystery of the eternal Word made manifest amongst the
Maçotecas, and a deity destroyed who for a hundred years and more had
done no harm to any one on earth . . . a thing unusual amongst Gods.
XI
MUDEJAR
BROWN, severe, and wall-girt, the stubborn city still held out.
Its proud traditions made it impossible for Zaragoza to capitulate
without a siege. As in the days of Soult, when the heroic maid, the
_artillera_, as her countrymen call her with pride, when Palafox held up
the blood and orange banner in which float the lions and the castles of
Castille, the city answered shot for shot.
Fire spurted from the Moorish walls, built by the Beni Hud, who reigned
in Zaragoza, when still Sohail poured its protecting rays upon the land.
The bluish wreaths of smoke curled on the Ebro, running along the water
and enveloping the Coso as if in a mist.
A dropping rifle-fire crackled out from the ramparts, and above the
castle the red flag of the Intransigent-Republic shivered and fluttered
in the breeze.
The Torre-Nueva sprang from the middle of the town, just as a palm tree
rises from the desert sands. It was built at the time when Moorish
artisans, infidel dogs who yet preserved the secrets of the East amongst
the Christians (may dogs defile their graves), had spent their science
and their love upon it.
Octagonal, and looking as if blown into the air by the magician’s art, it
leaned a little to one side, and, as the admiring inhabitants averred,
drawing their right hands open over their left arms, laughed at its rival
of Bologna and at every other tower on earth.
No finer specimen of the art known as Mudejar existed in all Spain.
Galleries cut it here and there; and ajimeces, the little horseshoe
windows divided by a marble pillar, loved of the Moors, which tradition
says they took from the rude openings in their tents of camel’s hair,
gave light to the inside. Stages of inclined planes led to the top, so
gradual in their ascent that once a Queen of Spain had ridden up them to
admire the view over the Sierras upon her palfrey, or her donkey, for all
is one when treating of a queen, who of a certainty ennobles the animal
she deigns to ride upon. Bold ajaracas, the patterns proper to the style
of architecture, stood up in high relief upon its sides, and near the
balustrade upon the top a band of bluish tiles relieved the brownness of
the brickwork and sparkled in the sun. Sieges and time and storms, rain,
wind, and snow had spared it; even the neglect of centuries had left it
unimpaired—erect and elegant as a young Arab maiden carrying water from
the well. Architects said that it inclined a little more each year, and
talked about subsidences; but they were foreigners, unused to the things
of Spain, and no one marked them; and the tower continued to be loved and
prized and to fall into disrepair. On this occasion riflemen lined the
galleries, pouring a hot fire upon the attacking forces of the
Government.
Encamped upon the heights above Torero, the Governmental army held the
banks of the canal that gives an air of Holland to that part of the adust
and calcined landscape of Aragon.
The General’s quarters overlooked the town, and from them he could see
Santa Engracia, in whose crypt repose the bodies of the martyrs in an
atmosphere of ice, standing alone upon its little plaza, fringed by a
belt of stunted and ill-grown acacia trees. The great cathedral, with
its domes, in which the shrine of the tutelary Virgin of the Pilar, the
Pilarica of the country folk, glittering with jewels and with silver
plate, is venerated as befits the abiding place on earth of the
miraculous figure sent direct from heaven, towered into the sky.
Churches and towers and convents, old castellated houses with their
overhanging eaves and coats-of-arms upon the doors, jewels of
architecture, memorials of the past, formed as it were a jungle wrought
in a warm brown stone. Beyond the city towered the mountains that hang
over Huesca of the Bell. Through them the Aragon has cut its roaring
passages towards Sobrarbe to the south. Northwards they circle Jaca, the
virgin little city that beat off the Moors a thousand years ago, and
still once every year commemorates her prowess outside the walls, where
Moors and Christians fight again the unequal contest, into which St.
