Part 7

Unarmoured, pouring with sweat, though at that western door a great buttress still shaded him from the noonday sun, Robert the Strong thundered enormously at the oak. A hinge broke, and he heard a salute of laughter from his men. He dropped his instrument, lifted, straining, a great beam which lay there, and trundled it like a battering-ram against the second hinge. But, just as the shock came, an arrow from the tower caught him also. It struck where the neck joins the shoulder, and he went down. Even as he fell, the great door gave, and the men of the imperial levy, fighting their way in, broke upon the massed pirates that still defended the entry with a whirl of axe and sword.

Four men tended the leader, one man holding his head upon his knee, the three others making shift to lift him, to take him where he might be tended. But his body was no longer convulsed; the motions of the arms had ceased; and when the arrow was plucked at last from the wound, the thick blood hardly followed it. He was dead.

The name of this village and this church was Brissarthe; and the man who so fell, and from whose falling soldier songs and legends arose, was the first father of all the Capetians, the French kings.

From this man sprang Eudes, who defended Paris from the Sea-Rovers: Hugh Capet and Philip Augustus and Louis the Saint and Philip the Fair; and so through century after century to the kings that rode through Italy, to Henri IV, to Louis XIV in the splendour of his wars, and to that last unfortunate who lost the Tuileries on August 10th, 1793. His line survives to-day, for its eldest heir is the man whom the Basques would follow. His expectants call him Don Carlos, and he claims the crown of Spain.

XVIII

THE CROOKED STREETS

Why do they pull down and do away with the Crooked Streets, I wonder, which are my delight, and hurt no man living?

Every day the wealthier nations are pulling down one or another in their capitals and their great towns: they do not know why they do it; neither do I.

It ought to be enough, surely, to drive the great broad ways which commerce needs and which are the life-channels of a modern city, without destroying all the history and all the humanity in between: the islands of the past. For, note you, the Crooked Streets are packed with human experience and reflect in a lively manner all the chances and misfortunes and expectations and domesticity and wonderment of men. One marks a boundary, another the kennel of an ancient stream, a third the track some animal took to cross a field hundreds upon hundreds of years ago; another is the line of an old defence, another shows where a rich man's garden stopped long before the first ancestor one's family can trace was born; a garden now all houses, and its owner who took delight in it turned to be a printed name.

Leave men alone in their cities, pester them not with the futilities of great governments, nor with the fads of too powerful men, and they will build you Crooked Streets of their very nature as moles throw up the little mounds or bees construct their combs. There is no ancient city but glories, or has gloried, in a whole foison and multitude of Crooked Streets. There is none, however wasted and swept by power which, if you leave it alone to natural things, will not breed Crooked Streets in less than a hundred years and keep them for a thousand more.

I know a dead city called Timgad, which the sand or the barbarians of the Atlas overwhelmed fourteen centuries ago. It lies between the desert and the Algerian fields, high up upon a mountain-side. Its columns stand. Even its fountains are apparent, though their waterways are choked. It has a great forum or market-place, all flagged and even, and the ruined walls of its houses mark its emplacement on every side. All its streets are straight, set out with a line, and by this you may judge how a Roman town lay when the last order of Rome sank into darkness.

Well, take any other town which has not thus been mummified and preserved but has lived through the intervening time, and you will find that man, active, curious, intense, in all the fruitful centuries of Christian time has endowed them with Crooked Streets, which kind of streets are the most native to Christian men. So it is with Arles, so it is with Nîmes, so it is with old Rome itself, and so it is with the City of London, on which by a special Providence the curse of the Straight Street has never fallen, so that it is to this day a labyrinth of little lanes. It was intended after the Great Fire to set it all out in order with "piazzas" and boulevards and the rest--but the English temper was too strong for any such nonsense, and the streets and the courts took to the natural lines which suit us best.

The Renaissance indeed everywhere began this plague of vistas and of avenues. It was determined three centuries ago to rebuild Paris as regular as a chessboard, and nothing but money saved the town--or rather the lack of money. You may to this day see in a square called the "Place des Vosges" what was intended. But when they had driven their Straight Street two hundred yards or so the exchequer ran dry, and thus was old Paris saved. But in the last seventy years they have hurt it badly again. I have no quarrel with what is regal and magnificent, with splendid ways of a hundred feet or more, with great avenues and lines of palaces; but why should they pull down my nest beyond the river--Straw Street and Rat Street and all those winding belts round the little Church of St. Julien the Poor, where they say that Dante studied and where Danton in the madness of his grief dug up his dead love from the earth on his returning from the wars.

