THE LAND OF THE BASQUE
My knapsack garnished, I turned my back on Oviedo early on Sunday
morning. The train wound slowly away toward the lofty serrated range
that shuts off the world on the south. As we approached the mountains,
the line began to tie itself in knots, climbing ever upward. In one
section two stations seven miles apart had twenty-six miles of railroad
between them. At the second of the two a flushed and puffing Spaniard
burst into our compartment with the information that, having reached the
former after the train had departed, he had overtaken us on foot.
Still we climbed until, at the turning of the day, high up where clouds
should have been we surmounted the ridgepole of the range and, racing,
roaring downward, were almost in a moment back in the barren, rocky,
sun-baked Spain of old, dust swirling everywhere, the heat wrapping us
round as with a woolen blanket, drying up the very tobacco in my pouch;
a change almost as decided as from the forests of Norway to the plains
of India.
Arrived in Leon at three, I set off at once tourist-fashion for the
cathedral, with its soaring Gothic towers and delicate, airy
flying-buttresses the first truly inspiring bit of Christian
architecture I had seen in Spain; the first indeed whose exterior was
anything. Much of the edifice, however, was glaringly new, the
scaffolds of the renovators being still in place.
But here again "if the house of God is rich that of man is poor,"
pauperous in fact. When once the traveler has forced himself to believe
that Leon was not many centuries since the rich capital of a vast empire
he must surely fall sad and pensive reflecting how mutable and fleeting
indeed are the things of earth. The Leon of to-day is a large village,
a dried-up, dirty, dilapidated, depopulated, cobble-streeted village of
snarling, meretricious-minded inhabitants jumbled together inside a wall
that with the cathedral is the only remaining proof of former
importance. Here once more was the beggar with his distressing whine,
his brow of bronze, and his all too evident injuries; not numerously but
constituting a large percentage of the population. In all Spain the
devise of insurance companies on the fronts of buildings is more than
frequent; in Leon there was barely a hovel without one or more. Which
could not but awaken profound wonder, for not only are there no wooden
houses within her walls to make danger of fire imminent, but a greater
blessing could hardly be imagined for Leon than a general and
all-embracing conflagration.
It was, perhaps, because of the unbroken misery with which they were
surrounded that the Leonese were individually crabbed and cynical. Not
a courteous word do I remember having received in all the town, and in
vitriolic remarks the keepers and guests of the tumble-down parador
where I was forced to put up outdid all others.
I was off in the morning at the first opportunity, again by train,
which, passing in the early afternoon through a blinding sand-storm near
the village of Cisneros, landed me soon after at Palencia. This was a
counterpart of Leon; a trifle less sulky and universally miserable, but
as sprawling, sun-parched, and slovenly. Its surrounding plains were
utterly verdureless, their flanking hills ossified, its gardens,
promenades, and Alameda past all hope of relief by sprinkling even had
its river not long since gone desert-dry as the rest. I left the place
quickly, riding into the night and descending at length to march to the
inspiriting music of a military band along a broad, thick-peopled
Alameda, at the end of which a giant statue of Columbus bulked massive
against the moonlit sky, into Valladolid.
I had come again upon a real city, almost the first since leaving
Madrid; whence accommodations, while in no sense lacking, were high in
price. In the course of an hour of prowling, however, I was apprised of
the existence of a modest casa eta huespedes in a canyon-like side
street. I rang the great doorbell below several times in vain; which
was as I had expected, for foolish indeed would have been the Spaniard
who remained within doors on such a night, while the band played and the
city strolled in the Alameda. I dropped my bundle at my feet and leaned
against the lintel of the massive doorway.
Within an hour there arrived another seeker after quarters, a slender
Spaniard in the early summer of life, who carried two heavy portmanteaus
and a leather swordcase. Almost at the opening of our conversation he
surprised me by inquiring, "You are a foreigner, verdad, senor?" I
commended his penetration and, as we chatted, sought for some sign of
his profession or place in society. All at once the long, slender
swordcase caught my eye.
"Ah! Es usted torero, senor," I observed with assurance.
The youth awakened the echoes of the narrow street with his laughter.
"Bullfighter! No, indeed! I am happy to say no. I am a student in the
national cavalry school here, just returned from my month's furlough.
But your error is natural," he went on, "and my fault. I have really no
right to appear in civilian garb. It would mean a month of bread and
water at least if one of our officers caught a glimpse of me. But
carajo! The family above may not be back by midnight. We can leave our
baggage with the portier next door."
We strolled slowly back to the brilliantly lighted Plaza de la
Constitution. Suddenly the youth interrupted an anecdote of the
tan-bark to exclaim in a calm but earnest voice:
"Caramba! There come my commandante and the first lieutenant."
