Ellen M. Whishaw

A saddle for femininity—September fairs—Three kinds of hostelries—A night at the street door—BuÑolitos—Mosquitoes and holy water—All the fun of the fair—The etiquette of mendicancy—A Spanish circus—A cinematograph—Drunk but still courteous—The diligence.

There are three perfect months for exploring the mountains and visiting remote hills, valleys, and villages in the leisurely way only to be done on horse, mule, or donkey back. One is April, but then one ought to be in Seville for the most typical fair in Western Europe; another is May, but then one must be in Granada for the nightingales and the roses which make the Alhambra a dream of delight; the third is September, when grapes, peaches, and melons are in their prime, when the weather though brilliantly sunny is no longer oppressively hot, and the high roads are gay with swarming herds of creatures moving from fair to fair, and forming with their owners a series of living pictures which make the longest journey enjoyable.

For a woman no longer young, a donkey with jamugas and a pack mule is the ideal mode of transit over the mountains. If you possess your own jamugas, as I do, with the leathern straps that support them on three sides fitted to your measure, there is no more comfortable riding seat. But perhaps I ought to explain what the jamugas consist of, for they are rarely seen nowadays except in mountain towns, and unless seen are not easily imagined.

According to the dictionary of the Spanish Academy the word is derived from the Basque zamucac, “a seat intended for femininity to mount on any kind of beast of burden.” But although the name may have been originally Basque, the apparatus is Oriental, for one sees just the same sort of thing in Morocco and in the East, only there it is hooded to hide all the femininity from curious eyes.

The basis is simply a folding trestle, like that for a table, with cross-straps to prevent the trestle from opening too wide. This is placed on the aparejo of the beast of burden, the aparejo being a stout pad of straw used to prevent the jamugas or the panniers, as the case may be, from galling the animal’s back. It is fixed firmly with innumerable twists and turns of tightly knotted cord, and a folded blanket is laid across the donkey’s back to make your seat soft. As a matter of fact you generally feel the cord through the blanket, but to obviate this you can use a pillow, which is supplied if desired with the donkey, pillow-case and all. For the information of my fellow-femininity I may add that I personally take a cushion of my own to sit upon, and have the pillow tied to the strap which forms the back of the jamugas, and thus save myself from jolts and jars on rough ground, no small advantage on a long journey. Between the blanket and the cushion a gaily coloured cotton cloth covers the aparejo and most of the donkey, and streams out behind and around when you meet the wind. The oldest and most delicate femininity can ride in this arm-chair, for it amounts to that, and I have travelled all day long on my jamugas up hill and down dale, and my sure-footed little donkey has never tripped or turned a hair.

It is slow progress, certainly, but what of that, when at every fresh step fresh beauty is revealed, and all your way your guide, as he leads the sumpter mule with your inappropriate modern “grip” or suit-case in its panniers, entertains you with his discourse, or wakes the echoes with his song, for he sings most of the way, “to bring good luck.”

The worst of it is that nowadays one has to go a long way by rail and road before one reaches country remote enough for jamugas: one is lucky if half a charming tour can be covered on a donkey. Such was my fortune one sunny September, and I never felt more sorry than when I had to come back to the railway after a fortnight spent on the hills. But the first part of the journey was not without incident, as I will now relate.

I left the train at Jerez, the sherry city with its huge bodegas full of valuable wine, its cosmopolitan hotel, and its numerous millionaires. From there to Arcos, thirty kilometres distant along a mountain road continually increasing in beauty, a motor bus takes one in about two hours. Arcos is a town of 20,000 inhabitants, perched on the steepest of hills, with a Tartessian-Roman-Arabic castle on the very top, altered and restored like many others in this country by the great Dukes of Arcos, who in the fifteenth century were the rivals in wealth and political power of the Medina Sidonia family.

From an Arabic loggia, here called mirador, which means literally “view place,” we obtain a marvellous panorama of the mountains, with a bird’s-eye view of a fertile valley in the foreground, encircled by the winding Guadalete. It is truly a bird’s-eye view, for the vega, as the cultivated valley is called, lies fully five hundred feet below the sheer cliff on which the castle stands, and people walking on it look about six inches high. The cliff is so steep that in many places even the ubiquitous cactus cannot take hold, and here vultures and eagles build their nests in security, for no little boy can throw stones anywhere near them. Even the goats can only clamber up a little way at the base, where the detritus of ages has formed a sharply sloping rise extending fifty or sixty feet up from the river and the new high road which leads from Arcos to El Bosque. That view alone is worth a stop at Arcos, but it is by no means the only “sight,” for the ancient town is full of Roman, Arabic, and Renaissance remains, and the fourteenth-century mother church contains a wonderful gold chalice given by one of the ducal family when the church was built—a relic which no one interested in goldsmith’s work should miss. This church, which the people call their cathedral, overlooks a square at the foot of the castle, and that square in May is a mass of golden mimosa. I have never seen such a glow of colour or smelt such overpowering sweetness from trees of that kind.