James, mounted upon his milk-white charger, had plunged and thrown the
weight of his right arm. The light was so intense and African that on
the mountain sides each rock was visible, outlined as in a camera-lucida,
and as the artillery played upon the tower the effects of every salvo
showed up distinctly on the crumbling walls. All round the Government’s
encampment stood groups of peasantry who had been impressed together with
their animals to bring provisions. Wrapped in their brown and white
checked blankets, dressed in tight knee-breeches, short jackets, and grey
stockings, and shod with alpargatas—the canvas, hemp-soled sandals that
are fastened round the ankles with blue cords—they stood and smoked,
stolid as Moors, and as unfathomable as the deep mysterious corries of
their hills.
When the artillery thundered and the breaches in the walls grew daily
more apparent and more ominous, the country people merely smiled, for
they were sure the Pilarica would preserve the city; and even if she did
not, all Governments, republican or clerical, were the same to them.
All their ambition was to live quietly, each in his village, which to him
was the hub round which the world revolved.
So one would say, as they stood watching the progress of the siege:
“Chiquio, the sciences advance a bestiality, the Government in the
Madrids can hear each cannon-shot. The sound goes on those wires that
stretch upon the posts we tie our donkeys to when we come into town. . . .”
Little by little the forces of the Government advanced, crossing the Ebro
at the bridge which spans it in the middle of the great double promenade
called the Coso, and by degrees drew near the walls.
The stubborn guerrilleros in the town contested every point of vantage,
fighting like wolves, throwing themselves with knives and scythes stuck
upright on long poles upon the troops.
So fought their grandfathers against the French, and so Strabo describes
their ancestors, adding, “The Spaniard is a taciturn, dark man, usually
dressed in black; he fights with a short sword, and always tries to come
to close grips with our legionaries.”
As happens in all civil wars, when brother finds himself opposed to
brother, the strife was mortal, and he who fell received no mercy from
the conqueror.
The riflemen upon the Torre Nueva poured in their fire, especially upon
the Regiment of Pavia, whose Colonel, Don Luis Montoro, on several
occasions gave orders to the artillerymen at any cost to spare the tower.
Officer after officer fell by his side, and soldiers in the ranks cursed
audibly, covering the saints with filth, as runs the phrase in Spanish,
and wondering why their Colonel did not dislodge the riflemen who made
such havoc in their files. Discipline told at last, and all the
Intransigents were forced inside the walls, leaving the moat with but a
single plank to cross it by which to reach the town. Upon the plank the
fire was concentrated from the walls, and the besiegers stood for a space
appalled, sheltering themselves as best they could behind the trees and
inequalities of the ground.
Montoro called for volunteers, and one by one three grizzled soldiers,
who had grown grey in wars against the Moors, stepped forward and fell
pierced with a dozen wounds.
After a pause there was a movement in the ranks, and with a sword in his
right hand, and in his left the colours of Castille, his brown stuff gown
tucked up showing his hairy knees knotted and muscular, out stepped a
friar, and strode towards the plank. Taking the sword between his teeth
he crossed himself, and beckoning on the men, rushed forward in the
thickest of the fire.
He crossed in safety, and then the regiment, with a hoarse shout of “Long
live God,” dashed on behind him, some carrying planks and others crossing
upon bales of straw, which they had thrown into the moat. Under the
walls they formed and rushed into the town, only to find each house a
fortress and each street blocked by a barricade. From every window dark
faces peered, and a continual fusillade was poured upon them, whilst from
the house-tops the women showered down tiles.
Smoke filled the narrow streets, and from dark archways groups of
desperate men came rushing, armed with knives, only to fall in heaps
before the troops who, with fixed bayonets, steadily pushed on.
A shift of wind cleared off the smoke and showed the crimson flag still
floating from the citadel, ragged and torn by shots. Beyond the town
appeared the mountains peeping out shyly through the smoke, as if they
looked down on the follies of mankind with a contemptuous air.
