The Old-Fashioned Invocation--"Them 'ere Spanish
Kings!"--Candidates for a Throne--_En Voyage_--Bordeaux and the
Back-ache--An Unmannerly Alsatian--The Patriot gets a Roland for
his Oliver--Small Change for a Hot Bath--Plan for Universal
Coinage--Daughters of Israel--The Jews Diagnosed--Across the
Border--The Writer is Saluted "Caballero"--Bugaboo Santa Cruz--Over
a Brasero.
O mules, liquorice, onions, oranges, garlic, and eke figs, cork and
olives, and all you other products of Spain, come to my aid now that I
enter upon my theme! Why should not a prose-chronicler of this era
proffer his appeal as did the poets of era undetermined, of the eras of
Augustus or the Second Charles? Perchance the [Greek:_Thea_], _Musa_, or
Muse, to whom he makes his plea, may prove less kind than those to whom
Homer, Virgil, or Milton prayed; but he has his remedy. In most
instances, he can eat them.
Having complied with what used to be a hallowed custom, I shall now,
following the example of that shrewd man, the late Abraham Lincoln,
proceed to tell a story. The deadly sin in any book is dulness, and an
occasional anecdote--if it point a moral so much the better--is sovran
balsam for spleen.
I had a literary friend in London, and as he once returned to his
residence by Regent's Park after a long walk, and asked had anyone
called during his absence, the housekeeper replied "No;" but, correcting
herself, added, "leastways, nobody, sir, except one of them 'ere Spanish
kings!"
The Spanish king who was of no consequence was one of the race of
Pretenders, and had the proud blood of countless generations of
thick-lipped Bourbons meandering through his veins.
In the February of 1873, from which my personal knowledge of Spain
dates, there were quite a number of these Spanish kings on the carpet.
Amadeus, the Italian, had vacated the throne on the 11th, in a message
which substantially affirmed that the peaceful government of Spain was
hopeless--his Majesty gave it up as a bad job--and the two Chambers,
combining as the sovereign Cortes, proclaimed the Republic by a majority
of four to one. Of the aspirants to the crown there were notably Don
Carlos Maria de los Dolores, the legitimate heir--if there be any virtue
in legitimacy--and Don Alfonso, only son of the deposed Isabella, a boy
of fifteen, at school at Vienna, a legitimate claimant if the abolition
of the Salic law in 1830 be acknowledged. There was one who might have
been a king, but sensibly declined the proffered honour, in the person
of the ancient Espartero, Duke of Victory, Prince of Vergara; and there
was a Prussian princeling, a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who had been
nominated king in the midsummer of 1870, and whose nomination afforded
the coveted pretext for the war between France and Germany. Besides,
every Captain-General in the country--and the allowance is five--was a
king _in prospectu_, not to mention the multifarious leaders of the many
parties in the Congress, all of whom were qualified to be kings in their
own conceit. Spain being thus suffering from a plethora of kings--as one
result of which the Republic existed--it struck those who had
commissioned me to chronicle the humours of besieged Paris that I might
find some material for instructive and entertaining writing at the other
side of the Pyrenees.
There are several ways of getting to Madrid. I had no difficulty in
selecting mine--in fact, I had no choice. It was my duty to go there by
the quickest route, no matter what the expense, the danger, or the
inconvenience. These were the terms implied in my bond. The first stage
was to Bordeaux. Over that I shall not dwell beyond a passing note on
the excitement of the mad drive from terminus to terminus through Paris
streets, in the early morn, at the rate of four statute miles an hour,
in order, as Brother Jonathan has it, to "establish connection," and the
misery of the long railway pilgrimage south. The scenery, I believe, was
lovely; but fatigue, and the worry of a constrained position, and the
frequent jerky stops as one was dozing to sleep, and the impatient
summons "_en voiture_" as the hungry man was settling to a square meal,
indisposed one for the proper appreciation of the picturesque. I got so
eye-dazed from the whirl and dust and flitting sentinels of
telegraph-posts on the long music-lines of telegraph-wires, that I could
not distinguish a life-buoy from a funeral wreath. There were no
sleeping-cars between Paris and Bordeaux then; back-ache, with an
occasional variety in the shape of migraine, is my principal memory of
that journey. Back-ache, the reader will allow, would take the poetry
out of a honeymoon trip. And here I interpose a short parenthesis to
register my acknowledgment to the philanthropist who invented
sleeping-cars with their complementary accommodations. He is a
benefactor to travelling humanity. Statues have been erected to dozens
who have done less good to their kind--soldiers, lawyers, politicians,
and patent pill-makers. Sleeping-cars avert exhaustion, ill-humour, bad
dreams, and kidney-disease, not to exclude the back-ache and migraine
afore-mentioned. Whenever a bronze memorial is to be raised on the
Thames Embankment to their inventor, I am ready with my contribution.
