A Castle in Spain

I

DON JAIME we called him, for he wore a gallant air, though his clothes were threadbare and his shiny back might have done duty as a pier glass. His were the quiet manners of the Spaniard, respectful and self-respectful, becoming a democrat. To him Spain was the land of lands, — but in all Spain what was there which might compare with Andalusia? — and as he drove the car through orange grove or cork wood nothing excellent would he permit to elude our attention.

If manners ever touch perfection, it is in the relation of master and man in Spain. There is the true balance, friendliness without condescension, and respect unmarred by servility. Don Jaime never intruded, but when he had information to impart, no false modesty could hold him back. He liked to disport in his painfully acquired English; still better he liked to make new friends for his well-loved Spain. One subject alone roused the volcano which slumbers in every Spanish heart. ‘When you were in the army,’ I asked him, ‘were you ever in the Riff?’

‘The Riff—three years, sweating, starved, led by men who let you die. No water. Never any water. We drank from pools of yellow muck mired by mules, and there was a week — what do you suppose we lived on? Rotten bread and vinegar — yes, vinegar. We were climbing down — how do you say it? — through the bush. No enemy, no noise, but everybody afraid.

And then, when we reached the river, suddenly right, left, in front, behind, there went crack, crack, crack! Men were falling just like the grass in my father’s field. An officer yelled, “Get on!” Then he threw up his hands and shouted, — how do you say it in English? — “Save who can!” And we did. And why do you think those Arabs were shooting us down like rabbits? Because they love their country just as I love mine, and we were taking it away from them to make millions for the king and for all the people who sold things to the army. Nombre de Dios! Do you think those Arabs don’t love their country? Do you think they are not as bright as we are? Go to Granada. Go to Córdoba, and see what they did there, and then you judge whether we can teach them or they can teach us. Ugh! Grr!’

It was the longest speech he ever made, rising to furious heights of emphasis. All his wasted years, his thirst, the burning of old wounds, his brother lost in the bush never to return, all the past agony rose in his throat. It had made a Republican of him. Gone was his reverence for the King, his pride in his uniform, his glory in his history, which, like the intelligent man he was, he had picked up piecemeal.

It was all very interesting, but to me the most interesting part of Don Jaime was his hands. For those hands were our salvation. We were traveling a winding road at some seventy kilometres an hour, and while Don Jaime’s hands were on the wheel our safety was assured, but at the magic word ‘Riff’ they waved in the air. They thumped the rim of the wheel. They gesticulated. They clasped and unclasped. And the rhythm of the car responded. It swerved and joggled. It swooped to the verge of a twentyfoot drop, and then careened to the inner edge.

My voice — I take credit for it — was measurably steady: ‘That’s all over, Jaime. At least you have never forgotten how to drive a car.’

It was apparently a new thought to him. Down came those capable hands. The car steadied and shot ahead, and I reflected how deep below the causes of Revolution, fusing them all into a white flame, were the hot and shameful memories of corruption, incompetence, imperialism, impoverishment, starvation, ambush, rout, and death that Morocco means to Spain.

II

All my quiet life I had longed to see a Revolution, and now that one was here to see, I could n’t see it. No amount of imagination would transform the quiet, respectable crowds in city streets into mobs of Pandemonium. Towns in Spain wake slowly to the day’s existence. To start on a journey before half-past nine is a matter of consternation. Only beggars are stirring at eight. The prosperous reach their offices toward eleven, refresh themselves in seclusion between one and three, and the business day gathers momentum about five o’clock. At seven, for the comfortable, there is tea. At eight, clerks and muleteers sit down to supper, and at ten, or half an hour later, society settles down to the solid meal of the day. For the crowd, life begins when the stars come out. The deserted streets are suddenly populous. By nine the town square is like church steps on Sunday — men, women, and a multitude of children for whom our traditional bedtime does not exist, but who will, happily, not be herded into school until ten o’clock to-morrow. When ten strikes, the city is all animation. At eleven the theatres will open, and meanwhile there is supper at the restaurant, promenading, endless greetings, gossip and life, while the band plays and boys and girls step to it.

