Travelling in Spain: four grades of trains but only one price—Ten miles an hour—Dangerous speed—Amusing the villagers—A slow night journey—Suppressing a raconteur—“Shall we go?”—Hot water while we wait—The paralytic—Taking a photograph—The beauty at the window—A discourteous custom—Empty minds—The toothpick—A gentleman of the old school—Hospitality at Antequera—A Spanish dinner table—Delightful memories.
Travelling in Spain: four grades of trains but only one price—Ten miles an hour—Dangerous speed—Amusing the villagers—A slow night journey—Suppressing a raconteur—“Shall we go?”—Hot water while we wait—The paralytic—Taking a photograph—The beauty at the window—A discourteous custom—Empty minds—The toothpick—A gentleman of the old school—Hospitality at Antequera—A Spanish dinner table—Delightful memories.
Travelling in this country is really a trial to the patience. It is true that the main lines have now been made comfortable, with corridor carriages, well-cushioned seats, and good lighting on the night trains; but the unpunctuality and the purposeless delays all along the line make even a short journey tiresome and a long one intolerable, unless one resolutely determines only to look at the comic side of things.
There are four classes of passenger trains, and we may take the journey from Madrid to Seville as typical of the rest. This line is used by the King, the Court, and the governing classes generally, and is travelled by nearly every tourist who comes to Spain, for every one wants to see Seville, Cordova, and Granada, while naturally the capital, with its superlative picture gallery, is the objective of all foreigners interested in art.
AN ANCIENT GATEWAY.
AN ANCIENT GATEWAY.
The slowest of these trains is themixto, a sort of cross between a passenger and a luggage train. The distance from Madrid to Seville is 358 miles, and themixtodoes the journey in twenty-four hours and twenty minutes, or at the rate of nearly fifteen miles an hour, if it gets in punctually, which it seldom or never does. Next we have thecorreoor mail train, which nominally takes eighteen hours one way and nineteen the other—the more rapid journey being rather under twenty miles an hour. Then comes theexpreso, which takes eleven and a half hours one way and twelve the other, travelling at the rate of about thirty miles an hour; and then theexpreso de lujo, which does the journey in eleven hours and forty minutes, being a shade faster than theexpreso. Both these last aretrains de luxe, with dining-car and the wagon-lits Company’s carriages, and are usually pretty punctual. These trains, be it remembered, are running on one of the chief main lines of Spain.
On the branch lines nothing like these speeds are attained. On one of these, as I was told by a friend who often had to travel by it, the usual rate was ten miles an hour, and the district petitioned the railway to reduce the speed, which was considered highly dangerous. The petition was refused, on the ground that if the train went any slower it would come too expensive, on account of the increased coal consumption.
With true Spanish inconsistency the same fares are charged for all these trains except thetrains de luxe, for which an excess of ten per cent. islevied on the first-class fares. On these trains there is no second-class, and on one of them only a single third-class carriage. Themixtois horribly uncomfortable, and the carriages of all classes are usually dirty, but one need not fear any rudeness or roughness from one’s fellow-travellers.
It was once my fate to travel by amixtofrom a wayside station where I had missed the express after a long donkey ride across country. My men had never been there, but when it became evident that by no possibility could I catch the train I had intended, they declared, in their desire to reassure me, that there was a decentposadaclose to the station where I could comfortably spend the night. We arrived to find not even a cottage, but only achozaor hovel, built of stones and thatched with reeds, and a canteen consisting of the bar and a tiny room off it, where the railway people took their meals, for it was a junction of some importance, and several men were employed there. I had no alternative but to go on by themixto, and I sat for seven mortal hours in that train, travelling in all eighty-four miles. It was about three in the morning when I reached a town which gave reasonable promise of possessing some sort of hotel, and at least half of that time we spent at stations, all lighted up and all crowded with villagers, just as if it were day.
