CHAPTER VIISPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERSIn the gloom of evening I espied on a dull, sterile hillside a vast rambling venta, as bare, slate-colored, and marked with time as the hills themselves. Here was exactly such a caravansary as that in which he of the Triste Figura had watched over his arms by night and won his Micomiconian knighthood. It consisted of an immense enclosure that was half farmyard, backed by a great stable of which a strip around two sides beneath the low vaulted roof had been marked off for the use of man; the whole dull, gloomy, cheerless, unrelieved by a touch of color. Within the building were scattered a score of mules, borricos and machos. Several tough-clothed muleteers, with what had been bright handkerchiefs wound about their brows, sauntered in the courtyard or sat eating with their great razor-edged navajas their lean suppers of brown bread and a knuckle of ham. Even the massive wooden pump in the yard among an array of ponderous carts and wagons was there to complete the picture. Indeed, this was none other than the Venta de Cardenas, reputed the very same in which Don Greaves passed his vigilant night, where Sancho was tossed in a blanket and Master Nicholas, the barber, bearded himself with a cow's tail.The chance betrayal of my nationality aroused in the arrieros a suggestion of wonder and even an occasional question. But in general their interest was as meager as their knowledge of the world outside the national boundaries. Not once did they display the eagerness to learn that is so characteristic of the Italian. For the Spaniard considers it beneath his dignity as a caballero and a cristino viejo to show any marked curiosity, especially concerning a foreign land, which cannot but be vastly inferior to his own. Four centuries of national misfortune and shrinkage have by no means eradicated his firm conviction, implanted in his mind by Ferdinand and Isabel in the days of conquest, that he is the salt of the earth, superior in all things to the rest of the human race.Spain is one of the most illiterate countries of the civilized world, yet also one of the best educated, unless education be merely that mass of undigested and commonly misapplied information absorbed within four walls. Few men have a more exact knowledge, a more solid footing on the everyday earth than the peasant, the laborer, the muleteer of Spain. One does not marvel merely at the fluent, powerful, entirely grammatical language of these unlettered fellows, but at the sound basic wisdom that stands forth in their every sentence. If their illiteracy denies them the advantage of absorbing the festering rot of the yellow journal, in compensation they have a wealth of vocabulary and a forceful simplicity of diction that raises them many degrees above the corresponding class in more "advanced" lands.It is of the "lower" classes that I am speaking, the common sense and backbone of Spain. The so-called upper class is one of the most truly ignorant and uneducated on earth--though among its members, be it noted, is no illiteracy. The maltreated Miguel was adamantinely right in choosing his hero from the higher orders; no Spaniard of the masses could be so far led astray from reason as to become a Quixote.It is noticeable that the Spaniard of the laboring class has almost none of that subservience born in the blood in the rest of Europe. Not only does each man consider himself the equal of any other; he takes and expects the world to take for granted that this is the case, and never feels called upon to demonstrate that equality to himself and the rest of the world by insolence and rowdyism. Dissipation he knows not, except the dissipation of fresh air, sunshine, and a guitar. Nowhere in Christian lands is drunkenness more rare. Like the Arab the hardy lower-class Spaniard thrives robustly on a mean and scanty diet; he can sleep anywhere, at any time, and to the creature comforts is supremely indifferent. One can hardly believe this the country in which Alfonso X felt it necessary to enact stern laws against the serving of more than two dishes of meat at a meal or the wearing of "slashed" silks. Yet the Spain of to-day is not really a cheap country; it is merely that within its borders frugality is universal and held in honor rather than contempt.When the evening grew advanced, my fellow guests lay down on the bare cobble-stones of the venta, making pillows of the furniture of their mules, and were soon sleeping peacefully and sonorously. For me, soft-skinned product of a more ladylike world, was spread a muleteer's thick blanket in the embrasure of a wooden-blinded window, and amid the munching of asses and the not unpleasant smell of a Spanish stable I, too, drifted into slumber.From dawn until early afternoon I marched on across the rocky vastness of Spain, where fields have no boundary nor limit, a gnarled and osseous country and a true despoblado, as fruitless as that sterile neck of sand that binds Gibraltar to the continent. It is in these haggard, unpeopled plateaus of the interior that one begins to believe that the population of the peninsula is to-day barely one-third what it was in the prosperous years of Abd er-Rahman.At length, across a valley that was like a lake of heat waves, appeared Santa Cruz, a hard, colorless town where I was forced to be content with the usual bread, cheese and wine, the former as ossified as the surrounding countryside. In the further outskirts of the place I found a potter at work in a large open hovel and halted to pass the most heated hour with him. In one end of the building was a great trough of clay in which a bare-foot boy was slowly treading up and down. Now and again he caught up a lump of the dough and deposited it on a board before the potter. This the latter took by the handful and, placing it on his wheel, whirled it quickly into a vessel of a shape not unlike a soup-bowl. I inquired what these sold for and with a sigh he replied:"Three small dogs apiece, cocidos (cooked)"--pointing at the kiln--"y cuantos--how many break in the glazing! It is no joyful trade, señor."Once he left his work to munch a crust and to offer me a cigarette and a drink from his leather bota, but soon drifted back to his task with the restless, harassed look of the piece-worker the world over. As I sat watching his agile fingers a bit drowsily, there came suddenly back to memory the almost forgotten days when I, too, had toiled thus in the gloomy, sweltering depths of a factory. Truer slavery there never was than that of the piece-worker under our modern division of labor. Stroll through a factory to find a man seated at a machine stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist, and his task seems easy, almost a pastime in its simplicity. But go away for a year, travel through half the countries of the globe, go on a honeymoon to Venice and the Grecian isles, and then come back to find him sitting on the self-same stool, in the self-same attitude, stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist.Three blazing hours passed by, and I found myself entering a rolling land of vineyards, heralding wine-famous Valdepeñas. The vines were low shrubs not trained on sticks, the grapes touching the ground. A dip in an exotic stream reduced the grime and sweat of travel, and just beyond I came again upon the railway. A half-hour along it brought me face to face with the first foreign tramp I had met in Spain,--a light-haired, muscular youth in tattered, sun-brown garb, his hob-nailed shoes swung over one shoulder and around his feet thick bandages of burlap. He was a German certainly, perhaps a modern Benedict Moll whose story would have been equally interesting in its absurdity. But he passed me with the stare of a man absorbed in his personal affairs and accustomed to keep his own counsel, and stalked away southward along the scintillant railroad.I halted for a drink at the stuccoed dwelling of a track-walker. In the grassless yard, under the only imitation of a tree in the neighborhood, slept a roadster. Now and again the chickens that scratched in vain the dry, lifeless earth about him, marched disconsolately across his prostrate form."Poor fellow," said the track-walker's wife at the well, "he has known misery, more even than the rest of us. Vaya como duerme!"I sat down in the streak of shade that was crawling eastward across him. He wore a ten-day beard and the garb of a Spanish workman of the city, set off by a broad red faja around his waist. In one bulging pocket of his coat appeared to be all his earthly possessions.There was no evidence of overwhelming "miseria" in the cheery greeting with which he awoke, and as our ways coincided we continued in company. He was a Sevillian named Jesús, bound northward in general and wherever else the gods might lead him."For a long time there has been no work in Seville for nosotros, the carpenters," he explained, though with no indication of grief. "This half year I have been selling apricots and azucarillos in the bullring and on the Alameda. But each day more of Seville comes to sell and less to buy. I should have gone away long ago, but my comrade Gáspare would not leave his amiga. Gásparo is a stone-polisher and had work."Then one day I am taken by the police for I know not what. When after two weeks I come out, Gásparo is gone. But he has come north and somewhere I shall run across him."Jesús had just passed through a marvelous experience, which he proceeded to relate in all his Latin wealth of language--though not in the phraseology, of a graduate roadster:"Mira V., hombre! Two nights ago, when my feet are worn away with more than ten leguas of walking on the railroad, I come to Baeza. It is dark, and I wander along the track to find a soft bank to sleep. On the short railroad that is at each station there is waiting a train of merchandise. Suddenly a great idea comes to me. 'Sh! Jesús,' I whisper, 'what if you should hide yourself away somewhere on this train of merchandise? It would perhaps bring you to the next station.'"With great quiet I climb a wagon and hide myself between bales of cork. Screech! Brrr! Rboom! The train is off, and all night I am riding--without a ticket. But at Vilches the man that goes with the train with a lantern comes by and it is my curse to be making some noise, moving to roll a cigarette. 'Ya te 'pia!' (I spy you!) he cries. Vaca que soy! So of course I must get down. But mira, hombre! There I have traveled more than twelve miles without paying a perrito!"I had not the heart to disillusion him with a yarn or two from the land of the "hobo."In the telling we had come within sight of Valdepeñas. It was a "valley of rocks" indeed, though a city of good size and considerable evidence of industry, abounding with greatbodegas, or wine warehouses. As we trudged through the long straight street that had swallowed up the highway, we passed thetallerof a marble-cutter."It is in a place like this that Gásparo works," sighed Jesús, wandering languidly in at the open door. I was strolling slowly on when a whoop as of a man suddenly beset by a band of savages brought me running back into the establishment. Jesús was shaking wildly by both hands a stockily-built young fellow in shirt sleeves and white canvas apron, who was rivaling him in volubility of greeting. Gásparo was found.Still shouting incoherently, the two left the shop and squatted in the shade along the outside wall."Hombre!" panted Jesús, when his excitement had somewhat died down. "I have told myself that by to-morrow we should be tramping the carretera together."But Gásparo shook his head, sadly yet decisively."No, amigo. Jamás! Nunca! Never do I take to the road again. I have here a good job, the finest of patrons. No. I shall stay, and send for the amiga--or find another here."With the dignity of a caballero, Jesús accepted the decree without protest, and wished his erstwhile comrade luck and prosperity. Then that they might part in full knowledge, he launched forth in the story of his journey from Seville. Gásparo listened absently, shaking his head sadly from time to time. When the episode of the amateur hoboing began, he sat up with renewed interest; before it was ended he was staring at the speaker with clenched fists, his eyes bulging, the cigarette between his lips stone-dead. From that great epic Jesús jumped without intermission to a hasty survey of the anticipated joys that lay between him and Madrid. Suddenly Gásparo sprang into the air with an explosive howl, landing on his feet."By the blood of your namesake!" he shouted. "How can a man stay always in one place? This daily drudgery will kill me! I will throw the job in the patron's face, and get my wages this very minute, amaguito, and we will go to Madrid together. Jesús Maria! Who knows but we can hide ourselves on another freight train!"