William Dean Howells - "Ragged Lady, Complete"

John Dos Passos - "Three Soldiers"

Chris. Evans - "EURASIA"

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Familiar Spanish Travels

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Among the ancient Spanish liberties which were restricted by the
consolidating monarchy from age to age, the Basque _fueros,_ or rights,
were the oldest; they lasted quite to our own day; and although it is
known to more ignorant men that these privileges (including immunity
from conscription) have now been abrogated, the custodian of the House
of Provincial Deputies, whom our driver took us to visit, was such a
glowing Basque patriot that he treated them as in full force. His pride
in the seat of the local government spared us no detail of the whole
electric-lighting system, or even the hose-bibs for guarding the edifice
against fire, let alone every picture and photograph on the wall of
every chamber of greater or less dignity, with every notable table and
chair. He certainly earned the peseta I gave him, but he would have done
far more for it if we had suffered him to take us up another flight of
stairs; and he followed us in our descent with bows and adieux that
ought to have left no doubt in our minds of the persistence of the
Basque _fueros._




V


It was to such a powerful embodiment of the local patriotism that our
driver had brought us from another civic palace overlooking the Plaza de
la Constitution, chiefly notable now for having been the old theater of
the bull-fights. The windows in the houses round still bear the numbers
by which they were sold to spectators as boxes; but now the municipality
has built a beautiful brand-new bull-ring in San Sebastian; and I do not
know just why we were required to inspect the interior of the edifice
overlooking this square. I only know that at sight of our bewilderment a
workman doing something to the staircase clapped his hands orientally,
and the custodian was quickly upon us in response to a form of summons
which we were to find so often used in Spain. He was not so crushingly
upon us as that other custodian; he was apologetically proud, rather
than boastfully; at times he waved his hands in deprecation, and would
have made us observe that the place was little, very little; he deplored
it like a host who wishes his possessions praised. Among the artistic
treasures of the place from which he did not excuse us there were some
pen-drawings, such as writing-masters execute without lifting the pen
from the paper, by a native of South America, probably of Basque
descent, since the Basques have done so much to people that continent.
We not only admired these, but we would not consent to any of the
custodian's deprecations, especially when it came to question of the
pretty salon in which Queen Victoria was received on her first visit to
San Sebastian. We supposed then, and in fact I had supposed till this
moment, that it was Queen Victoria of Great Britain who was meant; but
now I realize that it must have been the queen consort of Spain, who
seems already to have made herself so liked there.

She, of course, comes every summer to San Sebastian, and presently our
driver took us to see the royal villa by the shore, withdrawn, perhaps
from a sense of its extreme plainness, not to say ugliness, among its
trees and vines behind its gates and walls. Our driver excused himself
for not being able to show us through it; he gladly made us free of an
unrestricted view of the royal bathing-pavilion, much more frankly
splendid in its gilding, beside the beach. Other villas ranked
themselves along the hillside, testifying to the gaiety of the social
life in summers past and summers to come. In the summer just past the
gaiety may have been interrupted by the strikes taking in the newspapers
the revolutionary complexion which it was now said they did not wear. At
least, when the King had lately come to fetch the royal household away
nothing whatever happened, and the "constitutional guarantees,"
suspended amidst the ministerial anxieties, were restored during the
month, with the ironical applause of the liberal press, which pretended
that there had never been any need of their suspension.




VI


All pleasures, mixed or unmixed, must end, and the qualified joy of our
drive through San Sebastian came to a close on our return to our hotel
well within the second hour, almost within its first half. When I
proposed paying our driver for the exact time, he drooped upon his box
and, remembering my remorse in former years for standing upon my just
rights in such matters, I increased the fare, peseta by peseta, till his
sinking spirits rose, and he smiled gratefully upon me and touched his
brave red cap as he drove away. He had earned his money, if racking his
invention for objects of interest in San Sebastian was a merit. At the
end we were satisfied that it was a well-built town with regular blocks
in the modern quarter, and not without the charm of picturesqueness
which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the older parts. Prescient of
the incalculable riches before us, we did not ask much of it, and we got
all we asked. I should be grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing else
than the two very Spanish experiences I had there. One concerned a
letter for me which had been refused by the bankers named in my letter
of credit, from a want of faith, I suppose, in my coming. When I did
come I was told that I would find it at the post-office. That would be
well enough when I found the post-office, which ought to have been easy
enough, but which presented certain difficulties in the driving rain of
our first afternoon. At last in a fine square I asked a fellow-man in my
best conversational Spanish where the post-office was, and after a
moment's apparent suffering he returned, "Do you speak English?" "Yes."
I said, "and I am so glad you do." "Not at all. I don't speak anything
else. Great pleasure. There is the post-office," and it seemed that I
had hardly escaped collision with it. But this was the beginning, not
the end, of my troubles. When I showed my card to the _poste restante_
clerk, he went carefully through the letters bearing the initial of my
name and denied that there was any for me. We entered into reciprocally
bewildering explanations, and parted altogether baffled. Then, at the
hotel, I consulted with a capable young office-lady, who tardily
developed a knowledge of English, and we agreed that it would be well to
send the _chico_ to the post-office for it. The _chico,_ corresponding
in a Spanish hotel to a _piccolo_ in Germany or a page in England, or
our own now evanescing bell-boy, was to get a _peseta_ for bringing me
the letter. He got the _peseta,_ though he only brought me word that the
axithorities would send the letter to the hotel by the postman that
night. The authorities did not send it that night, and the next morning
I recurred to my bankers. There, on my entreaty for some one who could
meet my Spanish at least half-way in English, a manager of the bank came
out of his office and reassured me concerning the letter which I had now
begun to imagine the most important I had ever missed. Even while we
talked the postman came in and owned having taken the letter back to the
office. He voluntarily promised to bring it to the bank at one o'clock,
when I hastened to meet him. At that hour every one was out at lunch; I
came again at four, when everybody had returned, but the letter was not
delivered; at five, just before the bank closed, the letter, which had
now grown from a _carta_ to a _cartela,_ was still on its way. I left
San Sebastian without it; and will it be credited that when it was
forwarded to me a week later at Madrid it proved the most fatuous
missive imaginable, wholly concerning the writer's own affairs and none
of mine?