At Bordeaux, where I shuffled into the nearest hotel, I uncoiled myself,
and took the kinks out of my bones; but of the wine capital I shall say
no more than that "I came, I slept, I left." At leaving, a little
adventure variegated the itinerary. As I entered the railway-carriage, a
gentleman on the opposite seat, its only occupant, was sucking an
orange. I pulled out my cigar-case, and politely asked him if he had any
objection to my smoking.
"Are you a German?" he demanded stiffly.
"Pardon me," I said, "I inquired if you had any objection to my
smoking."
"Are you a German?" he repeated almost fiercely, his eyes flashing.
"I fail to see what business it is of yours what my nationality may be."
"It is my business, and I insist on your answering my question," he
shouted, dropping the orange in his anger.
"And I decline to answer it," I said quietly.
Now he fairly raged. There is nothing which so provokes a man of hasty
temper, with whom you may be in a controversy, as to preserve a
tranquil, self-possessed demeanour. Ladies who nag their husbands are
aware of this interesting feature in household ethics.
"Ah, you _are_ a German!" he yelled. "You are a Prussian. I will not sit
in the same compartment with you'!" and he stood up, and danced, and
went through a round of epileptic gesticulation.
"Your absence will not leave me inconsolable," said I, in soft, sweet
accents, ceremoniously lifting my hat.
He bounced out of the carriage like a maniac, stamped along the
platform, muttering with incoherent vehemence as he went, and presently
reappeared with a gendarme, whom he informed that he suspected I was a
Prussian spy. Interrogated, he could advance no proof beyond his own
suspicions, my arrogant coolness of manner, and my hesitation in
returning a straightforward reply.
"I am sure he is," he concluded, "for he all but admitted it."
The gendarme was perplexed, and asked me very civilly, was I a German?
"Distinctly not," I answered.
Had Monsieur any papers? I produced my British passport, which he
looked at, pretended to understand, folded up, returned to me with
excuses for having given me so much trouble, and fixed a look of grave
reproach on his countryman. The latter was embarrassed, and had not the
grace to make a frank apology, but mumbled something to the effect that
I might have saved all this annoyance if I had stated what countryman I
was at first.
"If you had put your question in the French fashion, that is to say
courteously, I might have done so," I said.
He blushed, and stammered forth the apology at last; he hoped I would
forgive his quickness, but he could not control himself when he met a
German; he hated the race--the Germans were a pack of cold-blooded
robbers, who had brought ruin on his country. He had vowed vengeance
against them, and he had reason for it, for he was an Alsatian.
I saw my chance.
"_Mon Dieu!_" I exclaimed, throwing up my hands in affected horror. "It
is you who are the German, then, and not I. Do you not know, sir, that
Alsace has been a province of Germany for the past two years?"
If the face be an index to the mind, that Alsatian must have passed
through a mental cyclone. Luckily for the angel who records bad
language, his rage was so terrible that he lost the power of speech, the
while I gently moved my head to and fro, and gazed at him with
compassionate remonstrance, as much as to say how could he, a
sausage-eating creature, have had the heart to pass himself off on me as
a Frenchman? It was cruel, but it was merited. That Alsatian I despised
as the meanest thing in patriotism I had ever met--and my experience of
the article is not limited--for even were I a German, so long as I
behaved myself with propriety he had no right to insult me by his surly
cross-examination. But I suppose the poor devil thought he was playing
the rôle of redresser of the wrongs of his country, and exacting an
instalment of that _revanche_ of which we hear occasional frothing
babble. If I were a German I should be proud of it, and I hope I should
have had the firmness to tell my Alsatian interlocutor so to his teeth.