--and crying over his shoulder some rendezvous, he disappeared within the establishment.We sauntered on to the central plaza. It was utterly treeless and paved with cobble-stones; nor could we find a patch of grass or a shaded bench in all the neighborhood."Look here, señor!" cried Jesús, suddenly rushing toward a policeman who was loitering in the shade of a bodega. "Don't you have any parks or Alamedas in this val de penas of yours? You call this a city!""Señor," replied the officer in the most apologetic of voices, "we are not a rich city, and the rain so seldom falls in La Mancha. I am very sorry," and touching a finger respectfully to his cap, he strolled slowly on.Though the sun was low it was still wiltingly hot in the stony streets. Jesús, as I knew, was penniless. I suggested therefore that I would willingly pay the score of two for the privilege of retreating to the coolness of a wineshop."Bueno!" cried the Sevillian. "The wine of Valdepeñas is without equal, and of the cheapest--if you know where to buy. Vámonos, hombre!"He led the way down the street and by some Castilian instinct into a tiny underground shop that was ostensibly given over to the sale of charcoal. The smudged old keeper motioned us to the short rickety bench on which he had been dreaming away the afternoon and, descending still lower by a dark hole in the floor, soon set before us a brown glazed pitcher holding aquarto--about a quart--of wine, for which I paid him approximately three and a half cents.In all western Europe I have drunk the common table wine in whatever quantity it has pleased me, and suffered from it always the same effect as from so much clear water. It may be that the long tramp under a scorching sun and the distance from my last meal-place altered conditions. Certainly there was no need of the seller's assurance that this was genuine "valdepeñas" and that what had been sold us elsewhere as such was atrociously adulterated. Before the pitcher was half empty, I noted with wonder that I was taking an extraordinary interest in the old man's phillipic against the government and its exorbitant tax on wine. Jesús, too, grew in animation, and when the subterranean Demosthenes ended with a thundering, "Sí, señores! If it wasn't for the cursed government you and I could drink just such wine as this pure valdepenas anywhere as if it was water!" I was startled to hear us both applaud loud and long. A scant four-cents' worth had seemed so parsimonious a treat for two full-thirsted men that I had intended to order in due time a second pitcherful. But this strange mirth seemed worthy of investigation. I sipped the last of my portion and made no movement to suggest a replenishing. A few minutes later the old man had bade us go with the Almighty, and we were strolling away arm in arm.The sun was setting when we reached the plaza. We sat down on the cathedral steps. The Sevillian had suddenly an unaccountable desire to sing. He struck up one of the Moorish-descended ballads of his native city. To my increasing astonishment I found myself joining in. Not only that, but for the first and last time of my existence I caught the real Andalusian rhythm. An appreciative audience of urchins gathered. Then the sacristan stepped out and politely invited us to choose some other stage.Across the square was a casa de comidas. We entered and ordered dinner. The señora served us about one-third of what the bill-of-fare promised, and demanded full price--something that had never before happened in all my Spanish experience. I protested vociferously--another wholly unprecedented proceeding. The policeman who had apologized for the absence of parks sauntered in, and I laid the case before him. The señora restated it still more noisily. I declared I would not pay more than one peseta. The lady took oath that I would pay two. The policeman requested me to comply with her demand. I refused to the extent of commanding him to take his hand off the hilt of his sword. He apologized and suggested that we split the difference. This seemed reasonable. I paid it, and we left. Dark night had settled down. We marched aimlessly away into it. Somewhere Gásparo fell in with us. Somewhere else, on the edge of the city, we came upon a heap of bright clean straw on a threshing floor, and fell asleep.CHAPTER VIIION THE ROAD IN LA MANCHAIt was Sunday morning, the market day of Valdepeñas, when I returned alone to stock my knapsack. The plaza that had been so deserted and peaceful the evening before was packed from casa de comidas to cathedral steps with canvas booths in which the peasants of the encircling country were selling all the products of La Mancha, and among which circulated all the housewives of Valdepeñas, basket on arm. The women of the smaller cities of Spain cling stoutly to their local costumes, aping not in the least the world of fashion. These of Valdepeñas were strikingly different from the Andalusians, considering how slight the distance that separates them from that province. They were almost German in their slowness, with hardly a suggestion of "sal"; a solemn, bronze-tanned multitude who, parting their hair in the middle and combing it tight and smooth, much resembled Indian squaws.From the northern edge of the city the highway ran straight as the flight of a crow to where it was lost in a flat, colorless horizon. The land was artificially irrigated. The first place I stopped for water was a field in which an old man was driving round and round a blind-folded burro hitched to a noria, a water-wheel that was an exact replica of the Egyptiansakka, even to its squawk, jars of Andújar being tied to the endless chain with leather thongs. The man, too, had that dreamy, listless air of the Egyptianfellah; had I had a kodak to turn upon him I should have expected him to run after me crying for "backsheesh."Ahead stretched long vistas of low vineyards. The only buildings along the way were an occasional bare uniform stone dwelling of apeon caminero, or government road-tender. At one of these I halted to quench my thirst, and the occupant, smoking in Sabbath ease before it, instantly pronounced me a "norte americano." I showed my astonishment, for hardly once before in the peninsula had I been taken for other than a Frenchman, or a Spaniard from some distant province.The peon's unusual perspicacity was soon explained; he had been a soldier in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. I readily led him into reminiscences. Throughout the war, he stated, he had fought like a hero, not because he was of that rare breed but because every member of the troop had been filled with the belief that once captured by "los yanquis" he would be hanged on the spot."And are you still of the opinion?" I asked."Qué barbaridad!" he laughed. "I was taken at Santiago and carried a prisoner to your country. What a people! A whole meal at breakfast! We lived as never before, or since."You were quite right, vosotros, to take the island. I do not blame you. It was competición, just competition, like two shop-keepers in the city. I am glad the miserable government lost their Cuba."So often did I hear exactly this view from Spaniards of the laboring class that it may be considered typical of their attitude toward the late disagreement. The strange question has often been asked whether it is safe so soon after the war for a North American to travel alone in the interior of Spain. For answer we have only to ask ourselves whether a Spaniard traveling alone in the interior of the United States would be in any imminent danger of having his throat cut--even had we been defeated. In Spain there is vastly less, for not only is the Spaniard quicker to forgive and far less belligerent than he is commonly fancied, but there exists in the peninsula not one-tenth the rowdyism and hoodlum "patriotism" of our own country.I stayed long and left with difficulty. Gregarious is man, and on Sunday, when all the world about him is at rest, even the pedestrian finds it hard to exert himself. A league beyond I came upon the Sevillians lolling in the shadow of another isolated peon dwelling in what seemed once to have been a village.Jesús in his eleven-day beard hailed me from afar; moreover, the Sunday languor was still upon me. I stretched out with them in the shade of the building, but the flies prevented us from sleeping. We crawled into a peasant's cart under the shed--but the flies quickly found us out. We crossed the road to the ruin of a church, split almost exactly through the middle of tower and all, and one side fallen. Within it was a grassy corner where the sun never fell, and even a bit of breeze fanned us. But the flies had made this their Spanish headquarters. We decided to go on.In that only were we unanimous, for the Sevillians wished to follow the railroad, a furlong away, and I the carretera. I had all but won them over when a freight train labored by."Ay! Ay! Los toros!" shouted the two in chorus."Where?" I asked, seeing no such animals in sight."En las jaulas, hombre! In the cages!" cried Jesús, pointing to a flat-car on which, set close together, were six tightly-closed boxes each just large enough to hold a bull."We go by the railroad!" shouted Gásparo, decisively. "Alma de Dios! Who knows but we may be able to hide ourselves on a train that is carrying toros to the córrida!"We separated, therefore, and struck northward, though we marched side by side within hailing distance until we were all three swallowed up in the city of Manzanares.The bare-faced, truly Manchegan town was half-deserted, though the reason therefor was not hard to guess, for the bullring in the outskirts was howling as I passed. For all its size the place did not seem to boast an eating-house of any description. At last I halted before an old man seated in a shaded corner of the plaza, to inquire:"Señor, what does a stranger in your town do when he would eat?""Vaya, señor!" he replied, with the placid deliberation of age, and pointing with his cane to the shops that bordered the square. "He buys a perrito of bread in the bakery there, dos perros of ham in the butchery beyond, fruit of the market-woman--""And eats it where?" I interrupted."Hi jo de mi alma!" responded the patriarch with extreme slowness and almost a touch of sarcasm in his voice. "Here is the broad plaza, all but empty. In all that is there not room to sit down and eat?"I continued my quest and entered two posadas. But for the only time during the summer the proprietors demanded mycédula personal. I explained that Americans are not supplied with these government licenses to live, and showed instead my passport. Both landlords protested that it was not in Spanish and refused to admit me. One might have fancied one's self in Germany. It was some time after dark that I was directed to a private boarding-house that almost rewarded my long search. For the supper set before me was equal to a five-course repast in the Casa Robledo of Granada, and for the first time since leaving Seville I slept in a bed, and not in my clothes.In the morning an absolutely straight road lay before me across a land treeless but for a few stunted shrubs, a face of desolation and aridity and solitude as of Asia Minor. From the eastward swept a hot, dry wind across the baked plains of La Mancha that recalled all too forcibly the derivation of its name from the Arabicmanxa--a moistureless land.At fifteen kilometers the highway swerved slightly and lost from view for the first time the immense cathedral of Manzanares behind. On either hand, miles visible in every direction, huddled stone towns on bare hillsides and in rocky vales, each inconspicuous but for its vast overtowering church. "Si la demeure des hommes est pauvre, celle de Dieu est riche," charges colorful Gautier; which, if the church of Spain is truly the "demeure de Dieu," is sternly true. City, town, village, hamlet, a church always bulks vast above it like a hen among her chicks--rather like some violent overpowering tyrant with a club. To the right of the turn one might, but for a slight rise of ground, have espied a bare twelve kilometers away immortal Argamasilla itself.During the day there developed a hole in my shoe, through a sole of those very "custom-made" oxfords warranted by all the eloquent Broadway salesman held sacred--whatever that may have been--to endure at least six months of the hardest possible wear. Sand and pebbles drifted in, as sand and pebbles will the world over under such circumstances, and for some days to come walking was not of the smoothest.Almost exactly at noonday I caught sight of the first windmills of La Mancha, three of them slowly toiling together on a curving hillside, too distinctly visible at this hour to be mistaken by the most romance-mad for giants. The few peasants I fell in with now and then were a more placid, somber people than