The Charms of Cadiz--Seville-by-the-Sea--Cervantes-Daughters of
Eve--The Ladies who Prayed and the Women who Didn't--Fasting
Monks--Notice to Quit on the Nuns--The Rival Processions--Gutting a
Church--A Disorganized Garrison--Taking it Easy--The Mysterious
"Mr. Crabapple"--The Steamer _Murillo_--An Unsentimental
Navvy--Bandaged Justice--Tricky Ship-Owning--Painting Black White.
THE man who pitched on Cadiz as the site of a city knew what he was
about. Without exception it is the most charmingly-located place I ever
set foot in. Its white terraces, crowded with white pinnacles,
belvederes, and turrets, glistening ninety-nine days out of the hundred
in clear sunlight, rise gently out of a green sea necked with foam; the
harbour is busy with commerce, crowded with steamers and sailing ships
coming and going from the Mediterranean shores, from France, from
England, or from the distant countries beyond the Atlantic; the waters
around (for Cadiz is built on a peninsula, and peeps of water make the
horizon of almost every street) are dotted with fishing craft or
scudding curlews; the public squares are everlastingly verdant with the
tall fern-palm, the feathery mimosa, the myrtle, and the silvery ash,
which only recalls the summer the better for its suggestive appearance
of having been recently blown over with dust; the gaze inland is repaid
with the sight of hills brown by distance, of sheets of pasture, and
pyramidal salt-mounds of creamy grey; and the gaze upwards--to lend a
glow to the ravishing picture--is delighted by such a cope of dreamy
blue, deep and pure, and unstained by a single cloudlet, as one seldom
has the happiness of looking upon in England outside the doors of an
exhibition of paintings. The climate is dry and genial, and not so hot
as Seville. The Sevillanos know that, and come to Cadiz when the heats
make residence in their own city insupportable. Winter is unknown;
skating has never been witnessed by Gaditanos, except when exhibited by
foreign professors, clad in furs, who glide on rollers over polished
floors; and small British boys who are fond of snowballing when they
come out here are obliged to pelt each other with oranges to keep their
hands in. One enthusiastic traveller compares it to a pearl set in
sapphires and emeralds, but adds--lest we should all be running to hug
the jewel--there is little art here and less society.
"Letters of exchange are the only belles-lettres." Indeed. Now this is
one of those wiseacres who are _in_ a community, but not _of_ it, who
materially are present, but can never mentally, so to speak, get
themselves inside the skins of the inhabitants. That city cannot be said
to be without letters which has its poetic brotherhood, limited though
it be, and which reveres the memory of Cervantes, as the memory of
Shakespeare is revered in no English seaport. Wiseacre should hie him to
Cadiz on the 23rd of April, when the birth of Cervantes is celebrated,
for in spite of intestine broils, Spaniards are true to the worship of
the author of "Don Quixote," and his no less immortal attendant, whom
Gandalin, friend to Amadis of Gaul, affectionately apostrophizes thus:
"Salve! Sancho with the paunch,
Thou most famous squire,
Fortune smiled as Escudero she did dub thee
Tho' Fate insisted 'gainst the world to rub thee.
Fortune gave wit and common-sense,
Philosophy, ambition to aspire;
While Chivalry thy wallet stored,
And led thee harmless through the fire."
With the respect he deserves for this wandering critic and no more, I
will take the liberty of saying that there is art, and a great deal of
art, in the site of the clean town; and that there is society, and good
society, in that forest of spars in the roadstead, and in the fishing
and shooting in the neighbourhood. When the Tauchnitz editions have been
exhausted, and when the stranger has mastered Cervantes and Lope de
Vega, Espronceda, Larra, and Rivas, there is always that book which Dr.
