VII.

The high aquiline nose which is characteristic of the autochthonic race

abounds in San Sebastian, but we saw no signs of the high temper which

is said to go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from my

first reading in _Don Quixote,_ of the terrific combat between the

squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the knight of La Mancha

stopped after his engagement with the windmills. In their exchange of

insults incident to the knight’s desire that the ladies should go to

Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the necromancers

he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks, “‘Get

gone,’ the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse Biscayan, ‘Get gone,

thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by He Who me create... me kill

thee now so sure as me be Biscayan,’” and when the knight called him an

“inconsiderable mortal,” and said that if he were a gentleman he would

chastise him: “‘What! me no gentleman?’ replied the Biscayan. ‘I swear

thou be liar as me be Christian.... Me will show thee me be Biscayan,

and gentleman by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman in spite of Devil;

and thou lie if thou say the contrary.’”

It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of every reader, and

I recurred to it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this

fiery threefold gentleman might have lived in his time. It would be

interesting to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in a

fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to represent in the talk

of his Biscayan. Like the Welsh again they strenuously keep their

immemorial language against the inroads of the neighboring speech. How

much they fix it in a modern literature it would be easier to ask than

to say. I suppose there must be Basque newspapers; perhaps there are

Basque novelists, there are notoriously Basque bards who recite their

verses to the peasants, and doubtless there are poets who print their

rhymes: and I blame myself for not inquiring further concerning them of

that kindly Basque banker who wished so much to do something for me in

compensation for the loss of my worthless letter. I knew, too cheaply,

that the Basques have their poetical contests, as the Welsh have their

musical competitions in the Eisteddfod, and they are once more like the

Welsh, their brothers in antiquity, in calling themselves by a national

name of their own. They call themselves Euskaldunac, which is as

different from the name of Basque given them by the alien races as Cymru

is from Welsh.

All this lore I have easily accumulated from the guide-books since

leaving San Sebastian, but I was carelessly ignorant of it in driving

from the hotel to the station when we came away, and was much concerned

in the overtures made us in a mixed Spanish, English, and French by a

charming family from Chili, through the brother to one of the ladies and

luisband to the other. When he perceived from my Spanish that we were

not English, he rejoiced that we were Americans of the north, and as

joyfully proclaimed that they were Americans of the south. We were

at once sensible of a community of spirit in our difference from our

different ancestral races. They were Spanish, but with a New World

blitheness which we nowhere afterward found in the native Spaniards; and

we were English, with a willingness to laugh and to joke which they had

not perhaps noted in our ancestral contemporaries. Again and again we

met them in the different cities where we feared we had lost them, until

we feared no more and counted confidently on seeing them wherever we

went. They were always radiantly smiling; and upon this narrow ground I

am going to base the conjecture that the most distinctive difference of

the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern is its habit of seeing the

fun of things. With those dear Chilians we saw the fun of many little

hardships of travel which might have been insupportable without the

vision. Sometimes we surprised one another in the same hotel; sometimes

it was in the street that we encountered, usually to exchange

amusing misfortunes. If we could have been constantly with these

fellow-hemispherists our progress through Spain would have been an

unbroken holiday.

There is a superstition of travelers in Spain, much fostered by

innkeepers and porters, that you cannot get seats in the fast trains

without buying your tickets the day before, and then perhaps not, and

we abandoned ourselves to this fear at San Sebastian so far as to get

places some hours in advance. But once established in the ten-foot-wide

interior of the first-class compartment which we had to ourselves, every

anxiety fell from us; and I do not know a more flattering emotion than

that which you experience in sinking into your luxurious seat, and,

after a glance at your hand-bags in the racks where they have been put

with no strain on your own muscles, giving your eyes altogether to the

joy of the novel landscape.

The train was what they call a Rapido in Spain; and though we were

supposed to be devouring space with indiscriminate gluttony, I do not

think that in our mad rush of twenty-five miles an hour we failed to

taste any essential detail of the scenery..But I wish now that I had

known the Basques were all nobles, and that the peasants owned many of

the little farms we saw declaring the general thrift. In the first two

hours of the six to Burgos we ran through lovely valleys held in the

embrace of gentle hills, where the fields of Indian corn were varied by

groves of chestnut trees, where we could see the burrs gaping on their

stems. The blades and tassels of the corn had been stripped away,

leaving the ripe ears a-tilt at the top of the stalks, which looked

like cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive

contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the

farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick

and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars

trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The

houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered

into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered church with a

bell-tower in front or at one corner of the fagade. In most of the

larger houses an economy of the sun’s heat, the only heat recognized

in the winter of southern countries, was practised by glassing in the

balconies that stretched quite across their fronts and kept the cold

from at least one story. It gave them a very cheery look, and must have

made them livable at least in the daytime. Now and then the tall chimney

of one of those manufactories we had seen on the way from Irun invited

belief in the march of industrial prosperity; but whether the Basque who

took work in a mill or a foundry forfeited his nobility remained a part

of the universal Basque secret. From time to time a mountain stream

brawled from under a world-old bridge, and then spread a quiet tide for

the women to kneel beside and wash the clothes which they spread to dry

on every bush and grassy slope of the banks.