Dead bodies strewed the streets, in attitudes half tragical, half
ludicrous, some looking like mere bundles of old clothes, and some
distorted with a stiff arm still pointing to the sky.
Right in the middle of a little square the friar lay shot through the
forehead, his sword beside him, and with the flag clasped tightly to his
breast.
His great brown eyes stared upwards, and as the soldiers passed him some
of them crossed themselves, and an old sergeant spoke his epitaph: “This
friar,” he said, “was not of those fit only for the Lord; he would have
made a soldier, and a good one; may God have pardoned him.”
Driven into the middle plaza of the town, the Intransigents fought till
the last, selling their lives for more than they were worth, and dying
silently.
The citadel was taken with a rush, and the red flag hauled down.
Bugles rang out from the other angle of the plaza; the General and his
staff rode slowly forward to meet the Regiment of Pavia as it debouched
into the square.
Colonel Montoro halted, and then, saluting, advanced towards his chief.
His General, turning to him, angrily exclaimed, “Tell me, why did you let
those fellows in the tower do so much damage, when a few shots from the
field guns would have soon finished them?”
Montoro hesitated, and recovering his sword once more saluted as his
horse fretted on the curb, snorting and sidling from the dead bodies that
were strewed upon the ground.
“My General,” he said, “not for all Spain and half the Indies would I
have trained the cannon on the tower; it is Mudejar of the purest
architecture.”
His General smiled at him a little grimly, and saying, “Well, after all,
this is no time to ask accounts from any man,” touched his horse with the
spur and, followed by his staff, he disappeared into the town.
XII
A MINOR PROPHET
THE city sweltered in the August heat. No breath of air lifted the pall
of haze that wrapped the streets, the houses, and the dark group of
Græco-Roman buildings that stands up like a rock in the dull tide-way of
the brick-built tenements that compose the town.
Bells pealed at intervals, summoning the fractioned faithful to their
various centres of belief.
When they had ceased and all the congregations were assembled listening
to the exhortations of their spiritual advisers, and were employed
fumbling inside their purses, as they listened, for the destined
“threepenny,” that obolus which gives respectability to alms, the silence
was complete. Whitey-brown paper bags, dropped overnight, just stirred
occasionally as the air swelled their bellies, making them seem alive, or
as alive as is a jelly-fish left stranded by the tide.
Just as the faithful were assembled in their conventicles adoring the
same Deity, all filled with rancour against one another because their
methods of interpretation of the Creator’s will were different, so did
the politicians and the cranks of every sort and sect turn out to push
their methods of salvation for mankind. In groups they gathered round
the various speakers who discoursed from chairs and carts and points of
vantage on the streets.
Above the speakers’ heads, banners, held up between two poles, called on
the audiences to vote for Liberal or for Tory, for Poor Law Reform, for
Social Purity, and for Temperance. Orators, varying from well-dressed
and glibly-educated hacks from party centres, to red-faced working-men,
held forth perspiring, and occasionally bedewing those who listened to
them with saliva, after an emphatic burst.
It seemed so easy after listening to them to redress all wrongs, smooth
out all wrinkles, and instate each citizen in his own shop where he could
sell his sweated goods, with the best advantage to himself and with the
greatest modicum of disadvantage to his neighbour, that one was left
amazed at the dense apathy of those who did not fall in with the nostrums
they had heard. Again, at other platforms, sleek men in broadcloth, who
had never seen a plough except at Agricultural Exhibitions, nor had got
on closer terms of friendship with a horse than to be bitten by him as
they passed along a street, discoursed upon the land.
“My friends, I say, the land is a fixed quantity, you can’t increase it,
and without it, it’s impossible to live. ’Ow is it, then, that all the
land of England is in so few hands?” He paused and mopped his face, and
looking round, began again: “Friends—you’ll allow me to style you
Friends, I know, Friends in the sycred cause of Liberty—the landed
aristocracy is our enemy.
