FROM BIARRITZ TO BURGOS.
Biarritz disappoints one at first, and then grows upon one. It is like a
jumble of Ilfracombe, Westgate-on-Sea, the Land’s End, Ostend, and
Broadstairs. The sea dashes in gloriously, and makes tremendous breaches
in coast and cliff. The hotels are as grand as money can make them, and
on the Parade, in all their glory, I came suddenly upon Mary Ann and
Susan, two English nursemaids, in the usual hats and feathers, and the
usual imitation fur-trimmed jackets, and the usual fingers through the
gloves, wheeling unmistakable English perambulators, full of
unmistakable English babies; and when, later on, I came upon Eliza Jane
sitting down and reading the _London Journal_ while _her_ perambulator
was gently working itself, baby and all, over the parade on to the
beach, I actually looked up and down and round about for the Life
Guardsman.
The French _bonnes_ and the Basque nurses, so clean, so neatly dressed,
must have been considerably astonished when Mary Ann and Eliza Jane
first came from Clapham to the Bay of Biscay. Even now they eye their
ostrich feathers, their brooches, and their fur-trimmed jackets with
awe. I earnestly trust the awe is not mixed with admiration. It would be
a very terrible thing if the neat and picturesque French _bonne_,
corrupted by the English example, suddenly broke out into hats and
feathers, and bad boots and rusty finger-twisted gloves. The downfall of
France would then be assured. Whichever way I turn, the British
nursemaid meets me and defies me. I sit down to contemplate a grand
effect of wave-washed rock, and a female voice behind me shouts to
Master Tommy not to go too near the edge; I climb the cliffs and gaze at
the distant coast of Spain, and a little imp in a sailor costume, with a
broken spade and a sand-grimed bucket, assaults me with, ‘Please, sir,
can you tell me the time?’ I find a lovely romantic spot right out on
the extreme ledge of an overhanging rock, and, on turning round to look
back at the town, I see a young woman behind me nursing a baby and
reading the _Family Herald_. When I rise and fly to the streets for
refuge, when I gaze into the shop windows at the fans and tambourines of
Spain, the English nursemaid still pursues me. A perambulator is wheeled
across my heels, and the wheeleress says, ‘Beg yer pardon, sir; I ‘ope I
didn’t ‘urt you!’
Ye gods! Is it for this I have travelled many hundreds of miles? Is it
for this I have been saturating myself with the language and the legends
of the Basques? I go to an hotel and order my lunch. At the next table
to me are a young gentleman and a young lady. The young gentleman says,
‘Are you coming to the lawn-tennis ground this afternoon?’ and the young
lady replies, ‘No; Jack’s going to drive me to St. Jean de Luz in his
dogcart.’ It is all English--everywhere English, and nothing but
English. The stationers’ shops are full of English valentines and
English books; the grocers’ shops display English jams and English
pickles; the chemists’ shops have their windows stocked with English
patent medicines, and English pills and English plaisters; and, as I
live, when I turn to make a mad dash for the railway-station, two
little boys come along arm-in-arm, and as they walk they whistle
‘Grandfather’s Clock'!
Oh, for the lost illusions of my youth! Oh, for the Biarritz of my
dreams! I am at Margate; I am at Brighton; I am at Eastbourne; I am
anywhere and everywhere on the coast of England; but I can’t possibly be
on the Biscayan shores, and almost within hail of the Spanish coast!
Sadly I enter the train, and return to Bayonne and a foreign land. I
like England _in_ England; but to come to Biarritz and find everything
British, to be abroad and to be run down by London nursemaids, and to
have ‘Grandfather’s Clock’ all over again, is worse than earthquakes to
me.
After the shock of the English nursemaids wore off, I appreciated
Biarritz at its true value, and I ceased to wonder that it had such a
large winter colony of English. All along this coast there are huge
hotels, which are kept open in the winter solely on account of the
English. At St. Jean de Luz, a lovely little seaside spot, I saw a whole
dozen of English Mary Janes and Sarah Anns sitting on the Parade in the
warm sunshine, and talking, I suppose, of the lovers they had left in
dear old England far away. While I was in the post-office, an English
nursemaid came in and sat down at the table, and put the stamps lovingly
on a letter she had in her hand, and I was curious enough to look over
her shoulder and read the address. It was ‘Private John Smith, The
Barracks, Chelsea.’ How I wished I could see under the envelope! I
should like to read a description of life on the Basque coasts from the
pen of a true-born British nursemaid, reared in all the insular
prejudices and antipathies.
