The church itself we found very clean, and of an interest quite beyond
the promise of the rather bare outside. A painted window above the
door cast a glare of fresh red and blue over the interior, and over
the comfortably matted floor; and there was a quite freshly carved and
gilded chapel which the pleasant youth supplementing our policeman for
the time said was done by artists still living in Tarifa. The edifice
was of a very flamboyant Gothic, with clusters of slender columns and a
vault brilliantly swirled over with decorations of the effect of peacock
feathers. But above all there was on a small side altar a figure of
the Child Jesus dressed in the corduroy suit and felt hat of a Spanish
shepherd, with a silver crook in one hand and leading a toy lamb by a
string in the other. Our young guide took the image down for us to look
at, and showed its shepherd’s dress with peculiar satisfaction; and then
he left it on the ground while he went to show us something else. When
we came back we found two small boys playing with the Child, putting its
hat off and on, and feeling of its clothes. Our guide took it from them,
not unkindly, and put it back on the altar; and whether the reader
will agree with me or not, I must own that I did not find the incident
irreverent or without a certain touchingness, as if those children and
He were all of one family and they were at home with Him there.
Rather suddenly, after we left the church, by way of one of those
unexpectedly expanding lanes, we found ourselves on the shore of the
purple sea where the Moors first triumphed over the Goths twelve hundred
years before, and five centuries later the Spaniards heat them back from
their attempt to reconquer the city. There were barracks, empty of the
Spanish soldiers gone to fight the same old battle of the Moors on their
own ground in Africa, and there was the castle which Alfonso Perez de
Guzman held against them in 1292, and made the scene of one of those
acts of self-devotion which the heart of this time has scarcely strength
for. The Moors when they had vainly summoned him to yield brought out
his son whom they held captive, and threatened to kill him. Guzman drew
his knife and flung it down to them, and they slew the boy, but Tarif a
was saved. His king decreed that thereafter the father should be known
as Guzman the Good, and the fact has gone into a ballad, but the name
somehow does not seem quite to fit, and one wishes that the father had
not won it that way.
We were glad to go away from the dreadful place, though Tangier was so
plain across the strait, and we were almost in Africa there, and hard
by, in the waters tossing free, the great battle of Trafalgar was
fought. From the fountains of my far youth, when I first heard of
Guzman’s dreadful heroism, I endeavored to pump up an adequate emotion;
I succeeded somewhat better with Nelson and his pathetic prayer of
“Kiss me, Hardy,” as he lay dying on his bloody deck; but I did not much
triumph with either, and I was grateful when our good little policeman
comfortably questioned the deed of Guzman which he said some doubted,
though he took us to the very spot where the Moors had parleyed with
Guzman, and showed us the tablet over the castle gate affirming the
fact.
We liked far better the pretty Alameda rising in terraces from it with
beds of flowers beside the promenade, and boys playing up and down, and
old men sitting in the sun, and trying to ignore the wind that blew over
them too freshly for us. Our policeman confessed that there was nothing
more worth seeing in Tarifa, and we entreated of him the favor of
showing us a shop where we could buy a Cordovese hat; a hat which we
had seen nourishing on the heads of all men in Cordova and Seville and
Granada and Ronda, and had always forborne to buy because we could get
it anywhere; and now we were almost leaving Spain without it. We wanted
one brown in color, as well as stiff and flat of brim, and slightly
conical in form; and our policeman promptly imagined it, and took us
to a shop abounding solely in hats, and especially in Cordoveses. The
proprietor came out wiping his mouth from an inner room, where he had
left his family visibly at their _almuerzo;_ and then we were desolated
together that he should only have Cordoveses that were black. But
passing a _patio_ where there was a poinsettia in brilliant bloom
against the wall, we found ourselves in a variety store where there were
Cordoveses of all colors; and we chose one of the right brown, with the
picture of a beautiful Spanish girl, wearing a pink shawl, inside the
crown which was fluted round in green and red ribbon. Seven pesetas was
the monstrous asking price, but we beat it down to five and a half,
and then came a trying moment: we could not carry a Cordovese in
tissue-paper through the streets of Tarifa, but could we ask our guide,
who was also our armed escort, to carry it? He simplified the situation
by taking it himself and bearing it back to the _fonda_ as proudly as
if he had not also worn a sword at his side; and we parted there in a
kindness which I should like to think he shared equally with us.
He was practically the last of those Spaniards who were always
winning my heart (save in the bank at Valladolid where they must
have misunderstood me), and whom I remember with tenderness for their
courtesy and amiability. In little things and large, I found the
Spaniards everywhere what I heard a Piedmontese commercial traveler say
of them in Venice fifty years ago: “They are the honestest people in
Europe.” In Italy I never began to see the cruelty to animals which
English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. If the
reader asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity,
the Spaniards have contrived to build up their repute for cruelty,
treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity; how with their love of
bull-feasts and the suffering to man and brute which these involve, they
should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know. I do
not know how the Americans are reputed good and just and law-abiding,
although they often shoot one another, and upon mere suspicion rather
often burn negroes alive.