Part of the castle was granted to the Town Council for their hall in the sixteenth century, and in one of the rooms, which was the chapel of the Dukes of Arcos, are preserved no less than eleven grants to the city bearing the signature of Alfonso the Learned, who won it from the Almohad Moors in 1284 with the help of his ally Al Ahmar, the Arab king of Granada.

The Dukes of Arcos held sway here for over two hundred years, until all memory of the friendship of Alfonso and his father St. Ferdinand with the Moslems of Granada was forgotten in the ambition of the “Catholic Kings,” Ferdinand and Isabella, to make a united kingdom of Spain. Then, when Andalucia was all a-fire with ruthless war, Arcos fell on evil days, for lying as she does on the frontier of the kingdom of Granada (hence her full name, which is Arcos de la Frontera), the Moslems naturally seized the opportunity to try again and again to recover this strong outpost of their former dominion. Until nearly the end of the war the castle held out, but in 1484 the Moslems possessed themselves of the city, and the Duchess, who was defending the castle, was so hard pressed that surrender seemed inevitable. The Duke was away besieging Alhama by the Queen’s orders, and although the Duchess contrived to send a message to her husband telling him of her straits, Isabella could not spare him and his troops even to rescue his wife.

The only knight who could help was the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was known to be somewhere in the district, on his way from Seville with reinforcements for the Queen. But Medina Sidonia and Arcos had been at daggers-drawn for generations. It was almost as bitter and prolonged a feud as that of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and none of the Arcos faction dreamed of appealing to Medina Sidonia for help.

Medina Sidonia, however, was a very chivalrous gentleman. The tidings of the lady’s plight reached him as he lay before Setenil (so called, according to local etymology, because the Romans besieged it seven times—septem = sete—and took nothing—nil!) some twenty miles from Arcos. He turned back at once with half of his troops, drove the Moslems out of the town, left a strong guard with the rescued lady, and then returned to continue the siege of the still stronger fortress of Setenil, and to play his part in the taking of Alhama.

If Medina Sidonia had not brought the feud between the two families thus dramatically to an end Arcos would have had to capitulate, as its neighbour Zahara had already done, and once the Moslems had recovered the four strategic points, Arcos, Zahara, Setenil, and Ronda, the war against Granada might have had a different ending.

We do not find this story in the published histories of Ferdinand and Isabella, but it is written in the archives of the city of Arcos and in those of the Arcos family, now, alas! mouldering in a locked room in one of the great towers of the castle, which is falling to ruin because its owners cannot afford to keep it up.

With regret I tore myself away from the castle, whose once warlike keep is now a garden of roses, orange trees, jessamine, and geraniums grown into bushes with age. But I had to get on to Bornos and VillamartÍn on the way to Algodonales, where I was to change the diligence for the donkey.

Of that stage of the road the less said the better. Much of it was dull, all of it was dusty, and the diligence was packed to its utmost capacity, for it was the eve of the VillamartÍn September Fair, and the rattling old shandridan, built to carry eight or ten passengers in all, had five horses instead of three, and no less than twenty-seven people were stowed inside, on the box, and on the roof. Every one declared that it was excessively dangerous, and made a great joke of the fact; and as Spanish drivers make a point of whipping up their horses when they near the bottom of a hill, in order to take the next rise on the run, and the over-loaded machine rocked like a ship in a storm on every such occasion, it was little short of a miracle that we arrived at VillamartÍn alive.

Arrive we did, however, and at once found ourselves in all the fun of the fair.

The only fonda in the place looked out on the main square. The polite name for fonda (the Arabic fondak) in English is hotel, and the fonda professes to provide food and beds for its customers; unlike the parador (stopping-place), which only gives beds to travellers providing their own food, and the posada (rest-house), which is really little more than a stable for animals with some sort of shelter attached for the people who belong to them. Our VillamartÍn “hotel” only had three or four bedrooms and no sitting-room at all, the food being served in a passage through which one passed from the street to the staircase, or one might rather say step-ladder, leading up to an open gallery containing one of the convenient and comfortable folding bedsteads called catres, minus a mattress; one broken-backed chair, and nothing else. From this a narrow door led into a tiny bedroom which just held a bed and a washstand.