If I had to choose the spot where I would spend my winter, it would not
be Biarritz or St. Jean de Luz, but San Sebastian, the Spanish
watering-place, where in the season the Spanish aristocracy are so
numerous you can walk on their heads. I should want a chapter to do
justice to this glorious spot, so I must pass it by with just a nod of
friendly recognition, and continue my journey--a journey which was
nearly being interrupted in a manner which, much as I desire novel
experiences, I am heartily glad that I was spared.
My original idea was to return from Bayonne to Bordeaux, and then take
the Pacific mail steamer for Lisbon, working from thence to Seville and
Granada, and then to Madrid, and so up through Spain into France and
home again. I had even gone so far as to send to the shipping office for
the tickets. My messenger returned with the information that the ship
would be the _Valparaiso_, but that we could not have berths until the
agent received a telegram from Liverpool telling him if there were any
vacant. On the day before we were to return to Bordeaux, we received a
letter from the agent saying we could have berths. We packed up. We were
on the point of starting to Bordeaux, when, sitting in my armchair after
dinner, I fell asleep and had a dream. I dreamt that I was shipwrecked.
I felt the water closing over my head. I struck out and tried to swim,
but the great waves struck me and threw me back. I clung to spars; I
shouted for help. I went through a whole catalogue of agonies; and, just
as a big shark was opening his mouth to swallow me, I woke up with a
start. ‘It is time to go,’ said Albert Edward. ‘The omnibus is at the
door. Shall I send the luggage down?’ ‘No,’ I exclaimed, starting up and
rubbing my eyes. ‘No; a hundred times no! I’ve had a dream, and nothing
will tempt me to make that sea-trip now.’ A few days after, in the
reading-room of our hotel in Madrid, I picked up a newspaper, and saw
that the _Valparaiso_, the ship by which we should have sailed but for
that dream, had been wrecked in Vigo Bay, and that all the passengers’
luggage had been lost.
I am always anxious for adventures which will furnish material for my
books, but I very much prefer to rely upon my imagination for my
shipwrecks. A good many people have described earthquakes without being
in them, and I am sure I can give a good account of ‘an awful night at
sea’ without being taken off in a small boat and losing my luggage.
Instead of going by sea, we went by land, and the next day found us in
the sleeping-car _en route_ from Bayonne to Burgos, our first
halting-place on our way to Madrid. The French authorities arrange this
journey admirably. You arrive at Hendaye, the French frontier, at five
minutes past twelve, and here you have half an hour for luncheon. The
train then goes on, and reaches Irun in five minutes, where the Spanish
authorities, not to be outdone in politeness, give you an hour. It is a
battle between France and Spain which shall have the buffet money.
Seeing that you have an hour at Irun, I can in no other way account for
the absurdity of giving you half an hour at Hendaye. A run of two and a
quarter miles in an hour and a half is surely the best on record for a
special express train like the Paris-Madrid mail bound on a journey of
968 miles.
At Irun we entered on Spanish territory, Spanish customs, and Spanish
manners. We received the utmost courtesy at the station and in the
Custom House, and everywhere along the line. And we did it all with a
well-filled case of halfpenny cigars. No official in the world is so
polite or appreciates politeness so much as a Spanish one. The French
are artificially polite, the Spaniards are naturally so. Hats are
raised everywhere, faces are wreathed in smiles, bows are low and
stately. To the chiefs of stations, to Custom House officers, after a
few words of courteous inquiry, we offered a cigar. If we had offered
gold and precious stones our gift could not have been received with
greater sweetness and recognition. And for those few cigars we were
treated everywhere like princes. Gold-braided caps-in-hand,
stationmasters wished us a pleasant journey, and guards came and mounted
on the steps and peeped in and inquired as to our comfort. At the end of
the journey I really felt ashamed that we had received so much for so
little. On the return journey we are going to fill that cigar-case with
penny ones.
The run through the Pyrenees in the blazing sunshine was magnificent.
When the train stopped, high up upon the great mountains, we got out and
let our faces bronze, inhaled the splendid mountain air, and contrasted
the scene around us (it was Sunday afternoon) with the aspect of
Tottenham Court Road and Camden Town. We pitied the people in London,
and we wondered if they were having a fog and crouching over their fires
with the gas alight, and we made up our minds, when we were rich enough
to retire, to come and end our days in the sunshine of the Pyrenees. The
difficulty must be _to_ end your days there. Unless you go up to the top
of a precipice, and throw yourself deliberately over, it is difficult to
see what can kill you in such a splendidly healthy, bracing air--in a
land of perpetual life-giving sunshine.
