Part 2

No Spanish town is without its paseo--its public promenade; and in Burgos this is supplied by The Spur--a broad esplanade skirting the shrunken river, with borders of chubby shade trees and shrubbery. On Corpus Christi the citizens also turned out in the arcades of the Main Plaza. Here, and later in the dusty dusk of The Spur, they crowded and chatted, in accordance with native ideas of enjoyment; and except that their mantillas and shoulder-veils[2] made a difference, the señoras and señoritas might have passed for Americans, so delicate were their features, so trim their daintily-attired figures, though perhaps they hadn't a coin in their pockets. The men had the universal Iberian habit of carrying their light overcoats folded over the left shoulder; but their quick nervous expression and spare faces would have been quite in place on Wall Street. Spanish ladies are allowed far more liberty than the French or English in public; but though they walked without male escort, they showed remarkable skill in avoiding any direct look at men from their own lustrous eyes. During the accredited hours of the paseo, however, gallants and friends are suffered to walk close behind them--so close that the entire procession often comes to a stand-still--and to whisper complimentary speeches into their ears; no one, not even relatives of the damsels, resenting this freedom.

At Las Huelgas, a famous convent near the town, much resorted to by nuns of aristocratic family (even the Empress Eugénie it was thought would retire thither after her son's death), the fête was renewed next day; and it was here that we saw beggars in perfection. A huge stork's nest was perched high on one end of the chapel, as on many churches of Spain. Bombs were fired above the crowd from the high square tower that rose into the hot air not far from the inner shrine; and in the chapel below the nuns were at their devotions, caged behind heavy iron lattices that barely disclosed their picturesque head-dress. Meanwhile peasants and burghers wandered aimlessly about, looking at pictures, relics, and inscriptions in an outer arcade; after which the holiday of the people began. Holiday here means either walking or sleeping. In a sultry, dusty little square by the convent, covered with trees, the people went to sleep, or sat talking, and occasionally eating or drinking with much frugality. The first object that had greeted us by daylight in Burgos was a marvellous mendicant clad in an immense cloak, one mass of patches--in fact, a monument of indigence--carrying on his head a mangy fur cap, with a wallet at his waist to contain alms. The beggars assembled at Las Huelgas were quite as bad, except that they mostly had the good taste to remain asleep. In any attitude, face down or up, on stone benches or on the grass, they dozed at a moment's notice, reposing piously. One sat for a long time torpid near us, but finally mustered energy to come and entreat us. He received a copper, whereupon he kissed the coin, murmured a blessing, and again retreated to his shadow. Another, having acquired something from some other source, halted near us to find his pocket. He searched long among his rags, and plunged fiercely into a big cavity which exposed his dirty linen; but this proved to be only a tear in his trousers, and he was at last obliged to tie his treasure to a voluminous string around his waist, letting it hang down thence into some interior vacancy of rags.

It may not be generally known that beggars are licensed in Spain. Veteran soldiers, instead of receiving a pension, are generously endowed with official permission to seek charity; the Church gives doles to the poor, and citizens consider it a virtue to relieve the miserable objects who petition for pence at every turn. As we came from Las Huelgas we saw the maimed and blind and certain more robust paupers creeping up to the door of a church, where priests were giving out food. A little farther on an emaciated crone at a bridge-head, with eyes shut fast in sleep, lifted her hand mechanically and repeated her formula. We were convinced that, since she could do this in her slumbers, she must have been satisfied with merely dreaming of that charity we did not bestow.

It was a favorable season for the beggars, and many of them sunned their bodies, warped and scarred by hereditary disease, on the cathedral steps. But professional enterprise with them was constantly hindered by the tendency to nap. One old fellow I saw who, feeling a brotherhood between himself and the broken-nosed statues, had mounted into a beautiful niche there and coiled himself in sleep, first hauling his wooden leg up after him like a drawbridge.

Meanwhile the peasants kept on swarming into the town, decorating it with their blue and red and yellow kerchiefs and kirtles, as with a mass of small moving banners. The men wore vivid sashes, leather leggings, and laced sandals. It was partly for enjoyment they came, and partly to sell produce. All alike were to be met with at noon, squatting down in any sheltered coigne of street or square, every group with a bowl in its midst containing the common dinner. There were also little eating-houses, in which they regaled themselves on bread and sardines, with a special cupful of oil thrown in, or on salt meat. A lively trade in various small articles was carried on in the Main Plaza; among them loaves of tasteless white bread, hard as tiles, and delicious cherries, recalling the farms of New York. Another product was offered, the presence of which in large quantity was like a sarcasm. This was Castile soap. It must have taken an immense effort of imagination on the part of these people to think of manufacturing an article for which they have so little use. I am bound to add that I did not see an ounce of it sold; and I have my suspicions that the business is merely a traditional one--the same big cheese-like chunks being probably brought out at every fair and fête, as a time-honored symbol of Castilian prosperity. But, after all, so devout a community must be convinced that it possesses godliness; and having that, what do they need of the proximate virtue? This is the region where the inhabitants refer to themselves as "old and rancid Castilians;" and the expression is appropriate.

