THE MISCONCEPTIONS OF LUGGAGE.--THE COMFORTS OF SPANISH RAILWAY
TRAVELLING.--OUR LIBRARY.--FROM THE TROPICS TO THE
STEPPES.--GREGORIA AND ISIDORA.--JOURNEY TO MADRID.
“Dos billetes de primera clase para Burgos?” (Two first-class tickets to
Burgos) with astonishment repeated the young woman acting as collector
at the railway station of Biarritz. “To Burgos! to Burgos!”
“To Burgos,” we replied, quietly.
“If you are really going as far as Burgos,” she said, with the same look
of unmitigated surprise, “I must apply to the station-master for the
tickets. Have the goodness to sit down and I will see about it.”
We supposed by this young lady’s behaviour, and we afterwards found our
supposition to be true, that it is a most unusual thing for ladies to
travel in Spain. With one or two exceptions, we had the ladies’ coupé to
ourselves from one end of Spain to the other, and very comfortable
travelling we found it.
Our tickets came to hand in due time. We took our seats, the train moved
slowly, and we felt fairly off to Spain. There was a pleasant excitement
about such a journey just then, for every one prophesied a revolution in
Madrid; it might come to-morrow, it must come soon, people said; and we
were thought very venturesome to venture beyond the Pyrenees at all. Not
that the sense of danger attracted us. We had come to Spain with very
definite objects, and though we could not help feeling that the sooner a
revolution came for the Spaniards the better, we hoped that it might not
come till we were safely at Gibraltar, at least. The pictures of
Velasquez, and the Moorish relics of Cordova, Seville, and Granada, were
the loadstones that drew us to Spain; at the same time we could not but
be alive to the great political and social questions agitating a country
once so glorious, and still so capable of glorious things. But in a stay
so short as ours was likely to be, we despaired of seeing more than the
surface of Spanish thought and life, however much we might wish for
other opportunities. It made us smile then, and it makes me smile now,
to review the magnitude of our preparations for this trip. And now let
me put down, if putting down be possible, a very absurd notion that, to
travel comfortably, you should travel without luggage. I have travelled
a good deal, and if I were writing a manual for all future tourists, I
should affix, as a motto to the book,--“Always travel in your best
clothes, and with half-a-dozen trunks at least.” Luggage and good
clothes take the place of a train of servants. Luggage and good clothes
ensure you good places, general civility, and an infinity of minor
comforts. Luggage and good clothes will prove your good angels wherever
you go. It is all very well for savages to travel without luggage--the
Japanese Grandees don’t even carry pocket-handkerchiefs about with them;
but if any one wants to travel pleasantly and profitably, let him carry
a well-stored portmanteau. Surely in no country but patient Spain would
two ladies have been allowed to fill the first-class compartment of a
railway carriage in the way we did. Under the seats, on the seats, above
the seats, were piled an infinite variety of packages, a box of
medicines, a folding india-rubber bath, a basket of provisions (a
precaution never to be neglected), two or three parcels of books, two or
three bundles of rugs, a leather bag of sketching materials, sketching
blocks of various sizes, a silk bag of needles and threads; lastly, an
odd bag, containing note-books, opera-glasses, passports, a tea-pot, a
water-bottle, an etna, an air-cushion, slippers, and sundries without
number.
And everything was so useful in its turn. In that long, slow railway
journey through Spain, we were, as I have said, always alone. We
breakfasted, we dined, we wrote letters and diaries, we read all our
books from beginning to end, and we mended our clothes, we made
sketches, we made tea, we might have refreshed ourselves with a cold
bath, but for want of water. Not a bit of our precious luggage could we
have spared, and not a bit ever troubled us beyond the necessity of
giving a few cuartos to the porters when changing carriages. As for
books we were not half way through Spain before they were done, and yet
we had taken a goodly supply; Ford’s _Guide_, Street’s _Gothic
Architecture_, _Don Quixote_ in Spanish, Stirling’s _Life of Velasquez_,
Washington Irving’s pretty twaddle about the Alhambra, Chasles’ _Memoir
of Cervantes_, the Manuals of Lavice and Viardot, Gautier’s book, and
half a hundred books about Spain in French, German, English, and
Spanish, among others, the delightful and racy sketches of his
countrymen, by Don Ramon Mesonero de Romanos.