Crooked Streets will never tire a man, and each will have its character, and each will have a soul of its own. To proceed from one to another is like travelling in a multitude or mixing with a number of friends. In a town of Crooked Streets it is natural that one should be the Moneylenders' Street and another that of the Burglars, and a third that of the Politicians, and so forth through all the trades and professions.

Then also, how much better are not the beauties of a town seen from Crooked Streets! Consider those old Dutch towns where you suddenly come round a corner upon great stretches of salt water, or those towns of Central France which from one street and then another show you the Gothic in a hundred ways.

It is as it should be when you have the back of Chartres Cathedral towering up above you from between and above two houses gabled and almost meeting. It is what the builders meant when one comes out from such fissures into the great Place, the parvis of the cathedral, like a sailor from a river into the sea. Not that certain buildings were not made particularly for wide approaches and splendid roads, but that these, when they are the rule, sterilize and kill a town. Napoleon was wise enough when he designed that there should lead all up beyond the Tiber to St. Peter's a vast imperial way. But the modern nondescript horde, which has made Rome its prey, is very ill advised to drive those new Straight Streets foolishly, emptily, with mean façades of plaster and great gaps that will not fill.

You will have noted in your travels how the Crooked Streets gather names to themselves which are as individual as they, and which are bound up with them as our names are with all our own human reality and humour. Thus I bear in mind certain streets of the town where I served as a soldier. There was the Street of the Three Little Heaps of Wheat, the Street of the Trumpeting Moor, the Street of the False Heart, and an exceedingly pleasant street called "Who Grumbles at It?" and another short one called "The Street of the Devil in His Haste," and many others.

From time to time those modern town councillors from whom Heaven has wisely withdrawn all immoderate sums of money, and who therefore have not the power to take away my Crooked Streets and put Straight ones in their places, change old names to new ones. Every such change indicates some snobbery of the time: some little battle exaggerated to be a great thing; some public fellow or other, in Parliament or what not; some fad of the learned or of the important in their day.

Once I remember seeing in an obscure corner a twist of dear old houses built before George III was king, and on the corner of this row was painted "Kipling Street: late Nelson Street."

Upon another occasion I went to a little Norman market town up among the hills, where one of the smaller squares was called "The Place of the Three Mad Nuns," and when I got there after so many years and was beginning to renew my youth I was struck all of a heap to see a great enamelled blue and white affair upon the walls. They had renamed the triangle. They had called it "The Place Victor Hugo"!

However, all you who love Crooked Streets, I bid you lift up your hearts. There is no power on earth that can make man build Straight Streets for long. It is a bad thing, as a general rule, to prophesy good or to make men feel comfortable with the vision of a pleasant future; but in this case I am right enough. The Crooked Streets will certainly return.

Let me boldly borrow a quotation which I never saw until the other day, and that in another man's work, but which, having once seen it, I shall retain all the days of my life.

"Oh, passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem," or words to that effect. I can never be sure of a quotation, still less of scansion, and anyhow, as I am deliberately stealing it from another man, if I have changed it so much the better.

XIX

THE PLACE APART

Little pen, be good and flow with ink (which you do not always do) so that I may tell you what came to me once in a high summer and the happiness I had of it.

* * * * *

One Summer morning as I was wandering from one house to another among the houses of men, I lifted up a bank from a river to a village and good houses, and there I was well entertained. I wish I could recite the names of those chance companions, but I cannot, for they did not tell me their names. June was just beginning in the middle lands where there are vines, but not many, and where the look of the stonework is still northern. The place was not very far from the Western Sea.

The bank on which the village stood above that river had behind it a solemn slope of woodland leading up gently to where, two miles or more away, yet not three hundred feet above me, the new green of the tree-tops made a line along the sky. Clouds of a little, happy, hurrying sort ran across the gentle blue of that heaven, and I thought, as I went onward into the forest upland, that I had come to very good things: but indeed I had come to things of a graver kind.

A path went on athwart the woods and upwards. This path was first regular, and then grew less and less marked, though it still preserved a clear-way through the undergrowth. The new leaves were opened all about me, and there was a little breeze: yet the birds piped singly and the height was lonely when I reached it, as though it were engaged in a sort of contemplation. At the summit was first one small clearing and then another, in which coarse grass grew high within the walls of trees; men had not often come that way, and those men only the few of the countryside.