Johnson loved, the street, or that lighter literature which Moore sings,
"woman's looks," to fall back upon. I am afraid some prudes may be
misjudging my character on account of the frequency of my allusions to
the sex lately; but I beg them to recollect that this is Andalusia, and
that woman is a very important element in the population of Cadiz. She
rules the roost, and the courtly Spaniard of the south forgets that
there was ever such an undutiful person as Eve. Woman played a
remarkable part in the events of the couple of months after the Royal
crown was punched out of the middle of the national flag. She is
political here, and is not shy of declaring her opinions. Ladies of the
better classes of Cadiz are attentive to the duties of their religion;
kneeling figures gracefully draped in black may be seen at all hours of
the day in the churches during this Lenten season, telling their beads
or turning over their missals. Those ladies are Carlist to a man, as
Paddy would say; they naturally exert an influence over their husbands,
though the influence falls short of making their husbands accompany them
to church except on great festivals such as Easter Sunday, or on what
may be called occasions of social rendezvous, such as a Requiem service
for a deceased friend. The men seem to be of one mind with the French
freethinker, who abjured religion himself, or put off thoughts of it
till his dying day, but pronounced it necessary for peasants and
wholesome for women and children. But _les femmes du peuple_, the
fishwives, the labourers' daughters, the bouncing young fruit-sellers,
and the like, are not religious in Cadiz. They have been bitten with the
revolutionary mania; they are staunch Red Republicans, and have the bump
of veneration as flat as the furies that went in procession to
Versailles at the period of the Great Revolution, or their great
granddaughters who fought on the barricades of the Commune. The nymphs
of the pavement sympathize strongly with the Republic likewise; but
their ideal of a Republic is not that of Senores Castelar and Figueras.
They want bull-fights and distribution of property, and object to all
religious confraternities unless based on the principles of "the Monks
of the Screw," whose charter-song, written by that wit in wig and gown,
Philpot Curran, was of the least ascetic:
"My children, be chaste--till you're tempted;
While sober, be wise and discreet,
And humble your bodies with--fasting,
Whene'er you have nothing to eat."
So long ago as 1834 a sequestration of convents was ordered in Spain,
but the Gaditanos never had the courage to enforce the decree till
after the revolution that sent Queen Isabella into exile. A few years
ago the convent of Barefooted Carmelites on the Plaza de los Descalzados
was pulled down; the decree that legalized the act provided an
indemnity, but the unfortunate monks who were turned bag and baggage out
of their house never got a penny. They have had to humble their bodies
with fasting since. For those amongst them who were old or infirm that
was a grievance; but for the lusty young fellows who could handle a
spade there need not be much pity, for Spain had more of their sort than
was good for her. Even at that date the revolutionists of Cadiz had some
respect left for the nunneries. But they progressed; the example of
Paris was not lost upon them. The ayuntamiento which came into power
with the Republic was Federal. Barcelona and Malaga were stirring; the
ayuntamiento made up its mind that Cadiz should be as good as its
neighbours and show vigour too. The cheapest way to show vigour was to
make war on the weak and defenceless, and that was what this
enlightened and courageous municipality did. The nuns in the convent of
the Candelaria were told that their house and the church adjoining were
in a bad state, that they must clear out, and that both should be razed
in the interests of public safety. It was not that the presence of
ladies devoted to God after their own wishes and the traditions of their
creed was offensive to the Republic; no, not by any means. The nuns
protested that if their convent and church were in a dangerous condition
the proper measure to take was to prop them up, not pull them down. But
the blustering heroes of the municipality would not listen to this
reasoning; they were too careful of the lives of the citizens, the nuns
included; down the edifices must come. The Commune of Paris over again.
The ladies of Cadiz, those who pass to and fro, prayer-book in hand, in
the streets, and startle the flashing sunshine with their solemn
mantillas, were wroth with the municipality. They saw through its
designs, and they resolved to defeat them. To the number of some five
hundred they formed a procession, and marched four deep to the
Town-house to beg of their worships, the civic tyrants, to revoke their
order. If the convent and church were in ruins, the ladies were prepared
to pay out of their own pockets the expense of all repairs. That
procession was a sight to see; there was the beauty, the rank, the
fashion, and the worth of the city, in "linked sweetness long drawn
out," coiling through the thoroughfares on pious errand. The fair
petitioners were dressed as for a _fete_; diamonds sparkled in their
hair, and the potent fan, never deserted by the Andalusians, was
agitated by five hundred of the smallest of hands in the softest of
gloves. But the civic tyrants were more severe than Coriolanus. They
were not to be mollified by woman's entreaties, but rightly fearing her
charms they fled. When the procession arrived at the Town-house, there
was but a solitary intrepid bailie to receive it. They told him their
tale. He paid them the usual compliments, kissed their feet in the grand
Oriental way individually and collectively, said he would lay their
wishes before his colleagues, but that he could give no promise to
recall the mandate of the municipality--it was more than he dare
undertake to do, and so forth. The long and short of it was, he politely
sent them about their business. They came away, working the fans more
pettishly than ever, and liquid voices were heard to hiss scornfully
that the Republic, which proclaimed respect for all religions and
rights, was a lie, for its first thought was to trample on the national
religion, and to dispossess an inoffensive corporation of cloistered
ladies of their right to then property. Here the first act of the drama
ended.
