Spanish Highways and Byways Part 10

Don Jose was shocked. Merriest and most indulgent of hosts, he was inclined at this point to play the tyrant. If I must see Cadiz, well and good. He would take me to the morning express and put me under charge of the conductor. At Utrera, an hour farther on, his son would come to the train and see that all was well. At _Puerto de Santa Maria_, another hour distant, I should be met by a trusted friend of the family, who would transfer me to another train and another conductor, and so speed me for my third hour to Cadiz, where I should be greeted by a relative of mine hostess and conveyed in safety to his home.

I appreciated the kindness involved in this very Andalusian programme, but otherwise it did not appeal to me. That was not the way Columbus went, nor Cortes. And much as I delighted in the Alhambra, and the Mosque of Cordova, and the Alcazar of Seville, I did not feel called upon to bow a New England bonnet beneath the Moorish yoke.

Thus Don Jose and I found ourselves quietly engaged in an Hispano-American contest. He heartily disapproved of my going, even by train. "_Una senora sola!_ It is not the custom in Andalusia." His plan of campaign consisted in deferring the arrangements from day to day. "_Manana!_" Whenever I attempted to set a time for departure he blandly a.s.sented, and presently projected some irresistibly attractive excursion for that very date. His household were all with him. His wife had not been able to procure the particular _dulces_ indispensable to a traveller's luncheon. Even my faithless comrade, draped in her flower-garden shawl, practised the steps of a _seguidilla_ to the rattle of the castanets and laughed at my defeats.

At last, grown desperate, I suavely announced at the Sunday dinner table that I was going to Cadiz that week. My host said, "_Bueno!_"

and my hostess, "_Muy bien!_" But there was no surrender in their tones. On Monday, instead of writing the requisite notes to these relays of protectors along the route, Don Jose took us himself, on a mimic steamboat, for a judicious distance down the Guadalquivir.

Tuesday he put me off with Roman ruins, and Wednesday with a private gallery of Murillos. By Thursday I grew insistent, and, with shrug and sigh, he finally consented to my going by train on Friday. I still urged the boat, but he heaped up a thousand difficulties. There wasn't any; it would be overcrowded; I should be seasick; the boat would arrive, wherever it might arrive, too late for my train, whatever my train might be. Compromise is always becoming, and I agreed to take the nine o'clock express in the morning.

After the extended Spanish farewells, for to kiss on both cheeks and be kissed on both cheeks down a long feminine line, mother, daughters, and maid-servants, is no hasty ceremony, I sallied forth at half-past eight with Don Jose in attendance. He called a cab, but in Spain the cabbies are men and brothers, and this one, on learning our destination, declared that the train did not start until half-past nine and it was much better for a lady to wait _en casa_ than at the depot. This additional guardians.h.i.+p goaded me to active remonstrance.

Why not take the cab for the hour and look up a procession on our way to the station? There are always processions in Seville. This appealed to both the pleasure-loving Spaniards, and we drove into the palmy _Plaza de San Fernando_, where an array of military bands was serenading some civic dignitary.

The music was of the best, and we fell in with the large and varied retinue that escorted the musicians to the palace of the archbishop.

As they were rousing him from his reverend slumbers with _La Marcha de Cadiz_, I caught a twinkle in Don Jose's eye. Did he hope to keep me chasing after those bands all the forenoon? I awakened the cabman, whom the music had lulled into the easy Andalusian doze, and we clattered off to the station. Of all silent and forsaken places! I looked suspiciously at Don Jose, whose swarthy countenance wore an overdone expression of innocent surprise. A solitary official sauntered out.

"Good morning, senor! Is the express gone?" asked the driver.

"Good morning, senor! There isn't any express to-day," was the reply.

"The express runs only Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sat.u.r.days."

"What a pity," cooed Don Jose, contentedly. "You will have to wait till to-morrow."

"Yes, you can go to-morrow," indulgently added the driver, and the official chimed sweetly in, "_Manana por la manana!_"

"But is there no other train to-day?" I asked.