I cannot guess yet why it was withheld from me, but since the incident
brought me that experience of Spanish politeness, I cannot grieve for
it. The young banker who left his region of high finance to come out and
condole with me, in apologizing for the original refusal of my letter,
would not be contented with so little. Nothing would satisfy him but
going with me, on my hinted purpose, and inquiring with me at the
railroad office into the whole business of circular tickets, and even
those kilometric tickets which the Spanish railroads issue to such
passengers as will have their photographs affixed to them for the
prevention of transference. As it seemed advisable not to go to this
extreme till I got to Madrid, my kind young banker put himself at my
disposal for any other service I could imagine from him; but I searched
myself in vain for any desire, much less necessity, and I parted from
him at the door of his bank with the best possible opinion of the
Basques. I suppose he was a Basque; at any rate, he was blond, which the
Spaniards are mostly not, and the Basques often are. Now I am sorry,
since he was so kind, that I did not get him to read me the Basque
inscription on the front of his bank, which looked exactly like that on
the bank at Bayonne; I should not have understood it, but I should have
known what it sounded like, if it sounded like anything but Basque.

Everybody in San Sebastian seemed resolved to outdo every other in
kindness. In a shop where we endeavored to explain that we wanted to get
a flat cap which should be both Basque and red, a lady who was buying
herself a hat asked in English if she could help us. When we gladly
answered that she could, she was silent, almost to tears, and it
appeared that in this generous offer of aid she had exhausted her whole
stock of English. Her mortification, her painful surprise, at the
strange catastrophe, was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape from
it to a shop across the street. There instantly a small boy rushed
enterprisingly out and brought back with him a very pretty girl who
spoke most of the little French which has made its way in San Sebastian
against the combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap of the right flatness
and redness was brought. I must not forget, among the pleasures done us
by the place, the pastry cook's shop which advertised in English "Tea at
all Hours," and which at that hour of our afternoon we now found so
opportune, that it seemed almost personally attentive to us as the only
Anglo-Saxon visitors in town. The tea might have been better, but it was
as good as it knew how; and the small boy who came in with his mother
(the Spanish mother seldom fails of the company of a small boy) in her
moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his finger all the
pieces of pastry except those we were eating.




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.




III

BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS


It appears to be the use in most minor cities of Spain for the best
hotel to send the worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, "Good
wine needs no bush." At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness
of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of praise
in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong one. It was
indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right hotel in Burgos when
you arrive there on an afternoon of early October, and feel the
prophetic chill of that nine months of winter which is said to contrast
there with three months of hell.



I


The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and
clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer
attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile.
Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she
ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and
shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century. Now,
in the twentieth, we asked nothing of her but two rooms in which we
could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it
had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must have been one
in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out that it was completely equipped
with steam-heating apparatus, but when I made him observe that there was
no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was
truth in what I said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south
which would have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing
in San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us his
beautiful new dining-room, cold, with the same sunny exposure. I rashly
declared that all would not do, and that I would look elsewhere for
rooms with fireplaces. I had first to find a cab in order to find the
other hotels, but I found instead that in a city of thirty-eight
thousand inhabitants there was not one cab standing for hire in the
streets. I tried to enlist the sympathies of some private carriages, but
they remained indifferent, and I went back foiled, but not crushed, to
our hotel. There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was the
omnibus which had brought us from the station. The landlord calmly (I
did not then perceive the irony of his calm) had the horses put to and
our baggage put on, and we drove away. But first we met our dear
Chilians coming to our hotel from the hotel they had chosen, and from a
search for hearthstones in others; and we drove to the only hotel they
had left unvisited. There at our demand for fires the landlord all but
laughed us to scorn; he laid his hand on the cold radiator in the hotel
as if to ask what better we could wish than that. We drove back,
humbled, to our own hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian
cairn he had kept at our departure. Then there was nothing for me but to
declare myself the Prodigal Son returned to take the rooms he had
offered us. We were so perfectly in his power that he could
magnanimously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but we did
not care to move. The Chilians had retired baffled to their own hotel,
and there was nothing for us but to accept the long evening of gelid
torpor which we foresaw must follow the effort of the soup and wine to
warm us at dinner. That night we heard through our closed doors agonized
voices which we knew to be the voices of despairing American women
wailing through the freezing corridors, "Can't she understand that I
want _boiling_ water?" and, "Can't' we go down-stairs to a fire
somewhere?" We knew the one meant the chambermaid and the other the
kitchen, but apparently neither prayer was answered.

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