From Bordeaux to Bayonne, down through the Landes, is a most interesting
ride, as I dimly recollect; but I have no notes of it, and I infer that
nothing particular occurred as I sped through the fat, nice, pleasant
country. I had a short stay at Bayonne--long enough, however, to enable
me to mark by ethnological signs and tinge of complexion that Spain was
near. There were architectural signs, too, for there were colonnades in
some of the streets to shelter promenaders from the powerful sun. Plenty
of soldiers in Bayonne, and plenty of Hebrews. All of the latter seem to
be engaged in the money-changing business. The whole art of
money-changing consists in undervaluing the coin you are buying, and
setting an exaggerated value on that you are giving for it. I must have
lost a small fortune in the course of my money-changing transactions,
therefore am I a most determined adherent of a uniform system of coinage
for all civilized nations; and that coinage, I maintain, should be
decimal. Fancy a foreigner getting small money for a sovereign after he
has incurred a debt of one and sixpence for a hot salt-water bath on the
South Coast! The fair attendant offers him a crown-piece, two
half-crowns, two florins, two shillings, two six-pences, two groats, two
threepenny bits, a postage stamp, a wheedling simper and a charity-bob.
He is puzzled, and to my thinking he is justified in being puzzled; and
if the attendant be not exceedingly attractive he is cheated. Coinage
should be simple--should be so plain in identity that a child could
distinguish it in the dark, and its worth should descend in regulated
gradation. This reform will come eventually. One of the objections to a
universal mintage may be that there would be a struggle as to whose
profile should be sunk into the stamps--a point on which many rulers are
solicitous, for they foresee that it is the only species of immortality
they will ever attain. His Majesty of Araucania might legitimately
protest against having his individuality merged in the lineaments of the
artistic concretion of the Republic of San Marino, and the Queen of
Madagascar (what is her name, by-the-bye?) might not easily be weaned
from a natural longing for the luxury of having her own face in the
perpetual youthfulness of Hebe imprinted on the discs which circulate
at Tananarivo. That objection might be met in two ways; one side of the
coin might be common to all the world, and the other reserved for the
vanities, or the vanities might toss up, and acquire the renown of the
numismatist's glass-case in turn.
That the reform will come I am convinced, but not while the Hebrews can
hinder it. It is their interest to have this diversity of coinage; and
they are very conservative of what is their interest. I have for a long
time been trying to make up my mind about the Hebrews. My sympathies fly
out to them because they have been persecuted, foully persecuted, on
account of their religious belief, while, on the other hand, my
antipathies are stirred because they make to themselves an idol of gold.
Beautiful are the daughters of Israel with a striking Old Testament
beauty, marvellously imperious considering the lengthened apprenticeship
of helotry through which they have served; but _naïveté_ is not the
quality one would look for in their countenances. As well seek a dimple,
or a blush, or a coy reserve. Oh! beautiful indeed, and to an imposing
degree, with long straight nose, full orbs, pursing lips,
clean-chiselled regular contour; but the earliest lesson they learn is
how many grains Troy go to a silver shekel. They may have in them still
the fire of Jael, who drove the tent-peg into the skull of the tyrant,
or the fierce genius of the poetic Deborah, who was one of the first to
strike the lyre of triumph; but, alas! that it must be said, the gentle
Ruth, gleaning in the fields of barley, is a lost tradition of the race.
I can almost imagine the tender-eyed Leah and the well-favoured Rachel
figuring in an idyl of another Wakefield family; but, then, where are we
to seek for them? Not in Bayonne. There are no artless Jewesses there;
the pupils under their black lashes glitter with the glow of cupidity,
and I prefer the light of love. There is something in it more womanly
and mellow. I have seen the eyes of a Jewess almost bulge out of their
sockets like those of the telescope fish, as she gazed on the treasures
of Notre Dame at Paris--to me a degrading dilatation--and I set it down
to the instincts engendered by centuries of servitude, when the Jews
discovered that the surest mode of checkmating their masters was by
amassing money, and lending it out to them at usurious rates. Certes,
they are a pushing and clannish tribe, and skilled in the mimetic arts;
but they are not so high-souled and all-influential as their friend
Disraeli would fain make them in a chapter of elaborate gush in that
fine novel, "Coningsby." In the main I admire them; but I could wish
that they stripped to manual toil oftener; that they were less
obsequious in indigence, and less despotic and dictatorial when they are
in authority--niggers and Hindoos can be that; that they were less prone
to exhibit their entire stock-in-trade in the shop-window; that they
were less ostentatious in their hospitality, when they are hospitable,
and that they had a quieter taste in raiment. Now, I think I have had
ample retribution out of that greasy matron at Bayonne, who exploited me
when converting my honest notes of the Bank of England into Spanish
duros.