If thunder is in the air, here is where the storm will break, thought I, but each evening the children skipped their ropes, and though here and yon knots of men talked earnestly, there was nothing to suggest that twenty millions of people were embarked on a critical experiment.

It was not that the Revolution had come quite unexpected. Indeed, the previous November — this was March — a mutiny broke out. The explosion missed fire; the ringleaders were arrested, tried, convicted. Two of them were shot. Where does treason end and honor begin? Traitors had suffered a traitor’s death. Then came the Revolution, and presto! the dead were traitors no more, but patriots and heroes. Their names were on every tongue and their pictures on every postcard. Already legend has retold their story, and children will read in the histories their immortal deeds.

The drama was brought home to us on our first night in Spain. One of the former mutineers, whose death sentence had been commuted to thirty years’ confinement, was carried in triumph to his native Málaga. Ten thousand men met him at the station. He was lifted to a platform and tried to speak. Words choked him, and tears streamed from his eyes. In three months all that life holds had swept over him — wild adventure, hope, the death sentence, despair, reprieve, incarceration, freedom, and now glory. Fate was still there with her bag of tricks. What more, I wondered, though he live for a century, had she to offer him?

If you were on the trail of Revolution other evidence was about. It was amusing to watch conservative householders pasting brown labels over the insignia of the Royal Automobile Club, whose affiches were everywhere; and on the roof of the Hotel of the Prince of Asturias, workmen were busy taking down the immense gilt crown which had lent its touch of majesty to the hostelry. In the first license of liberty, royal statues were thrown down, but good sense reinstated itself. Deep in the country, on a lofty spur of the Guadarramas, the Regina Fountain, which gives tired donkeys their sparkling reward, had by some sensible peasant been painted a protective red, and I noted the shrewd device which saved the great arc of Kings and Queens standing in front of the Royal Palace of Madrid. Someone had splotched on each pedestal the appealing letters ‘R. I. P.,’ and they were suffered to rest in peace.

III

Were I the historian of the Revolution, amongst all the complicated factors I should give first place, not to the crimes, but to the fatuousness of the nobility. It is quite within the limits of the truth to say that a more utterly worthless group than the Spanish aristocracy never cumbered the travailing earth. Absentee landlords, many of them, have not from boyhood laid eyes on the land which gave them revenue.

Commonly they rent their estates to some intendant who makes what he can from the transaction. They live in no state. They set no standards. Their social duties they neither perform nor recognize. They give no splendid entertainments and make no effort to return the hospitality they accept. When diplomats invite them to meet the King, they are apt as not to reply that they can give no immediate answer, as they may be going to a ‘ shoot’ — their single amusement.

The creation of grandees is a royal prerogative. To be a grandee of Spain has a noble sound. Its significance is really this: at a certain moment in the ceremony of investiture, while the King is on his throne, the new-made grandee puts on his hat. Then he takes it off, and never again is the liberty assumed. What boots it? He has gone hatted in the presence of kings. George Fox could do no more.

Nor are the ladies superior to their lords. The Queen appoints — I still use the present tense — her ladies in waiting. There are nearly as many of these maids of honor as there are days in the year, and their duties are to wait each for a single day in attendance on Her Majesty. Yet such is their inertia that not infrequently the chamberlain has to telephone round to a dozen ladies before he can secure one to perform her tiny but honorable task.

Such the nobility with which Alfonso was inextricably intertwined. They looked to him to save them, and as he slowly sank they stifled him. To the people they represented a nuisance not to be borne. The dead weight of their idleness and sloth lay heavy on the shoulders of peasants who coveted their lands and who deserved them.

Another great burden of the Spanish people is the Church and her drones. Not that the clergy live comfortably in indolence. They are, if truth be told, desperately poor. The treasuries of their churches are heavy with plate of silver and gold, with embroideries beyond price sewn with pearls, strewn there by conquistadores who sought forgiveness five centuries ago; but these belong to Our Lady and her saints, and many a priest goes hungry in the midst of riches. Yet the villager, as he rises before dawn to ride his donkey for two hours or maybe three to the fields of his absentee landlord, feels on his stooping shoulders a triple weight — army, aristocracy, and Church. It is too much.