The second was, if anything, more sensational, though infinitely less
attractive. The Federals bit their thumbs, and cried:
"Ah, this is the work of the priests!"
So it was; not a doubt of that. The Federals meditated, and this was the
fruit of their meditations:
"Let us organize a counter-procession!"
That counter-procession was a sight to see, too; the feature of elegance
was conspicuous by its absence, but there was more colour in it.
Harridans of seventy crawled after hussies of seventeen; bare arms and
bandannas were more noticeable than black veils and fans; the _improbae
Gaditanae_, known of old to certain lively satirists, Martial and Juvenal
by name, turned out in force. Mayhap it is prejudice, but Republican
females, methinks, are rather muscular than good-looking. Still they
have influence sometimes, and when they said their say at the Town-house
the ladies plainly betrayed how much they dreaded that influence. They
wrote to Madrid praying that the municipality should be arrested in its
course. Senor Castelar did send a remonstrance; some say he ordered the
local authorities not to touch the church or convent, but they laughed
at his letter, and contented themselves by reflecting that he was not in
possession of the facts--that is, if they reflected at all, which is
doubtful.
Act the third was in representation during my stay. I passed the
Candelaria one morning. Scaffolding poles were erected in the street
alongside in preparation for the demolition of the building, and a party
of workmen in the pay of the municipality were engaged gutting the
church of its contents, and carting them off to a place of deposit,
where they were to be sold by public auction. These workmen looked
cheerful over their sacrilege. A waggon was outside the door laden with
ornaments ripped from the walls, gilt picture-frames, fragments of
altar-rails, and the head of a cherub. Half a dozen rough fellows in
guernseys had their shoulders under a block of painted wood-carving. As
far as I could make out, it was the effigy of one of the Evangelists. I
was refused admittance to the building, but I was told the sacramental
plate had been removed with the same indifference. The nuns escaped
without insult, thanks to the good offices of some friends outside, who
brought up carriages at midnight to the doors of the convent and
conveyed them to secret places of safety put at their disposal by the
bishop.
The people who committed this mean piece of desecration were all Federal
Republicans. They disobeyed orders from Madrid, and would disobey them
again. They were as deaf to the commands of Senor Castelar as to the
prayers and entreaties of the wives and daughters of respectable
fellow-citizens. And all this time that the central authority were
defied, artillerymen and linesmen were loitering about the streets of
Cadiz. Eventually it was plain they would be disarmed, as they were
disarmed at Malaga; and they would not offer serious opposition to the
process. Their officers were barely tolerated by them. The Guardia Civil
were true to duty, but when the crisis came, what could they do any more
than their comrades at Malaga? They were but as a drop of water in a
well. Disarmament is not liked by the old soldiers who have money to
their credit, but there is a large proportion of mere conscripts in the
ranks, and they are glad to jump at the chance of returning home.
Troubles worse than any may yet be in store; meanwhile the sun shines,
and Cadiz, like Seville, takes it easy. But there is a bad spirit
abroad, and it is growing. A pack of ruffians forcibly entered a mansion
at San Lucar, and annexed what was in it in the name of Republican
freedom; the "volunteers of liberty" have taken the liberty of breaking
into the houses of the consuls at Malaga in search for arms; an excited
mob attacked the printing-office of _El Oriente_ at Seville after I
left, smashed the type, and threatened to strangle the editor if he
brought out the paper again; and the precious municipality of Cadiz has
nothing better to do than order that no mourners shall be allowed in
future to use religious exercises or emblems, to sing litanies or carry
crosses, at the open graves of relatives in the cemeteries.