I am bound to say that although the seats were so hard and so grimy, and the jolting of the train so incessant that sleep was impossible, I neither heard nor saw anything offensive, although myfellow-travellers were all men, and there was not one gentleman, in the conventional sense of the term, among the lot. One man, it is true, began a funny story which it was probably just as well that I did not understand, but before he came to the point his friends hushed him up, on the ground that they had heard it all before, whereupon the facetious person so promptly dropped asleep that I guessed he had been looking too long on the wine-cup before he started. Nothing was said to me, but I quite understood that the raconteur was silenced out of consideration for my presence.
Thecorreoon the main lines is much better than themixto; the first and second class even have corridor carriages, and these are roomy and comfortably cushioned. If time were absolutely no object—as indeed seems to be the case in Spain—one need not complain of thecorreoat all. But to people who prefer getting to their journey’s end to sitting in the train, the endless delays and the purposeless dawdling are intensely irritating. The train stops at every little station, apparently to amuse the villagers, for often no one gets either in or out, though there will be from twenty to a hundred loafers on the platform. After long waiting a guard is heard to inquire, “Shall we go?” (Vamonos?); some other official says, “Let’s go!” (Vamonos!); a third rings a bell and shouts, “My lords the travellers to the train!” (Señores viajeros, al tren!); some one blows a horn, the engine whistles two or three times, and we drift out as vaguely as we drifted in, ten, twenty, or thirty minutes before.
At one station on a very dull journey which I often have occasion to make, an extra delay seems to have been arranged to enable the wives of the stationmaster, the canteen keeper, and the one porter to obtain a supply of hot water from the engine boiler, for every time I travel that way I see a group of these ladies filling cans and buckets from a steaming jet which certainly is not let off anywhere else.
At another station we spend an interminable time watering the engine. This station is only half an hour from a junction where the train waits, according to schedule, for thirty minutes, and why the water cannot be taken in then, the demon of dilatoriness that presides over Spanish railways alone knows. This, like the distribution of hot water, does not occur only once in a way. I have been over the line eight times, for my sins, and have seen the same incidents every time.
Once our train waited an extra ten minutes while a poor paralysed old woman was conveyed in front of the engine from a train alongside of ours to the exit from the station, where a donkey awaited her. The porter carried her slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, head downwards. We all thought she was dead until we saw her hands waving and heard her shrill voice bidding the man shift her into an easier position, which he did, by no means unkindly. She was a very poor woman, and her old husband trudged after her, bearing a couple of worn pillows and a bag of food. It was clear that there was no money wherewith to tip that porter. No one grumbled at the time lost by our train, whichwas already close on an hour late, although she might just as well have been carried behind it and thus let us go on. They only said, “Poor creature! She seems very ill.” On the other hand, no one thought of producing pesetas or even coppers to alleviate her sufferings, though probably if I had been ready-witted enough to suggest it, most of my travelling companions would have contributed. Spaniards are curiously destitute of imagination in such cases, but when I have had the presence of mind to propose some such obvious charity as the above they have quickly followed suit, expressing admiration of our English initiative.
The funniest example of official indifference to the time table that I have seen occurred on a journey from Algeciras to Bobadilla. During a long pause at a wayside station one of our party got out to photograph a group of picturesque beggars—for on the Andalucian railways beggars are chartered libertines, permitted to climb up to the windows and pester the travellers for money. Before he had finished the bell rang for the train to start, but seeing how he was engaged the stationmaster politely turned to the guard.
“Wait a moment longer,” he said; “do you not see that the gentleman is taking a photograph?”
Let it not be supposed, however, that Spanish travellers find their slow trains such a trial as we do. The men chat, smoke, eat, drink, and sleep, and the women eat and sleep—the elder ones, that is. The younger ones spend most of their time standing at the window. This is a very favourite occupationof all Spanish travellers in first-class compartments. Directly the train slows into a station every window of the corridor carriage will be occupied by a more or less portly person of either sex, who thrust their heads and bodies out as far as they will go, to stare up and down at the exceedingly uninteresting crowd assembled to see the train come in. Except on Sundays and holidays, when the station is to the village what the fashionable promenade is to the town, the people who loaf on the platform are by no means the pick of the population, being merely those who have nothing else to do. But this does not seem to diminish the Spanish traveller’s interest in them, and he will block the windows till the very last minute, watching the village idiot or the diseased beggar until he is quite out of sight, as if all his hopes of happiness depended on getting the very last glimpse of the unpleasing spectacle.