Yet Spain is not quite the priestridden country we think it. Women and men, too, still crowd to Mass, but in the cathedrals the narrow space between the Coro and the Capilla Mayor amply holds the congregation. It is not that the people have lost their faith, but that little by little their faith in the priesthood has begun to decay. The demand for the separation of Church and State is, after the land question, the principal article in the Republican creed. ‘ Let the priest work like the rest of us,’ said a laboring man to me. ‘Why should n’t he? He can be a priest if he wishes to, and if I want to marry or be buried or have my children christened he can charge me for it and I can pay. But why should n’t he work just for what he gets? We all do.’

The Church in Spain is still led by obscurantists of the ancient Spanish type, blameless spiritual men, their minds so full of heavenly certainties that doubts of earthly wisdom cannot stir them. The Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain, may well serve as an example. More than a score of years ago two brothers of the Segura family entered the priesthood with a spiritual exaltation rare even in the country Santa Teresa loved. The elder soon found himself the parish priest of a remote hill village where the people, cut off from their neighbors and stricken with poverty and disease, were slowly sinking into the mire of hopeless degradation. Of this thriftless vineyard Segura was the true husbandman. Morning and night he labored, tending the sick, comforting the weary, bringing aid from without, teaching self-help, self-respect, and the common welfare. None was more weary than he, but his labor was not in vain. The village was transformed. Men loved him as a visible embodiment of the Holy Spirit. In those days, it chanced, the King came by. He saw the miracle and heard the testimony. When next a bishopric was vacant he proffered the name of Segura. And when a few years later a new archbishop of Toledo had to be chosen, Segura, though still in what the Church regards his early youth, became Primate of Spain.

All earthly honors now seemed open to him, when an event occurred. His brother, in his own parish, had pursued a parallel history. He had built up his little congregation and fortified men’s souls by his example, by devotion, and by preaching. Almost he was adored. He was eloquent, and his people hung upon his words. Then by chance one Sunday he was absent. An unfamiliar figure ascended the pulpit and began to speak. The congregation grew restless. They missed their weekly sustenance. Everywhere they looked about them for their priest. The stranger’s words were chaff. Murmurs arose, then exclamations, then shouts: ‘We want Father Segura! Give us Father Segura! ’ The noise swelled into wild volume — cries, catcalls, riot. The church was cleared, and Father Segura promptly returned to reproach his people, but the mischief had been done. The scandal passed from village to village. It reached Madrid. It flew to Rome. What was this family of priests who made themselves and not the Church so necessary to the people? From the Archbishop of Toledo the Red Hat was withheld.

It was better so. For new traits began to show themselves in the Segura family. The Archbishop’s views set like cement. His terror of modernism became an obsession. He discouraged the intellectual progress of women. He denied their right to join an organization which did not have ‘ Church ’ in the title of it. He forbade his people to accept membership in Rotary Clubs, and when Republicanism showed its horrid head he announced that there could be no compromise between God and a Republic. The Archbishop of Seville played up to him. The curse of God would fall on Spain were the Republic to be proclaimed. The answer of the people was to nail the Tricolor over the Archiepiscopal portal. I saw it waving there and it was not taken down. The wise Vatican took alarm. The Papal Nuncio formally announced that the Church has naught to do with politics. Its Kingdom is of the spirit. But the public was roused. Archbishop Segura followed his King. Then he returned, but so unrestrained was the violence of his utterances that the Government transported him by force beyond the frontier, and to-day the only active see in Christendom ruled in absentia is the See of Toledo.

What are the portents for the Republic? One observer reflects that in the whole Mediterranean world no real republic has ever existed. Here dwells the intensest individualism on earth. Here have lived the greatest artists and the greatest tyrants. Here men work each for himself in bitterness of competition, intellectual and moral. They will take no orders from their equals. They will not coöperate. Whatever the form, two ways of government, and two ways only, lie open to them — monarchy or oligarchy.

