THE FRONTIER
I wonder what Charlemagne would have done if one had whisked him down
from Paris to the Spanish Frontier in something under twenty hours?
Probably the hero would have been paralysed with terror during the
journey and would have revenged himself upon the magician by means of a
little stake party.
But what would have been magic and miracle to Charlemagne remains in
one's mind as a jumble--the interior of a second-class carriage;
antimacassars; an adolescent who ate lusciously a basket of peaches,
thereby reminding us that French peaches ripen early in June; intrusive
knees and superfluous legs; an obese man who pinched my knee in his
sleep, probably from habit; touches of indigestion which made one
fidget, and in the dawn a little excitement roused by observing the
turpentine tapping operations at work on the pine-trees by the side of
the railroad--cemented together by the thick atmosphere of a summer's
night enclosed between shut windows.
It is a strange fact that the more perfect do we make travelling, the
more tedious does it become--I wonder whether the same may not apply to
almost all progress in civilization.
The most primitive aspect of travel is that of walking, and even upon
the most tedious of walks the exercise itself seldom degenerates into
definite boredom, one is never far away from one's fellow men, yet even
if one is quite alone the mere fact of walking is an occupation which
cannot be despised; of riding similar things may be said. Coaching may
have had its inconveniences, yet a coach drive cannot have been lacking
in definite interest. One was in very close contact with one's fellow
passengers, coaching made as strange bedfellows as any adversity, and
the journey was seldom so short that one could enjoy a sort of snuffy
insulation from one's fellows--mutual discomforts, even mutual terrors
of footpads made a definite bond of humanity.
It is true that in all these primitive processes the act of getting from
here to there is prolonged--perhaps extremely prolonged--but mere
duration is not tedium. If the act itself is interesting and vivid then
the act itself is worth while. To-day the act of travelling by a fast
train is scarcely worth while--the traveller can almost count it out as
so much time lost out of life. I fear that when the aeroplane is
perfected journeys will be performed in a tedium absolutely unrelieved,
and those patients who have to undertake journeys would be advised to
take a mild anæsthetic at the beginning.
What is missing to-day from the act of travelling--and what lacks from
much modern civilization--is the expectation of the unexpected; the
sense of adventure, the true sauce of life.
Now to have the true sense of adventure it is not necessary that one
should always be expecting to meet a lion round the corner. Any little
thing will do, anything not before experienced, anything that will give
the imagination that extra fillip of interest which will convince it
that the world will always remain a Fortunatus purse of new things to
learn, anything that will make positive the fact that the act of living
is also the act of growing,--anything of this nature will contribute to
the sense of adventure.
But the trend of civilization to-day is that all these little interests
are being quietly but very effectively crushed: we fling them beneath
the wheels of railway trains and into the cogs of factories, with the
result that only those experiences which are too large for us to fling
thus are allowed to flourish. We have, in fact, almost cleared away the
little things and left only the big. Now, if we turn the corner, either
there is nothing at all or, in one case out of a hundred, we find the
lion. In our railway travelling to-day, either nothing happens or there
is a railway accident; but we have turned so many corners in our lives
which led to the mere blankness of more empty road, that the possibility
of the lion has almost faded from our minds--and so the sense of
adventure in little, the true sense of adventure, is in danger of
atrophy.
Some day, I feel sure that this sense of adventure will take a revenge
on the civilization which would destroy it. We kill off birds and
caterpillars flourish. Some worm lies near the heart of things ready to
gnaw at the right moment. I fear that never will they apply
"preservation laws" to the sense of adventure, or we, as adventurers,
properly appreciated, should be in receipt of a scholarship or of a
civil list pension.
We were too dazed by the drug of twenty hours of tedium and
sleeplessness to suck any adventure from the passage through the French
Customs House at Hendaye. But this experience roused us so that we were
quite mentally awake by the time that we reached Irun. Here a problem
confronted us.