The girls who travel have, it must be admitted, another object in planting themselves at the window while the train is in a station. They want not so much to see as to be seen, andfaute de mieux, the open admiration of the village loafer helps to pass the time. On one occasion I travelled for many hours in company with the wife and daughter of a man whose office under the Government argued a good social position and a certain amount of cultivation. The mother talked of nothing but the excellence of the food in the town we had both been visiting, and the girl never spoke at all save to ask me at intervals where we were and how much behind time the train was now. At every station she plantedherself in the window, and as she was strikingly handsome with unusually brilliant colouring, a group of yokels never failed to collect in front of our compartment, staring at her for all they were worth.
“I cannot imagine,” the mother once remarked to me, “why so many people stand there.”
“Well,” I said with perfect sincerity, “they probably do not often have any one so pretty as your daughter to look at.”
The mother bridled and smiled, and immediately told the girl what I had said.
After that our young beauty never left the window at all—presumably lest some admirer should miss the opportunity of gazing on her charms—from the moment the train drew into any station until it left again; and I calculated afterwards that she had stood three solid hours on end in the corridor, only varying her position to move to my window at the opposite end of the compartment when we stopped at a station where the platform was on that side.
This discourteous habit, common to men and women alike, of blocking the first-class carriage windows regardless of the comfort and convenience of the other passengers, is in some ways the most unpleasant feature of travelling in Spain. It is practically confined, however, to the well-to-do, and I am bound to say that on short journeys, where a little fatigue does not matter, I often prefer to travel second or even third class, so that I may get my fair share of the view and the air, which is impossible when travelling with Spaniards who can afford to pay the higher fares. On the other hand,as they seem quite unable to amuse themselves in other ways (for very few of them ever read in the train, or indeed in their own houses), perhaps one ought not to grudge them the delightful distraction and the wide enlightenment to be obtained by looking out of the carriage window.
In other ways many little courtesies are shown. Food, for instance, is always offered, even though you are at the moment unpacking your own lunch basket. This is as a rule a form, which means no more than the offer of his house, at such a number of such a street, which your travelling acquaintance will make you when he gets out at his station, well knowing that you and he will never meet again in this world. But sometimes the offer to share with you is quite genuine, as in the case of a stout Catalan commis-voyageur, who, after I had politely declined three times over to divide his lunch, having just finished my own before his eyes, took two elegant celluloid toothpicks out of his pocket, and laid one upon my knee, saying, “That at least you will accept!”
He afterwards told me that he “travelled” for a German firm which made celluloid ornaments, and I always regret that I returned his toothpick without reading the advertisement printed on it. I thought he might want it, and I knew I did not, but I believe he really did wish me to accept his gift—and take a note of his firm.
When one has the luck to make the acquaintance of a Spanish gentleman of the old school, one realises what a loss is inflicted on society by his retirementfrom the world, for men of his kind dislike the new aristocracy of wealth, and shrink from competing with thecursileriaof the large towns as much as Don Quixote himself would have done.
On my way to Granada one lovely May day I had the rare good luck to travel with one of these gentlemen. I was accompanied by an old friend whom I had not seen for many years, and we congratulated ourselves on finding an empty compartment when we got into the train. Just before we started, however, a slim well-dressed man of forty or so clambered up the precipitous steps into the carriage, with a pot of carnations under each arm. This alone would have prepossessed one in his favour, for the male Spaniard of any class above the labourer usually thinks it degrading to be seen carrying anything in his hands, and leaves the parcels to be borne by his wife if there is no servant handy. Our man not only carried his own carnations, but was a great deal more careful of them than of his smart personal luggage, and finally, after asking permission, he wedged them up in the rack between his valise and mine, explaining that he had bought them at the last moment to take to his wife, and was anxious that they should come to no harm.