IV

It is said of Charles the Fifth that the great Emperor spoke Italian to his mistresses, French to his friends, German to his dogs, while in Spanish he communed with his God, and with the stately music of the language in his ears the traveler knows that it cannot be displeasing to his Maker. Spoken Spanish has a deep and serious sound. The sweet sibilance of Italian, the lilting ripple of French, are alike foreign to it. And as with language, so with behavior. Manners unlearned in America and forgotten in northern Europe still live in Spain. Nowhere on the Continent will the traveler find such quiet courtesy. Nowhere will he find women so untouched by the brisk roughness of modern life. There is in Spain an unwritten code to which all manners conform. The stranger there never finds himself the subject of curious and disconcerting interest. There the eye of the pretty waitress does not roam, and on the street one is never conscious of a furtive smile or a provoking glance. Yet such modesty, or affectation of it, cannot arise from any feminine lack of confidence, for I know not a country where the women are more lovely. Something, of course, one’s imagination owes to the mantilla and the crowning comb of tortoise shell, to the whiteness of ruffle at the wrist, and the black folds of the graceful gown, but the olive smoothness of the cheek and the blue shadows in the glistening hair will ensnare an attention disposed to wander in the presence of feminine charm.

Is it manners which bring customs, or do customs flow from manners? The traveler must notice how much one owes to the other; and, watching the quiet distance at which each Spanish girl keeps her young man, I asked romantic questions. This is what I learned.

Chief among the Roman ruins of every Latin country are the vestiges of ancient family discipline. Our modern slogan, every boy for himself and the girl take the foremost, is not heard in Spain. Marriages are alliances in the true sense, yet the Spaniard has contrived to introduce into the mariage de convenance a certain flexibility and freedom of choice still widely unknown in France. The process is interesting.

The youth of the two sexes live an easy and a natural life. They see much of each other in groups. One thing and one thing alone is forbidden: boy and maiden must never be alone together. Gay and free as the groups are, no rule is more inviolable than this. Drop in late in the afternoon at one of the little restaurants. As you wait for your indifferent tea (real tea is the heritage of other peoples), you will see among the family circles many tables àtrois. A married lady accompanies her sister and a young man, or a discreet elder brother plays his part. Never are the two alone. Yet they see much of each other, and if that much leads to a taste for more, the young man makes the first move in the intricate game. He asks whether his lady will be at her window should he come and stand below it of an evening. If her consent be given, come he does. Often the strains of his guitar pass through the iron grille behind which she sits, or it may be the music of his low Spanish accent. Walk as the stars come out down the shadowy streets of any little city. In many a dark doorway you will see one shadow, not the two which block the American doorway — and above, in the dim light from within, you will discern the outline of a listening girl. Invariably the iron grille, but a rose may pass through it, or a note, and sometimes, one imagines, a slender hand. Night after night the conversation grows more intimate, the accents lower, and then a step is taken. The cavalier inquires whether he may call. So bold a request is not lightly made, nor consent casually given, but if it be granted, the young man makes his first stately visit. The family is at home, of course, and there are cigarettes and sometimes a glass of the wine of Jerez.

All this is very pleasant, but the call carries responsibilities. From that day forth, although no troth has been asked and no pledge given, the cavalier is bound each day to visit his lady, either alone to wait at her window, or in company within her father’s house. If he is ill or if business absolutely forbids, he may be pardoned, but no social excuse will be tolerated. And so the courtship continues day in, day out, until that august occasion when fathers and mothers meet and the treaty of alliance is negotiated in all its rigorous detail. Once that is solemnized, public opinion will tolerate no breach of contract; but, however long the engagement lasts, the young people are never alone together until the carriage drives them away from the church door.

Such is the Spanish answer to the courses in domestic science offered by American universities.