Two men of forty-five or fifty, in resplendent uniforms and tall red
caps, their swords clinking along the pavement, were sauntering down
upon us. I stepped quickly to the opposite side of my companion, being
taller--and likewise curious.
"Hombre!" he protested sharply, stepping back again. "No tenga V.
cuidado. It is not our way to hide from our officers."
With head erect and military stride he marched straight on before him.
Luckily the officers were so engrossed in conversation that neither
glanced up as they passed.
We drifted into a cafe and ordered "helado," that Spanish imitation of
ice-cream the calling of which in the streets had so frequently caused
me to whirl about in astonishment, so much does it sound like our
"hello." Over it we fell to discussing things American, in which we
were gradually joined by several well-dressed men at the adjoining
marble tables. In the course of the evening I chanced to remark that
one of the surprises of my summer's trip had been to find so little
resentment against the United States.
"Senor," said the youth, while each and all of our companions gave signs
of agreement, "nothing more fortunate has befallen our country in a
century than the loss of Cuba and the Philippines. Not only has it
taken a load off the Spanish people; it has brought more relief than you
can guess to us of the army. The colonies were the dumping-ground of
our profession. Once let an officer show ability and he was forthwith
shipped off to the islands to die. Now they are taken away, Spain has
already begun to regain her lost place among the nations. No, senor; we
of the army at least think nothing but kindness to your people for the
relief."
Returned to the casa de huespedes, the student and I were given
adjoining rooms and saw much of Valladolid together before I took train
the second morning after to Burgos. There, were regulation "sights" in
abundance; on every hand memories of the Cid Campeador, even the spot
where stood his dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks of
Jerusalem. Two miles or more out along the shallow mill-race that
Burgos calls a river I visited the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims
for its distinction never in its centuries of existence to have admitted
to the veil less than a daughter of the nobility. The stroll is
pleasant, but the place, noble though it be, unexciting--at least
outwardly. Of the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be
said--that has been often said before.
It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what I might have seen
earlier and frequently had my tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery.
More exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside in which
hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed for future reference, with the
name and a charitably indulgent characterization of the deceased on the
end of his coffin. The Spaniard, with his superstitions, prefers this
style of tomb for much the same reason, it seems, that the Arab seals
his graves with cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular
regions may not bear away the departed before the agents of the better
and hence slower realm put in an appearance.
The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was the view from the summit
of the hot, dry Cerro de San Miguel. Not merely does it offer a mighty
and comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of Castilla Vieja,
but a bird's-eye view as it were of all Spain and her history. Of the
city spread out at one's feet fully three-fourths the space is taken up
by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas de misericordia,
the vast bulk of the castle, the barracks, the bullring,--all the
countless buildings of non-producers; while between them in the nooks
and corners wherever a crack offers are packed and huddled the hovels of
the mere inhabitants. There, in plain sight, is Spain's malady. She is
a land of non-producers. Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi
guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by the omnivorous
priesthood that mendicancy is an honorable profession, make up almost
the bulk of her population of productive age. Not without reason does
nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail against "Batuschca."
There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that she shoot her priests
and set her soldiers to work. As isolated individuals the merry,
dissolute fellows of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they
have, and suffer the natural end of such living. But as a class they are
beyond reform; their point of view is so utterly warped and
incorrigible, they have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft"
that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro remedio" as the Spaniard
himself would say could his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of
superstition and cant for one clear thought. Let him who protests that
they are teachers of the youth go once and see what they teach,--the
vapid, senseless lies about "saints" so far from truth as to be an
abomination, so far above the possible aspirations and attainments of
real humanity as to force the rising generations from very hopelessness
of imitation to lose heart and sink to iniquity as the priesthood has
done before them. Or are there some who still credit them with feeding
the poor? A high praise, indeed, exactly equal to that due the footpad
who refunds his victim carfare that he may be the more quickly rid of
him.