The official admitted that there was one at three o'clock. Don Jose gave him a reproachful glance.

"But you do not want to go by train," said my ingenious host. "Perhaps to-morrow you can go by steamboat."

"Perhaps I can go by steamboat now," I returned, seizing my opportunity. "When does that boat start?"

n.o.body knew. I asked the cabman to drive us to the Golden Tower, off which sea-going vessels usually anchor. Don Jose fell back in his seat, exhausted.

The cabman drove so fast, for Seville, that we ran into a donkey and made a paralyzed beggar jump, but we reached the river in time to see a small steamer just in the act of swinging loose from the pier. In the excitement of the moment Don Jose forgot everything save the necessity of properly presenting me to the captain, and I, for my part, was absorbed in the ecstasy of sailing from the foot of the Golden Tower along the Silver Road.

It was not until a rod of water lay between boat and wharf that the captain shouted to Don Jose, who struck an att.i.tude of utter consternation, that this craft went only to Bonanza, and no connection could be made from there to Cadiz until the following afternoon. And I, mindful of the austere dignity that befitted these critical circ.u.mstances, could not even laugh.

It was a dirty little boat, with a malodorous cargo of fish, and for pa.s.sengers two soldiers, two peasants, and a commercial traveller. But what of that? I was sailing on a treasure s.h.i.+p of the Indies, one of those lofty galleons of Spain, "rowed by thrice one hundred slaves and gay with streamers, banners, music," that had delivered at the Golden Tower her tribute from the h.o.a.rd of the Incas, and was proudly bearing back to the open roads of Cadiz.

We dropped down past a n.o.ble line of deep-sea merchantmen, from Ma.r.s.eilles, Hamburg, and far-away ports of Norway and Sweden. We pa.s.sed fis.h.i.+ng boats casting their nets, and met a stately Spanish bark, the _Calderon_. On the sh.o.r.es we caught glimpses of orange grove and olive orchard, lines of osiers and white poplars, and we paused at the little town of Coria, famous for its earthen jars, to land one of our peasants, while a jolly priest, whose plain black garb was relieved by a vermilion parasol, tossed down cigars to his friends among the sailors.

Then our galleon pursued her course into the flat and desolate regions of the _marismas_. These great salt marshes of the Guadalquivir, scarcely more than a bog in winter, serve as pasture for herds of hardy sheep and for those droves of mighty bulls bred in Andalusia to die in the arenas of all Spain. For long stretches the green bank would be lined with the glorious creatures, standing like ebony statues deep amid the reeds, some entirely black, and many black with slight markings of white. The Guadalquivir intersects in triple channel this unpeopled waste, concerning whose profusion of plant life and animal life English hunters tell strange tales. They report flocks of rosy flamingoes, three hundred or five hundred in a column, "glinting in the suns.h.i.+ne like a pink cloud," and muddy islets studded thick with colonies of flamingo nests. Most wonderful of all, the camel, that ancient and serious beast of burden, a figure pertaining in all imaginations to the arid, sandy desert, keeps holiday in these huge swamps. It seems that, in 1829, a herd of camels was brought into the province of Cadiz, from the Canaries, for transport service in road-building and the like, and for trial in agriculture. But the peculiar distaste of horses for these humpy monsters spoiled the scheme, and the camels, increased to some eighty in number, took merrily to the marshes, where, in defiance of all caravan tradition, they thrive in aquatic liberty. The fascination of this wilderness reached even the dingy steamer deck. Gulls, ducks, and all manner of wild fowl flashed in the suns.h.i.+ne, which often made the winding river, as tawny as our James, sparkle like liquid gold.

