THE MATTRESS BEATER
Englishmen are justly proud of their birthright. The less they travel,
moreover, the prouder they are, and the stronger is their conviction that
England leads the world in thought and art and action.
They are quite unaware, for instance, that no country in the world is
behind England (unless it be Scotland) in a small matter that affects
very materially one-third of a human span of life, namely beds. In any
town of France, Germany or Holland, the curious need not seek long for
the mattress-maker. He is usually to be found in some open space at the
corner of a market-place or beneath an arcade near the Maine exercising
his health-giving trade in the open air. He lives, and lives bountifully,
by unmaking, picking over and re-making the mattresses of the people.
Good housewives, moreover, stand near him with their knitting to see that
he does it well and puts back within the cover all the wool that he took
out. In these backward countries the domestic mattress is remade once a
year if not oftener. In our great land there is a considerable vagueness
as to the period allowed to a mattress to form itself into lumps and to
accumulate dust or germs. Moreover, there are thousands of exemplary
housekeepers who throw up the eye of horror to their whitewashed ceiling
at the thought of a foreign person's personal habits, who do not know
what is inside their mattress and never think of looking to see from
year's end to year's end.
In Spain, a country rarely visited by those persons who pride themselves
upon being particular, the mattress-maker is a much more necessary factor
in domestic life than is the sweep or the plumber in northern lands. No
palace is too royal for him, no cottage is too humble to employ him.
He is, moreover, the only man allowed inside a nunnery. Which is the
reason why he finds himself brought into prominence now. He is usually a
thin, lithe man, somewhat of the figure of those northerners who supply
the bull-ring with Banderilléros. He arrives in the early morning with a
sheathe knife at his waist, a packet of cigarettes in his jacket pocket
and two light sticks under his arm. All he asks is a courtyard and the
sunshine that Heaven gives him.
In a moment he deftly cuts the stitches of the mattress and lays bare the
wool which he never touches with his fingers. The longer stick in his
right hand describes great circles in the air and descends with the
whistle of a sword upon the wool of which it picks up a small handful.
Then the shorter stick comes into play, picks the wool from the longer,
throws it into the air, beats it this way and that, tosses it and catches
it until every fibre is clear, when the fluffy mass is deftly cast aside.
All the while, through the beating of the wool, the two sticks beaten
against each other play a distinct air, and each mattress-maker has his
own, handed down from his forefathers, ending with a whole chromatic
scale as the shorter stick swoops up the length of the longer to sweep
away the lingering wool. Thus the whole mattress is transferred from a
sodden heap to a high and fluffy mountain of carded wool, all baked by
the heat of the sun.
The man has a hundred attitudes, full of grace. He works with a skill
which is a conscious pleasure; a pleasure unknown to those who have never
had opportunity of acquiring a manual craft or appreciating the wondrous
power that God has put into human limbs. He has complete control over his
two thin sticks, can pick up with them a single strand of wool, or half a
mattress. He can throw aside a pin that lurks in a ball of wool, or kill
a fly that settles on his work, without staining the snowy mass. And all
the while, from the moment that the mattress is open till the heap is
complete, the two sticks never cease playing their thin and woody air so
that any within hearing may know that the "colchonero" is at work.
When the mattress case is empty he pauses to wipe his brow (for he must
needs work in the sun) and smoke a cigarette in the shade. It is then
that he gossips.
In a Southern land such a worker as this must always have an audience,
and the children hail with delight the coming of the mattress-maker. At
the Convent School of the Sisters of the True Faith his services were
required once a fortnight; for there were many beds; but his coming was
none the less exciting for its frequency. He was the only man allowed
inside the door. Father Muro was, it seemed, not counted as a man. And in
truth a priest is often found to possess many qualities which are
essentially small and feminine.
The mattress-maker of Pampeluna was a thin man with a ropy neck, and keen
black eyes that flashed hither and thither through the mist of wool and
dust in which he worked. He was considered so essentially a domestic and
harmless person that he was permitted to go where he listed in the house
and high-walled garden. For nuns have a profound distrust of man as a
mass and a confiding faith in the few individuals with whom they have to
deal.