In the merchants' club (of which I was made free) they were saddened at
the disrupted state of society, but took it as kismet, and seemed to
think that all would come right in the end, by the interposition of some
_Deus ex machina_. But who that God was they could not tell: he was
hidden in the womb of Fate. As Cadiz accepted its destiny with
equanimity, I accommodated myself to the situation, and did as the
natives did. I helped to fly kites from the flat housetops--a favourite
pastime of mature manhood here; I opened mild flirtations with the
damsels in cigar-shops, and discovered that they were not slow to meet
advances; I expended hours every day cheapening a treatise on the
mystery of bull-fighting, with accompanying engravings, in vain--its
price was above rubies. But my great distraction was a strange character
I met at dinner at the house of the British Consul. I did not catch his
name at our introduction, so I mentally named him Mr. Crabapple. He was
short and stout, had a round wizened face freckled to the fuscous tint
of a russedon apple, and was endowed with a voice which had all the
husky sonority of a greengrocer's. He was beardless and sandy-haired,
and one of those persons whose age is a puzzle to define; he might have
been anything between fifteen and five-and-thirty. As he talked of
Harrow as if he had left it but yesterday, I was disposed to set him
down as a queer public-school boy on vacation, until I was astounded by
some self-possessed remark on Jamaica dyewoods. We stopped in the same
hotel. One morning he descended the stairs, a sort of dressing-case in
hand, and yelled to an urchin at the door:
"Here, you son of a sea-calf, take this down to the waterside for me!"
"Will he understand you?" I said.
"Bound to," Mr. Crabapple replied; "never talk to them any other way,
anyhow. 'Tis their business to understand. Ta, ta--deuce of a hurry."
"Where are you going, may I ask?"
"Read the Church Service--rather a bore--Sunday, you know."
The nondescript, then, was a chaplain.
The same evening he returned to the hotel, and on the following morning
I saw him again descending the stairs, the same dressing-case in hand.
He nodded salute, slung his luggage to the same urchin with the cry,
"Hook it, you lubber!" and, turning to me, said, "Ta, ta, sheering off
again."
"Where to now?"
"Mediterranean."
"There's no boat to-day."
"There is, though--there's mine;" and he was off.
The supposed chaplain was a stray-away from a novel by Marryat,
commanded her Majesty's gunboat _Catapult_, and was at Cadiz on the duty
of protecting British interests. At the moment his mission was to carry
important despatches to Gibraltar.
My mission to Cadiz was, partly, to ascertain the progress of the
inquiry into the case of the _Murillo_ steamer, more than suspected of
having run down the _Northfleet_, a vessel laden with railway-iron and
navvies, off Dungeness, on the night of the 22nd of January previous.
Three hundred lives had been lost on the occasion. I knew something of
that wreck, for I had seen and spoken with the survivors in the Sailors'
Home at Dover on the following evening. A dazed, stupid lot they were,
of an exceedingly low standard of intelligence. The sense of their own
rescue had overcome the poignancy of grief. I envied them their
stolidity, which I explained to my own mind by the rush of the engulfing
waters still swirling and singing knell of sudden doom in their ears.
"Guv'nor," said one clown to me, "I seed my ole 'ooman go down afore my
eyes, and I felt that grieved a'most as if I was agoin' down myself, and
I chewed a bit o' baccer."
I saw the _Murillo_ lying quietly a little distance off the land--a
handsome, shapely craft, fine in the lines, with a sharp stem fashioned
like that of a ram. She was painted black, with the exception of a band
of pink above the water-line, where she was coated with Peacock's
mixture. The British Consul informed me that he understood the inquiry
into the guilt of the master was to be carried on _secretly_. He would
not be allowed to attend it. Copies of the depositions of the accused,
and permission to see them, had also been denied to the agents of the
British Government, who applied for them for the purposes of the Board
of Trade inquiry. Though Spaniards, in private conversation, own that
the _Murillo_ is the criminal ship, they seem, for some unaccountable
reason, to be anxious that she should escape the penalty of her
wickedness, as if the national honour were concerned, and the national
honour would be served by cloaking an offence cruel and mean in itself,
and awful in its consequences.