The guard of our train was a very wonderful man, I have heard of a
sailor who had a wife in every port, but we almost came to the
conclusion that our guard had a wife at every station. Whenever the
train stopped there was a young woman waiting, who was instantly kissed
on both cheeks by our guard. Some of the ladies he kissed had little
boys and girls with them, and he kissed the children too. It was to us a
matter of much speculation as to what this constantly-recurring lady
waiting to be kissed by our guard could mean. It remains a mystery to
this hour. Perhaps he was one of a very large family, and his sisters
and his cousins and his aunts had scattered and settled all along the
line.
At Miranda we had ‘buffet’ again. It was a wonderful meal--real Spanish
cookery, everything done in oil; but it was by no means bad. The
wonderful thing about it was the way in which the passengers got through
a meal of ten courses in fifteen minutes by the clock. It was one plate
down and another up. The waiters actually galloped round the table
piling plates full of soup, fish, entrée, joint, fowl, salad, pastry,
cheese, and fruit before the astonished passengers. Heavens, how we ate!
How we finished one plate and pushed it aside and seized the full one by
our side! No changing knives and forks. It was just one wild waltz from
dish to dish, and when the bell rang and we rushed out to the train we
carried oranges and apples and figs and dates and biscuits in our hands.
I had an indigestion five minutes afterwards which has lasted up to now,
and which bids fair to remain with me until the end of my chequered
career.
The rest of the journey was performed in the dark. The only bit of
colour was made by our gens d’armes, who, with loaded rifles,
accompanied the train, and were changed at each station. All trains in
Spain carry two of these men--‘Civil Guards’ they are called--to protect
the passengers in case of attack. These men, a picked body, without fear
and without reproach, have cleared Spain of brigands. They are to Spain
what the Irish constabulary was once to Ireland. They are unbribable,
and have only one idea--duty. They are empowered to shoot at their own
discretion, and they are trusted not to make a mistake. There is no
arresting with them. A man taken red-handed, they put a bullet into.
Spanish justice is slow--a man sent for trial knows there are a hundred
ways of getting acquitted, and failing that of escaping from prison. So
the Spanish Civil Guard executes its own justice in a speedy and summary
manner. Murderers and brigands they kill first and try afterwards. These
men have made Spain safe for the traveller for the first time for many
hundreds of years.
Our halting-place was Burgos. Here we left the train, and began our
first experience of Spanish towns and Spanish hotel life. We had been
reading up our guide-books, and we alighted with doubt and dread. We
were told that the hotels were bad, and that the people were difficult
to deal with. But we had a little knowledge of the language, and we had
determined to conform literally to Spanish customs and to observe the
forms of Spanish etiquette, and so we hoped to fare better than the bulk
of English travellers who, in print and out of it, have made such a
parade of the drawbacks to a sojourn in Spain.
These Spanish customs are most interesting. They _must_ be observed by
anyone who wants to get on with the people. The usual British idea of
looking upon natives as ‘a lot of foreigners’ won’t do here. If you
insist upon being English and doing as you would in England you will
have a very bad time among a people who are the proudest and the most
sensitive in Europe. Cast your British prejudices to the wind, and try
to be Spanish, and you will carry home with you pleasant memories which
will last you all your life. We decided to be Spanish down to the
ground, to treat every man as a grandee, and to praise everything we
saw with all the adjectives we could find the Spanish for in our
dictionary.
In the first place, we commenced to practise worshipping each other’s
hats. The hat in Spain is elevated almost to the position of an idol.
When anyone comes to see you, you place his hat in an armchair all to
itself. You take it from him at the door. With loving care you bear it
across the room, and then, with many flowery speeches, you deposit the
sacred tile gently on the right-hand chair of honour. All Spanish
sitting-rooms are arranged for this ceremony. They contain no furniture,
as a rule, but a sofa, a console table, and some chairs, and this gives
them a bare appearance, which is not decreased by the entire absence of
a fireplace.
The sofa in the Spanish room is put against the wall in the right-hand
corner. In front of it on each side are two chairs, one an armchair, and
the other an ordinary one. The sofa and the four chairs are so arranged
as to form three sides of a square. The sofa is for you and your guests,
the armchairs are for their hats, and the smaller chairs for ornament.
This ‘reception of the hat’ sounds like an exaggeration, but it is a
ceremony which is observed with the greatest punctiliousness all through
Spain. My companion and I practised it in our sitting-room for hours.
First he knocked at the door and pretended to be a Spanish hidalgo, and
I received him, took his hat and conducted it, walking backwards, to the
armchair. Then I recited verses in its honour, kissed its brim, and
bestowed titles upon it. Then he received me and _my_ hat, and we
buttered each other up in our best Spanish and bowed to each other till
our backs ached. We very soon got perfect in the art of receiving
gentlemen visitors, and, of course, that was all we wanted, as we were
not likely to have any lady visitors.