We had in our large leather trunk a good many yards of government
canvas, several pounds' worth of paints, and ten pounds in weight of
preparation for turning the government canvas into material for painting
upon. We had heard that the Spanish customs were very strict; very
strict in theory, that is.
"But if they worry you, bribe them a bit," had said a friend. Were these
things contraband? If so, how much was one to bribe, and how was one to
do it? There are plenty of men with nerve enough to try to tip Charon
for his trip over the Styx, but Jan is not one of these.
Now for a man of Jan's kind to attempt a delicate piece of palmed
bribing often results in things worse than if he had left well alone.
Ten to one there is a fumble and the coin drops to the floor beneath the
nose of the chief bug-a-bug. So, fingering two unpleasantly warm
five-peseta pieces in his pocket, he prayed fervently to kind
Opportunity to step in.
To his prayer the goddess answered. We had brought with us from our
Paris studio a mosquito curtain which once before had been used in
Majorca. As our baggage was packed in London we had, rather than undo
straps and locks, tied this mosquito curtain, wrapped in clean brown
paper, on to the outside of our suit-case. Upon this the authorities
flung themselves.
"Hi!" they cried. "You will pay duty on this, it is new."
Two gendarmes and a clerk tore off the paper, pitched the mosquito
curtain into a pair of scales, weighed it and wrote out the bill. All
the while we had been clamouring, with a sudden memory from Hugo:
"Antigua, antigua, antigua...."
This clamour became suddenly effective as soon as the officials had
nothing to do than to collect the money. Instead of cash we gave them a
chorus of "Antigua, antigua." The clerk and the two gendarmes then began
what seemed to be an impromptu imitation of Miss Loie Fuller in her
celebrated skirt dancing--mosquito curtain whirled this way and that in
voluptuous curves. They were looking for evidence. Suddenly I pointed
out a spot where perchance some full-blooded mosquito had come to a
sudden death in 1913, when the world was yet at peace. The mosquito
curtain was refolded, the bill torn up. They were quite peremptory with
the rest of our luggage; so Jan dropped the two warm five-peseta pieces
back into his pocket.
However much one may be in a country, one never feels that one _is_ in
the country until the door leading out of the customs house has been
passed. So we never really thought of ourselves as being in Spain until
we stepped on to the platform where the train for Madrid was standing.
With a bitter shock, we realized that it was a chill day and raining.
We had come all the way from England, hunting the sun, to be greeted in
June by a day which would fit, both in temperature and atmosphere, the
tail-end of a March at home.
[Illustration]
Of those minor adventures which make life so valuable, some of the
finest flowers amongst them which may be picked are the delicate first
impressions of a new country. These impressions have a flavour all their
own; they are usually compressed within the space of one hour or so, and
once experienced they never return. New impressions indeed one may
gather by the score, but those first, fine savourings of the new can
never be retasted.
We had expected so much from Spain. We had hoped at the first moment to
open out our arms to her sun, to satiate our colour sense with the
blueness of her skies--we were received instead with this grey, gloomy
weather. How can one describe the revulsion? It would be an exaggeration
to say that it was as though we had touched a corpse where we had
expected to find a living man, but the revulsion was of this nature
though perhaps less poignant.
I left Jan to finish with the larger luggage and, securing the aid of a
porter, set out to look for an hotel. At the exit of the station I was
accosted by a sallow man with a large, peaked jockey cap pulled down
over a thin face.
He said: "Hey, Señora! Hotel? Spik Engleesh. Yes."
"We don't want a dear place," I answered in English. "We want a cheap
one, understand?"
"Hotel. Spik Engleesh. Yes," replied the tout.
"Cheap hotel--cheap," I said.
"Hotel. Spik Engleesh--yes," said he.
"Puede usted recomendarme una fonda barata?" said I, out of the
conversation book, though the "_barata_"[1] at the end was my own.
But the tout turned sulky and would not answer--I suppose he thought his
fee would diminish if he were enticed into Spanish. The porter stood on
one side; he was a small, inadequate man and he sniffed continually.