Therein lies the chief weakness of Spain. It is not because she is
ruled by a slender youth chosen by the accident of birth rather than by
a more portly man chosen more or less by his fellow-citizens; not
because her religion happens to be that of Rome rather than the
austerities of Calvin or the fatalism of Mohammed; not because her
national sport is a bit more dramatically brutal than that of other
lands; not because her soil is dry and stony and her rains and rivers
slight; not because her people are decadent, her human stock run down--I
have plowed in the sea in the foregoing pages if I have not made it
clear that her real manhood, the workman, the peasant, the arriero, the
muscle and sinew of the nation, are as hardy, toilsome and all-enduring
as the world harbors. But in the long centuries of warfare her
attention was drawn away from internal affairs, she fell among thieves
within, and the force of example, the helplessness of the individual
drove her people in the line of least resistance,--to become thieves
too, nationally, officially, until mad
grab-what-you-can-and-the-devil-grab-the-ungrabbing has her by the
throat gasping for life. If she is not to sink down for the vultures of
the nations to pick clean of her meager scraps of flesh there must arise
within her boundaries a man, a movement, a sweeping change that shall
cast off the burden of precedent and turn her officials to doing
honestly with all their might what now they do with all their might
dishonestly. She must regain confidence in the necessity and prevalence
of honesty. She must learn that patent yet rarely comprehended truth
that work and work only is the real source of life; she must cease to be
the sworn enemy of the innovator, thinking her ways best and those of
the rest of the world abnormal, unable to see a yard beyond her national
boundaries, scorning all ideas and arguments from the outside like the
most hide-bound of Orientals.
The next afternoon found me in Vitoria, in the land of the Basque; yet
another kind of Spain. Vitoria is a city of to-day, clean, bustling,
almost American in her streets and architecture and the wide-awake air
of the _Vascongado_. The _boina_--round cap without visor and the end
of a string for tassel--had all at once become universal, worn, like the
fez in Damascus, by every age and grade of man from bootblack to mayor.
So pleasing was this prosaic city that even though her prices were high
I loitered in her shade until the next afternoon before seeking out the
highway to Bilbao.
There lay sixty-seven kilometers to the seaport, a half of which I hoped
to cover before halting for the night. For on the following day Bilbao
was to celebrate in honor of the king. The way led me through a country
fertile for all its stoniness, made so by the energy and diligence of
the Basque, whose strong features, bold curved nose, piercing eyes and
sturdy form was to be seen on every hand. With the southern Spaniard
this new race had almost nothing in common, and though as serious of
deportment as the gallego there was neither his bashfulness nor
stupidity. The Castilian spoken in the region was excellent, the
farming implements of modern manufacture and the methods of the
husbandman thousands of years ahead of Andalusia.
As the day was fading I began to clamber my way upward into the
mountains that rose high in the darkening sky ahead. The night grew to
one of the blackest, the heavens being overcast; but he who marches on
into the darkness without contact with artificial light may still see
almost plainly. It was two hours, perhaps, after nightfall, and the
road was winding ever higher around the shoulder of a mammoth peak, its
edge a sheer precipice above unfathomable depths, when suddenly I saw a
man, a denser blackness against the sea of obscurity, standing
stock-still on the utmost edge of the highway.
"Buenos tardes," I greeted in a low voice, almost afraid that a hearty
tone would send him toppling backward to his death.
He neither answered nor moved. I stepped closer.
"You have rather a dangerous position, verdad, senor?"
Still he stared motionless at me through the darkness. Could he be some
sleep-walker? I moved quietly forward and, thrusting out a hand,
touched him on the sleeve. It was hard as if frozen! For an instant I
recoiled, then with a sudden instinctive movement passed a hand quickly
and lightly over his face. Was I dreaming? That, too, was hard and
cold. I sprang back and, rummaging hastily through my pockets, found
one broken match. The wind was rushing up from the bottomless gulf
below. I struck a light, holding it in the hollow of my hand, and in the
instant before it was blown out I caught a few words of an inscription
on a pedestal:
"ERECTED TO THE MEM--
THROWN OVER THIS PRECIPICE--
BANDITS--NIGHT OF--"
and before I had made out date or name I was again in darkness.
Over the summit, on a lower, less wind-swept level, I came upon a long
mining town scattered on either side of the highway. I dropped in at a
wineshop and bespoke supper and lodging. A dish of the now omnipresent
bacalao was set before me, but for a time the keeper showed strong
disinclination to house a wandering stranger falling upon him at this
advanced hour.
The young woman who served me at table and answered the demands for wine
of the half-dozen youthful miners about me seemed strangely out of place
in such surroundings. Nothing was plainer than that she was not of the
barmaid type. One would have said rather the convent-reared daughter of
some well-to-do merchant or large farmer. This surmise turned out to be
close to the truth. When the carousing miners had drifted into the
night and I, by dint of talking and acting my best Castilian, had found
my way into the good graces of the family, I heard the girl's story--for
rightly approached the Spaniard is easily led to talk of his private
affairs. Her father had been the principal shop-keeper of the mining
town, and had died a few weeks before. His debts were heavy and when
all claims had been settled there remained to his orphaned daughter five
hundred pesetas.