When you go to a lady’s house there are terrible ceremonies to be gone
through. When you rise to leave you are bound to say, ‘A los piés de
usted’ (this last word is always written thus, ‘V.’ simply, in Spanish),
‘señora.’ ‘My lady, I place myself at your feet.’ Then the lady says,
‘Beso á V.’ (usted that V. means) ‘la mano, caballero.’ ‘I kiss your
hand, sir.’ ‘Vaya V. con Dios que V. lo pase bien.’ ‘May you depart with
God and continue well.’ Then you have to answer to that, ‘Quede V. con
Dios.’ ‘May you remain with God.’ And so you go, your hat being handed
to you as if it were a new-born baby.
The salutations and greetings and farewells among the common people are
many of them very poetical. When I left my first Spanish hotel, the
waiter and the chambermaid came out with the landlord to see us off. My
companion and I laid ourselves figuratively at the chambermaid’s feet;
we invoked all the blessings of Heaven on the landlord’s head, and, in
accordance with Spanish etiquette, we expressed a hope that the waiter
might remain with God. The group returned our adieux, and the little
chambermaid made us a sweet reverence in the Andalusian manner (she was
of Seville, was our ‘chica'), and said, ‘Good-bye, your lordships; may
we all meet again some day in God’s big parlour.’ Now, I think that was
very pretty--don’t you?
‘Chica’ means sweetheart. It is another pretty custom in Spanish inns to
call the waitress ‘chica.’ It sounds odd at first to English
ears--‘Sweetheart, bring me a glass of beer;’ ‘Sweetheart, a cup of
chocolate;’ ‘Sweetheart, do you call these boots blacked, or have you
given them to the dog to lick?’ When an inn is full, and everybody is
shouting for his ‘sweetheart,’ the Englishman unused to the form of
address, but knowing a little of the language, wonders what it means.
But he soon drops into the habit, and addresses the dark-eyed Spanish
muchacha as ‘chica,’ too.
Spain is saturated with Moorish manners and customs. The Eastern custom
of clapping the hands, instead of calling the waiter or attendant,
prevails everywhere. You never hear a sound of ‘Waiter!’ in a café, only
here and there two sharp short claps of the hand. The effect is
pleasing, and it saves your throat considerably.
But I am keeping you waiting a long time before taking you to see
Burgos, and I have told you nothing about hotel life.
The first things that strike you as you enter an old Spanish town at
night are the dark and mysterious-looking men gliding along in the dark
shadows, cloaked to the eyes. Nearly all Spaniards still wear the old
‘capa,’ or long black mantle, and the folds of this are so arranged as
to completely muffle the face, leaving only the eyes visible. The
Castilians muffle like this in the hottest weather. They dread a breath
of fresh air. But it makes them look awfully like murderers, and it gave
us quite a creepy sensation as we plodded through old, decaying Burgos,
late at night, and came suddenly on men muffled in black to the eyes at
the street corners. But having occasion to ask one to direct us to the
hotel, he instantly flung his cloak from his face and disclosed his
features. This is another Spanish custom. If you keep your cloak over
your face when you stop anyone, or when you address anyone, you are at
once supposed to be a bad character, or an assassin, and the man talking
to you clasps his knife or his revolver, and gets ready for you.
We reached the hotel in Burgos in safety, and walked upstairs, and found
a gentleman smoking a cigarette in an easy-chair, who rose and bowed,
and told us to choose what rooms we liked and to make ourselves at
home, and God be with us; and then he sat down and lit another
cigarette. We chose our rooms, then went down and bargained with the
gentleman for so much a day. All hotels in Spain lodge and feed you at
so much a day, and you have to make the contract on arrival. There are
no extras when once you have agreed to the price. We arranged at 50
reals a day each (a real is 2½d.). For this we had our rooms and the
following meals: The desayuno in the bedroom, a cup of chocolate and a
piece of sour bread; the almuerzo, or lunch, at eleven; the comida, or
dinner, at seven. The Spanish lunch begins generally with eggs cooked in
various fashions, then a roast, _then the fish_, very highly flavoured,
then salad and the sweets and dessert. The fish is always served after
meat. The dishes for dinner are few, but curious, and the cooking is
excellent for those with cosmopolitan palates. The dishes cooked in oil
are not deserving the opprobrium heaped upon them by bigoted British
guide-book writers. The Spaniards do not over-eat like the French, and
the meals are not long ones. But between every course at _table d’hôte_
Spaniards smoke a cigarette. It is an excellent idea for filling in the
waits; but English ladies don’t like it. There were no ladies and no
English at our first _table d’hôte_, so we adopted the custom of the
country.