V

It is the fashion in the modern world to rate a civilization by its sense of values. In Spain the highest value is human dignity. Read again the conversations between Sancho and his master, and note how mutual is the punctilio between them. Everywhere in Spain you see instances in high relief of the universal recognition of the respect one man owes to another. In most countries, begging is an outlawed trade; in all, the beggar seems little entitled to the amenities of intercourse; but in Spain, beggary is raised to the technical proficiency of a profession, and the beggar takes a virtuoso’s pride in it. One morning at dawn I watched from my window in Madrid. At five o’clock a barefoot friar or two were entering the church across the street. In their train came the beggars, a dozen of them. Briskly they walked, men and women, chatting, laughing, and enjoying themselves. At the church door an ancient man of authority, whom I took to be the dean of the guild, ranked them six to the left, six to the right. And as I looked all joy was banished from their faces. A woebegone expression ludicrous to me, but to a newcomer most distressing, was pictured on every countenance. Almost it was as if some cruel stroke of fate had visited them. The women seemed to dwindle into malformed grotesques. The men shrank to impotent senility. Their professional day had begun.

Then came the worshipers to the early service, each dropping a penny into a ragged cap or outstretched claw. It was the ritual of charity, orthodox as crossing in holy water. It brought comfort to the giver and consolation to them that received. This is the essence of giving. Here is the Spanish equivalent of the charity organization society.

A care-free beggar of Toledo sought alms, it is said, of an obdurate Philistine. The stranger was deaf to every plea. Then cried the beggar, ‘Give, give, for the love of God, since in the fullness of my youth the Almighty has taken from me all desire to work!’

Spanish beggars may be charlatans, but the merit of their poverty is genuine, and if you talk with them you can see that, professional obligation apart, they have not lost the sense of their dignity. After all, theirs is a calling more ancient than the law.

Who could write of Spain without a word on Spanish humor? No touch is here of the caustic of French wit, still less of the explosiveness which marks our hearty American jocularity. Something of its quality comes, I think, from its unexpectedness. Who would look for whimsies in the gray and silver landscape strewn with boulders and broken by the harsh outline of the Sierras? The air of the Mediterranean seaboard is gentle and caressing, but the Castilian calls his climate ‘nine months of winter and three of hell,’ and the peasant of the Guadarramas is pierced to the bone by winds that ‘ take a man’s life but would n’t blow out his candle.’ It is a lonely countryside with the people huddled in their gray villages. The women cluster about the fountain for gossip, but the speech of men is pungent and full of pith. No such land is there for proverbs, the minted wisdom of the race, and when a saying suits his fancy you can see a man chewing its cud, his smile twisted in comic appreciation. I watched a laborer as he stood before the statue of a dog outside the Casa Lonja in Seville. Some wag had painted on its base ‘Tomb of the Unknown Dog,’ and the face of the man was a study in the spirit of comedy.

VI

To my generation, who picked up our smattering of learning while the story of the Far East was still a legend and years before Clio prefixed an archæological peristyle to her Temple, Europe is the other name for History. Our American story, however important to us and to the world, is but a postscript to the Spanish chapter, and almost intuitively the Yankee pilgrim follows the trail which first led from the Old World to the New. He turns to Seville, for there beneath a groined arch in the most beautiful of Spanish churches rest, if rest they can, the ashes of the most uneasy spirit that ever walked the Impassable Way. Columbus was buried in the Franciscan monastery of Valladolid. Four years later his unworthy son, Diego, brought his coffin to Seville. Again, after a space, the Emperor Charles, out of respect for the Admiral’s desires, ordered his bones transported to the New World, where they were interred beneath the high altar of the Cathedral of San Domingo. In 1673 an earthquake toppled the church and mingled the common dust of all who lay beneath its roof, but bones thought to be those of Columbus were collected and ceremoniously reinterred. The next century had not half gone when the island was taken by the French, and the Spanish, desiring that the hero they had made their own should lie in Spanish soil, removed the sarcophagus to Havana. Again a new catastrophe of conquest. All that was saved from the Spanish wreck of Cuba was the Admiral’s dust, carried back to Seville, where the catafalque now lies under the protection of the most ancient Mother of God, Our Lady of Antigua. It was before that archaic portrait which still looks compassionately upon him that the Admiral, kneeling in passionate prayer the day before he sailed into the unknown, swore to perpetuate the name of his divine Patroness in lands beyond Ultima Thule.