the Andaluz and, as is commonly the case in villages reached by no railway, more courteous to the roadster than their fellows more directly in touch with the wide world.It was that hour when the sun halts lingering above the edge of the earth, as if loath to leave it, that I entered the noiseless little hamlet of Puerto Lápiche. It contained no public hostelry, but the woman who kept its single shop cooked me a supper, chiefly of fried eggs, which I ate sitting on a stool before the building. The fried eggs of Spain! Wherein their preparation differs from that in other lands I know not, but he who has never eaten them after a long day's tramp cannot guess to what Epicurean heights fried eggs may rise. How, knowing of them, could Sancho have named cow-heel for his choice?The evening was of that soft and gentle texture that invites openly to a night out-of-doors. On the edge of the open country beyond, too, was a threshing-floor heaped with new straw that would certainly have been my choice, had not the village guardia been watching my every movement from across the way. When I had returned the porcelain frying-pan to its owner, I strolled boldly across to the officer and inquired for a lodging."With regret, señor," he replied, raising his hat and offering me the stool on which he had been seated, "I am forced to say that we are a small village so rarely honored by the presence of travelers that we have no public house. But--" he hesitated a moment, then went on "--the weather is fine, señor; the night is warm, the pure air hurts no one; why do you not make your bed on the soft, clean straw of the threshing-floor yonder?""Caballero," I responded, with my most Spanish salute, "a thousand thanks--and may your grace remain with God."For the first time during my journey the heat was tempered next morning, though by no means routed, by a slightly overcast sky. The wind continued. The highway led on through a seared brown country, for the most part a silent, smokeless, unpeopled land. The windmills of La Mancha were numerous now on either hand as the road sank slowly down to a gap in the low, gaunt mountains of Ciudad Real. At last it reached them and, picking its way through the narrow pass of Lápiche, strode off again across a still hotter, drier region, unmitigated even by the wind, which had stopped short at the mountain barrier--a land flowing not even with ditch-water. I halted but briefly at the large village of Madridejos, peopled by a slow, dreamy-eyed, yet toil-calloused peasantry, as if their world of fancy and the hard stony life of reality never quite joined hands.Hot, thirsty and hungry, I came in mid-afternoon to an isolated ramshackle venta in a rocky wilderness. An enormous shaggy man of a zoölogical cast of countenance, and a male-limbed girl were harnessing mules in the yard. No other living thing showed itself. I offered a peseta for food. The man glared at me for a time in silence, then growled that he sold nothing, but that I should find a posada not far beyond. He was evidently the champion prevaricator of that region, for not the suggestion of a hovel appeared during the rest of the afternoon. But he would be a fellow with Sancho indeed, who could not overrule a few hour's appetite in thinking of higher things, and no fit traveler in this hard, toilsome land where overeating is not numbered among the vices.The setting of the sun was perhaps an hour off when the highway, swinging a bit to the left and surmounting a barren, rocky ridge, laid suddenly before me an enthralling prospect. Below, far down on a distinctly lower level, a flat, ruffled country still misty with rising waves of heat, stretched away to the uttermost endless distance. The whole, glinting in the oblique rays of the setting sun, was scored in every direction with dull rock villages huddled compactly together, while on every hand, like signal fires on a western prairie, rose from a hundred threshing-floors columns of chaff straight and slender into the motionless air to an incredible height before breaking up. The road descended with decision, yet in no unseemly haste and, marching for an hour across a country traveled only by an occasional donkey loaded with chopped straw, led me at nightfall into the scene of Sancho's labors in the wheat-piles--the village of Tembleque.In its immense fonda, but for the underground stables one single, vast, cobble-paved room, a vacant-eyed old man, a girl, and a leviathan of a woman sat among the carts, wine-casks, and heaps of harnesses, the latter knitting. In strictest Castilian the establishment was no fonda, but aparador, fromparar, to stop; and certainly it could not with honesty have laid claim to any more inviting name, for assuredly no man in his senses would have dreamed of choosing it as astaying-place. When I asked if lodging was to be had, the woman replied with a caustic sneer that she had always been able thus far to accommodate any who were able and willing to pay."And can one also get supper?" I inquired timorously."How on earth do I know?" snapped the woman.I stared with a puzzled air at the old man and he in like manner at the knitter, who turned out to be his wife, espoused in budding maidenhood when his march in life had well begun."How can I cook him supper if he has none with him?" snarled the no longer maidenly."Er--what have you brought to eat?" asked the preadamite in a quavering voice."Nothing to be sure. What is a fonda for?""Ah, then how can la señora mía get you supper? Over the way is the butcher, beyond, the green-grocer, further still the panadero--"I returned some time later with meat, bread, potatoes, garbanzos, and a variety of vegetables, supplied with which the señora duly prepared me a supper--by sitting tight in her chair and issuing a volley of commands to the girl and the old man. For this service she demanded two "fat dogs," and collected at the same time an equal amount for my lodging.When I had eaten, the mistress of the house mumbled a word to the dotard. He lighted with trembling hand a sort of miner's lamp and led the way downward into the subterranean stable and for what seemed little short of a half-mile through great stone vaults musty with time, close by the cruppers of an army of mules and burros. Opening at last a door some three feet square and as many above the floor, he motioned to me to climb through it into a bin filled with chaff. This was to all appearances clean, yet I hesitated. For in these endless vaults, to which the outer air seemed not to have penetrated for a century, it was cold as a November evening. I glanced at the old man in protest. He blinked back at me, shook his ever-quaking head a bit more forcibly, and turning, shuffled away through the resounding cavern, the torch casting at first weird, dancing shadows behind his wavering legs, then gradually dying out entirely. I stood in blackest darkness, undecided. Before, however, the last faint sound of his going had wholly passed away, the scrape of the veteran's faltering feet grew louder again and in another moment he reappeared, clutching under one thin arm a heavy blanket. When I had taken it, he put a finger to his lips, cast his sunken eyes about him, whispered "sh!" with a labored wink, and tottered once more away. I climbed into the bin and slept soundly until the cursing of arrieros harnessing their mules aroused me shortly before dawn.CHAPTER IXTHE TRAIL OF THE PRIESTThe people of Tembleque had been just certain enough that none but an arriero could follow the intricate route thither, and that no man could cover the distance on foot in one day, to cause me to awaken determined to leave the Madrid highway and strike cross-country to Toledo. The first stage of the journey was the road to the village of Mora, which I was long in finding because at its entrance to--which chanced also to be its exit from--Tembleque it split up like an unraveled shoe-string. I got beyond the loose ends at last, however, and set a sharp pace--even though the hole in my shoe had enlarged to the size of a peseta--across a scarred and weather-beaten landscape that seemed constantly reminding how aged is the world.Twenty-four kilometers brought me to Mora, a sturdy town of countrymen, in time for an early and stinted dinner and inquiries which led me off in a new direction up a steadily mounting region to Mascargne. There, at a still different point of the compass, a ruined castle on a hilltop ten kilometers away was pointed out to me as the landmark of El Monacail; to which village a rugged and sterile road clambered over a country hunch-backed with hills. It was siesta-time when I arrived, the sun scorching hot, a burning wind sweeping among the patched and misshapen hovels that made up the place. There were no inhabitants abroad, which argued their good sense; but in the shadow of the only public building a trio of soldiers were playing at cards. They leered at me for some time when I made inquiry, then burst out in derisive laughter."Claro, hombre!" answered one of them sarcastically. "You can walk to Toledo la Santa if you know enough to follow a cow-path."I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed, though too little used to be clearly marked, and meandering in and out with it for twenty kilometers through rockybarrancasand across sandy patches, gained as the day was nearing its close the wind-bitten village of Nambroca. A few miles more through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory that brought me to a sudden halt before one of the most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there began a few miles beyond, the vast, wrinkled, verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away and upward like an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue with distance and heat rays, all details blended together into an indistinctness that left only an undivided impression like a Whistlerian painting. I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge gasped aloud with new wonder. From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia. My goal was won; before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging the Tajo, almost beneath the enormous iron cross set in a rock to mark Toledo as the religious center of Spain, and remained watching the city across the gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its walls could in no degree equal the view from this facing hilltop. Richly indeed did this one sight of her reward the long day's tramp across the choking hills, even had there not been a pleasure in the walk itself; and upon me fell a great pity for those that come to her by railroad in the glare of day and the swelter of humanity.As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the descending night, a voice sounded behind me and a ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered the accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down at my side. He was a "child of Toledo," and of his native city we fell to talking. At length he raised his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling lights across the Tajo, cried out:"O Toledo, my city! Gaunt, sunken-bellied Toledo, bound to your rock and devoured by the vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your children are starving!"Señor," he continued, suddenly returning to a conversational tone, "let me show you but one of a thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."He rose and led the way a little further along the path I had been following, halting at the edge of a yawning hole in the rocks, like a bottomless well, the existence of which I was thankful to have learned before I continued my way."Señor," he said, "no man can tell how many have died here, for it lies, as you see, in the very center of the trail over these hills. For a hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has stood so. But do you think yon cursed priests would spend a perrito of their blood-sweated booty to cover it?"It was black night when I picked my way down into the valley of the Tajo and, crossing the Alkántara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into Toledo. Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost, though the Castilian tongue sounded on every side. With each step forward came some new sign to recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo was an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city. Thus it is still her Eastern fashion to conceal her wealth by building her houses inwardly, leaving for public thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard passageways between them, and giving to the arriving stranger the sensation of wandering through a haughty crowd of which each coldly turns his back.Her medley of streets was such as one might find in removing the top of an ant-hill, an ant-hill in which modern improvements have made little progress; her pavements of round, century-polished cobble-stones, glinting in the weak light of an occasional street-lamp, were painful indeed to blistered feet. Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the Alhambra, hen houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too, in that they are rich with decoration and comfort within. It was an hour or more before I was directed to a casa de huéspedes in the calle de la Lechuga, or Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of buildings. The house itself was such as only a man of courage would have entered by night in any other city. I ventured in, however, and found the family out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that formed the roof by day being drawn back. Even the well was in the patio, on which opened, like the others, the room to which I was assigned, presenting toward the street a blank, windowless wall.It was late the next forenoon before I had slept the forty hot and rocky miles out of my legs and sallied forth to visit a shoemaker. As he lived only two streets away, it was my good fortune to find him in less than an hour, and as Toledo is the last city in the world in which a man would care to run about in his socks, I sat on a stool beside his workbench for something over three hours. His home and shop consisted of one cavernous room; his family, of a wife who sewed so incessantly that one might easily have fancied her run by machinery, and of a daughter of six who devised more amusement with a few scraps of leather than many another might with all the toys of Nürnberg. The shoemaker was of that old-fashioned tribe of careful workmen, taking pride in their labor, whom it is always a joy to meet--though not always to sit waiting for. He, too, hinted at the misery of life in Toledo, but unlike the specter of the night before, did not lay the blame for the sunken condition of his city on the "frailuchos," charging it rather to the well-known perverseness of fate, either because he was of an orthodox turn of mind or because his wife sat close at hand. When he had finished, having sewed soles and nailed heels on my shoes that were to endure until Spain was left behind, he collected a sum barely equal to forty cents.In striking contrast to him--indeed, the two well illustrated the two types of workmen the world harbors--was the barber who performed the next service. He was a mountain of sloth who rose with almost a growl at being disturbed and, his mind elsewhere, listlessly proceeded to the task before him. Though he was over forty and knew no other trade, he had not learned even this one, but haggled and clawed as that breed of man will who drifts through life without training himself to do anything. The reflective wanderer comes more and more to respect only the man, be he merely a street-sweeper, who does his life's work honestly; the "four-flusher" is ever a source of nausea and a lowerer of the tone of life, be he the president of a nation.While I suffered, a priest dropped in to have his tonsure renovated and gloriously outdid in the scrofulousness of his anecdotes not only this clumsy wielder of the helmet of Mambrino, but exposed poor timorous Boccaccio for a prude and a Quaker.Packed away down in a hollow of the congested city is that famous cathedral surnamed "la Rica." "The Rich"--it would be nearer justice to dub her the Midian, the Ostentatious, for she is so overburdened and top-heavy with wealth that one experiences at sight of her a feeling almost of disgust, as for a woman garish with jewelry. We of the United States must see, to conceive what shiploads of riches are heaped up within the churches of Spain by the superstitions of her people and the rapacity of her priests, who, discovering the impossibility of laying up their booty hereafter, agree with many groans to stack it here."The Spanish church," observes Gautier, "is scarcely any longer frequented except by tourists, mendicants, and horrible old women." If one choose the right hour of the afternoon even these vexations are chiefly absent, entirely, perhaps, but for a poor old crone or two kneeling before some mammoth doll tricked out to represent the Virgin and bowing down now and then in true Mohammedan fashion to kiss the stone flagging. The Iberian traveler must visit the cathedrals of the peninsula, not merely because they offer the only cool retreat on a summer day, but because they are the museums of Spain's art and history. But even the splendor of the setting sun through her marvelous stained-glass windows cannot overcome the oppressiveness of "la Rica."As he stands before the wondrous paintings that enrich the great religious edifices of Spain, the matter-of-fact American of to-day is not unlikely to be assailed by other thoughts than the pure esthetic. There comes, perhaps, the reflection of how false is that oft-repeated assertion that the world's truly great artists exercised their genius solely for pure art's sake. Would they then have prostituted their years on earth to tickling the vanity of their patrons, in depicting the wife of some rich candle-maker walking arm in arm with the Nazarene on the Mount of Olives, or the absurdity of picturing Saint Fulano, who was fed to Roman lions in A.D. 300, strolling through a Sevillian garden with the infant Jesus in his arms and a heavenly smirk on his countenance? How much greater treasures might we have to-day had they thrown off the double yoke of contemporaneous superstitions and servility to wealth and painted, for example, the real Mary as in their creative souls they saw her, the simple Jewish housewife amid her plain Syrian surroundings. Instead of which they have set on canvas and ask us to accept as their real conception voluptuous-faced "Virgins" who were certainly painted from models of a very different type, and into whose likeness in spite of the painter's skill has crept a hint that the poser's thoughts during the sitting were much less on her assumed motherhood of a deity than on the coming evening's amours.Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting. The Spaniard is, incongruously enough, as realist of the first water. He will see things materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great delight, not the pretended reality of the theater. Centuries of fighting the infidel, centuries of courting self-sacrifice in slaying heretics, the reaction against the sensuous gentleness of the Moor, have all combined to make his Christianity fervid, savage, sanguinary. Yielding to which characteristic of his fellow-countrymen, or tainted with it himself, many a Spanish artist seems to have gloried in depicting in all gruesome detail martyrs undergoing torture, limbs and breasts lopped off and lying bleeding close at hand, unshaven torturers wielding their dripping knives with fiendish merriment. These horrors, too, are set up in public places of worship, where little children come daily, and even men on occasion. It is strange, indeed, if childhood's proneness to imitation does not make the playground frequently the scene of similar martyrdoms. How much better to treat the tots to a daily visit to the morgue, where what they see would at least be true to nature--and far less repulsive.There are other "sights" in Toledo than the cathedral for him who is successful in running them down in her jungle of streets. Each such chase is certain sooner or later to bring him out into the Zocodover, that disheveled central plaza in which the sunbeams fall like a shower of arrows. The inferno into which he seems plunged unwarned chokes at once the rambler's grumble at the intricacies of the city and brings him instead to mumble praises of the Arabs, who had the good sense so to build that the sun with his best endeavors rarely gets a peep into the depth of the pavement; and the time is short indeed before he dives back into the relief of one of the radiating calles.As often as I crossed the "Zoco" my eyes were drawn to a ragged fellow of my own age, with a six-inch stump for one leg, lolling prone on the dirt-carpeted earth in a corner of the square, mumbling from time to time over his cigarette:"Una limosnita, señores; qué Dios se lo pagará."There was in his face evidence that he had been born with fully average gifts, perhaps special talents; and a sensation of sadness mingled with anger came upon me with the reflection that through all the years I had been living and learning and journeying to and fro upon the earth, this hapless fellow-mortal had been squatting in the dust of Toledo's Zocodover, droning the national lamentation:"A little alms, señores, and may God repay you."Just another was he of her thousands of sons that Spain has wantonly let go to waste, until even at this early age he had sunk to a lump of living human carrion that all the powers of earth or from Elsewhere could not remake into the semblance of a man.Try though one may, one cannot escape the conviction that the fat of Toledo goes to the priesthood, both physically and figuratively. High or low, the churchmen that overrun the place have all a sleek, contented air and on their cynical, sordid faces an all too plain proof of addiction to the flesh pots; while the layman has always a hungry look, not quite always of animal hunger for food, but at least for those things that stand next above. Nowhere can one escape the cloth. Every half-hour one is sure to run across at least a bishop tottering under a fortune's-worth of robes and attended by a bodyguard of acolytes, pausing now and again to shed his putative blessing on some devout passer-by. Of lesser dignitaries, of cowled monks and religious mendicants there is no lack, while with the common or garden variety of priest, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, his shovel hat set at a rakish angle, his black gown swinging with the jauntiness of a stage Mephistopheles, ogling the girls in street or promenade, the city swarms. Distressingly close is the resemblance of these latter to those creatures one may find loitering about the stage-door toward the termination of a musical comedy.I sat one afternoon on a bench of that broken promenade that partly surrounds Toledo high above the Tajo, watching the sun set across the western vega, when my thoughts were suddenly snatched back through fully a thousand years of time by the six-o'clock whistle of the Fabrica de Armas below. When my astonishment had died away, there came over me the recollection that not once before in all Spain had I heard that sound, a factory whistle. Agreeable as that absence of sibilant discord is to the wanderer's soul, I could not but wonder whether just there is not the outward mark of one of the chief reasons why the Spain of to-day straggles where she does in the procession of nations.I descended one afternoon from Lettuce street to the sand-clouded station on the plain and spent the ensuing night in Aranjuez, a modern checker-board city planted with exotic elms and royal palaces. It was again afternoon before I turned out into the broad highway that, crossing the Tajo, struck off with business-like directness across a vega fertile with wheat. Before long it swung sharply to the right and, laboring up the scarified face of a cliff, gained the great central tableland of Castilla Nueva, then stalked away across a weird and solemn landscape as drear and desolate as the hills of Judea.The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk furnished me bread and wine, but no lodging. I plodded on, trusting soon to find a more hospitable hamlet. But the desolation increased with the night; neither man nor habitation appeared. Toward eleven I gave up the search and, stepping off the edge of the highway, found a bit of space unencumbered with rocks and lay down until the dawn.The sun rose murky. In twenty kilometers the deserted carretera passed only two squalid wineshops. Then rounding in mid-morning a slight eminence, it presented suddenly to my eyes a smoky, indistinct, yet vast city stretching on a higher plane half across the desolate horizon. It was Madrid. I tramped hours longer, so uncertainly did the highway wander to and fro seeking an entrance, but came at last into a miserable outskirt village and tossed away the stick that had borne my knapsack since the day I had fashioned that convenience in the southern foothills of Andalusia. Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it almost as it fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was it in this unwooded region--waged pitched battle until each carried away a half triumphant. I pushed on across the massive Puente de Toledo high above the trickle of water that goes by the name of the river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus, halted at last in the mildly animated Puerta del Sol, the center of Spain and, to the Spaniard, of the universe.