The ice thus broken, we soon got into conversation, and when he found that we were going to stop the night at Antequera he seemed quite delighted.
“That is my own town,” he said, “I can assure you that it is worth a visit, and I wish more foreigners knew how beautiful is the situation, and how many objects of interest it contains. There isalso a quite passable hotel, and the people of Antequera have good manners, and do not worry tourists in the streets, although they see comparatively few English ladies, or—what is even of greater interest to them—English ladies’ hats.”
Most unluckily, he said, he would only be at home himself for quite a few hours, as he had to go on to Malaga early next morning, but he was deeply interested in archæology, and on finding that my tastes lay in that direction, he said that, no matter what business he had to set aside, he must have the pleasure of showing me some very curious capitals of columns, recently unearthed from a fourteenth-century convent wall, the period of which he found himself unable to determine. I accepted the invitation with delight, for not only did I know by experience that great interest often attaches to objects “found in the convent walls,” but I knew it was the chance of a lifetime for my friend to see the interior of a Spanish gentleman’s country house.
Having fixed the hour for our call and given us his address, our friend proceeded to spread his belongings over three seats, for we were approaching a junction, and he explained that he did not mean anyone else to get in, as he had slept badly over-night and wanted a good nap.
The station was crowded and many people came and looked into our compartment, shook their heads at the much-engaged seats, and went off to stow themselves in the packed compartments elsewhere. Our friend smiled pleasantly, showing beautiful white teeth under a short fair moustache—for hewas as blond as a Dane, with brown hair and blue eyes—and suggested that the stationmaster should put on another carriage when an insistent lady with several children tried, in vain, to force her way in against his polite resistance.
And when we were safe out of the station he pulled out his three seats to form a sofa, as is done when these compartments are converted into sleeping carriages at night, and calmly slumbered until we got to Bobadilla some three hours later. This is the Clapham Junction of southern Spain, and it was impossible for our fellow-traveller, for all his fine manners and general grand air, to appropriate our whole compartment any longer; but, as he remarked, he had had his sleep and now no longer required the extra seats. So other travellers were welcome to come in, and the more so because we should all three be getting out at the next station but one.
“You will require half an hour to secure your rooms at the hotel, and half an hour to rest,” he said as we parted, we in one omnibus and he in another, with many apologies for not being able to offer us his carriage, because his return was unexpected, and no one had come to meet him. “But I hope you will be able to reach my house conveniently by six o’clock, that I may present my wife and children to you, and show you my capitals in a good light.”
He had, of course, given us his card, but the name told us nothing except that he was not a man of title. So in the omnibus we took the opportunity of obtaining a little information about him. We found he was the Alcalde, or Mayor, which meansthat he was little short of a king in the town, for the Alcalde here holds a position social, political, and municipal, considerably higher than that of any Lord Mayor in England. In fact we have at home no authority with which the Spanish Alcalde can be compared, for he is appointed by the Government, and can make and unmake at will any of the numerous paid officials under him. Alcaldes therefore generally have as many enemies as friends during their term of office, but our Alcalde of Antequera seemed to have gained the affections of his townspeople, not by political favouritism, but by his personal qualities.
“He is the richest and the best man in the town,” said the respectable tradesman with whom we talked in the omnibus; “and I should not say that if it was not true, for he is a Conservative and I am a Liberal, and I lost my job at the Town Hall when they made him Alcalde, so I’ve kept a sharp look out for any mistakes he might make.”
At six o’clock, according to promise, we made our way to the Alcalde’s house, and were ushered by a smiling servant, evidently on the look out for us, across a patio blazing with geraniums and heavy with the scent of roses, heliotrope, and jessamine, through a long shady gallery with fine eighteenth-century furniture ranged along the walls, into a charming little reception-room, furnished with light-painted wood, and adorned with the usual window blinds, chair-backs, and table-covers of exquisite needlework, edged and inset with fine lace and embroidery.
To us here appeared our Alcalde leading his handsome wife and followed by his two good-looking children. We were a little late, and he apologised for the family being at dinner; but if we would come into the dining-room and “accompany” them at their meal, without ceremony and as friends, he and the Señora would soon have done eating and be ready to take us round their—and our—house and show us any little object of interest which might repay us for the trouble of looking at it.