We had no choice but to stay here. The humble Spanish friends with whom I was travelling to their home at Algodonales—a mother and son—insisted on my taking the bedroom, although they gladly accepted my invitation to share the washstand. The mother said she could sleep on the catre with a pillow from my bed, and the boy on the floor alongside, with his head on my travelling-bag. Every other corner in the house was full for the fair, and even this modest accommodation could only be had for one night. Poor as it was, the bedding and the linen were clean, and we thought ourselves lucky to get a room at all.

But we rashly arranged a pillow and rug for Rosario on the catre before going out to see the town, and when we got back, the catre, the pillow, and even the broken-backed chair had been carried off for another customer, and my poor friends had just to sit downstairs at the street door and amuse themselves as best they could till it was time to start. This, however, was not quite the hardship it sounds, for all Spaniards love to turn night into day; and their main concern was lest I should be uncomfortable.

We were to start by diligence for Algodonales, our final destination, at 3 a.m., and pretty Rosario had agreed to let me sleep till two—if I could, which seemed doubtful in view of the incessant noise in the main street on which my tiny window looked. I did sleep, notwithstanding the noise, and woke to find the sun streaming in, and the town alive with goatherds and their flocks, donkeys loaded with fruit and vegetables, women with baskets of eggs and live fowls tied together by the legs and distressfully clucking, and a continual stream of ponies, mules, cows, calves, pigs, sheep, and oxen coming in from the country to the fair; while all along the footwalks little canvas-covered sweet-stalls had sprung up like mushrooms in the night. I had slept through all the riot of the small hours, and the diligence had either not gone at 3 a.m. or had gone without me.

I sprang up and opened my door, wondering if Rosario had also overslept the appointed hour. There she was with a cup of coffee for me, smiling as brightly as ever, but her curly hair was ruffled and she had a generally dishevelled appearance. The diligence had not gone. Something was wrong with the wheels, or the harness, or the horses, or the driver, no one knew exactly what; but Rosario thought that the truth was probably that the driver wanted to do some business in the fair. Anyhow the diligence did not start, and Rosario and her boy had sat all night long in their chairs, with various other visitors to the town, who like themselves could get no beds.

Relieved of their anxiety lest I should be vexed at the delay, the mother and son quickly brightened up, and we agreed that as we had to stay there all day we would get all the fun we could out of it. Rosario after a wash and a brush in my room looked as fresh as if she had slept in her own comfortable bed, and as for the boy, he was at an age to enjoy anything.

The innkeeper flatly declined to provide us with coffee or anything else for breakfast, so we went out and ate buÑolitos, a peculiar dainty largely in evidence at these country fairs, where booths are set up entirely for their sale. My friends took me to the largest and gayest of the two tents already opened, which had white muslin curtains tied together in the middle with streamers of red and yellow calico, just like the sweet-stalls in Syria. An overpowering smell of boiling oil greeted our nostrils as we approached, and such was the frizzling and the smoke that we could hardly see the buÑolera, a stout lady in a brown skirt, white apron, and blue cross-over, with a red handkerchief picturesquely knotted round her head. She saw us, however, and promptly turned to serve us with the odd product of her cooking—a mixture of flour and water squeezed through a funnel into a vast frying-pan and coiled round and round as it fried, until the whole was deftly thrown out unbroken on the dish. BuÑolitos are crisp and tempting and really delicious to eat, provided only that the oil be good and of last year’s milling; for the new oil has an abominable smell and taste which only a native can endure.

This was good oil, and the buÑolera was an artist. We ate all we could, and be it observed that I fell little short of my companions in the quantity consumed. We paid a penny a piece for our breakfast, and then strolled up the hill to the Parish Church, for it was Sunday and a festival Mass was in progress.

Very few people were present. A couple of nuns, a few ladies shrouded in black gauze veils falling over their shoulders and down to their knees,—a graceful Oriental survival which lends dignity to the stoutest old dowager,—two or three peasants with handkerchiefs on their heads, and the usual group of beggars about the door.