“I am not out for confiscation, why should I? I ’ave my ’ome purchased
with the fruits of my own hhonest toil . . .”
Before he could conclude his sentence, a dock labourer, dressed in his
Sunday suit of shoddy serge, check shirt, and black silk handkerchief
knotted loosely round his neck, looked up, and interjected: “’Ard work,
too, mate, that ’ere talkin’ in the sun is, that built your ’ome. Beats
coal whippin’.”
Just for an instant the orator was disconcerted as a laugh ran through
the audience; but habit, joined to a natural gift of public speaking,
came to his aid, and he rejoined: “Brother working-men, I say ditto to
what has fallen from our friend ’ere upon my right. We all are
working-men. Some of us, like our friend, work with their ’ands, and
others with their ’eds. In either case, the Land is what we ’ave to get
at as an article of prime necessity.”
Rapidly he sketched a state of things in which a happy population, drawn
from the slums, but all instinct with agricultural knowledge, would be
settled on the land, each on his little farm, and all devoted to
intensive culture in the most modern form. Trees would be all cut down,
because they only “’arbour” birds that eat the corn. Hedges would all be
extirpated, for it is known to every one that mice and rats and animals
of every kind live under them, and that they only serve to shelter game.
Each man would own a gun and be at liberty to kill a “rabbut” or a
“’are”—“animals, as we say at college, _feery naturrey_, and placed by
Providence upon the land.”
These noble sentiments evoked applause, which was a little mitigated by
an interjection from a man in gaiters, with a sunburnt face, of: “Mister,
if every one is to have a gun and shoot, ’ow long will these ’ere ’ares
and rabbuts last?”
A little farther on, as thinly covered by his indecently transparent veil
of reciprocity as a bare-footed dancer in her Grecian clothes, or a tall
ostrich under an inch of sand, and yet as confident as either of them
that the essential is concealed, a staunch Protectionist discoursed.
With copious notes, to which he turned at intervals, when he appealed to
those statistics which can be made in any question to fit every side, he
talked of loss of trade. “Friends, we must tax the foreigner. It is
this way, you see, our working classes have to compete with other
nations, all of which enjoy protective duties. I ask you, is it
reasonable that we should let a foreign article come into England?”
Here a dour-looking Scotsman almost spat out the words: “Man, can ye no
juist say Great Britain?” and received a bow and “Certainly, my friend, I
am not here to wound the sentiments of any man . . . as I was saying, is
it reasonable that goods should come to England . . . I mean Great
Britain, duty free, and yet articles we manufacture have to pay heavy
duties in any foreign port?”
“’Ow about bread?” came from a voice upon the outskirts of the crowd.
The speaker reddened, and resumed: “My friend, man doth not live by bread
alone; still, I understand the point. A little dooty upon corn, say five
shillings in the quarter, would not hurt any one. We’ve got to do it.
The foreigner is the enemy. I am a Christian; but yet, readin’ as I
often do the Sermon on the Mount, I never saw we had to lie down in the
dust and let ourselves be trampled on.
“Who are to be the inheritors of the earth? Our Lord says, ‘Blessed are
the meek; they shall inherit it.’”
He paused, and was about to clinch his argument, when a tall Irishman,
after expectorating judiciously upon a vacant space between two
listeners, shot in: “Shure, then, the English are the meekest of the lot,
for they have got the greater part of it.”
At other gatherings Socialists held forth under the red flag. “That
banner, comrades, which ’as braved a ’undred fights, and the mere sight
of which makes the Capitalistic bloodsucker tremble as he feels the time
approach when Lybor shall come into its inheritance and the Proletariat
shyke off its chaine and join ’ands all the world over, despizin’ ryce
and creed and all the artificial obstructions that a designin’
Priest-’ood and a blood-stained Plutocracy ’ave placed between them to
distract their attention from the great cause of Socialism, the great
cause that mykes us comrades . . . ’ere, keep off my ’oof, you blighter,
with your ammunition wagons. . . .”