CHAPTER VII
SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS
In the gloom of evening I espied on a dull, sterile hillside a vast rambling venta, as bare, slate-colored, and marked with time as the hills themselves. Here was exactly such a caravansary as that in which he of the Triste Figura had watched over his arms by night and won his Micomiconian knighthood. It consisted of an immense enclosure that was half farmyard, backed by a great stable of which a strip around two sides beneath the low vaulted roof had been marked off for the use of man; the whole dull, gloomy, cheerless, unrelieved by a touch of color. Within the building were scattered a score of mules, borricos and machos. Several tough-clothed muleteers, with what had been bright handkerchiefs wound about their brows, sauntered in the courtyard or sat eating with their great razor-edged navajas their lean suppers of brown bread and a knuckle of ham. Even the massive wooden pump in the yard among an array of ponderous carts and wagons was there to complete the picture. Indeed, this was none other than the Venta de Cardenas, reputed the very same in which Don Greaves passed his vigilant night, where Sancho was tossed in a blanket and Master Nicholas, the barber, bearded himself with a cow's tail.
The chance betrayal of my nationality aroused in the arrieros a suggestion of wonder and even an occasional question. But in general their interest was as meager as their knowledge of the world outside the national boundaries. Not once did they display the eagerness to learn that is so characteristic of the Italian. For the Spaniard considers it beneath his dignity as a caballero and a cristino viejo to show any marked curiosity, especially concerning a foreign land, which cannot but be vastly inferior to his own. Four centuries of national misfortune and shrinkage have by no means eradicated his firm conviction, implanted in his mind by Ferdinand and Isabel in the days of conquest, that he is the salt of the earth, superior in all things to the rest of the human race.
Spain is one of the most illiterate countries of the civilized world, yet also one of the best educated, unless education be merely that mass of undigested and commonly misapplied information absorbed within four walls. Few men have a more exact knowledge, a more solid footing on the everyday earth than the peasant, the laborer, the muleteer of Spain. One does not marvel merely at the fluent, powerful, entirely grammatical language of these unlettered fellows, but at the sound basic wisdom that stands forth in their every sentence. If their illiteracy denies them the advantage of absorbing the festering rot of the yellow journal, in compensation they have a wealth of vocabulary and a forceful simplicity of diction that raises them many degrees above the corresponding class in more "advanced" lands.
It is of the "lower" classes that I am speaking, the common sense and backbone of Spain. The so-called upper class is one of the most truly ignorant and uneducated on earth--though among its members, be it noted, is no illiteracy. The maltreated Miguel was adamantinely right in choosing his hero from the higher orders; no Spaniard of the masses could be so far led astray from reason as to become a Quixote.
It is noticeable that the Spaniard of the laboring class has almost none of that subservience born in the blood in the rest of Europe. Not only does each man consider himself the equal of any other; he takes and expects the world to take for granted that this is the case, and never feels called upon to demonstrate that equality to himself and the rest of the world by insolence and rowdyism. Dissipation he knows not, except the dissipation of fresh air, sunshine, and a guitar. Nowhere in Christian lands is drunkenness more rare. Like the Arab the hardy lower-class Spaniard thrives robustly on a mean and scanty diet; he can sleep anywhere, at any time, and to the creature comforts is supremely indifferent. One can hardly believe this the country in which Alfonso X felt it necessary to enact stern laws against the serving of more than two dishes of meat at a meal or the wearing of "slashed" silks. Yet the Spain of to-day is not really a cheap country; it is merely that within its borders frugality is universal and held in honor rather than contempt.
When the evening grew advanced, my fellow guests lay down on the bare cobble-stones of the venta, making pillows of the furniture of their mules, and were soon sleeping peacefully and sonorously. For me, soft-skinned product of a more ladylike world, was spread a muleteer's thick blanket in the embrasure of a wooden-blinded window, and amid the munching of asses and the not unpleasant smell of a Spanish stable I, too, drifted into slumber.
From dawn until early afternoon I marched on across the rocky vastness of Spain, where fields have no boundary nor limit, a gnarled and osseous country and a true despoblado, as fruitless as that sterile neck of sand that binds Gibraltar to the continent. It is in these haggard, unpeopled plateaus of the interior that one begins to believe that the population of the peninsula is to-day barely one-third what it was in the prosperous years of Abd er-Rahman.
At length, across a valley that was like a lake of heat waves, appeared Santa Cruz, a hard, colorless town where I was forced to be content with the usual bread, cheese and wine, the former as ossified as the surrounding countryside. In the further outskirts of the place I found a potter at work in a large open hovel and halted to pass the most heated hour with him. In one end of the building was a great trough of clay in which a bare-foot boy was slowly treading up and down. Now and again he caught up a lump of the dough and deposited it on a board before the potter. This the latter took by the handful and, placing it on his wheel, whirled it quickly into a vessel of a shape not unlike a soup-bowl. I inquired what these sold for and with a sigh he replied:
"Three small dogs apiece, cocidos (cooked)"--pointing at the kiln--"y cuantos--how many break in the glazing! It is no joyful trade, señor."
Once he left his work to munch a crust and to offer me a cigarette and a drink from his leather bota, but soon drifted back to his task with the restless, harassed look of the piece-worker the world over. As I sat watching his agile fingers a bit drowsily, there came suddenly back to memory the almost forgotten days when I, too, had toiled thus in the gloomy, sweltering depths of a factory. Truer slavery there never was than that of the piece-worker under our modern division of labor. Stroll through a factory to find a man seated at a machine stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist, and his task seems easy, almost a pastime in its simplicity. But go away for a year, travel through half the countries of the globe, go on a honeymoon to Venice and the Grecian isles, and then come back to find him sitting on the self-same stool, in the self-same attitude, stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist.
Three blazing hours passed by, and I found myself entering a rolling land of vineyards, heralding wine-famous Valdepeñas. The vines were low shrubs not trained on sticks, the grapes touching the ground. A dip in an exotic stream reduced the grime and sweat of travel, and just beyond I came again upon the railway. A half-hour along it brought me face to face with the first foreign tramp I had met in Spain,--a light-haired, muscular youth in tattered, sun-brown garb, his hob-nailed shoes swung over one shoulder and around his feet thick bandages of burlap. He was a German certainly, perhaps a modern Benedict Moll whose story would have been equally interesting in its absurdity. But he passed me with the stare of a man absorbed in his personal affairs and accustomed to keep his own counsel, and stalked away southward along the scintillant railroad.
I halted for a drink at the stuccoed dwelling of a track-walker. In the grassless yard, under the only imitation of a tree in the neighborhood, slept a roadster. Now and again the chickens that scratched in vain the dry, lifeless earth about him, marched disconsolately across his prostrate form.
"Poor fellow," said the track-walker's wife at the well, "he has known misery, more even than the rest of us. Vaya como duerme!"
I sat down in the streak of shade that was crawling eastward across him. He wore a ten-day beard and the garb of a Spanish workman of the city, set off by a broad red faja around his waist. In one bulging pocket of his coat appeared to be all his earthly possessions.
There was no evidence of overwhelming "miseria" in the cheery greeting with which he awoke, and as our ways coincided we continued in company. He was a Sevillian named Jesús, bound northward in general and wherever else the gods might lead him.
"For a long time there has been no work in Seville for nosotros, the carpenters," he explained, though with no indication of grief. "This half year I have been selling apricots and azucarillos in the bullring and on the Alameda. But each day more of Seville comes to sell and less to buy. I should have gone away long ago, but my comrade Gáspare would not leave his amiga. Gásparo is a stone-polisher and had work.
"Then one day I am taken by the police for I know not what. When after two weeks I come out, Gásparo is gone. But he has come north and somewhere I shall run across him."
Jesús had just passed through a marvelous experience, which he proceeded to relate in all his Latin wealth of language--though not in the phraseology, of a graduate roadster:
"Mira V., hombre! Two nights ago, when my feet are worn away with more than ten leguas of walking on the railroad, I come to Baeza. It is dark, and I wander along the track to find a soft bank to sleep. On the short railroad that is at each station there is waiting a train of merchandise. Suddenly a great idea comes to me. 'Sh! Jesús,' I whisper, 'what if you should hide yourself away somewhere on this train of merchandise? It would perhaps bring you to the next station.'
"With great quiet I climb a wagon and hide myself between bales of cork. Screech! Brrr! Rboom! The train is off, and all night I am riding--without a ticket. But at Vilches the man that goes with the train with a lantern comes by and it is my curse to be making some noise, moving to roll a cigarette. 'Ya te 'pia!' (I spy you!) he cries. Vaca que soy! So of course I must get down. But mira, hombre! There I have traveled more than twelve miles without paying a perrito!"
I had not the heart to disillusion him with a yarn or two from the land of the "hobo."
In the telling we had come within sight of Valdepeñas. It was a "valley of rocks" indeed, though a city of good size and considerable evidence of industry, abounding with greatbodegas, or wine warehouses. As we trudged through the long straight street that had swallowed up the highway, we passed thetallerof a marble-cutter.
"It is in a place like this that Gásparo works," sighed Jesús, wandering languidly in at the open door. I was strolling slowly on when a whoop as of a man suddenly beset by a band of savages brought me running back into the establishment. Jesús was shaking wildly by both hands a stockily-built young fellow in shirt sleeves and white canvas apron, who was rivaling him in volubility of greeting. Gásparo was found.
Still shouting incoherently, the two left the shop and squatted in the shade along the outside wall.
"Hombre!" panted Jesús, when his excitement had somewhat died down. "I have told myself that by to-morrow we should be tramping the carretera together."
But Gásparo shook his head, sadly yet decisively.
"No, amigo. Jamás! Nunca! Never do I take to the road again. I have here a good job, the finest of patrons. No. I shall stay, and send for the amiga--or find another here."
With the dignity of a caballero, Jesús accepted the decree without protest, and wished his erstwhile comrade luck and prosperity. Then that they might part in full knowledge, he launched forth in the story of his journey from Seville. Gásparo listened absently, shaking his head sadly from time to time. When the episode of the amateur hoboing began, he sat up with renewed interest; before it was ended he was staring at the speaker with clenched fists, his eyes bulging, the cigarette between his lips stone-dead. From that great epic Jesús jumped without intermission to a hasty survey of the anticipated joys that lay between him and Madrid. Suddenly Gásparo sprang into the air with an explosive howl, landing on his feet.