"But," I cried, "five hundred pesetas! It is a fortune, senorita, in
Spain. You could have started a shop, or lived well until the novio
appeared."
"Jesus Maria!" cried the girl, looking at me with wondering eyes. "Do
you forget purgatory? For the repose of my father's soul five hundred
masses must be said; no less, the cura himself told me; and each mass
costs a peseta. Then I have come to work here."
There was that in the air next morning that reminded me, as I wound down
into a wooded, well-peopled valley, that summer was drawing toward its
close. The day grew quickly warm, however. In the knowledge that the
king was sojourning in the city upon which I was marching, I was fully
prepared to endure long catechizing and examination by guardias civiles.
My wonder was not slight, therefore, when I was suffered to pass through
one, two, three villages without being once challenged.
But the expected meeting came at last and quite made up for the lack of
others. The third village lay already behind me when I heard an
authoritative shout and, turning around, saw a bareheaded man of thirty,
dressed half in peasant, half in village garb, beckoning to me with a
commanding gesture to return. Fancying him some wily shop-keeper, I
swung on my heel and set off again. He shouted loudly, and racing after
me, caught me by an arm. I shook him off with an indignation that sent
him spinning half across the highway. Instead of retreating he sprang
at me again and we should certainly have been soon entangled in a crude
performance of the manly art had he not cried out in a voice quaking
with anger:
"Have a care, senor, in resisting the law. I am a minon."
"Minon!" I cried, recalling suddenly that in the Basque provinces the
national guardias are reenforced by local officers thus named. "Then
why the devil don't you wear your uniform? How shall I know you are not
a footpad?"
"I shall prove that soon enough," he replied, still visibly shaking with
the rage of a Spaniard whose "pundonor" has been sullied.
I returned with him to the casa de ayuntamiento, in the doorway of which
he halted, and, examining me for concealed weapons, demanded that I
untie my knapsack. Never before had this been more than superficially
inspected, but the thoroughness with which the angry minon overhauled
it, examining even my letters and fingering my clothes-brush over and
over as if convinced that it could be opened by some secret spring,
fully made up for any possible carelessness of his fellow-officers
elsewhere. When he had lost hope of finding evidence of treason he
handed back my possessions reluctantly and bade me with a scowl the
conventional "Go with God;" to which I answered, "Queda V. con el
mismisimo diablo"--but the thrust was too subtle for his bullet-headed
intellect.
Toward noon the green slopes and cool forests turned to a cindered soil
and the sooty aspect of a factory town. I mounted a last hill and
descended quickly through a smoke-laden atmosphere into Bilbao. Here
was the first entirely modern city I had seen in Spain; one might easily
have fancied one's self in Newcastle or Seattle. The Spanish casa de
huespedes seemed not even known by name, and in its place were only
boisterous taverns, smacking of sea-faring custom and overrun with the
touts that feed on the simple mariner.
As I sat toward evening in one of these establishments, there entered a
man something over thirty-five, dressed in boina and workingman's garb
that showed but slight wear. I noted him only half consciously, being
at that moment expressing to the landlord my surprise that the king,
instead of being in Bilbao as he was reported by the newspapers, was ten
or twelve miles away on his yacht at the mouth of the river. The keeper,
a stocky Basque of much better parts than the average of his guild,
glanced up from his spigots and replied in a smooth and pleasant voice:
"Porque, senor, no quiere morir tan joven--Because he does not care to
die so young."
"Y con mujer tan bella y fresca--And with a wife so beautiful and
fresh," added a thick-set fellow at a neighboring table without looking
up from his cards.
Love for Alfonso is not one of the characteristics of the masses in this
section of the country.
Meanwhile the newcomer, whose eye had been wandering leisurely over the
assembly, threaded his way half across the room to sit down at my table.
I wondered a bit at the preference, but certain he was no tout, gave him
the customary greeting. By the time I had accepted a glass and treated
in turn we were exchanging personal information. He announced himself a
cobbler, and even before I had broached the subject suggested that he
could find me a lodging with an old woman above his shop. This
workroom, when we reached it, proved to be nothing but a kit of tools
and a few strips of leather scattered about the small hallway at the
foot of the stairs. I found above the hospitality he had promised,
however, and paying two night's lodging in an unusually pleasant room,
descended.
The shoemaker appeared more obliging than industrious, for he at once
laid aside the shoe he was hammering and announced that he was going to
give himself the pleasure of spending the evening with me and of finding
me the best place to take in the fireworks that were to be set off in
honor of the king. I explained that it was rather my plan to attend the
city theater, where I might both see that remarkable personage in the
flesh and hear one of Moliere's best comedies in Spanish.