The girls were allowed to watch the colchonero at his work, more
especially the elder girls such as Juanita de Mogente and her friend
Milagros of the red-gold hair. Juanita watched him so closely one spring
afternoon that the keen black eyes kept returning to her face at each
round of the long whistling stick. The other girls grew tired of the
sight and moved away to another part of the garden where the sun was
warmer and the violets already in bloom; but Juanita lingered.
She did not know that this was one of Marcos' friends--that in the summer
this colchonero took the road with his packet of cigarettes and two
sticks and wandered from village to village in the mountains beating the
mattresses of the people and seeing the wondrous works of God as these
are only seen by such as live all day and sleep all night beneath the
open sky.
Quite suddenly the polished sticks ceased playing loudly and dropped
their tone to pianissimo, so that if Juanita were to speak she could be
heard.
"Hombre," she said, "do you know Marcos de Sarrion?"
"I know the chapel of Our Lady of the Shadows," he answered, glancing at
her through a mist of wool.
"Will you give him a letter?"
"Fold it small and throw it in the wool," he said, and immediately the
sticks beat loudly again.
Juanita's hand was already in her pocket seeking her purse.
"No, no," he said; "I am too much caballero to take money from a lady."
She walked away, dropping as she passed the uncarded heap, a folded paper
which was lost amid the fluff. The sticks flew this way and that, and the
twisted note shot up into the air with a bunch of wool which fell across
the two sticks and was presently cast aside upon the carded heap. And
peeping eyes from the barred windows of the convent school saw nothing.
Marcos and his father had returned to Saragossa. They were people of
influence in that city, and Saragossa, strange to say, had a desire to
maintain law and order within its walls. It was unlike Barcelona, which
is at all times republican and frankly turbulent. Its other neighbour,
Pampeluna, remains to this day clerical and mysterious. It is the city of
the lost causes; Carlism and the Church. The Sarrions were not looked
upon with a kindly eye within the walls of the Northern fortress and it
is much too small a town for any to pass unobserved in its streets.
There was work to do in Saragossa. In Pampeluna there were only
suspicions to arouse. Juanita was in Sor Teresa's care and could scarcely
come to harm, holding in her hand as she did a strong card to be played
on emergency.
All Spain seemed to be pausing breathlessly. The murder of Prim had
shaken the land like an earthquake. The king had already made enemies. He
had no enthusiasm. His new subjects would have preferred a few mistakes
to this cautious pause. They were a people vaguely craving for liberty
before they had cast off the habit of servitude.
No Latin race will ever evolve a great republic; for it must be ruled.
But Spain was already talking of democracy and the new king had scarcely
seated himself on the throne.
"We can do nothing," said Sarrion, "but try to keep order in our own
small corner of this bear-garden."
So he remained at Saragossa and threw open his great house there, while
Marcos passed to and fro into Navarre up the Valley of the Wolf to Torre
Garda.
Where Evasio Mon might be, no man knew. Paris had fallen. The Commune was
rife. France was wallowing in the deepest degradation. And in Bayonne the
Carlist plotters schemed without let or hindrance.
"So long as he is away we need not be uneasy about Juanita," said Marcos.
"He cannot return to Saragossa without my hearing of it."
And one evening a casual teamster from the North, whose great two-wheeled
cart, as high as a house and as long as a locomotive, stood in the dusty
road outside the Posada de los Reyes, dropped in, cigarette in mouth, to
the Palacio Sarrion. In Spain, a messenger delivers neither message nor
letter to a servant. A survival of mediaeval habits permits the humblest
to seek the presence of the great at any time of day.
The Sarrions had just finished dinner and still sat in the vast
dining-room, the walls of which glittered with arms and loomed darkly
with great portraits of the Spanish school of painting.
The teamster was not abashed. It was a time of war, and war is a great
leveler of social scales. He had brought his load through a disturbed
country. He was a Guipuzcoan--as good as any man.
"It was about the Señor Mon," he said. "You wished to hear of him. He
returned to Pampeluna two days ago."
The teamster thanked their Excellencies, but he could not accept their
hospitality because he had ordered his supper at his hotel. It was only
at the Posada de los Reyes in all Saragossa that one procured the real
cuisine of Guipuzcoa. Yes, he would take a glass of wine.
And he took it with a fine wave of the arm, signifying that he drank to
the health of his host.