"By the blood of your namesake!" he shouted. "How can a man stay always in one place? This daily drudgery will kill me! I will throw the job in the patron's face, and get my wages this very minute, amaguito, and we will go to Madrid together. Jesús Maria! Who knows but we can hide ourselves on another freight train!"--and crying over his shoulder some rendezvous, he disappeared within the establishment.
We sauntered on to the central plaza. It was utterly treeless and paved with cobble-stones; nor could we find a patch of grass or a shaded bench in all the neighborhood.
"Look here, señor!" cried Jesús, suddenly rushing toward a policeman who was loitering in the shade of a bodega. "Don't you have any parks or Alamedas in this val de penas of yours? You call this a city!"
"Señor," replied the officer in the most apologetic of voices, "we are not a rich city, and the rain so seldom falls in La Mancha. I am very sorry," and touching a finger respectfully to his cap, he strolled slowly on.
Though the sun was low it was still wiltingly hot in the stony streets. Jesús, as I knew, was penniless. I suggested therefore that I would willingly pay the score of two for the privilege of retreating to the coolness of a wineshop.
"Bueno!" cried the Sevillian. "The wine of Valdepeñas is without equal, and of the cheapest--if you know where to buy. Vámonos, hombre!"
He led the way down the street and by some Castilian instinct into a tiny underground shop that was ostensibly given over to the sale of charcoal. The smudged old keeper motioned us to the short rickety bench on which he had been dreaming away the afternoon and, descending still lower by a dark hole in the floor, soon set before us a brown glazed pitcher holding aquarto--about a quart--of wine, for which I paid him approximately three and a half cents.
In all western Europe I have drunk the common table wine in whatever quantity it has pleased me, and suffered from it always the same effect as from so much clear water. It may be that the long tramp under a scorching sun and the distance from my last meal-place altered conditions. Certainly there was no need of the seller's assurance that this was genuine "valdepeñas" and that what had been sold us elsewhere as such was atrociously adulterated. Before the pitcher was half empty, I noted with wonder that I was taking an extraordinary interest in the old man's phillipic against the government and its exorbitant tax on wine. Jesús, too, grew in animation, and when the subterranean Demosthenes ended with a thundering, "Sí, señores! If it wasn't for the cursed government you and I could drink just such wine as this pure valdepenas anywhere as if it was water!" I was startled to hear us both applaud loud and long. A scant four-cents' worth had seemed so parsimonious a treat for two full-thirsted men that I had intended to order in due time a second pitcherful. But this strange mirth seemed worthy of investigation. I sipped the last of my portion and made no movement to suggest a replenishing. A few minutes later the old man had bade us go with the Almighty, and we were strolling away arm in arm.
The sun was setting when we reached the plaza. We sat down on the cathedral steps. The Sevillian had suddenly an unaccountable desire to sing. He struck up one of the Moorish-descended ballads of his native city. To my increasing astonishment I found myself joining in. Not only that, but for the first and last time of my existence I caught the real Andalusian rhythm. An appreciative audience of urchins gathered. Then the sacristan stepped out and politely invited us to choose some other stage.
Across the square was a casa de comidas. We entered and ordered dinner. The señora served us about one-third of what the bill-of-fare promised, and demanded full price--something that had never before happened in all my Spanish experience. I protested vociferously--another wholly unprecedented proceeding. The policeman who had apologized for the absence of parks sauntered in, and I laid the case before him. The señora restated it still more noisily. I declared I would not pay more than one peseta. The lady took oath that I would pay two. The policeman requested me to comply with her demand. I refused to the extent of commanding him to take his hand off the hilt of his sword. He apologized and suggested that we split the difference. This seemed reasonable. I paid it, and we left. Dark night had settled down. We marched aimlessly away into it. Somewhere Gásparo fell in with us. Somewhere else, on the edge of the city, we came upon a heap of bright clean straw on a threshing floor, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER VIII
ON THE ROAD IN LA MANCHA
It was Sunday morning, the market day of Valdepeñas, when I returned alone to stock my knapsack. The plaza that had been so deserted and peaceful the evening before was packed from casa de comidas to cathedral steps with canvas booths in which the peasants of the encircling country were selling all the products of La Mancha, and among which circulated all the housewives of Valdepeñas, basket on arm. The women of the smaller cities of Spain cling stoutly to their local costumes, aping not in the least the world of fashion. These of Valdepeñas were strikingly different from the Andalusians, considering how slight the distance that separates them from that province. They were almost German in their slowness, with hardly a suggestion of "sal"; a solemn, bronze-tanned multitude who, parting their hair in the middle and combing it tight and smooth, much resembled Indian squaws.
From the northern edge of the city the highway ran straight as the flight of a crow to where it was lost in a flat, colorless horizon. The land was artificially irrigated. The first place I stopped for water was a field in which an old man was driving round and round a blind-folded burro hitched to a noria, a water-wheel that was an exact replica of the Egyptiansakka, even to its squawk, jars of Andújar being tied to the endless chain with leather thongs. The man, too, had that dreamy, listless air of the Egyptianfellah; had I had a kodak to turn upon him I should have expected him to run after me crying for "backsheesh."
Ahead stretched long vistas of low vineyards. The only buildings along the way were an occasional bare uniform stone dwelling of apeon caminero, or government road-tender. At one of these I halted to quench my thirst, and the occupant, smoking in Sabbath ease before it, instantly pronounced me a "norte americano." I showed my astonishment, for hardly once before in the peninsula had I been taken for other than a Frenchman, or a Spaniard from some distant province.
The peon's unusual perspicacity was soon explained; he had been a soldier in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. I readily led him into reminiscences. Throughout the war, he stated, he had fought like a hero, not because he was of that rare breed but because every member of the troop had been filled with the belief that once captured by "los yanquis" he would be hanged on the spot.
"And are you still of the opinion?" I asked.
"Qué barbaridad!" he laughed. "I was taken at Santiago and carried a prisoner to your country. What a people! A whole meal at breakfast! We lived as never before, or since.
"You were quite right, vosotros, to take the island. I do not blame you. It was competición, just competition, like two shop-keepers in the city. I am glad the miserable government lost their Cuba."
So often did I hear exactly this view from Spaniards of the laboring class that it may be considered typical of their attitude toward the late disagreement. The strange question has often been asked whether it is safe so soon after the war for a North American to travel alone in the interior of Spain. For answer we have only to ask ourselves whether a Spaniard traveling alone in the interior of the United States would be in any imminent danger of having his throat cut--even had we been defeated. In Spain there is vastly less, for not only is the Spaniard quicker to forgive and far less belligerent than he is commonly fancied, but there exists in the peninsula not one-tenth the rowdyism and hoodlum "patriotism" of our own country.
I stayed long and left with difficulty. Gregarious is man, and on Sunday, when all the world about him is at rest, even the pedestrian finds it hard to exert himself. A league beyond I came upon the Sevillians lolling in the shadow of another isolated peon dwelling in what seemed once to have been a village.
Jesús in his eleven-day beard hailed me from afar; moreover, the Sunday languor was still upon me. I stretched out with them in the shade of the building, but the flies prevented us from sleeping. We crawled into a peasant's cart under the shed--but the flies quickly found us out. We crossed the road to the ruin of a church, split almost exactly through the middle of tower and all, and one side fallen. Within it was a grassy corner where the sun never fell, and even a bit of breeze fanned us. But the flies had made this their Spanish headquarters. We decided to go on.
In that only were we unanimous, for the Sevillians wished to follow the railroad, a furlong away, and I the carretera. I had all but won them over when a freight train labored by.
"Ay! Ay! Los toros!" shouted the two in chorus.
"Where?" I asked, seeing no such animals in sight.
"En las jaulas, hombre! In the cages!" cried Jesús, pointing to a flat-car on which, set close together, were six tightly-closed boxes each just large enough to hold a bull.
"We go by the railroad!" shouted Gásparo, decisively. "Alma de Dios! Who knows but we may be able to hide ourselves on a train that is carrying toros to the córrida!"
We separated, therefore, and struck northward, though we marched side by side within hailing distance until we were all three swallowed up in the city of Manzanares.
The bare-faced, truly Manchegan town was half-deserted, though the reason therefor was not hard to guess, for the bullring in the outskirts was howling as I passed. For all its size the place did not seem to boast an eating-house of any description. At last I halted before an old man seated in a shaded corner of the plaza, to inquire:
"Señor, what does a stranger in your town do when he would eat?"
"Vaya, señor!" he replied, with the placid deliberation of age, and pointing with his cane to the shops that bordered the square. "He buys a perrito of bread in the bakery there, dos perros of ham in the butchery beyond, fruit of the market-woman--"
"And eats it where?" I interrupted.
"Hi jo de mi alma!" responded the patriarch with extreme slowness and almost a touch of sarcasm in his voice. "Here is the broad plaza, all but empty. In all that is there not room to sit down and eat?"
I continued my quest and entered two posadas. But for the only time during the summer the proprietors demanded mycédula personal. I explained that Americans are not supplied with these government licenses to live, and showed instead my passport. Both landlords protested that it was not in Spanish and refused to admit me. One might have fancied one's self in Germany. It was some time after dark that I was directed to a private boarding-house that almost rewarded my long search. For the supper set before me was equal to a five-course repast in the Casa Robledo of Granada, and for the first time since leaving Seville I slept in a bed, and not in my clothes.
In the morning an absolutely straight road lay before me across a land treeless but for a few stunted shrubs, a face of desolation and aridity and solitude as of Asia Minor. From the eastward swept a hot, dry wind across the baked plains of La Mancha that recalled all too forcibly the derivation of its name from the Arabicmanxa--a moistureless land.
At fifteen kilometers the highway swerved slightly and lost from view for the first time the immense cathedral of Manzanares behind. On either hand, miles visible in every direction, huddled stone towns on bare hillsides and in rocky vales, each inconspicuous but for its vast overtowering church. "Si la demeure des hommes est pauvre, celle de Dieu est riche," charges colorful Gautier; which, if the church of Spain is truly the "demeure de Dieu," is sternly true. City, town, village, hamlet, a church always bulks vast above it like a hen among her chicks--rather like some violent overpowering tyrant with a club. To the right of the turn one might, but for a slight rise of ground, have espied a bare twelve kilometers away immortal Argamasilla itself.
