I should be sorry if I could believe that Cordova experienced the
disappointment in us, which I must own we felt in her; but our
disappointment was unquestionable, and I will at once offer it to
the reader as an inducement for him to go to Cordova with less lively
expectations than ours. I would by no means have him stay away; after
all, there is only one Cordova in the world which the capital of the
Caliphate of the West once filled with her renown; and if the great
mosque of Abderrahman is not so beautiful as one has been made to fancy
it, still it is wonderful, and could not be missed without loss.
I
Better, I should say, take the _rapido_ which leaves Madrid three times
a week at nine-thirty in the morning, than the night express which
leaves as often at the same hour in the evening. Since there are now
such good day trains on the chief Spanish lines, it is flying in the
face of Providence not to go by them; they might be suddenly taken off;
besides, they have excellent restaurant-cars, and there is, moreover,
always the fascinating and often the memorable landscape which they pass
through. By no fault of ours that I can remember, our train was rather
crowded; that is, four or five out of the eight places in our corridor
compartment were taken, and we were afraid at every stop that more
people would get in, though I do not know that it was our anxieties
kept them out. For the matter of that, I do not know why I employed an
interpreter at Madrid to get my ticket stamped at the ticket-office; it
required merely the presentation of the ticket at the window; but the
interpreter seemed to wish it and it enabled him to practise his English
with me, and I realized that he must live. In a peseta’s worth of
gratitude he followed us to our carriage, and he did not molest the
_mozo_ in putting our bags into the racks, though he hovered about the
door till the train started; and it just now occurs to me that he may
have thought a peseta was not a sufficient return for his gratitude; he
had rendered us no service.
At Aranjuez the wheat-lands, which began to widen about us as soon as we
got beyond the suburbs of Madrid, gave way to the groves and gardens of
that really charming pleasaunce, charming quite from the station, with
grounds penetrated by placid waters overhung by the English elms which
the Castilians are so happy in having naturalized in their treeless
waste. Multitudes of nightingales are said to sing among them, but it
was not the season for hearing them from the train; and we made what
shift we could with the strawberry and asparagus beds which we could
see plainly, and the peach trees and cherry trees. One of these had
committed the solecism of blossoming in October, instead of April or
May, when the nobility came to their villas.
We had often said during our stay in Madrid that we should certainly
come for a day at Aranjuez; and here we were, passing it with a five
minutes’ stop. I am sure it merited much more, not only for its many
proud memories, but for its shameful ones, which are apt to be so much
more lasting in the case of royal pleasaunces. The great Catholic
King Ferdinand inherited the place with the Mastership of the Order of
Santiago; Charles V. used to come there for the shooting, and Philip
II., Charleses III. and IV., and Ferdinand VII. built and rebuilt its
edifices. But it is also memorable because the wretched Godoy fled there
with the king, his friend, and the queen, his paramour, and there the
pitiable king abdicated in favor of his abominable son Ferdinand VII.
It is the careful Murray who reminds me of this fact; Gautier, who
apparently fails to get anything to his purpose out of Aranjuez, passes
it with the remark that Godoy built there a gallery from his villa to
the royal palace, for his easier access to the royal family in which he
held a place so anomalous. From Mr. Martin Hume’s _Modern Spain_ I learn
that when the court fled to Aranjuez from Madrid before the advance of
Murat, and the mob, civil and military, hunted Godoy’s villa through for
him, he jumped out of bed and hid himself under a roll of matting, while
the king and the queen, to save him, decreed his dismissal from all his
offices and honors.
But here just at the most interesting moment the successive bells and
whistles are screeching, and the _rapido_ is hurrying me away from
Aranjuez. We are leaving a railway station, but presently it is as if
we had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell such as we
remembered from Old Castile. These innumerable pastures and wheat-fields
are in New Castile, and before long more distinctively they are in La
Mancha, the country dear to fame as the home of Don Quixote. I must own
at once it does not look it, or at least look like the country I had
read out of his history in my boyhood. For the matter of that, no
country ever looks like the country one reads out of a book, however
really it may be that country. The trouble probably is that one carries
out of one’s reading an image which one had carried into it. When I read
_Don Quixote_ and read and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the
map of southern Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven
or eight years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his
adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my earlier
and later boyhood. There was then always something soft and mild in the
_Don Quixote_ country, with a blue river and gentle uplands, and woods
where one could rest in the shade, and hide one’s self if one wished,
after easily rescuing the oppressed. Now, instead, a treeless plain
unrolled itself from sky to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure
tops dimmed the clear line of the western horizon, how could I have got
them into my early picture when I had never yet seen a mountain in my
life? I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels
where they should not have got a mile from home without discovery and
arrest. I tried to think of them jogging along in talk of the adventures
which the knight hoped for; but I could not make it work. I could have
done better before we got so far from Aranjuez; there were gardens
and orchards and a very suitable river there, and those elm trees
overhanging it; but the prospect in La Mancha had only here and there a
white-availed white farmhouse to vary its lonely simplicity, its
desert fertility; and I could do nothing with the strips and patches of
vineyard. It was all strangely African, strangely Mexican, and not at
all American, not Ohioan, enough to be anything like the real La Mancha
of my invention. To be sure, the doors and windows of the nearer houses
were visibly netted against mosquitoes and that was something, but even
that did not begin to be noticeable till we were drawing near the Sierra
Morena. Then, so long before we reached the mighty chain of mountains
which nature has stretched between the gravity of New Castile and the
gaiety of Andalusia, as if they could not bear immediate contact, I
experienced a moment of perfect reconciliation to the landscape as
really wearing the face of that La Mancha familiar to my boyish vision.
Late in the forenoon, but early enough to save the face of La Mancha,
there appeared certain unquestionable shapes in the nearer and farther
distance which I joyously knew for those windmills which Don Quixote had
known for giants and spurred at, lance in rest. They were waving their
vans in what he had found insolent defiance, but which seemed to us
glad welcome, as of windmills waiting that long time for a reader of
Cervantes who could enter into their feelings and into the friendly
companionship they were offering.