Burgos is a grand old city, famous in history for many things, but for
nothing so much as being the city of the Cid. You know who the great Cid
was, or you ought to, so I won’t tell you. We saw his bones, and the
bones of Ximena, his wife--the real bones and the real skulls, in a real
coffin, in a room in the Prefecture hung with banners and patriotic
emblems. Of course we saw the cathedral and the ancient gates and the
old Palace of the Inquisition, now fallen to ruins. We stood and smoked
cigarettes in the grass-grown courtyard, where many a hero had been done
to death, where the hideous tortures devised by human fiends were
carried out in the blasphemed name of God, and we leaned against old
crumbling pillars that had looked down upon scenes of the most
unutterable human anguish. All is but as a dream now, yet the old stones
and pillars remain to this day, and cry out against the infamy of that
dark and cruel era in the blood-stained annals of Spain. The rooms
around, which look down upon the courtyard, are let to the poor at a
shilling or two a month. The Palace of the Inquisition is now a slum,
and from the windows where monarchs and grandees and Grand Inquisitors
looked down hang the yellow rags of beggars and the blue sheets of poor
labourers drying in the sun.
Burgos at night is the absolutely dullest place I ever saw in my life,
and that is saying a good deal. Some Spanish gentlemen who had made
friends with us at the hotel took us to a café, and we spent the evening
in getting all the information out of them that we could. The theatre
was shut, there was no music-hall, no entertainment of any kind. There
is no trade in Burgos, and how the people live is a mystery. But for the
military the place would be a city of the dead. And yet it is the
capital of proud Castile, and was at one time the residence of kings. At
ten at night I have the quiet deserted town almost to myself. I want to
tire myself out and make myself sleep if I can, for my old enemy
insomnia dogs my footsteps still. I smoke a cigarette under the shadow
of the great cathedral. I cross the bridge of the dried-up Arlanzon (all
the rivers of Spain have been emptied in consequence of the
rapidly-increasing export of Spanish wines), and I linger by the ruins
of the house of the mighty Cid. Everywhere I am alone save for some
cloaked and muffled figure that steals past me now and then, stealthily
and silently as a man bent on a mission of midnight assassination.
I am not afraid. Albert Edward is always close by me with a sword-stick,
a revolver, and a pair of fists that, though they have not much skill,
would be extremely useful in splitting pavingstones or breaking heads;
and, better than all, the old Sereno, or night-watchman, who, with his
lantern, his pointed staff, and his whistle, paces every street. The
Sereno has plenty of work at night in a Spanish town. In addition to his
duties as a watchman, he calls the hours. Quaint and weird upon the
night air floats the old watchman’s cry, ‘Ten o’clock at night, and
all’s well!’ ‘Las diez y sereno!’ It is from this last word, which means
‘All serene!’ that the watchman takes his name of ‘Sereno.’
He sees a good deal of the night side of (Spanish) nature, does the old
Sereno. He passes my lady’s balcony at midnight, and sees the cloaked
lover underneath twanging his guitar. He sees the lights in the rooms in
the small hours when the watchers of the sick keep their long vigils,
and he is the first to tumble over the bodies of the wounded and the
murdered at the street corners. Then his whistle rings out clear and
shrill over the silence, and the police come up and bear the body away.
Assassinations are still common enough in Spain. Every street-corner is
famous for somebody who was done to death at it. The lower classes and
many of the middle classes still carry the murderous ‘navaja,’ and
justice rarely overtakes the midnight assassin. Some of the murders are
political, but most of them are ‘all on account of Eliza.’ The Spanish
men are furiously jealous, and the Spanish women are terrible flirts.
The national custom of concealing your features entirely at night lends
itself splendidly to the use of the knife at dark street-corners.
We left Burgos by the night mail for Madrid. At the hotel they gave us
an omnibus. The roof was so low that we had to crawl in on our hands and
knees and lie flat on the cushions till we got to the station. There we
were the only passengers, but the station-master (another halfpenny
cigar did it) took us to his own private room and gave us armchairs in
front of his private fire while we waited. He took our hats and placed
them in royal state on more armchairs, and when the train arrived he
personally conducted us to it, recommended us to the guard, and,
bestowing on us all the titles of the noblest grandees of Old Castile,
expressed a devout desire that he, too, might have the honour of
renewing our acquaintance in God’s big parlour.