VI

We were going to spend the rest of the day driving out through the

city into the country beyond the Tagus, and we drove off in our really

splendid turnout through swarms of beggars whose prayers our horses’

bells drowned when we left them to their despair at the hotel door. At

the moment of course we believe that it was a purely dramatic misery

which the wretched creatures represented; but sometimes I have since

had moments of remorse in which I wish I had thrown big and little

dogs broadcast among them. They could not all have been begging for the

profit or pleasure of it; some of them were imaginably out of work and

worthily ragged as I saw them, and hungry as I begin to fear them. I am

glad now to think that many of them could not see with their poor blind

eyes the face which I hardened against them, as we whirled away to the

music of our horses’ bells.

The bells pretty well covered our horses from their necks to their

haunches, a pair of gallant grays urged to their briskest pace by the

driver whose short square face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy

whenever we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those drivers who

know everybody; he passed the time of day with all the men we met, and

he had a joking compliment for all the women, who gladdened at sight of

him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knitting: such a driver

as brings a gay world to home-keeping souls and leaves them with the

feeling of having been in it. I would have given much more than I gave

the beggars in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal

acquaintance bantered each other; but the terms might sometimes have

been rather rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air, which I

fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint recurrent odor, as

if in testimony of the driver’s derivation from those old rancid

Christians, as the Spaniards used to call them, whose lineage had never

been crossed with Moorish blood. If it was merely something the

carriage had acquired from the stable, still it was to be valued for

its distinction in a country of many smells; and I would not have been

without it.

When we crossed the Tagus by a bridge which a company of workmen

willingly paused from mending to let us by, and remained standing

absent-mindedly aside some time after we had passed, we found ourselves

in a scene which I do not believe was ever surpassed for spectacularity

in any theater. I hope this is not giving the notion of something

fictitious in it; I only mean that here Nature was in one of her most

dramatic moods. The yellow torrent swept through a deep gorge of red

earth, which on the farther side climbed in precipitous banks, cleft by

enormous fissures, or chasms rather, to the wide plateau where the gray

city stood. The roofs of mellow tiles formed a succession of levels

from which the irregular towers and pinnacles of the churches stamped

themselves against a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear

that their beautiful irregularities and differences showed to one very

noble effect. The city still looked the ancient capital of the two

hundred thousand souls it once embraced, and in its stony repair there

was no hint of decay.

[Illustration: 16 THE BRIDGE ACROSS THE YELLOW TAGUS]

On our right, the road mounted through country wild enough at times, but

for the most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost

homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were sometimes

mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks

there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown

withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of

the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant was bearing

an arm-load of them to a wide stone pen in the midst of which stood a

lordly black pig, with head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses,

toward Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more

imaginative tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of

the past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those

prehistoric ages

When wild in woods the noble savage ran,

pursuing or pursued by his tusked and bristled ancestor, and then slowly

reverting through the different invasions and civilizations to that

signal moment when, after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became

Christian again forever, and pork resumed its primacy at the table.

Dark, mysterious, fierce, the proud pig stood, a figure made for

sculpture; and if he had been a lion, with the lion’s royal ideal of

eating rather than feeding the human race, the reader would not have

thought him unworthy of literature; I have seldom seen a lion that

looked worthier of it.

We must have met farmer-folk, men and women, on our way and have seen

their white houses farther or nearer. But mostly the landscape was

lonely and at times nightmarish, as the Castilian landscape has a trick

of being, and remanded us momently to the awful entourage of our run

from Valladolid to Madrid. We were glad to get back to the Tagus, which

if awful is not grisly, but wherever it rolls its yellow flood lends the

landscape such a sublimity that it was no esthetic descent from the high

perch of that proud pig to the mighty gorge through which, geologically

long ago, the river had torn its way. When we drove back the

bridge-menders stood aside for us while we were yet far off, and the

women came to their doorways at the sound of our bells for another

exchange of jokes with our driver. By the time a protracted file of

mules had preceded us over the bridge, a brisk shower had come up, and

after urging our grays at their topmost speed toward the famous church

of San Juan de los Reyes Catolicos, we still had to run from our

carriage door through the rain.

Happily the portal was in the keeping of one of those authorized beggars

who guard the gates of heaven everywhere in that kind country, and he

welcomed us so eagerly from the wet that I could not do less than give

him a big dog at once. In a moment of confusion I turned about, and

taking him for another beggar, I gave him another big dog; and when we

came out of the church he had put off his cap and arranged so complete a

disguise with the red handkerchief bravely tied round his head, that my

innocence was again abused, and once more a big dog passed between us.

But if the merit of the church might only be partially attributed

to him, he was worth the whole three. The merit of the church was

incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic

Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at

Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most

beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the

guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I

personally recall also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy gallery

wandering far aloof in the upper gloom, which remains overhead with me

still, and the yet fainter sense of the balconies crowning like capitals

the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste,

but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their

presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live

near them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its

recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes

of them is no way of making that beauty part of one’s being, and I will

not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is

that I had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the

fagade of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian

captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic Kings in

their conquest of Granada. They were not only the memorials of the most

sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery of a thousand years of

warfare in which the prisoners on either side suffered in chains for

being Moslems or being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the

church front are merely decorative to the glance, but to the eye that

reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man’s inhumanity to man!

How heavily they had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly they had

eaten through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they were very, very

decorative, as the flowers are that bloom on battle-fields.

Even with only a few minutes of a scant quarter-hour to spare, I would

not have any one miss seeing the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings

used to enter the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, but

which the common American must now see by going outside the church. The

cloister is turned to the uses of an industrial school, as we were glad

to realize because our guide, whom we liked so much, was a night student

there. It remains as beautiful and reverend as if it were of no secular

use, full of gentle sculptures, with a garden in the middle, raised

above the pavement with a border of thin tiles, and flower-pots standing

on their coping, all in the shadow of tall trees, overhanging a deep

secret-keeping well. From this place, where you will be partly sheltered

from the rain, your next profitable sally through the storm will be to

Santa Maria la Blanca, once the synagogue of the richest Jews of Toledo,

but now turned church in spite of its high authorization as a place of

Hebrew worship. It was permitted them to build it because they declared

they were of that tribe of Israel which, when Caiaphas, the High Priest,

sent round to the different tribes for their vote whether Jesus should

live or die, alone voted that He should live. Their response, as

Theophile Gautier reports from the chronicles, is preserved in the

Vatican with a Latin version of the Hebrew text. The fable, if it is a

fable, has its pathos; and I for one can only lament the religious

zeal to which the preaching of a fanatical monk roused the Christian

neighborhood in the fifteenth century, to such excess that these kind

Jews were afterward forbidden their worship in the place. It is a very

clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with

a _retablo_ attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque Gothic detail

mingled with Byzantine ornament, and Moorish arabesquing and the famous

stucco honeycombing which we were destined at Seville and Granada to

find almost sickeningly sweet. Where the Rabbis read the law from their

pulpit the high altar stands, and the pious populace has for three

hundred years pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where they

had so humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest they should rouse

the jealousy of their sleepless enemies.