Just where the slope began to go downwards again upon the further side, these little clearings ceased and the woods closed in again. The path, or what was left of it, wholly failed, and I had now to push my way through many twigs and interlacing brambles, till in a little while that forest ceased abruptly upon the edge of a falling sward, and I saw before me the Valley.

Its floor must have lain higher than that river which I had crossed and left the same morning, for my ascent had been one of two miles or so, and my pushing downward on the further slope far less than one; moreover, that descent had been gentle.

The Valley opened to the right at my issue from the wood. To my left hand was a circle of the same trees as those through which I had passed, but to the right and so away northward, the pleasant empty dale.

Let me describe it.

Upon the further bank (for it was not steep enough to call a wall), the western bank which shut that valley in, grew a thick growth of low chestnuts with here and there a tall silver birch standing up among them. All this further slope was so held, and the chestnuts made a dark belt from which the tall graces of the birches lifted. The sunlight was behind that long afternoon of hills.

Opposite, the higher eastern slope stood full though gentle to the glorious light, and it was all a rise of pasture land. Its crest, which followed up and away northward for some miles, showed here and there a brown rock, aged and strong but low and half covered in the grass. These rocks were warm and mellow. The height of this eastern boundary was enough to protect the hollow below, but not so high as to carry any sense of savagery. It warned rather than forbade the approach of human kind. Between it and its opposing wooded fellow the narrowing floor of that Eden lay; winding, closing slowly, until it ended in a little cuplike pass, an easy saddle of grass where the two sides of the valley converged upon its northern conclusion. This pass was perhaps four miles away from me as I gazed, or perhaps a little less. The sun as I have said was shining upon all this: it made upon the little cuplike place a gentle shadow and a gentle light, both curved as the light might fall low and aslant upon a wooden bowl clothed in a soft green cloth. This was a lovely sight, and it invited me to go forward.

Therefore I went down the sward that fell from the abrupt edge of the wood, and set out to follow northward along the lower grasses of this single and most unexpected vale.

So strange was the place, even at this first sight, that I thought to myself: "I have happened upon one of those holidays God gives us." For we cannot give ourselves holidays: nor, if we are slaves, can our masters give us holidays, but God only: until at last we lay down the business and leave our work for good and all. And so much for holidays. Anyhow, the valley was a wonder to me there.

It was not as are common and earthly things. There was a peace about it which was not a mere repose, but rather something active which invited and intrigued. The meadows had a summons in them; and all was completely still. I heard no birds from the moment when I left the woodland, but a little brook, not shallow, ran past me for a companion as I went on. It made no murmur, but it slid full and at once mysterious and prosperous, brimming up to the rich field upon either side. I thought there must be chalk beneath it from its way of going. The pasture was not mown yet it was short, but if it had been fed there was no trace of herds anywhere; and indeed the grass was rather more in height than the grass of fed land, though it was not in flower. No wind moved it.

There were no divisions in this little kingdom; there were no walls or fences or hedges: it was all one field, with the woods upon the western slope to my left, and the tilted green of the eastern ridge to my right on which the sunlight softly and continually lay. Never have I found a place so much its own master and so contentedly alone.

If any man owned that Valley, blessed be that man, but if no man owned it, and only God, then I could better understand the benediction which it imposed upon me, a chance wanderer, for something little less than an hour. Here was a place in which thought settled upon itself, and was not concerned with unanswerable things; and here was a place in which memory did not trouble one with the incompletion of recent trial, but rather stretched back to things so very old that all sense of evil had been well purged out of them. The ultimate age of the world which is also its youth, was here securely preserved. I was not so foolish as to attempt a prolongation of this blessedness: these things are not for possession: they are an earnest only of things which we may perhaps possess, but not while the business is on.

I went along at a good sober pace of travelling, taking care to hurt no blossom with my staff and to destroy no living thing, whether of leaves or of those that have movement.

So I went until I came to the low pass at the head of the place, and when I had surmounted it I looked down a steep great fall into quite another land. I had come to a line where met two provinces, two different kinds of men, and this second valley was the end of one.

The moor (for so I would call it) upon the further side fell away and away distantly, till at its foot it struck a plain whereon I could see, further and further off to a very distant horizon, cities and fields and the anxious life of men.

XX

THE EBRO PLAIN

I wish I could put before men who have not seen that sight, the abrupt shock which the Northern eye receives when it first looks from some rampart of the Pyrenees upon the new deserts of Spain.