The most intolerable odor pervaded the whole place. It was a singular mixture, arising from the trustful local habit of allowing every kind of garbage and ordure to disperse itself without drainage, and complicated with fumes of oil, garlic, general mustiness, and a whiff or two of old incense. The potency of olive-oil, especially when somewhat rank, none can know who have not been in Spain. That first steak--how tempting it looked among its potatoes, but how abominably it tasted! We never approached meat with the same courage afterward, until our senses were subdued to the level of fried oil. Combine this with the odor of corruption, and you have the insinuating quality which we soon noticed even in the wine--perhaps from the custom of transporting it in badly dressed pig-skins, which impart an animal flavor. This astonishing local atmosphere saluted us everywhere; it was in our food and drink; we breathed it and dreamed of it. Yet the Burgalese flourished in calm unconsciousness thereof. The splendidly blooming peasant women showed their perfect teeth at us; and the men, in broad-brimmed, pointed caps and embroidered jackets, whose feet were brown and earthy as tree-roots, laughed outright, strong in the knowledge of their traditionary soap, at our ignorant foreign clothes and over-washed hands! Among the humbler class were some who were prepared to sell labor--an article not much in demand--and they were even more calmly squalid than the beggars. They sat in ranks on the curb-stones of the plaza, a matchless array of tatters; and if they could have been conveyed without alteration to Paris or New York, there would have been sharp competition for them between the artists and paper-makers.

So my companion, the artist, assured me--whom, by-the-way, in order to give him local color, I had rechristened Velazquez. But as he shrank from the large implication of this name, I softened him down to Velveteen.

We had been twenty-four hours in Burgos before we saw a carriage, excepting only the hotel coach, which stood most of the time without horses in front of the door, and was used by the porter as a private gambling den and loafing place for himself and his friends. When wheels did roll along the pavements they awoke a roar as of musketry. Perhaps the most important event which took place during our stay--it was certainly regarded with a more feverish interest by the inhabitants than the Corpus Christi ceremonies--was the bold act of our landlady, who went out to drive in a barouche, while her less daring spouse hung out of the window weakly staring at her. The house-fronts were filled with well-dressed feminine heads, witnessing the departure; a grave old gentleman opposite left his book and glared out intently. When the wheels could no longer even be heard, he turned to gaze wistfully in the opposite direction, dimly hoping that life might vouchsafe him a carriage.

Although, as I have said, women avoid meeting male glances when on the sidewalk, they enjoy full license to stand at their high windows, which are called _miradores_, or "lookers," and contemplate with entire freedom all things or persons that pass; which, in view of the complete listlessness of their lives, is a fortunate dispensation. Existence in Burgos is essentially life from the window point of view. It proceeds idly, and as a sort of accidental spectacle. Yet there is for strangers a dull fascination in wandering about the narrow, silent streets, and contemplating ancient buildings, the chiselled ornaments and armorial bearings of which recall the wealth and nobility that once inhabited them during the great days of the town. Where have all the dominant families gone? Are they keeping store, or tending the railroad station? Their descendants are sometimes only too happy if they can get some petty government office at five hundred dollars a year. I strolled one afternoon into the Calle de la Calera, and through a shabby archway penetrated to a stately old ruined court, around which ran an inscription in stone, declaring this palace to have been reared by an abbot of aristocratic line a century or two since. It is used now as an oil factory. A pretty girl was looking out over a flower-pot in an upper window, and, as I strayed up the noble staircase, I met a sad-looking gentleman coming down, who I afterward learned was a widower, formerly resident in Paris, but now returned with his daughter to this strange domicile in his native place. Some of the lower rooms, again, were devoted to plebeians and donkeys.