From Bayonne the train rattled along not far from the fringe of the Bay
of Biscay, by Biarritz and St. Jean de Luz, and across the bridge
spanning the Bidassoa to Irun, the border town of Spain, close by
Fontarabia's wooded height. Here we had a pause for customs and passport
examination and change of carriages. No railway official could give me
any information as to how far the line went; it might go to Madrid, it
might not go more than a few miles; the country was unsettled. These
officials impressed me as sulky or stupid or timorous, or all three
combined, and made glaring contrast with the smart servants on the
London, Chatham and Dover line, who know everything that regards their
calling, and are always quick and decisive in answer without taint of
rudeness. But I was recalled from my comparisons by one word, which
wrought a magic effect upon me.
That word was "_caballero_!"
How elated I felt! I realized that I was in Spain, and seemed to grow in
inches and self-esteem. I lent myself to an unconscious swagger, tipped
my hat jauntily on one side of my head, and was swayed by an almost
irresistible inclination to retire to some unobserved corner and wax the
ends of my moustache.
The speaker was a Guardia Civil, the Spanish equivalent for a French
gendarme. A solemn man in a cocked-hat, protected by a glazed cover, his
complexion was of sickly walnut-juice sallow, like the flesh-tint on a
portrait in oils by an old master. The complexion was characteristically
Spanish. He was the State personified, and had much dignity. He told me
I might count upon getting to Beasain, a village in a valley at this
side of one of the mountains of the Pyrenean range, but that progress
beyond that by rail was problematical, as the Cura Santa Cruz had torn
up the track.
This was the first I had heard of the Cura Santa Cruz, one of the most
ferocious and redoubtable of the partisans of Don Carlos. Truculent were
the stories which were told of him. He was Raw-head-and-bloody-bones in
cassock; priest and picaroon, with a well-developed tendency towards
wholesale murder; Bogie with a breviary--that is, according to some.
According to others, he was a brave, disinterested and reverend patriot;
a sort of Hofer-cum-Tell individual, etherealized by the sanctity of his
vocation. Anyhow, be he maleficent or benign, it was clear that he was
Somebody, and had filled the whole country-side with awe. He led a corps
of guerrilleros, who rejoiced in the nickname of the Black Band; and
such was the terror inspired by their exploits, that the whisper that
Santa Cruz was hovering near stunned opposition, and brought in any
ransom demanded. He must have been in one of his benign moods on this
occasion, for he permitted our train free passage through his territory;
and in the evening we drew up in a snow-bound basin, where shuddered the
straggling hamlet of Beasain. I took up my lodging for the night in a
two-storied cabin, and sent a news-letter to London, recounting what I
had seen and heard so far. I was urged to this by an intimation which
had reached me, that a rival had preceded me on the road to Madrid by
twenty-four hours. The first blow is half the battle, and I calculated
that if I could get the ear of the public in advance of him, there would
be a point gained. Communication with England was open from Beasain.
Heaven knows how it would be to-morrow or next day.
There was fearful tangible evidence of the presence of Santa Cruz in
this remote valley. At one extremity where the cavernous opening of the
railway tunnel made a dark gap in the hillside, the track had been
wrenched from its fastenings, and the sleepers smeared with oil and set
on fire. Heaps of charred timber marked the spot, and alongside, down in
a ravine, lay the wreck of shattered carriages and locomotive, just as
they had been tumbled in a topsy-turvy blending of complete collapse. It
made me tremble to reflect what this meant, and I came to the conclusion
that Santa Cruz was thoroughgoing in his warfare and restrained by few
scruples of compassion.
Over the fumes of the brasero, the brass-pan with its stifling embers of
charcoal, placed on a stand in the middle of my room, my landlord and I
with outstretched palms held long confab before I turned into bed. His
mother had been French, and we gossiped in that tongue. His views were
tolerably impartial, but it was plain that the Carlists had his good
wishes. The factions were partially dispersed, but were not defeated, he
said; they would give more trouble; and then he horrified me with a
well-authenticated tale of a recent fight at Aspeitia, where an old
villager had taken refuge in a house which was subsequently occupied by
the troops. He fell dead after a volley fired by the Carlists. His son
was one of those who had joined in the volley, and the awful muffled
rumour was spreading among the peasantry that it was by the son's bullet
the father had been slain.