"Deserts" is a term at once too violent and too simple. The effect of that amazement is by no means the effect which follows from a similar vision of the Sahara from the red-burnt and precipitous rocks of Atlas; nor is it the effect which those stretches of white blinding sand give forth when, looking southward toward Mexico and the sun, a man shades his eyes to catch a distant mark of human habitation along some rare river of Arizona from the cliff edge of a cut tableland.

Corn grows in that new Spain beneath one: many towns stand founded there; Christian Churches are established; a human society stands firmly, though sparsely, set in that broad waste of land. But to the Northern eye first seeing it--nay, to a Northerner well acquainted with it, but returning to the renewal of so strange a vision--it is always a renewed perplexity how corn, how men, how worship, how society (as he has known them) can have found a place there; and that, although he knows that nowhere in Europe have the fundamental things of Europe been fought for harder and more steadfastly maintained than they have along this naked and burnt valley of the Ebro.

I will suppose the traveller to have made his way on foot from the boundaries of the Basque country, from the Peak of Anie, down through the high Pyrenean silences to those banks of Aragon where the river runs west between parallel ranges, each of which is a bastion of the main Pyrenean chain. I will suppose him to have crossed that roll of thick mud which the tumbling Aragon is in all these lower reaches, to have climbed the further range (which is called "The Mountains of Stone," or "The Mountains of the Rock"), and, coming upon its further southern slope, to see for the first time spread before him that vast extent of uniform dead-brown stretching through an air metallically clear to the tiny peaks far off on the horizon, which mark the springs of the Tagus. It is a characteristic of the stretched Spanish upland, from within sight of the Pyrenees to within sight of the Southern Sea, that it may thus be grasped in less than half a dozen views, wider than any views in Europe; and, partly from the height of that interior land, partly from the Iberian aridity of its earth, these views are as sharp in detail, as inhuman in their lack of distant veils and blues, as might be the landscapes of a dead world.

The traveller who should so have passed the high ridge and watershed of the Pyrenees, would have come down from the snows of the Anie through forests not indeed as plentiful as those of the French side, but still dignified by many and noble trees, and alive with cascading water. While he was yet crossing the awful barriers (one standing out parallel before the next) which guard the mountains on their Spainward fall, he would continuously have perceived, though set in dry, unhospitable soil, bushes and clumps of trees; something at times resembling his own Northern conception of pasture-land. The herbage upon which he would pitch his camp, the branches he would pick for firewood, still, though sparse and Southern, would have reminded him of home.

But when he has come over the furthest of these parallel reaches, and sees at last the whole sweep of the Ebro country spread out before him, it is no longer so. His eye detects no trees, save that belt of green which accompanies the course of the river, no glint of water. Though human habitation is present in that landscape, it mixes, as it were, with the mud and the dust of the earth from which it rose; and, gazing at a distant clump in the plains beneath him, far off, the traveller asks himself doubtfully whether these hummocks are but small, abrupt, insignificant hills or a nest of the houses of men--things with histories.

For the rest all that immeasurable sweep of yellow-brown bare earth fills up whatever is not sky, and is contained or framed upon its final limit by mountains as severe as its own empty surface. Those far and dreadful hills are unrelieved by crag or wood or mist; they are a mere height, naked and unfruitful, running along wall-like and cutting off Aragon from the south and the old from the new Castile, save where the higher knot of the Moncayo stands tragic and enormous against the sky.

This experience of Spain, this first discovery of a thing so unexpected and so universally misstated by the pens of travellers and historians, is best seen in autumn sunsets, I think, when behind the mass of the distant mountains an angry sky lights up its unfruitful aspect of desolation, and, though lending it a colour it can never possess in commoner hours and seasons, in no way creates an illusion of fertility or of romance, of yield or of adventure, in that doomed silence.

The vision of which I speak does not, I know, convey this peculiar impression even to all of the few who may have seen it thus--and they are rare. They are rare because men do not now approach the old places of Europe in the old way. They come into a Spanish town of the north by those insufficient railways of our time. They return back home with no possession of great sights, no more memorable experience than of urban things done less natively, more awkwardly, more slowly than in England. Yet even those few, I say, who enter Spain from the north, as Spain should be entered--over the mountain roads--have not all of them received the impression of which I speak.

I have so received it, I know; I could wish that to the Northerner it were the impression most commonly conveyed: a marvel that men should live in such a place: a wonder when the ear catches the sound of a distant bell, that ritual and a creed should have survived there--so absolute is its message of desolation.