Of course we agreed, while apologising for our unpunctuality, and regretting the disturbance we were causing in the family.
But when we entered the large and well-furnished dining-room, we found that the whole thing had been planned by our hospitable acquaintance in order to induce us to dine with him; for places had been laid for us and they had not even begun their dinner. So we had no alternative but to sit down and accept the admirably cooked dishes that were set before us, or feel that by not eating with the family we were compelling our friends to swallow their food in haste while they kept us uncomfortably waiting.
The table was well furnished with good silver and glass, and china bearing the Alcalde’s arms. A vase of choice roses stood in the centre, and family portraits hung round the walls. We really might have been at an English dinner party, save for the unceremonious attendance of women servants with silk kerchiefs on their shoulders and flowers in theirhair, who casually strolled in and out with large dishes, which they always offered first to their master, then to their mistress, and afterwards to the guests. This is etiquette in old Spain, dating from the times when the food might perhaps be poisoned, and the host helped himself first to show that it could safely be eaten.
The dishes too, though tempting and well-cooked, were somewhat different from ours. First came a white soup thickened with vermicelli and having a strong flavour of fowl. Then a dish offrituras, a mass of milk sauce thickened with flour and minced ham, allowed to cool, then shaped into the form of pears, rolled in fine bread-crumbs, and fried with a skill which makes a dish of this kind one of the most appetising in the Spanish menu. Then came cold boiled fish, fresh from Malaga, served with a sauce made of yolk of egg and oil, and garnished with raw tomatoes, raw onions, and green and redpimientos, a kind of capsicum without any heat. A fowl followed, whose lack of flavour showed that it had been boiled in the soup; then the inevitablepucheroorcocido, also boiled in the soup, and consisting ofgarbanzos, ham, bacon fat, beef, haricot beans, and the stems of an edible thistle. Then an excellent concoction of custard with tiny meringues floating on the top. After this, biscuits, fruit, quince cheese, fresh goat-milk cheese, and various sweetmeats. Red and white wine were on the table, and last of all came a cup of capital black coffee. This was the everyday fare of the Alcalde’s family, but not of theAlcalde. He told us that his stomach was delicate, and took nothing but a couple of poached eggs and a glass of hot milk—which amply accounted for his elegant slenderness, so unlike the enormous obesity that afflicts most Spaniards of his wealth and position after twenty years or so of the feeding above described.
What was most noteworthy in his house, however, was the daintiness and luxury of the dining-room appointments, for it is not unusual to find, even in the homes of well-to-do people, only just enough knives, forks, and plates to go round once, while flowers on the table or anywhere else in the house are unheard of. Perhaps the excessive scantiness of the cutlery and crockery have much to say to the absence of those invitations to lunch and dinner which are the current social coin with us. The idea that a pretty and well-found table adds to the comfort and refinement of life at home never seems to have occurred to the mass of middle-class Spain; and of course where the family share a tumbler and eat three or four courses off the same plate, a visitor at meals is not likely to be welcome.
No doubt there are many people in the position of our Alcalde who live as elegantly as he does, but it is a great exception to find oneself invited to take one’s place as a guest at their table; and his hospitality, the beauty of the town, the glorious mountain views all round, the wealth of wild flowers on the hills, and the many remains of ancient buildings, all combined to mark Antequera with a white stone in my friend’s and my memories.
We see now that, although the “offer of the house” on the part of a travelling acquaintance has become in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred degraded into the merest empty compliment, the root whence grew this flower of a fine courtesy thrives in the soil to which it is native. For there are still Spanish gentlemen whose hospitality is as graceful as it is instinctive, and who, when they tell you that at such-and-such a number of such-and-such a street “you have your house and a friend,” really hope and expect that if occasion offers you will take them at their word and accept their frank invitations.
IN THE KEEP OF ARCOS CASTLE.
IN THE KEEP OF ARCOS CASTLE.