During the day there developed a hole in my shoe, through a sole of those very "custom-made" oxfords warranted by all the eloquent Broadway salesman held sacred--whatever that may have been--to endure at least six months of the hardest possible wear. Sand and pebbles drifted in, as sand and pebbles will the world over under such circumstances, and for some days to come walking was not of the smoothest.
Almost exactly at noonday I caught sight of the first windmills of La Mancha, three of them slowly toiling together on a curving hillside, too distinctly visible at this hour to be mistaken by the most romance-mad for giants. The few peasants I fell in with now and then were a more placid, somber people than the Andaluz and, as is commonly the case in villages reached by no railway, more courteous to the roadster than their fellows more directly in touch with the wide world.
It was that hour when the sun halts lingering above the edge of the earth, as if loath to leave it, that I entered the noiseless little hamlet of Puerto Lápiche. It contained no public hostelry, but the woman who kept its single shop cooked me a supper, chiefly of fried eggs, which I ate sitting on a stool before the building. The fried eggs of Spain! Wherein their preparation differs from that in other lands I know not, but he who has never eaten them after a long day's tramp cannot guess to what Epicurean heights fried eggs may rise. How, knowing of them, could Sancho have named cow-heel for his choice?
The evening was of that soft and gentle texture that invites openly to a night out-of-doors. On the edge of the open country beyond, too, was a threshing-floor heaped with new straw that would certainly have been my choice, had not the village guardia been watching my every movement from across the way. When I had returned the porcelain frying-pan to its owner, I strolled boldly across to the officer and inquired for a lodging.
"With regret, señor," he replied, raising his hat and offering me the stool on which he had been seated, "I am forced to say that we are a small village so rarely honored by the presence of travelers that we have no public house. But--" he hesitated a moment, then went on "--the weather is fine, señor; the night is warm, the pure air hurts no one; why do you not make your bed on the soft, clean straw of the threshing-floor yonder?"
"Caballero," I responded, with my most Spanish salute, "a thousand thanks--and may your grace remain with God."
For the first time during my journey the heat was tempered next morning, though by no means routed, by a slightly overcast sky. The wind continued. The highway led on through a seared brown country, for the most part a silent, smokeless, unpeopled land. The windmills of La Mancha were numerous now on either hand as the road sank slowly down to a gap in the low, gaunt mountains of Ciudad Real. At last it reached them and, picking its way through the narrow pass of Lápiche, strode off again across a still hotter, drier region, unmitigated even by the wind, which had stopped short at the mountain barrier--a land flowing not even with ditch-water. I halted but briefly at the large village of Madridejos, peopled by a slow, dreamy-eyed, yet toil-calloused peasantry, as if their world of fancy and the hard stony life of reality never quite joined hands.
Hot, thirsty and hungry, I came in mid-afternoon to an isolated ramshackle venta in a rocky wilderness. An enormous shaggy man of a zoölogical cast of countenance, and a male-limbed girl were harnessing mules in the yard. No other living thing showed itself. I offered a peseta for food. The man glared at me for a time in silence, then growled that he sold nothing, but that I should find a posada not far beyond. He was evidently the champion prevaricator of that region, for not the suggestion of a hovel appeared during the rest of the afternoon. But he would be a fellow with Sancho indeed, who could not overrule a few hour's appetite in thinking of higher things, and no fit traveler in this hard, toilsome land where overeating is not numbered among the vices.
The setting of the sun was perhaps an hour off when the highway, swinging a bit to the left and surmounting a barren, rocky ridge, laid suddenly before me an enthralling prospect. Below, far down on a distinctly lower level, a flat, ruffled country still misty with rising waves of heat, stretched away to the uttermost endless distance. The whole, glinting in the oblique rays of the setting sun, was scored in every direction with dull rock villages huddled compactly together, while on every hand, like signal fires on a western prairie, rose from a hundred threshing-floors columns of chaff straight and slender into the motionless air to an incredible height before breaking up. The road descended with decision, yet in no unseemly haste and, marching for an hour across a country traveled only by an occasional donkey loaded with chopped straw, led me at nightfall into the scene of Sancho's labors in the wheat-piles--the village of Tembleque.
In its immense fonda, but for the underground stables one single, vast, cobble-paved room, a vacant-eyed old man, a girl, and a leviathan of a woman sat among the carts, wine-casks, and heaps of harnesses, the latter knitting. In strictest Castilian the establishment was no fonda, but aparador, fromparar, to stop; and certainly it could not with honesty have laid claim to any more inviting name, for assuredly no man in his senses would have dreamed of choosing it as astaying-place. When I asked if lodging was to be had, the woman replied with a caustic sneer that she had always been able thus far to accommodate any who were able and willing to pay.
"And can one also get supper?" I inquired timorously.
"How on earth do I know?" snapped the woman.
I stared with a puzzled air at the old man and he in like manner at the knitter, who turned out to be his wife, espoused in budding maidenhood when his march in life had well begun.
"How can I cook him supper if he has none with him?" snarled the no longer maidenly.
"Er--what have you brought to eat?" asked the preadamite in a quavering voice.
"Nothing to be sure. What is a fonda for?"
"Ah, then how can la señora mía get you supper? Over the way is the butcher, beyond, the green-grocer, further still the panadero--"
I returned some time later with meat, bread, potatoes, garbanzos, and a variety of vegetables, supplied with which the señora duly prepared me a supper--by sitting tight in her chair and issuing a volley of commands to the girl and the old man. For this service she demanded two "fat dogs," and collected at the same time an equal amount for my lodging.
When I had eaten, the mistress of the house mumbled a word to the dotard. He lighted with trembling hand a sort of miner's lamp and led the way downward into the subterranean stable and for what seemed little short of a half-mile through great stone vaults musty with time, close by the cruppers of an army of mules and burros. Opening at last a door some three feet square and as many above the floor, he motioned to me to climb through it into a bin filled with chaff. This was to all appearances clean, yet I hesitated. For in these endless vaults, to which the outer air seemed not to have penetrated for a century, it was cold as a November evening. I glanced at the old man in protest. He blinked back at me, shook his ever-quaking head a bit more forcibly, and turning, shuffled away through the resounding cavern, the torch casting at first weird, dancing shadows behind his wavering legs, then gradually dying out entirely. I stood in blackest darkness, undecided. Before, however, the last faint sound of his going had wholly passed away, the scrape of the veteran's faltering feet grew louder again and in another moment he reappeared, clutching under one thin arm a heavy blanket. When I had taken it, he put a finger to his lips, cast his sunken eyes about him, whispered "sh!" with a labored wink, and tottered once more away. I climbed into the bin and slept soundly until the cursing of arrieros harnessing their mules aroused me shortly before dawn.
CHAPTER IX
THE TRAIL OF THE PRIEST
The people of Tembleque had been just certain enough that none but an arriero could follow the intricate route thither, and that no man could cover the distance on foot in one day, to cause me to awaken determined to leave the Madrid highway and strike cross-country to Toledo. The first stage of the journey was the road to the village of Mora, which I was long in finding because at its entrance to--which chanced also to be its exit from--Tembleque it split up like an unraveled shoe-string. I got beyond the loose ends at last, however, and set a sharp pace--even though the hole in my shoe had enlarged to the size of a peseta--across a scarred and weather-beaten landscape that seemed constantly reminding how aged is the world.
Twenty-four kilometers brought me to Mora, a sturdy town of countrymen, in time for an early and stinted dinner and inquiries which led me off in a new direction up a steadily mounting region to Mascargne. There, at a still different point of the compass, a ruined castle on a hilltop ten kilometers away was pointed out to me as the landmark of El Monacail; to which village a rugged and sterile road clambered over a country hunch-backed with hills. It was siesta-time when I arrived, the sun scorching hot, a burning wind sweeping among the patched and misshapen hovels that made up the place. There were no inhabitants abroad, which argued their good sense; but in the shadow of the only public building a trio of soldiers were playing at cards. They leered at me for some time when I made inquiry, then burst out in derisive laughter.
"Claro, hombre!" answered one of them sarcastically. "You can walk to Toledo la Santa if you know enough to follow a cow-path."
I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed, though too little used to be clearly marked, and meandering in and out with it for twenty kilometers through rockybarrancasand across sandy patches, gained as the day was nearing its close the wind-bitten village of Nambroca. A few miles more through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory that brought me to a sudden halt before one of the most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.
A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there began a few miles beyond, the vast, wrinkled, verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away and upward like an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue with distance and heat rays, all details blended together into an indistinctness that left only an undivided impression like a Whistlerian painting. I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge gasped aloud with new wonder. From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia. My goal was won; before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.
I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging the Tajo, almost beneath the enormous iron cross set in a rock to mark Toledo as the religious center of Spain, and remained watching the city across the gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its walls could in no degree equal the view from this facing hilltop. Richly indeed did this one sight of her reward the long day's tramp across the choking hills, even had there not been a pleasure in the walk itself; and upon me fell a great pity for those that come to her by railroad in the glare of day and the swelter of humanity.
As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the descending night, a voice sounded behind me and a ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered the accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down at my side. He was a "child of Toledo," and of his native city we fell to talking. At length he raised his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling lights across the Tajo, cried out:
"O Toledo, my city! Gaunt, sunken-bellied Toledo, bound to your rock and devoured by the vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your children are starving!
"Señor," he continued, suddenly returning to a conversational tone, "let me show you but one of a thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."
He rose and led the way a little further along the path I had been following, halting at the edge of a yawning hole in the rocks, like a bottomless well, the existence of which I was thankful to have learned before I continued my way.
"Señor," he said, "no man can tell how many have died here, for it lies, as you see, in the very center of the trail over these hills. For a hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has stood so. But do you think yon cursed priests would spend a perrito of their blood-sweated booty to cover it?"
It was black night when I picked my way down into the valley of the Tajo and, crossing the Alkántara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into Toledo. Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost, though the Castilian tongue sounded on every side. With each step forward came some new sign to recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo was an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city. Thus it is still her Eastern fashion to conceal her wealth by building her houses inwardly, leaving for public thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard passageways between them, and giving to the arriving stranger the sensation of wandering through a haughty crowd of which each coldly turns his back.
