“Let us get out and race it,” suggested Catalina; but she spoke with the
accent of indolent content, and hung over the door of the leisurely
train, giving no heed beyond a polite nod to the nervous protests of
Mrs. Moulton. That good lady, surrounded by air-cushions, which the
various members of her attentive family distended at stated intervals,
had propped herself in a corner, determined to let no expression of
fatigue escape her, and enjoying herself in her own fashion. The
material discomforts of travel certainly overbalanced the æsthetic
delights, but, at least, she was seeing the Europe she had dreamed of so
ardently in her youth. Jane sat in another corner reading a volume of
Pater. It was impossible to turn her back on the scenery, for the seats
ran from east to west and they were travelling due south, but she could
ignore it, and that she did.
They were in a large, open car furnished with wooden seats and a door
for each aisle. The carriage was not dirty, and all the windows were
open; moreover, it harbored, so far, no natives beyond two nuns and a
priest, who ate cherries continually and talked all at once with the
rapidity of ignited fire-crackers and with no falling inflection. The
Moultons had taken possession of the last compartment and sat with their
backs to the wall, but Catalina, disdaining such poor apology for
comfort, had the next to herself, and when not hanging over the door
rambled back and forth. Mr. Moulton and Lydia alternately read Baedeker
and leaned forward with exclamations of approval.
But although Catalina had responded amiably to Lydia’s expression of
contempt for Spanish methods of transit, the ambling train suited her
less energetic nature and enabled her to study the country that had
mothered her own. She stared hard at the blue and tumbled masses of the
Pyrenees with their lofty fields of snow glittering in a delicate mist,
the same frozen solitude through which Hannibal marched two thousand
years ago, longing, perhaps, for the hot, brown plain of Ampurdan below
and the familiar murmur of the bright waters that rimmed it. The sun was
hot, and all that quivering world of blue shimmered and sparkled and
coquetted as if life and not death were its bridegroom. But the
Mediterranean, like other seas, is a virago at heart and only dances and
sways like a Spanish beauty when out where there is naught to oppose
her; for centuries she has been snarling and clawing the rocky
head-lands, her white fangs never failing to capture their daily morsel,
and never content.
Catalina loved the sea and hated it. To-day she was in no mood to give
it anything and turned her back upon it, her eyes travelling from the
remote, disdainful beauty of the mountains down over the vineyards and
villages, leaning far out to catch a last glimpse of that most
characteristic object in a Spanish landscape—a huge and almost circular
mass of rock rising abruptly from the plain, brown, barren, its apex set
with a fortified castle, an old brown town clinging desperately to the
inhospitable sides. The castle may be in ruins, but men and women still
crawl lazily up and down the perpendicular streets, too idle or too poor
to get away from the soil, with its dust of ancestral blood. The
descendants of warriors slept and loafed and begged in the sun, thankful
for a tortilla a day and dreading nothing this side of Judgment but the
visit of the tax-gatherer. To escape the calls of the remorseless one,
many who owned not even a little vineyard on the plain slept in the
hollowed side of a hill and made the earth their pillow.
“Brutes!” said Catalina, meaning the government.
“Why don’t they come to America?” asked Lydia, wonderingly. “Look at
that old woman out in the field. That is the most shocking thing you see
in Europe—women in the fields everywhere.”
Catalina, indolent in some respects, waged eternal war with the
one-sided. “Your factories are far worse,” she asserted. “They are
really horrible, for the women stand on their feet all day with a
ceaseless din tearing at their nerves and never a breath of decent air
in their lungs. They are the most ghastly lot I ever saw in my life.
These women are always in the fresh air, with the quiet of nature about
them, and they rest when they like. I think we are the barbarians—we and
the Spanish government.”
“Well, well, don’t argue,” said Mr. Moulton, soothingly. “It is too hot.
We have our defects, but don’t forget our many redeeming virtues. And as
for Spain, backward, tax-ridden, oppressed as she is, one sees nothing
to compare with the horrors that Arthur Young saw in France just before
1789. Spain, no doubt, will have her own revolution in her own time; I
am told the peasants are very virile and independent. My love, shall I
blow up that bag behind your head?”