Whether he had caught cold from the rain, or whether he was expressing
his private opinion of travellers, I did not learn. Jan was arranging
about our trunk and a hold-all; I had in my charge two thermos flasks, a
camera, two rucksacks--memories of days in the German Tyrol before the
war--and a suit-case which had been with us in Serbia and which still
bore the faint traces of a painted red cross, but the cat had for the
last two years been sharpening her claws upon it and the leather now
looked something like "Teddy Bear" material. These I distributed between
the porter and the tout, and, trusting to Providence and my own powers
of observation, we entered Irun.
Where was the queer magic which lies in the first impressions of a new
land, the dreamlike quality, the unreality which almost puts one's feet
for a moment into Fairyland? Spain had played a nasty trick upon us;
the grey sky and the low-lying cloud and the drizzling rain had nothing
of Fairyland for us. With head held low against the drizzle one was
conscious of nothing but a wall on the right hand and of dirty pavement
beneath the feet.
The tout led me into the first house we reached. There, was a narrow
passage which passed by a room of a dingy whiteness; but the tout showed
me on, up some stumbly stairs and through a spring door. We came into a
dark room in which, by means of the light filtering through the slats of
the closed shutters, could be seen the dim outlines of a bed and of a
tin wash-hand-stand.
"Ocho pesetas," said the tout.
"Por todo," I answered.
"Todo--todo--comida y toda," protested the tout. I had been waiting for
this moment. In the conversation book which I had been studying was a
phrase which had caught my fancy; it meant "no extras," but it was much
more beautiful. The time had come.
"No hay extraordinario?" said I sternly.
"No, Señora, no," said the tout, spreading out his hands.
The matter having been thus settled, he took me downstairs again; and,
in the dingy white diningroom, introduced me to a plump woman, the
proprietress. I was ravenously hungry; the tables were laid. I asked:
"What time is lunch?"
"At two, Señora."
I was dismayed. It was now eleven o'clock--we had eaten little since the
night before.
"But," I stammered, "I am hungry. Tengo hambre." My memory shuffled with
conversation-book sentences and faint recollections of Majorca, but
could find nothing about the minutiæ of food.
"Tengo hambre," I repeated desperately. Suddenly inspiration came to
me. I made motions of beating up an omelet and clucked like a hen that
has laid an egg.
For a moment there was a silence, a positive kind of silence, which is
much more still than mere absence of noise. Then a roar of laughter went
up. The fat hostess shook like a jelly, the tout guffawed behind a
restraining hand--he had not yet received his tip--while an old woman
who had been sitting in one of the darker corners, went off:
"Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He! Ck! Ck! Ck! He! He! He!"
At this moment Jan arrived, having deposited the bigger luggage and
having been informed that the train to Avila, our first stopping-place,
went out at 8 a.m. I led him along the dark passage and upstairs. He
flung wide the shutters. The window looked into a deep, triangular well
at the bottom of which was a floor of stamped earth, a washtub and a
hen-coop. Windows of all sizes pierced the walls at irregular intervals
and across the well were stretched ropes, from some of which flapped
pieces of damp linen or underclothes. In the light of the open window
the room was dingy. We wondered if there were bugs in it, for we had
been cautioned against these insects.
But the room did not smell buggy; it had a peculiar smell of its own.
The strong characteristics of odours need more attention than novelists
give them. For instance, I remember that German mistresses had a faint
vinegary scent, but French governesses an odour like trunks which had
been suddenly opened.
This room had an austere smell. It smelt, I don't know how, Roman
Catholic: not of incense nor of censers, but of a flavour which, by some
combination of circumstances, we have associated with Roman Catholicism
in bulk. The bedroom door was largely panelled with tinted glass; it had
a very flimsy lock, but we did not fear that we would be murdered or
burgled in our bed.