There is a sentence in the Comminations which would keep running in my
mind every time I thought of that emigrant ship sent to the bottom off
Dungeness--"Cursed is he who smiteth his enemy secretly." But if he who
smites his enemy secretly is accursed, what is he who smites his
neighbour and then flees away like a coward in the dark? Is he not twice
and thrice wicked, and to be branded with malediction deeper still? Such
a thing the _Murillo_ steamer did--there could be no manner of doubt
about it; every seafaring man and every Spaniard admits her
blood-guiltiness; yet there she lies off Puntales, near the Trocadero,
calmly expecting soon to be under weigh again with her criminal master
and crew on board, with no punishment registered against her or them.
The Consul-General of Spain in London wrote to the papers after the loss
of the _Northfleet_, saying if this man was the wrongdoer he would be
punished, and sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. But he is the wrongdoer, and he
will never be sent to Ceuta or Tetuan. The master of the _Murillo_ and
the sailors of the watch on the fatal night are in prison, but they will
never be brought to serious account. The figure of Justice in these
latitudes is true to the sculptor's ideal in one sense: the eyes are
bandaged, not that Justice shall be impartial, but that she may not
see.
This instance of the _Murillo_ is but one of many, and as it illustrates
an artifice of tricky ship-owning, it will be well to state why the
_Murillo_ will go scot-free, and may audaciously turn up again in
British waters disguised by a few coats of paint, exhibiting a fresh
figure-head, and bearing a new name in gilt lettering on her stern.
In the first place, the _Murillo_ belonged not to Spanish so much as
English owners. The line of steamers of which she was one was the
property of a company of shareholders. The company was anxious that
their vessels should fly the Spanish flag, so they made one Don Miguel
Styles the nominal head of the firm. This individual was a mere clerk in
their office, a man of straw, and at the date of the catastrophe Don
Miguel Styles had no more substantial existence than our old friend John
Styles: he was dead, and in his grave.
Nextly, Mr. Daniel Macpherson, one of the most eminent merchants in the
port of Cadiz and Lloyd's agent, had been served with an instrument
claiming damages to the amount of 50,000 pesetas (L2,000), because that
he had calumniated the good ship _Murillo_, and caused her prejudice and
injury by detaining her a couple of months in the waters of Cadiz. The
persons who instituted this action forget that the Spanish courts have
no jurisdiction in the matter of libels published in England. And as for
the prejudice caused to the vessel, it is incredible that the British
Government should be so weak as to wait for letters from Lloyd's agent
before opening an inquiry into the deaths of some three hundred of its
subjects and the identity of the dastardly scoundrel who was the cause
of their deaths, who disabled the ship that held them, and then slunk
off, leaving them to the mercy of the midnight sea. That the _Murillo_
was that vessel, even those who maintain that she cannot be proved
legally guilty do not attempt to deny. It is true, as they say, that
moral certainty is one thing, legal certainty another. But there was
seldom a clearer chain of circumstantial evidence pointing to the
perpetrator of any crime than that which convicted the _Murillo_ of
being the misdemeanant. She was off Dungeness at the hour of the
disaster, and she was in contact with a ship; this the imprisoned master
admitted in his log. But he alleged that the ship could not have been
the _Northfleet_. He said he came into collision with a vessel; that he
stood by her for half an hour; that one of her boats put off with some
persons on board carrying a lantern; that they went round her examining
whether there was anything wrong; and that no call having been made to
him for assistance he steamed away. But there was a discrepancy between
the entry in his log and that in the log of the engineer. The latter, an
Englishman, stated that the engines of the _Murillo_ were backed before
the collision, that she went astern afterwards, and then went on ahead.
The delay altogether was only for a few minutes. No mention of the
half-hour. The engineer had no object in telling a lie. The master of
the _Murillo_ had. No other ship was in collision off Dungeness that
night. Besides, what meant the order to the _Murillo_ to come on at once
to Cadiz if she had been in collision, and not stop at Lisbon, whither
she was bound as port of call, if not to get her into limits where
justice is notoriously blind and halt? Argument is unnecessary and
childish; it was the _Murillo_ which cut down the _Northfleet_. But
Spain will never exact retribution for the destruction of the property
and the sacrifice of the lives of aliens. Cosas de Espana.