Who has expounded the miracle of Columbus? From no one knows where, he came to Portugal and spent years in tortured efforts to persuade the king to send him no one knew whither. It was at La Rábida, near Huelva, that he first stepped on the firm ground of history. There a tattered beggar with graying hair, leading by the hand a tired child, knocked and asked a cup of cold water. Just because it was given to him, that convent is immortal. Who was he, the monks asked, and the Ancient Mariner replied, ‘I am a sea captain from Genoa, and must beg my bread because kings will not accept the empires I offer them.’ We know the wonders that followed: how the Queen and her counselors at the very climax of their crusade against the Moors stopped to listen to the mystic visionary; how at the very instant of success the insensate egoist seemed to ruin all by his demands. This man with no achievement to his credit, with not a maravedi to his name, offered fantastic empires for sale, requiring that he be made Viceroy on land, Admiral on the sea, dowered with a tenth part of all the treasures he should find and one eighth of all the continent he should discover. But something there was in his demeanor, in the frenzy of his prophecy and the mystic eloquence of his speech, which finally prevailed. Not one jot of his demands would he abate, and he won a world.

Think of Columbus and you shall think of Isabella. If there is to-day a spirit in Spain, it is hers. Spain is her monument, but her memorials are everywhere. In the noble Chapel Royal of the Cathedral of Granada she sleeps beside her Ferdinand. But beautiful as is the tomb Fancelli carved over them, I feel her presence more poignantly in that bare cold room in the Moorish palace of Seville, so austerely in contrast to the fountained courts, where her fervent prayers were answered by the birth of her first child. Not since Christ was born was a son so welcomed into the world. An empire, Christendom itself, hung on that inheritance, and as if in direct answer to an universal petition the boy grew up in beauty and the grace of God. Then in the flowering of his early prime he died, at eighteen. You see him lying in marble at Ávila, his tranquil and lovely features untouched by the bitterness of death, his hands clasped in obedience to his Maker, his gauntlets tossed aside — mute symbols that man disposes as God wills.

What agony must have scorched the mother’s heart as she first knelt beside that tomb! What confusion of spirit! No duty had she left undone, no service disregarded, and yet this crowning sacrifice had been demanded, flouting every aspiration, destroying the just hopes of a people. Now the perfect Prince had been taken, and in his place was left a girl with wild and whirling wits, Joan, already called ’the Fool.’ Could the judgments of the Lord be true and righteous altogether?

As we ponder the character of Isabella, quite as intertwisted with Spanish history as Elizabeth with the story of England, how interesting it is to remember that on both sides of her house the great-grandfather of Isabella was old John of Gaunt. We remember Spain and England as mortal enemies. We forget how often they were official kin and friends.

Sometime I am going to Spain, not to consider what has happened, but to speculate on what might have been. History is a river changing its course when a chance boulder deflects the stream. I want to wander through the granite austerities of the Escorial, thinking on what would have happened if Mary of bloody memory had borne a son to Philip whom she loved so much. Whither would the Armada have sailed then, and how contracted the spacious days of Elizabeth might have been! Generations after, what would have been the sequel if ‘Baby Charles,’ frolicking at the Spanish Court with my worthless Lord Buckingham, incognito as Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith, had married the Infanta as he planned and confidently expected? Would the thin-lipped minx we know so well in Velásquez’s portrait have watched her husband drop his perfumed head upon the block while Henrietta Maria simpered and gossiped among her maidens at some European court?

Again I want to go to Spain to study the great enigma. Why should the supreme star in the firmament of Europe have dropped like a meteor? Why should Spain lead the world for half a century, then sink to the rear and the slaves? Misgovernment has done its worst. Look back for centuries. Whenever some brief respite has been given her, Spain, potentially a country as rich as any in Europe, rises from her poverty and apparent indolence. Perchance now some new vast opportunity is hers. One good authority said to me, ‘ Let the Revolution succeed. Let Spain flourish for five years, and hers will be the hegemony of the Spanish-speaking peoples of the New World. It will be hers by tradition, by culture, by riches, and by the proud determination of her people.’ Can such a shining future be in store? I was born a skeptic, and am too old to prophesy, but if that great day comes I shall remember the delight which Spain has given me and shall throw my cap into the air, and if breath is still given me I shall shout, ‘ Santiago! ’