The omelet was ready when we came down. The diningroom had two doors,
one leading to the kitchen, one up some steps and into the street. There
was a broad stretch of window and almost all the other walls of the room
were covered with big mirrors.
[Illustration]
About five grim people, mostly clad in black--including the old
lady--sat in the room and stared at us as we ate. We could not avoid
this disconcerting gaze--look where we would we either caught a human
eye or else, what was worse, we were fascinated by a long procession of
eyes passing away into the dim mysteries of reflection and re-reflection
of the mirrors. We had to choose between the gaze of one real old lady
or of twenty-five reflected old ladies, of one callow youth or of
twenty-five youths diminishing towards the infinite. The audience stared
at us as we ate our omelet, watched the fruit--apricots, cherries and
hard pears--with which we finished the meal, and noted each sip of
coffee. At last, unable to bear any longer the embarrassment of this
mechanically intensified curiosity, we took refuge in our bedroom and
lay down. We then noted that the bed was too small, all the rest of the
furniture, on the contrary, being much too big.
We rested till lunch. The omelet and the fruit had but filled some of
the minor vacancies within us and we were ready again on the stroke of
two. Once more we faced the Spanish stare and all the reflected
repetitions of it. A fair number of persons lunched at the hotel. As
they came in the women sat themselves directly at the table, but the men
without exception went to the far corner where, suspended against the
wall, was a small tin reservoir with a minute tap and beneath it a tiny
basin. Each man rinsed his hands in the infinitesimal trickle, before he
sat down to dinner. Why the men and women made this distinction we could
not guess. It seemed to be a custom and not to be dependent upon whether
the hands were dirty or not. Even if the hands had been dirty the small
amount of water used would not have cleaned them.
In the centre of the dining table were white, porous vessels containing
drinking water. The water oozes through the porous clay and appears on
the outside of the vessel as a faint sweat. This layer of moisture
evaporates and keeps all the water in the vessel at several degrees
cooler than the surrounding atmosphere.
Between mouthfuls of soup and wedges of beef the diners were watching
us. As soon as the meal was over we fled into the streets of Irun. One
cannot call Irun Spanish. It is abominably French, though France is
pleasant in its own place. The café in the little plaza is French, with
a French _terrasse_, French side screens of ugly ironwork and glass, and
faces a square full of shady trees between which one sees modern
fortifications of French appearance. So we sat sipping coffee and we
said to ourselves: "Forget that you are in Spain. Put off your
excitement. Don't waste your sensations with false sentiment".
Nor did the fact that all the wording on the shops was Spanish, nor even
the sight of a building of pure modern Spanish architecture rouse us
from our cloudy resignation. The building which towered into some six
stories by the side of the railway was of a maroon brick. The lower
story, including the entrance door, was decorated with _appliqué_ in the
design which the French used to call "l'art nouveau," and which now is
confined almost exclusively to the iron work on boulevard cafés. It is
marked by exaggerated curves. The whole bottom story of this building
was sculptured in this fantastic fashion; in order to fit in with the
decorations the front door was wider at the top than it was at the
bottom, while the windows were of every variety of shape, squashed
curves, dilated hearts, indented circles and so on. Above this story the
building rose gravely brick save for the corners, which were decorated
with bathroom tiles of bad glaze upon which flowers had been painted;
roses, violets and pansies: the top story, however, was part Gothic,
part Egyptian, with a unifying intermixture of more bathroom tiles.
A munition millionaire went to an art dealer saying he wanted a picture,
but he didn't mind what sort of a picture it was provided it looked
expensive. We imagined that the architect of this house had received a
similar order. Later on we were undeceived.
A yellow tram went by bearing the name "Fuentarabia." Having heard
eulogies of this place, we decided to go. We reached the terminus of the
tramway and the conductor told us we were there. Since then we have met
so many people who were in ecstasies about the beauties of Fuentarabia,
about its pure Spanish character, etc., etc., that we are still
wondering if we went to Fuentarabia after all.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Cheap.]