The humble ass, by-the-way, begins to thrust himself meekly upon you as soon as you set foot in the Peninsula, and you must look sharp if you wish to keep out of his way. His cheap labor has ruined and driven out the haughtier equine stock of Arabia that once pawed this devoted soil. Even the Cid, however, did not boast a barb of the desert in the earlier days of his prowess; for when King Alfonso bade him quit the land, "then the Cid clapped spurs to the mule upon which he rode, and vaulted into a piece of ground which was his own inheritance, and answered, 'Sire, I am not in your land, but in my own.'" This little incident occurred near Burgos, and the drowsy city still keeps some dim memory of that great Warrior Lord the Cid Campeador, Rodrigo de Bivar, whose quaint story, full of hardihood, robbery, and cruelty, gallant deeds and grim pathos, trails along the track of his adventures through half of Spain. But there is a curious cheapness and indifference in the memorials of him preserved. In the Town-hall, for the sum of ten cents, you are admitted to view the modern walnut receptacle wherein all that is left of him is economically stored. Those puissant bones, which went through so many hard fights against the Moors, are seen lying here, dusty and loose, with those of Ximena, under the glass cover. Among them reposes a portly corked bottle, in which minor fragments of the warrior lord were placed after the moving of his remains from the Convent of San Pedro in chains, where for many years he occupied a more seemly tomb. Imagine George Washington, partially bottled and wholly disjointed, on exhibition under glass! The Spaniards, in no way disconcerted by the incongruity, have graven on the brass plate of the case a high-sounding inscription; but a tribute as genuine and not less valuable, though humbler, was the big, spruce-looking modern wagon I saw in the market-place one day, driven by an energetic farmer, and bearing on its side the title _El Cid_.

One would look to see the conqueror's dust richly inurned within the cathedral--a noble outgrowth of the thirteenth century, enriched by accretions of later work until its whitish stone and wrought marble connect the Early Pointed style with that of the Renaissance in its flower. But perhaps this temple has enough without the Cid. Strangely placed on the side of a hill, with houses attached to one corner, as if it had sprung from the homes and hearts of the people, it seems to hold down the swelling ground with its massive weight; yet the spires, through the open-work of which the stars may be seen at night, rise with such lightness you would think the heavy bells might make them tremble and fall. I passed an hour of peace and fresh air above the fetid streets, looking down from the citadel hill on these pinnacles, while around and below them lay the town--an irregular mass of gray and mauve pierced with deep shadows--in the midst of bare, rolling uplands. Before the fair high altar hangs the victorious banner of Ferdinand VII., recalling to the people the great battle of Tolosa Plains. And when one sees peasants--rough spots of color in the sombre choir--studying the dark, fruit-like wood-carvings through which the Bible story wreathes itself in panel after panel, one feels the teaching power of these old churches for the unlettered. In one of the corner chapels appears another less favorable phase of such teaching, in the shape of a miracle-working Christ, amid deep shadows and dim lantern-light, stretched on the cross, and draped with a satin crinoline. This doubtful reverence of putting a short skirt on the figure of the Saviour, often practiced in Spain, may perhaps mark an influence unconsciously received from the Moorish dislike for nudity. The cathedral bells were continually clanging the summons to mass or vespers, and their loud voices, though cracked and inharmonious, seemed still to assert the supremacy of ecclesiastical power. But while a priest occasionally darkened the sidewalks, many others, on account of the growing prejudice against them, went about in frock-coats and ordinary tall hats. And under all its crowning beauty the old minster, motionless in the centre of the stagnant town--its chief entrance walled up, and a notice painted on its Late Roman façade warning boys not to play ball against the tempting masonry--wore the look of some neglected and half-blind thing, once glorious, symbol of a power abruptly stayed in its prodigious career.

Meanwhile the daily history of Burgos went on its wonted way, sleepy but picturesque--a sort of illuminated prose. Women chaffered in the blue-tiled fish-market; the _bourgeoisie_ patronized the sweetmeat shops, of which there were ten on the limited chief square; the tambourine-maker varied this ornamental industry with the construction of the more practical sieve; a peasant passed with a bundle of purple-flowering vetches on his head for fodder, and another drove six milch goats through the streets, seeking a purchaser. To this last one the proprietor of the principal book-store came running out to see if he could strike a bargain. One morning I met an uncouth countryman and his stout wife on the red-tiled landing of the inn stairs (they bowed and courtesied to me) with chickens and eggs for sale. In this simple manner our hotel was supplied. All the bread was got, a few pieces at a time, from a small bakery across the plazuela, in a dark cellar just under the niche of a neglected stone saint--a new arrival causing our maid to run hurriedly thither for a couple of rolls; and the water also came from some neighbor's well in earthen jars. The barber even exercises his primitive function in Burgos: he is called a "bleeder," and announces on his shop sign that "teeth and molars" are extracted there. Democratic and provincial the atmosphere was, and not unpleasantly so; yet during our stay Italian opera from Madrid was performing in the theatre, and large yellow posters promised "Bulls in Burgos" at an early date.

II.

To pass from this ancient city to Madrid is to experience one of those astonishing contrasts in which the country abounds.