Of course our luggage accumulated as we went along. We bought books,
maps, photographs, clothes everywhere, pottery of Andujar and Talavera,
lace from La Mancha, embroidery at Malaga, _capas_ at Granada, till, by
the time we arrived at our journey’s end, our _equipaje_, as the
Spaniards call it, was a sight for all beholders.
It was on the tenth of November that we crossed the Pyrenees, all
glowing with the purple and gold of autumn, and entered Spain. What a
change! It was like coming suddenly from the Tropics to the Steppes. As
if by magic, the crimsons, the carnations, the violets, died out of the
world, and all became cold and grey and barren. In Old Castile one
fancies oneself in a desert--a desert only varied by occasional forests
of the _Pinus maritima_, with its straight, weird stem and plumy tuft.
The colour and character of the scene varied but slightly--here
undulating plains of grey sand piled with columnar masses of granite,
there forests of pine, the round bosses of bluish-green standing out
sharp and clear against a bright blue sky; or breadths of brown
corn-land, lightly ploughed for the autumn seed-sowing. There was
something grand and harmonious about this wild monotony--broken rarely
by an oasis of a village with ilex groves and yellow acacias and a
narrow river winding near, and groups of wide-mouthed Sancho Panzas
staring at us as we looked out of the window.
But I must go back to Burgos where the purples and crimsons ended and
the desert began. We arrived a little before midnight and felt ourselves
at last in Spain. The very air had, as we thought, a foreign smell, and
so greatly did this feeling of novelty overcome us that all our Spanish
vocabulary seemed to vanish just when it would have stood us in good
stead. However, we found places in the omnibus of the Fonda del Norte,
and, after waiting about three quarters of an hour, rattled thither in
company of several Spanish gentlemen who were wrapped to the chin in
their bandit-looking cloaks, and smoked away without intermission. Two
or three long-limbed, black-eyed, rosy-cheeked young women, wearing
enormous chignons of false hair, but no costume unless untidiness may be
called one, led us upstairs flaring candles over our heads. “Dos
cuartos,” we said; “Si, si,” they replied, and on they went, climbing
stair after stair, till at last we caught hold of their sleeves in
breathless expostulation; and they consented to descend. Finally we were
consigned to rooms on the third floor, so spotlessly, ideally clean,
that a sanitary inspector could have found nothing to suggest. The rooms
had whitewashed walls, iron bedsteads that might have come out of Heal’s
warehouse, deliciously cool floors of brick-red tiles, wool-mattrasses,
sweet-smelling home-spun sheets, and pillows bordered with the lace of
La Mancha. We slept delightfully, though the noise of the watchman
calling the hours half awoke us now and then.
At seven o’clock, one of the maidens of the chignon, a handsome saucy
creature, named Isidora, of whom we grew very fond, brought us chocolate
_à l’Espagnol_, namely, tiny cups of sweet, thick chocolate, flavoured
with vanilla, rolls of bread, glasses of exquisite water and
_azucarillas_, or large crystals of sugar and white of egg. Isidora
delighted to give us lessons in Spanish, and went into fits of
good-humoured laughter at our blunders. At eleven o’clock we went to the
_table d’hôte_ breakfast, but there was no one there excepting a
Spanish-American family, consisting of a grave father, an insignificant
little daughter, and a cosmopolitan son, who spoke a little English. All
were very uninteresting, so there was nothing to do but study the
dishes, which were all excellent, and _ab ovo usque ad mala_, slightly
flavoured with garlic. We had tortillas or omelettes, patties of brains,
water-cresses served with oil, olla podrida of bacon, sausage, cabbage,
maize cobs, lentils, and other vegetables too numerous to mention, roast
snipes, fig jam, and Burgos cheese. The wine was excellent too, but the
invariable flavour of tar is not pleasant to the unaccustomed palate. We
were served by a waitress handsomer and saucier even than Isidora. She
was named Gregoria, and with her napkin swung on her left shoulder went
from one to the other, saying her say, and trying to get as much
entertainment as was possible out of us. We were very comfortable at
Burgos, excepting that it was impossible to keep warm indoors; the sun
was shining brilliantly, yet we shivered in our clean bare rooms, which
were chimneyless and only warmed by charcoal pans. Round these we
squatted like Arabs, but to no purpose, and we went to bed at seven
o’clock, finding bed the only warm place. How the cold of winter is
endured in Spain I cannot conceive, for winter does come in earnest
sometimes, and no preparations seem to be made for it.