He examined the other bags, readjusted them, and there being nothing to
claim the eye at the moment, read Baedeker aloud, to the intense but
respectful annoyance of his eldest daughter and the barely concealed
resentment of Catalina, who hung still farther over the creaking door.
The train walked into a little station of Tordera and stopped.
“Cinco minutos!” said the guard, raising his voice.
“Five!” said Catalina. “That means fifteen. Let us get out and exercise
and buy something.”
“Pray be careful!” exclaimed Mrs. Moulton. “I know you will be left. Mr.
Moulton, please—please don’t get out.”
Mr. Moulton patted her amiably and descended in the wake of Catalina and
Lydia. They were surrounded at once by beggars, even the babies in arms
extending their hands. There were few men among them, but the women,
picturesque enough in their closely pinned kerchiefs of red or yellow,
were more pertinacious than man ever dared to be. Lydia, fastidious and
economical, retreated into the train and closed the door; but Catalina
disbursed coppers and gave one dirty little Murillo a peseta. She had
spoken almost as much Spanish in her life as English, and exchanged so
many elaborate compliments with her retinue, in a manner so acceptable
to their democratic taste, that they forgot to beg and pressed close at
her heels as she strode up and down, her hands in her pockets, wondering
what manner of fallen princess was this who travelled third class and
knew how to treat a haughty peasant of Spain as her equal. She was
buying an inflammable-looking novel with which to insult Jane, and a
package of sweets for Lydia and herself, when she heard a shrill note of
anguish:
“Mr. Moulton! Catalina!”
Mingling with it was the drone of the guard: “Viajeros al tren!”
The train was moving, the guard having been occupied at the _cantina_
until the last moment. He was singing his song unconsciously on the step
of an open door. Catalina saw the frantic whir of Mr. Moulton’s
coat-tails as he flew by and leaped into the car. She flung two pesetas
at the anxious vender, dropped her purchase into her pockets, and,
running swiftly alongside the moving train, made the door easily.
“I could have caught the old thing if it had been half a mile off!” she
exclaimed, indignantly, as three pairs of hands jerked her within, and
Mrs. Moulton sniffed hysterically at her salts. “And if ever I do get
left, just remember that I speak the language and am not afraid of
anything.”
“Well,” said Mr. Moulton, tactfully, “just remember that _we_ do not
speak the language and have need of your services. Suppose we have our
afternoon meal? The lunch at the frontier was not all that could be
desired.”
He produced the hamper and neatly arrayed the top of two portmanteaus
with jam and bread and cake. Catalina placed a generous share of these
delicacies on a tin plate, and, omitting to explain to her astonished
relatives, climbed over the seats and made offering to each of the other
occupants of the car. It had half filled at the station, and besides the
nuns and priests there were now several Catalan peasants in red caps and
black velvet breeches, fine, independent men, prepared to ignore these
eccentric Americans, ready to take offence at the slightest suggestion
of superiority, but enchanted at the act of this unsmiling girl, who
spoke their language and understood their customs. They refused, as a
matter of course, politely, without servility, and in a moment she
returned to her party.
“You must always do that,” she informed them, as she set her teeth
hungrily into the bread, “and when they offer of theirs you must look
pleased with the attention.”
Mrs. Moulton sighed, and when, a few moments later, a peasant vaulted
over the seats and proudly offered of his store of black bread and
garlic, she buried a frozen smile in her smelling-salts. Jane refused to
notice him, but the other three declined with such professions of
gratitude that he told his comrades the Americans were not altogether a
contemptible race, and that the one who spoke their language looked like
a devil with a white soul and was worthy to have been born in Spain. He
took out his guitar in a moment and swept the keys with superb grace
while the others sang, the nuns in high, quavering voices that wandered
aimlessly through the rich tones of the men. After that they talked
politics and became so excited that Mr. Moulton was relieved when they
all fell out together at Mataro. He could then take notes and enjoy the
groves of olives and oranges, the castles and watch-towers on the
heights, eloquent and Iberian and Roman, Goth and Moor, the turquoise
surface of the Mediterranean—never so blue as the Adriatic or the
Caribbean—the bold, harsh sweep of the coast. Then, as even Catalina
began to change her position frequently on the hard seats, and they were
all so covered with dust that even the spinster visage of Jane looked
like a study in grotesque, the horizon gave up the palaces and palms of
Barcelona.