Her medley of streets was such as one might find in removing the top of an ant-hill, an ant-hill in which modern improvements have made little progress; her pavements of round, century-polished cobble-stones, glinting in the weak light of an occasional street-lamp, were painful indeed to blistered feet. Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the Alhambra, hen houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too, in that they are rich with decoration and comfort within. It was an hour or more before I was directed to a casa de huéspedes in the calle de la Lechuga, or Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of buildings. The house itself was such as only a man of courage would have entered by night in any other city. I ventured in, however, and found the family out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that formed the roof by day being drawn back. Even the well was in the patio, on which opened, like the others, the room to which I was assigned, presenting toward the street a blank, windowless wall.
It was late the next forenoon before I had slept the forty hot and rocky miles out of my legs and sallied forth to visit a shoemaker. As he lived only two streets away, it was my good fortune to find him in less than an hour, and as Toledo is the last city in the world in which a man would care to run about in his socks, I sat on a stool beside his workbench for something over three hours. His home and shop consisted of one cavernous room; his family, of a wife who sewed so incessantly that one might easily have fancied her run by machinery, and of a daughter of six who devised more amusement with a few scraps of leather than many another might with all the toys of Nürnberg. The shoemaker was of that old-fashioned tribe of careful workmen, taking pride in their labor, whom it is always a joy to meet--though not always to sit waiting for. He, too, hinted at the misery of life in Toledo, but unlike the specter of the night before, did not lay the blame for the sunken condition of his city on the "frailuchos," charging it rather to the well-known perverseness of fate, either because he was of an orthodox turn of mind or because his wife sat close at hand. When he had finished, having sewed soles and nailed heels on my shoes that were to endure until Spain was left behind, he collected a sum barely equal to forty cents.
In striking contrast to him--indeed, the two well illustrated the two types of workmen the world harbors--was the barber who performed the next service. He was a mountain of sloth who rose with almost a growl at being disturbed and, his mind elsewhere, listlessly proceeded to the task before him. Though he was over forty and knew no other trade, he had not learned even this one, but haggled and clawed as that breed of man will who drifts through life without training himself to do anything. The reflective wanderer comes more and more to respect only the man, be he merely a street-sweeper, who does his life's work honestly; the "four-flusher" is ever a source of nausea and a lowerer of the tone of life, be he the president of a nation.
While I suffered, a priest dropped in to have his tonsure renovated and gloriously outdid in the scrofulousness of his anecdotes not only this clumsy wielder of the helmet of Mambrino, but exposed poor timorous Boccaccio for a prude and a Quaker.
Packed away down in a hollow of the congested city is that famous cathedral surnamed "la Rica." "The Rich"--it would be nearer justice to dub her the Midian, the Ostentatious, for she is so overburdened and top-heavy with wealth that one experiences at sight of her a feeling almost of disgust, as for a woman garish with jewelry. We of the United States must see, to conceive what shiploads of riches are heaped up within the churches of Spain by the superstitions of her people and the rapacity of her priests, who, discovering the impossibility of laying up their booty hereafter, agree with many groans to stack it here.
"The Spanish church," observes Gautier, "is scarcely any longer frequented except by tourists, mendicants, and horrible old women." If one choose the right hour of the afternoon even these vexations are chiefly absent, entirely, perhaps, but for a poor old crone or two kneeling before some mammoth doll tricked out to represent the Virgin and bowing down now and then in true Mohammedan fashion to kiss the stone flagging. The Iberian traveler must visit the cathedrals of the peninsula, not merely because they offer the only cool retreat on a summer day, but because they are the museums of Spain's art and history. But even the splendor of the setting sun through her marvelous stained-glass windows cannot overcome the oppressiveness of "la Rica."
As he stands before the wondrous paintings that enrich the great religious edifices of Spain, the matter-of-fact American of to-day is not unlikely to be assailed by other thoughts than the pure esthetic. There comes, perhaps, the reflection of how false is that oft-repeated assertion that the world's truly great artists exercised their genius solely for pure art's sake. Would they then have prostituted their years on earth to tickling the vanity of their patrons, in depicting the wife of some rich candle-maker walking arm in arm with the Nazarene on the Mount of Olives, or the absurdity of picturing Saint Fulano, who was fed to Roman lions in A.D. 300, strolling through a Sevillian garden with the infant Jesus in his arms and a heavenly smirk on his countenance? How much greater treasures might we have to-day had they thrown off the double yoke of contemporaneous superstitions and servility to wealth and painted, for example, the real Mary as in their creative souls they saw her, the simple Jewish housewife amid her plain Syrian surroundings. Instead of which they have set on canvas and ask us to accept as their real conception voluptuous-faced "Virgins" who were certainly painted from models of a very different type, and into whose likeness in spite of the painter's skill has crept a hint that the poser's thoughts during the sitting were much less on her assumed motherhood of a deity than on the coming evening's amours.
Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting. The Spaniard is, incongruously enough, as realist of the first water. He will see things materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great delight, not the pretended reality of the theater. Centuries of fighting the infidel, centuries of courting self-sacrifice in slaying heretics, the reaction against the sensuous gentleness of the Moor, have all combined to make his Christianity fervid, savage, sanguinary. Yielding to which characteristic of his fellow-countrymen, or tainted with it himself, many a Spanish artist seems to have gloried in depicting in all gruesome detail martyrs undergoing torture, limbs and breasts lopped off and lying bleeding close at hand, unshaven torturers wielding their dripping knives with fiendish merriment. These horrors, too, are set up in public places of worship, where little children come daily, and even men on occasion. It is strange, indeed, if childhood's proneness to imitation does not make the playground frequently the scene of similar martyrdoms. How much better to treat the tots to a daily visit to the morgue, where what they see would at least be true to nature--and far less repulsive.
There are other "sights" in Toledo than the cathedral for him who is successful in running them down in her jungle of streets. Each such chase is certain sooner or later to bring him out into the Zocodover, that disheveled central plaza in which the sunbeams fall like a shower of arrows. The inferno into which he seems plunged unwarned chokes at once the rambler's grumble at the intricacies of the city and brings him instead to mumble praises of the Arabs, who had the good sense so to build that the sun with his best endeavors rarely gets a peep into the depth of the pavement; and the time is short indeed before he dives back into the relief of one of the radiating calles.
As often as I crossed the "Zoco" my eyes were drawn to a ragged fellow of my own age, with a six-inch stump for one leg, lolling prone on the dirt-carpeted earth in a corner of the square, mumbling from time to time over his cigarette:
"Una limosnita, señores; qué Dios se lo pagará."
There was in his face evidence that he had been born with fully average gifts, perhaps special talents; and a sensation of sadness mingled with anger came upon me with the reflection that through all the years I had been living and learning and journeying to and fro upon the earth, this hapless fellow-mortal had been squatting in the dust of Toledo's Zocodover, droning the national lamentation:
"A little alms, señores, and may God repay you."
Just another was he of her thousands of sons that Spain has wantonly let go to waste, until even at this early age he had sunk to a lump of living human carrion that all the powers of earth or from Elsewhere could not remake into the semblance of a man.
Try though one may, one cannot escape the conviction that the fat of Toledo goes to the priesthood, both physically and figuratively. High or low, the churchmen that overrun the place have all a sleek, contented air and on their cynical, sordid faces an all too plain proof of addiction to the flesh pots; while the layman has always a hungry look, not quite always of animal hunger for food, but at least for those things that stand next above. Nowhere can one escape the cloth. Every half-hour one is sure to run across at least a bishop tottering under a fortune's-worth of robes and attended by a bodyguard of acolytes, pausing now and again to shed his putative blessing on some devout passer-by. Of lesser dignitaries, of cowled monks and religious mendicants there is no lack, while with the common or garden variety of priest, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, his shovel hat set at a rakish angle, his black gown swinging with the jauntiness of a stage Mephistopheles, ogling the girls in street or promenade, the city swarms. Distressingly close is the resemblance of these latter to those creatures one may find loitering about the stage-door toward the termination of a musical comedy.
I sat one afternoon on a bench of that broken promenade that partly surrounds Toledo high above the Tajo, watching the sun set across the western vega, when my thoughts were suddenly snatched back through fully a thousand years of time by the six-o'clock whistle of the Fabrica de Armas below. When my astonishment had died away, there came over me the recollection that not once before in all Spain had I heard that sound, a factory whistle. Agreeable as that absence of sibilant discord is to the wanderer's soul, I could not but wonder whether just there is not the outward mark of one of the chief reasons why the Spain of to-day straggles where she does in the procession of nations.
I descended one afternoon from Lettuce street to the sand-clouded station on the plain and spent the ensuing night in Aranjuez, a modern checker-board city planted with exotic elms and royal palaces. It was again afternoon before I turned out into the broad highway that, crossing the Tajo, struck off with business-like directness across a vega fertile with wheat. Before long it swung sharply to the right and, laboring up the scarified face of a cliff, gained the great central tableland of Castilla Nueva, then stalked away across a weird and solemn landscape as drear and desolate as the hills of Judea.
The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk furnished me bread and wine, but no lodging. I plodded on, trusting soon to find a more hospitable hamlet. But the desolation increased with the night; neither man nor habitation appeared. Toward eleven I gave up the search and, stepping off the edge of the highway, found a bit of space unencumbered with rocks and lay down until the dawn.
The sun rose murky. In twenty kilometers the deserted carretera passed only two squalid wineshops. Then rounding in mid-morning a slight eminence, it presented suddenly to my eyes a smoky, indistinct, yet vast city stretching on a higher plane half across the desolate horizon. It was Madrid. I tramped hours longer, so uncertainly did the highway wander to and fro seeking an entrance, but came at last into a miserable outskirt village and tossed away the stick that had borne my knapsack since the day I had fashioned that convenience in the southern foothills of Andalusia. Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it almost as it fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was it in this unwooded region--waged pitched battle until each carried away a half triumphant. I pushed on across the massive Puente de Toledo high above the trickle of water that goes by the name of the river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus, halted at last in the mildly animated Puerta del Sol, the center of Spain and, to the Spaniard, of the universe.