We sauntered into the most beautiful old Cathedral on the morning after
our arrival, which was Sunday, hoping to find it full of peasants in
holiday costume; but though there were plenty of worshippers, except for
the sombreros and brown _capas_ or cloaks of the men, and the silk and
lace mantillas of the women, there was no costume at all. People seem
to enjoy going to church in Spain. The ladies come in with their little
dogs, drop on their knees on a mat, adjust their fans, and fall into a
sort of quiet ecstasy of prayer, the dogs sitting demurely by. The men
are equally devout; and every one, caballero or beggar, soldier or
priest, comes in his turn, week-day and Sunday. The churches are
beautifully kept, warm in cold weather, cool in summer, clean and dusky
and quiet always. No wonder they are never empty.
The Cathedral of Burgos is so rich in different sorts of beauty that it
would be idle for me to try and particularise any, excepting perhaps the
wonderful effect of it as a whole upon the accustomed eye. At first one
is quite unable to take in the wonderful simplicity, and strength, and
finish of the building, or rather mass of buildings, for it is a city in
itself; but later you feel, as it were, a child of the place, loving and
living in every part. The colour of the outside is of a soft deep grey,
and is unspeakably rich when seen, as we saw it, against quite an
Eastern sky. We never grew tired of wandering about the Cathedral, with
Street’s _Gothic Architecture_ in hand to help us through its history;
and no one seemed to take offence at us for pursuing such studies within
the sacred walls.
I have called the building a city in itself, and if a census were made
of its silent population, there might seem some reason in such a simile.
Who can doubt that these sculptured saints, archangels, kings, apostles,
and monks without, these bleeding Christs, Virgins, infants, and martyrs
within, would equal in number the living, moving world of Burgos? And
this multitude, stony, silent, dead, though it seems, is not without a
power and force that stand in good stead of vitality. Every Christ has
its special congregation, every martyr its believers, every saint its
legend quickening thousands of devotees to this day.
There is no trace of Moorish influence in the building, and despite many
excrescences of bastard-Gothic and Renaissance work, the old Cathedral
is still to be seen in all its beauty, reminding you of the purest
thirteenth-century Gothic of France. All who have time to study it
thoroughly will at the same time acquire a good deal of history, for
there is hardly a portion of it which does not show the thought and
work of many minds and periods. Spaniard, Gascon, Fleming, Englishman,
Florentine, have all had a hand in this glorious work, which gradually
increased in size and splendour, till nothing more remained to do except
to disfigure it in these later times; which I am sorry to say has been
done, within and without, by various means called “restoration.”
The ecclesiologist will find plenty to admire at Burgos, but the
ordinary traveller will content himself with seeing the Cathedral and
the Convents of Miraflores and Las Huelgas. The latter is especially
interesting on account of its history. It was founded by the husband of
Alienor, daughter of our King Henry II., whose daughter Costanza became
abbess. Here numbers of royal ladies took the veil; here kings were
crowned and buried; and here a lady abbess still lives and rules, though
no longer, as in former days, a princess palatinate, receiving princely
revenues.
But what makes Las Huelgas of peculiar value to students is the evidence
of Angevine influence in the architecture. Queen Alienor, as Mr. Street
justly observes, would naturally procure the help of some architect
from her father’s dominion of Anjou in the abbey she induced him to
found; and one finds here the early vaulting common to old churches in
Anjou and Poitou. But these special objects of interest are less
interesting than the general effect of the whole place.