The whole scene changed after we ran out of the Basque country and into

the austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled

into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage

nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the green of

the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands

into which the valleys flattened and widened. There were no longer any

factory chimneys; the villages seemed to turn from stone to mud; the

human poverty showed itself in the few patched and tattered figures that

followed the oxen in the interminable furrows shallowly scraping the

surface of the lonely levels. The haggard mountain ranges were of stone

that seemed blanched with geologic superannuation, and at one place we

ran by a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile long against

the sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered up again in a

succession of titanic bulks. But stupendous as these mountain masses

were, they were not so wonderful as those wheat-lands which in

harvest-time must wash their shores like a sea of gold. Where these now

rose and sank with the long ground-swell of the plains in our own West,

a thin gray stubble covered them from the feeble culture which leaves

Spain, for all their extent in both the Castiles, in Estremadura, in

Andalusia, still without bread enough to feed herself, and obliges

her to import alien wheat. At the lunch which we had so good in the

dining-car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and well away

from the interesting Spanish pair at our table. It is never safe in

Latin Europe to count upon ignorance of English in educated people, or

people who look so; and with these we had the reward of our prudence

when the husband asked after dessert if we minded his smoking. His

English seemed meant to open the way for talk, and we were willing he

should do the talking. He spoke without a trace of accent, and we at

once imagined circles in which it was now as _chic_ for Spaniards to

speak English as it once was to speak French. They are said never to

speak French quite well; but nobody could have spoken English better

than this gentleman, not even we who were, as he said he supposed,

English. Truth and patriotism both obliged us to deny his conjecture;

and when He intimated that he would not have known us for Americans

because we did not speak with the dreadful American accent, I hazarded

my belief that this dreadfulness was personal rather than national. But

he would not have it. Boston people, yes; they spoke very well, and he

allowed other exceptions to the general rule of our nasal twang, which

his wife summoned English enough to say was very ugly. They had suffered

from it too universally in the Americans they had met during the summer

in Germany to believe it was merely personal; and I suppose one may own

to strictly American readers that our speech _is_ dreadful, that it is

very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no reason and no wish to

wound; and they could never know what sweet and noble natures had been

producing their voices through their noses there in Germany. I for my

part could not insist; who, indeed, can defend the American accent,

which is not so much an accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang? It was

mortifying, all the same, to have it openly abhorred by a foreigner, and

I willingly got away from the question to that of the weather. We agreed

admirably about the heat in England where this gentleman went every

summer, and had never found it so hot before. It was hot even in

Denmark; but he warned me not to expect any warmth in Spain now that the

autumn rains had begun.

If this couple represented a cosmopolitan and modern Spain, it was

interesting to escape to something entirely native in the three young

girls who got in at the next station and shared our compartment with us

as far as we went. They were tenderly kissed by their father in putting

them on board, and held in lingering farewells at the window till the

train started. The eldest of the three then helped in arranging their

baskets in the rack, but the middle sister took motherly charge of the

youngest, whom she at once explained to us as _enferma._ She was

the prettiest girl of the conventional Spanish type we Lad yet seen:

dark-eyed and dark-haired, regular, but a little overfull of the chin

which she would presently have double. She was very, very pale of face,

with a pallor in which she had assisted nature with powder, as all

Spanish women, old and young, seem to do. But there was no red underglow

in the pallor, such as gives many lovely faces among them the complexion

of whitewash over pink on a stucco surface. She wrapped up the youngest

sister, who would by and by be beautiful, and now being sick had only

the flush of fever in her cheeks, and propped her in the coziest corner

of the car, where she tried to make her keep still, but could not make

her keep silent. In fact, they all babbled together, over the basket of

luncheon which the middle sister opened after springing up the little

table-leaf of the window, and spread with a substantial variety

including fowl and sausage and fruit, such as might tempt any sick

appetite, or a well one, even. As she brought out each of these

victuals, together with a bottle of wine and a large bottle of milk, she

first offered it to us, and when it was duly refused with thanks, she

made the invalid eat and drink, especially the milk which she made a wry

face at. When she had finished they all began to question whether her

fever was rising for the day; the good sister felt the girl’s pulse, and

got out a thermometer, which together they arranged under her arm, and

then duly inspected. It seemed that the fever _was_ rising, as it might

very well be, but the middle sister was not moved from her notable calm,

and the eldest did not fear. At a place where a class of young men

was to be seen before an ecclesiastical college the girls looked out

together, and joyfully decided that the brother (or possibly a cousin)

whom they expected to see, was really there among them. When we reached

Burgos we felt that we had assisted at a drama of family medicine and

affection which was so sweet that if the fever was not very wisely it

was very winningly treated. It was not perhaps a very serious case, and

it meant a good deal of pleasant excitement for all concerned.