We dropped asleep in the rough, time-worn regions of Old Castile, and in the morning found ourselves amid the glare and bustle of reconstructed Spain, as it displays itself on the great square called the Gate of the Sun--a spot with no hint of poetry about it other than its name. Madrid adopts largely the Parisian style of street architecture, and has in portions a resemblance to Boston. The sense of remoteness aroused in the north here suddenly fades, though the traits that mark a foreign land soon re-assemble and take shape in a new framework. Perhaps, too, our first rather flat impression was due to an exhausting night journey and some accompanying incidents.

"The Spaniards are a nation of robbers!" a cheerful French gentleman of Bordeaux had told us;[3] and he threw out warnings of certain little coin tricks in which they were adepts. When two Civil Guards, armed with swords and guns, inspected our train at the frontier, we recalled his statement. These guards persistently popped up at every succeeding station. No matter how fast the train went, there they were always waiting; always two of them, always with the same mustached faces, and the same white havelocks fluttering on their bunchy cocked hats of the French Revolution, and making their swarthy cheeks and black eyes fiercer by contrast. In fact, they were obviously the same men. Every time they marched up and down the platform, scanning the cars in a determined manner, and scowling at our compartment in a way that fully persuaded us some one must be guilty. Indeed, before long we became convinced that we ourselves were suspicious; but it would have been a relief if they had taken us in hand at once. Why should they go on glaring at us and swinging their guns, as if it were a good deal easier to shoot us than not, unless it was that we were too rich a "find" to be disposed of immediately--squandered, as it were? Perhaps the torture of suspense suited the enormity of our case, but it was certainly cruel. There was some satisfaction, however, in finding that when we left the depôt they allowed us a restricted liberty, and kept out of our way. If it had been otherwise, I don't know what they would have done to us at Burgos, for it was there that the landlady forced upon us a gold piece that would not pass, in exchange for a good one which we had given her. This very simple device was one of which the French gentleman had told us. But we were too confiding. The money to pay the bill was sent away by a servant, and once out of sight was easily replaced with inferior coin. Disturbed by this episode, we went to our train, which started with the watchman's first hail at eleven, and stumbled hastily into an empty compartment, which we soon converted into a sleeping-carriage by making our bundles pillows, drawing curtains, and pulling the silk screen over the lamp. Our nap was broken only by a halt at the next station. There was a long, drowsy pause, during which the train seemed to be pretending it hadn't been asleep. It was nearly time to go on, when feminine voices drew near our carriage; the door was thrown open, and two ladies quickly entered. There was no time for retreat; the usual fish-horn and dinner-bell accompaniment announced our departure, and the wheels moved. Then it was that one of the new-comers uttered a half scream, and we saw that she was a nun!

Had it been a cooler night our blood might have frozen; but as it failed us, we did what we could by feeling greatly embarrassed. The nun and her travelling companion had been speaking Spanish as they approached, and we tried in that language to impress on them our harmless devotion to their convenience.

"But he said it was reserved for ladies," murmured the sister, in good English.

The terrible truth was now clear. My eye caught, at the same instant, a card in the window which proved beyond question that we had got into the carriage for señoras.

The result of this adventure was that we found the nun to be an English Catholic, employed in teaching at a religious establishment, and her friend another Englishwoman protecting her on her journey. Pleasant conversation ensued, and we had almost forgotten that we were criminals, when the speed of the engine slackened again, and the thought of the Civil Guards returned to haunt us. We did not dare remain, yet we were sure that our military pursuers would confront us again on the platform. There indeed they were, when we tumbled out into the obscurity, with their white-hooded heads looming above their muskets in startling disconnectedness. Telling Velazquez, with all the firmness I possessed, to bare his breast to the avenging sword, I hastened to get into a coupé, preferring to die comfortably. He, however, ignominiously followed me. It is true, we were not molested; but the shock of that narrow escape kept us wakeful.

Not even our own prairies, I think, could present so dreary and monotonous an outlook as the wide, endless, treeless Castilian plains while morning slowly felt its way across them. Brown and cold they were, skirted by white roads, and all shorn of their barley crops, though it was but middle June. Now and then a village was seen huddled against some low slope--a church lifting its tall, square campanario above the humble roofs against the pearling sky. Interior Spain is a desolate land, but the Church thrives there and draws its tax from the poverty-stricken inhabitants--a crowned beggar ruling over beggars.

If the first man were now to be created from the clay of this region, he would doubtless turn out the very type of a lean hidalgo. The human product of such soil must perforce be meagre and melancholy; and the pensiveness which we see in most Spanish faces seems a reflection of the landscape which surrounds them.