It was here, indeed, that we were bodily as well as spiritually
transported back to the middle ages. The transformation happened in this
wise. After wandering about the cloisters we came unexpectedly upon a
scene that simply enchanted us. It was the nuns’ chapel. Looking through
a screen of delicately wrought cast-iron, we saw two kneeling figures
dressed in the black and cream-coloured robes of the Cistercian
sisterhood. They were as motionless as statues; and we felt them to be a
part of the place as much as the Gothic arches, the stained walls, and
the marble altars. So mediæval and ideal was the picture, that, when we
came away, we felt as if we of the nineteenth century were dreaming, and
the life of those women kneeling in the coloured light the only reality
after all!
The roads are so bad around Burgos that it was with great ado we got to
the celebrated Monastery of Miraflores, though it only lies two miles
off the town. It is a dreary drive. The road winds around hills so bleak
and desolate, as to give us an uneasy suspicion when a beggar in a long
black cloak came to the carriage-door begging. He looked exactly like a
bandit; and if it had not been for our sturdy coachman we should have
trembled for the gold Isabelinoes we carried in our pockets.
Coming home we saw a regiment at practice. The soldiers were the
shabbiest set I ever saw, the music poor, and the whole thing spiritless
enough; but all the people of Burgos seemed to have turned out for the
sight.
In Spain the railways are not made for travellers, but travellers for
railways. The trains run so slowly and so seldom that a journey of any
length always requires self-denial in the matter of sleep. No matter
whither you are bound, to Alicant, to Cordova, to Saragossa, to Badajoz,
you must rise early and not go to bed at all; and it is with very great
management and disregard of comfort that one can contrive to travel by
daylight through the most interesting tracts of scenery. To go to
Madrid in the daytime we had to rise at four o’clock. It is true that
the train did not start till nearly seven; but, whether you like it or
not, in Spain you are always aroused an hour before you want to get
up,--always carried off to the station an hour before the train starts,
and to the steamers at least a quarter of a day too soon. People seem in
such terrible haste to be rid of you, agreeable as the acquaintance may
seem to have been on both sides.
This waiting about in the raw, cold air of an autumn morning is not
without its compensations. Everything takes a supernatural shape in the
ghastly lamplight; the horses that have brought us here seem, on a
sudden, slim and spectral; the long lines of railway carriages have a
funereal look; the men, waiting about in their long black cloaks, become
brigand-like and terrible to look at; one’s own shadow is mysteriously
long and dark; one’s own voice sounds hollow and unearthly. It is like
reading a scene from Mrs. Radcliff’s novels. But when once the train
moves slowly off, and the blessed sun warms you, it is the very poetry
of railway-travelling. The carriage is so comfortable, the speed so
easy, the quiet so delicious, that it is worth while coming to Spain to
gain such an experience. No one seems impatient to arrive anywhere; if
indeed, any one is bound anywhere. The train stops at every station, and
at some so long that you might take photographs in the interval. If you
alight to lunch or stretch your limbs a little, you are never hurried
back into your carriage, but can loiter about in the pleasant assurance
that the train is sure to wait for you. “The train is going to stop; now
for a sketch,” we used to say when we approached a station; and there
was always time.
And then there is the ineffable sense of safety. A single gauge leads
from the French frontier to the Spanish capital; the up-train waits for
the down train half-way, and each goes its destination as lazily as
Kentish farmers jogging to market. How can there be accidents or
discomforts under such circumstances?
Tourists are apt to complain of the incivility of officials in Spain. I
can only say that we travelled from Biarritz to Gibraltar, and
encountered nothing but courtesy and kindness. We spoke a little
Spanish, it is true, and had left England with a solemn compact never to
get out of temper, which may, perhaps, in some degree account for such
experience. And we always travelled in the first-class carriage reserved
for ladies. I do not think English ladies would find second and
third-class travelling pleasant, on account of the smoking.
Thus we travelled through the brown deserts of Old Castille to Madrid.
Treeless, tawny, and interminable, anything more dreary than these same
Spanish steppes cannot well be conceived. Yet there was contrast and
colour for the artistic eye. There was mass after mass of cool, grey
limestone against a bright blue sky; and when the sun set over the
undulating table-lands, a weird, fiery, unimagined splendour not to be
put into any words!
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