If only it had been gold indeed, and had kept the traceries of the Roman keels that have traversed it, the Vandal swords whose red it has washed away, the Moorish faces it has mirrored, the Spanish--

"_Usted come?_"

It might have been Cortes who was offering that bowl of _puchero_, but no! Cortes would have mixed it in his plumy helmet and stirred it with that thin, keen sword one may see in the Madrid _Armeria_. This was a barefooted cabin boy, in blue linen blouse and patched blue trousers, with a scarlet cloth cap tied over his head by means of an orange-colored handkerchief. The dancing eyes that lit his shy brown face had sea blues in them. He was a winsome little fellow enough, but I did not incline to his cookery. While I was watching river, sh.o.r.es, and herds and chatting with the _simpatico_ sailor, who, taking his cue from my look, expressed the deepest abhorrence of the bull-fights, which, I make no doubt, he would sell his dinner, jacket, bed, even his guitar, to see, I had taken secret note of the cuisine. This child, who could not have counted his twelfth birthday, kindled the fire in a flimsy tin pail, lined with broken bricks. He cracked over his knee a few pieces of driftwood, mixed the fragments with bits of coal which he shook out of a sheepskin bottle, doused oil over the whole, and cheerfully applied the match, while the commercial traveller hastily drew up a bucket of water to have on hand for emergencies. Then the boy, with excellent intentions in the way of neatness, whisked his blackened hands across the rough end of a rope and plunged them into the pot of _garbanzos_, to which he added beans, cabbage, remnants of fried fish, and other sundries at his young discretion. And while the mess was simmering, he squatted down on the deck, with his grimy little feet in his fists, rocking himself back and forth to his own wild Malaga songs, and occasionally disengaging one hand or the other to plunge it into the pot after a tasty morsel.

"Will you eat?" he repeated manfully, reddening under the scrutiny of stranger eyes.

"Many thanks! May it profit yourself!"

I opened my luncheon, and again we exchanged these fixed phrases of Spanish etiquette, although after the refusals enjoined by code of courtesy, the boy was finally induced to relieve me of my more indigestible goodies.

"Did you ever hear of Columbus?" I asked, as we munched chestnut cakes together, leaning on the rail.

"No, senora," he replied, with another blush, "I have heard of nothing. I know little. I am of very small account. I cook and sing. I am good for nothing more."

And is it to this those arrogant Spanish boasts, which rang like trumpets up and down the Guadalquivir, have come at last!

We were in the heart of a perfect sapphire day. The river, often turbulent and unruly, was on this April afternoon, the sailors said, _buen muchacho_, a good boy. The boat appeared to navigate herself.

The captain nodded on his lofty perch, and the engineer was curled up in his own tiny hatchway, trying to read a newspaper, which the fresh breeze blew into horns and balloons. The rough cabin bunks were full of sleeping forms, and the leather wine-bottles, flung down carelessly in the stern, had cuddled each to each in cozy shapes, and seemed to be sleeping, too. The two soldiers, who had been gambling with coppers over innumerable games of dominos, were listening grimly to the oratory of the commercial traveller.

"No fighting for me!" this hero was declaiming. "In strenuous times like these a man ought to cherish his life for the sake of his country. Spain needs her sons right here at home. It is sweet, as the poet says, to die for the _patria_, but to live for the _patria_ is, in my opinion, just as glorious."

"And more comfortable," grunted one of the soldiers, while the other gave a hitch to those red infantry trousers which look as if they had been wading in blood, and walked forward to view from the bows the little white port of Bonanza.

As the boat went no farther, I had to stain my silver route by a prosaic parenthesis of land. It was some comfort to remember that Magellan waited here for that expedition from Seville which was the first to sail around the globe. I think I travelled the three miles from Bonanza, Good Weather, to San Lucar de Barrameda in Magellan's own carriage. It was certainly old enough. As I sat on a tipsy chair in the middle of a rude wagon frame mounted on two shrieking wooden wheels, and hooded with broken arches of bamboo, from which flapped shreds of russet oilcloth, I entered into poignant sympathy with Magellan's ups and downs of hope and fear. The jolting was such a torture that, to divert my attention, I questioned the driver as to the uses of this and that appliance in his rickety ark.

"And what are those ropes for, there in the corner?" was my final query.