I got past these last without trouble by using the accepted formulas, “Pardon me, brother, for God’s sake,” or “May God support you”; both of which mean that one consigns them to the mercy of Providence because one has no mercy of one’s own for them. And if this seems rather hard-hearted, let me point out that in remote places, where foreigners are never seen from one year’s end to another, the gift of a penny to a single beggar will be a sowing of the dragon’s teeth to raise up as by magic a swarm of from twenty to fifty more, who pursue one with pitiful appeals that change to imprecations and even stone-throwing, unless one proceeds to dole out pennies all round. One may therefore be thankful that the ceremonious response above quoted seldom fails of its effect, it being a matter of etiquette in Spanish mendicant circles politely to accept the time-worn courtesy in lieu of coin of the realm. It has often acted like a charm in my own experience, and I can call to mind brutal-looking men with some affliction or other which by no means hampered their physical power for violence, who stopped short and turned away with a gentle “Go with God” instead of a rude retort, when I answered their petitions with PerdÓneme, hermano.

The Mass ended a few minutes after we went in, and as I stood by the main door studying the not very interesting architecture of the church, I suddenly felt a wet finger on my forehead. It was one of the nuns, who, noticing that I had failed to cross myself with holy water, was doing it for me. I appreciated her good intention, but did not appreciate that particular holy water, for the marble vessel was alive with mosquito grubs, whose progenitors swarmed round us where we stood. I knew the holy water was seldom changed in these country churches, but never had I seen any quite so dirty as that.

A clamour of brass instruments drew us out. It was the town band making a round of the chief streets to announce that the fair had begun. It was a much better band than we should find in many English country towns of a similar size, and indeed the level of the brass bands is rather high here—a fact I cannot explain, for among amateurs one practically never hears any concerted music at all, and even when two performers sing together on the stage in the minor theatres, it is as often as not in unison. This band had already woke the town on its first round at 6 a.m., when the church bells were ringing for early Mass, and now as soon as its performance came to an end, a sort of blaring roar from a merry-go-round began and continued at intervals throughout the rest of the day. I had never imagined, far less heard, anything like the noise of that fair in the daytime; but worse was reserved for the night.

Many hours were yet to pass, however, before night fell, and I must say they did not hang heavily, for the people and their animals formed a series of moving pictures which it would need the brush of a Sorolla or a Zuloaga to do justice to. One especially took my fancy. Two pretty girls (and the mountain people are as a rule remarkably handsome), dressed in beautifully laundered print gowns with flowers in their sleek black hair, rode together on a white horse covered with the brilliantly embroidered trappings familiar to us in pictures of the last century and still in common use in the Sierras. One girl sat facing one way and the other the other, with their arms round each other’s waists, and a slim lad in a round Cordovese hat, a brown velvet jacket, and richly embroidered leather overalls,[5] led the horse by a purple-and-white halter made of twisted aloe fibre. On a donkey alongside were slung the girls’ worldly goods, consisting of a box almost as large as the donkey, brilliantly yellow with new paint that gleamed golden in the morning sun, balanced by a large bundle tied up in a crimson wrapper, and topped by a sheaf of pale maize stalks, which would be the donkey’s provender during the fair. It was a riot of youth and beauty and colour and gaiety which would have been the chance of a lifetime for a painter, but sad to say no painter was there to immortalise the scene.

In the afternoon we went to see a circus in the Bull Ring, and in company with the rank and fashion of the town we paid one peseta apiece for what was described on the programme as a “stall.” The “stalls” were honest reed-seated chairs, such as are sold new for two pesetas, but were borrowed on this occasion from the kindly neighbours and brought in by half-dozens at a time, as the aristocratic part of the audience increased.

The show was advertised for five o’clock, but did not begin till about six, by which time the shady side of the ring was crowded, and the stalls had almost surrounded the very small circle railed in and sanded for the performers. We first had a tumbler with a week’s beard, dressed in crimson satin and red cotton stockings, who usually came to grief in his feats, but never failed to draw applause. Followed a highly coloured young lady whom we had seen at the door taking tickets, and who now juggled with knives and cubes of wood, which invariably landed on the ground instead of on the table; a clown, in the same crimson satin and red cotton stockings, who played the fiddle quite nicely, but was interrupted by another clown with a feather brush, who always stopped the music by tickling the violinist’s nose at the third or fourth bar, to the intense delight of the audience; and then another highly rouged lady, past her first youth, who exhibited three rather sad little performing dogs.

An acrobat, again in the crimson satin and red cotton stockings, now came on, after great preparations and testing of wires, to perform a trapeze act. There seemed to be some sort of hitch about starting, which was explained when the acrobat with a sweet smile indicated that we had been seated by the attendants immediately under his taking-off platform, as indeed we were, unknown to ourselves. So we and our immediate neighbours picked up our chairs and retired, while the acrobat did some rather pretty swinging.