"There is more than time for both," replied the cobbler, and forthwith
fell to extolling the coming spectacle so highly that he came near to
arousing within me, too, an interest in the fireworks.
At the end of an hour's stroll we found ourselves on the summit of a
knoll in the outskirts, in a compact sea of Bilbaoans watching a tame
imitation of a Fourth of July celebration on the slope of one of the
surrounding hills. The display was, as I have said, in honor of the
king; though it turned out that his indifferent majesty was at that
moment dining and wining a company of fellow-sportsmen on board the
_Giralda_ twelve miles away.
The cobbler set a more than leisurely pace back to the city, but we
regained at length the bank of the river and, crossing the wooded Paseo
Arenal, approached the theater. Before it, was packed a vast and
compact multitude through which I struggled my way to the entrance, only
to be informed in the customary box-office tones that there was not
another ticket to be had. The shoemaker was no theater-goer, and as my
own disappointment was not overwhelming, we set out to fight our way
back to the Paseo.
Long before we had succeeded in that venturesome undertaking, however,
there burst forth a sudden, unheralded roar of uncounted voices, the
immense throng surged riverward with an abruptness that all but swept us
off our feet, the thunder of thousands of hoofs swelled nearer, and down
upon us rode an entire regiment of guardias civiles in uniforms so new
they seemed but that moment to have left the tailor, and astride finer
horses than I had dreamed existed in Spain. Straight into the crowd
they dashed, headlong, at full canter, like cowboys into a drove of
steers, sweeping all before them, scattering luckless individuals in all
directions, and completely surrounding the theater in solid phalanx.
Before I had recovered breath there arose another mighty shout, and,
some three hundred more horsemen, with a richly caparisoned carriage in
their midst, dashed through the throng from a landing-stage on the river
bank behind us to the door of the theater. I caught a fleeting glimpse
of a slight figure in a rakish overcoat, a burst of music sounded from
the theater, and died as suddenly away as the doors closed behind the
royal arrival. Again the cavalry charged, driving men, women and
children pellmell back a hundred yards from the building and, forming a
yet wider circle around it, settled down to sit their horses like
statues until the play should be ended.
When my wonder had somewhat subsided there came upon me an all but
uncontrollable desire to shout with laughter. The ludicrousness, the
ridiculousness of it all! A vast concourse of humanity driven
helter-skelter like as many cattle, scores of persons jostled and
bruised, thirteen hundred of the most able-bodied men in Spain to sit
motionless on horseback around a theater late into the night, all for
the mere protection of one slight youth whose equal was easily to be
found in every town or village of the land! Truly this institution of
kingship is as humorous a hoax as has been played upon mankind since man
was.
A hoax on all concerned. For the incumbent himself, the slender youth
inside, who must spend his brief span of years amid such mummery,
commands of himself a bit of mild admiration. I fell to wondering what
he would give for the right to wander freely and unnoticed all a
summer's day along the open highway. Let him who can imagine himself
born a king, discovering as early as such notions can penetrate to his
infant intellect that his fellow-mortals have placed him high on a
pedestal, have given him even without the asking power, riches, and
almost reverence as a superior being, when at heart he knows full well
he is of quite the same clay as they; and he may well ask himself
whether he would have grown up even as manly as the youth who goes by
the name of Alfonso XIII. Recalling that former kings of Spain could
not be touched by other than a royal finger, we may surely grant common
sense to this sovereign who dances uncondescendingly with daughters of
the middle class, who chats freely with bullfighters, peasants, or
apple-women. Pleasing, too, is his devil-may-carelessness. On this
same night, for instance, after reboarding his yacht, he took it
suddenly into his mad young head to return at once through this, his
most hostile province, to his queen. At one in the morning he was rowed
ashore with one companion, stepped into his automobile, himself playing
chauffeur, and tore away through Bilbao and a hundred miles along the
craggy coast to San Sebastian. It is not hard to guess what might have
happened had he punctured a tire among those stony mountains and been
chanced upon by a homing band of peasants brave with wine.
Musing all which I turned to address the cobbler and found him gone.
The crowd was slowly melting away. I sat down in the Paseo and waited
an hour, but my erstwhile companion did not reappear. When I descended
from my lodging next morning there remained not a trace of his "shop" at
the foot of the stairs. Had the village minon done me the honor of
telegraphing my description to the seaport, or was my road-worn garb the
livery of suspicion? This only I know; when, that Sunday evening after
my return from a glimpse of the open sea, I asked my hostess whether her
fellow renter were really a shoemaker, she screwed up her parchment-like
features into a smile and answered:
"Si, senor, one of the shoemakers of his majesty."