"Those are to tie the coffins down when I have a fare for the cemetery," he replied, cracking his whip over the incredibly lean mule that was sulkily jerking us along.

"Please let me get out and walk," I entreated. "You may keep the valise and show me the way to the inn, and I can go quite as fast as that mule."

"Now, don't!" he begged, with even intenser pathos. "Strangers always want to walk before they get to the inn, and then the people laugh at me. I know my carriage isn't very handsome, but it's the only one in Bonanza. Just do me the favor to keep your seat a little longer."

I had been lurched out of it only a minute before, but I could not refuse to sacrifice mere bodily ease to the pride of Spanish spirit.

Notwithstanding Don Jose's dark predictions, this was the only trial of the trip. To realize to the full the honesty, kindliness, and dignity of the everyday Spaniard, one needs to turn off from the sight-seer's route. On the beaten tourist track are exorbitant hotels, greedy guides, cheating merchants, troops of beggars--everywhere "the itching palm." But here in San Lucar, for instance, where I had to spend twenty-four hours at a genuine Spanish _fonda_, the proprietor took no advantage of the facts that I was a foreigner, a woman, and practically a prisoner in the place until the Sat.u.r.day afternoon train went out, but gave me excellent accommodations, most respectful and considerate treatment, and the lowest hotel bill that I had seen in Spain.

San Lucar has, in early Spanish literature, a very ill name for roguery, but, so far as my brief experience went, Boston could not have been safer and would not have been so genial. I strayed, for instance, into a modest little shop to buy a cake of soap, which its owner declined to sell, insisting that I ought to have a choicer variety than his, and sending his son, a lad of sixteen, to point me out more fas.h.i.+onable counters. This youth showed me the sights of the pleasant seash.o.r.e town, with its tiers of closely grated windows standing out from the white fronts of the houses, and its st.u.r.dy packhorses and orange-laden donkeys streaming along the rough stone streets, and when, at the inn door, I hesitatingly offered him a piece of silver, doffed his cap with smiling ease, and said he did not take pay for a pleasure.

Once off the regular lines of travel, however, speed is out of the question. I might have gone from Seville to Cadiz in three hours; thanks to historic enthusiasms, it took me nearer three days. After escaping from San Lucar, I had to pa.s.s four hours in Jerez, another whitewashed, palm-planted town, whose famous sherry has made it the third city in Spain for wealth. The thing to do at Jerez is to visit the great _bodegas_ and taste the rich white liquors treasured in those monster casks, which bear all manner of names, from Christ and His twelve disciples to Napoleon the Great; but mindful, in the light of Don Jose's admonitions, that the weak feminine estate is "as water unto wine," I contented myself with seeing the strange storage basin of the mountain aqueduct--an immense, immaculate cellar, where endless vistas of low stone arches stretch away in the silent dusk above the glimmer of a ghostly lake.

The train for Cadiz must needs be two hours late this particular evening, but my cabman drove me to approved shops for the purchase of bread and fruit, and then, of his own motion, drew up our modest equipage in a shady nook opposite the villa of the English consul, that I might enjoy my Arcadian repast with a secure mind. Jehu accepted, after due protestations, a share of the viands, and reciprocated the attention by buying me a gla.s.s of water at the nearest stand, much amused at my continued preference for Jerez water over Jerez wine.

One of the Jerez wine merchants, German by birth, shared the railway carriage with me for a while, and after the social wont of Continental travel fell to discussing the war. "The Spaniards deserved to be beaten," he declared, "but the Yankees didn't deserve to beat. They were conceited enough before, heaven knows, and now they expect all Europe to black their shoddy shoes. Your own country was a bit to blame in blocking every effort to keep them in their place."

I felt it time to explain that I was not English, but American. Much disconcerted, he did his best to make amends.

"I wouldn't have said that for the world if I had known you were an American--but it's every syllable true."

He thought over this remark in silence for a moment, his Teutonic spirit sorely strained between kindliness and honesty, and tried again.

"I would like to say something good about the United States, I would indeed,--if there was anything to say."