"Evasio Mon will not leave us long idle," said Sarrion, when the man had
gone, and he had hardly spoken when the servant ushered in a second
visitor, a man also of the road, who handed to Marcos a crumpled and
dirty envelope. He had nothing to say about it, so bowed and withdrew. He
was a man of the newer stamp, for he was a railway worker, having that
which is considered a better manner. He knew his place, and that
knowledge had affected his manhood.
The letter he gave to Marcos bore no address. It was sealed, however, in
red wax, which had the impress of Nature's seal, a man's thumb--unique
and not to be counterfeited.
From the envelope Marcos took a twisted paper, not innocent of carded
wool.
"We are going back to Saragossa," Juanita wrote. "I have refused to go
into religion, but they say it is too late; that I cannot draw back now.
Is this true?"
Marcos passed the note across to his father.
"I wish this was Barcelona," he said, with a sudden gleam in his grave
eyes.
"Why?"
"Because then we could pull the school down about their ears and take
Juanita away."
Sarrion smiled.
"Or get shot mysteriously from a window while attempting it," he said.
"No, we fight with finer weapons than that. Mon has got his dispensation
from Rome ... a few hours too late."
He handed back the note, and they sat in silence for a long time in the
huge, dimly-lighted room. Success in life rests upon one small gift--the
secret of the entry into another man's mind to discover what is passing
there. The greatest general the world has known owed his success, by his
own admission, to his power of guessing correctly what the enemy would do
next. Many can guess, but few guess right.
"She has not dated her letter," said Sarrion, at length.
"No, but it was written on Thursday. That is the day that the colchonero
goes to the Calle de la Dormitaleria."
He drew a strand of wool from the envelope and showed it to Sarrion.
"And the day that Mon returned to Pampeluna. He will be prompt to act. He
always has been. That is what makes him different from other men. Prompt
and restless."
Sarrion glanced across the table, as he spoke, at the face of his son,
who was also a prompt man, but withal restful, as if possessing a reserve
upon which to draw in emergency. For the restless and the uneasy are
those who have all their forces in the field.
"Do not sit up for me," said Marcos, rising. He stood and thoughtfully
emptied his glass. "I shall change my clothes," he said, "and go out.
There will be plenty of Navarrese at the Posada de los Reyes. The night
diligencias will be in before daylight. If there is any news of
importance I will wake you when I come in."
It was a dark night, and the wind roared down the bed of the Ebro. For
the spring was at hand with its wild march "solano" and hard, blue skies.
There was no moon. But Marcos had good eyes, and those whom he sought
were men who, after a long siesta, traveled or worked during half the
night.
The dust was astir on the Paseo del Ebro, where it lies four inches deep
on the broad space in front of the Posada de los Reyes where the carts
stand. There were carts here now with dim, old-fashioned lanterns, and
long teams of mules waiting patiently to be relieved of their massive
collars.
The first man he met told him that Evasio Mon must have arrived in
Saragossa at sunset, for he had passed him on the road, going at a good
pace on horseback.
From another he heard the rumour that the Carlists had torn up the line
between Pampeluna and Castéjon.
"Go to the station," this informant added. "They will tell you there,
because you are a rich man. To me they will tell nothing."
At the station he learnt that this rumour was true; and one who was in
the telegraph service gave him to understand that the Carlists had driven
the outpost back from the mouth of the Valley of the Wolf, which was now
cut off.
"He thinks I am at Torre Garda," reflected Marcos, as he returned to the
city, fighting the wind on the bridge.
Chance favoured him, for a man with tired horses stopped his carriage to
inquire if that were the Count Marcos de Sarrion. He had brought Juanita
to Saragossa in his carriage, not with Sor Teresa, but with the Mother
Superior of the school and two other pupils. He had been dismissed at the
Plaza de la Constitucion, and the ladies had taken another carriage. He
had not heard the address given to the driver.
By daylight Marcos returned to the Palacio Sarrion without having
discovered the driver of the second carriage or the whereabouts of
Juanita in Saragossa. But he had learnt that a carriage had been ordered
by telegraph from a station on the Pampeluna line to be at Alagon at four
o'clock in the morning. He learnt also that telegraphic communication
between Pampeluna and Saragossa was interrupted.
The Carlists again.