The unshaven tumbler then reappeared, now dressed in a pilot coat and brown trousers, but still unshaven, and we discovered that what the advertisements called an “automovil race” was about to take place. It was in fact a terribly gimcrack “loop-the-loop” affair, and the performer looked haggard with nervousness as he examined his wires and pulleys.

In retiring from the trapeze we had unconsciously planted ourselves just where the “automovil” must inevitably smash into us all; no attempt having been made to indicate a danger zone. No one waited to be asked to retire this time. As soon as we saw the bold chauffeur climb his scaffold and realised what was going to happen, we just got up and bolted like rabbits, all quite as frightened as the chauffeur looked. We did not, however, omit to carry our chairs with us. The band struck up an inappropriate gipsy dance, the performer whirled down, and we settled into our seats with a sigh of relief that he and we had escaped with our lives.

But even this was not the last time we were moved on, for the finale was a play in pantomime, in which the middle-aged lady played the heroine, in a long train which she carefully held up all the time; the other lady played the young lover in yellow tights and a red cloak; the tumbler, the clowns, and the manager, all wearing Russian caps and blouses trimmed with rabbit-skin over their workaday trousers, interfered each after his manner with the course of true love; and the stout acrobat with a scarlet-horned hood over the inevitable crimson satin and red stockings, appeared as a friendly devil and made all the stage furniture dance to distract the attention of the rest of the company from the antics of the lovers. The devil ended by letting off a lot of fireworks right in front of the “stalls,” and this time we got up and ran, regardless of our chairs. It was not as dangerous as it looked, however, for the fireworks promptly fizzled out, and I for one was so weak with laughter by then that I could not even start when a cracker went off under my nose.

The whole centre of the ring had been invaded by a swarm of young men and lads of the peasant class, who obviously had not paid a peseta for the privilege. The manager, wearing a monstrous Emperor William moustache fiercely curling up to his eyebrows, had at intervals blandly requested them to retire and not incommode the ladies. They always retired with perfect politeness, to return again the moment his back was turned. When the circus was over this portion of the audience at once blocked the only exit, and gave us time to observe the back of the scenery of the pantomime, which was remarkable. A sheet of painted canvas stood on end, held in place by some mysterious law of cohesion, for visible supports it had none; and how the red devil, who must have weighed a good fifteen stone, contrived to jump in and out of the window without bringing the whole thing down will always be for me an insoluble mystery.

The fonda was less of an hotel than ever this evening, and we were warned that we must, willy-nilly, leave by the night diligence, because a viajante (commis-voyageur) had engaged my room and would want to go to bed when the Fair meeting of the Commercial Club closed about 2 a.m. But the fun of the Fair was not yet over for us, and the little window overlooking the main square now became for me a kind of Royal Box at the opera, music and all.

At nine o’clock the band took up its position under my window, and the fireworks began. Another point I have never quite understood is why Spanish fireworks even in remote little towns like VillamartÍn are always good; and how it is that every remote little town manages to keep its own firework-maker. But the profusion of devices in interlacing circles of arabesques leads me to suspect an Arabic origin for this as for so many other popular junkets in Spain.

The VillamartÍn fireworks were beautiful, differing from those of the big towns only in quantity, not at all in quality, and the set pieces were quite the most attractive to the crowd, whose inherited instincts are all for the arabesque in art.

After the fireworks came a cinematograph, still accompanied by the band, whose repertoire consisted of six pieces, very well played, which they had been repeating at intervals all day. The people grew wildly enthusiastic over the moving pictures, and shouted and laughed and clapped like children, at the runaway who upsets every one he meets as he evades his pursuers, at the illicit lover who hides under the dinner-table and turns it over so as to spill the soup into the lady’s lap, and at all the other stale old jokes which seemed to be brand-new to these unsophisticated southerners. There was no risk at all of our going to sleep and forgetting our diligence now. No one but a deaf mute could have closed an eye in the main square of VillamartÍn that night.

After midnight, when the cinematograph closed, I laid me down fondly imagining I might get a little sleep; but the clamour of the voices in no way diminished. On the contrary, as the night wore on it began to rise louder and louder, until it became a perfect roar. Now and then it would die down for a few minutes, until a boyish voice shouted something that I could not catch, when it began again worse than ever, still good-natured, but sounding ever more impatient, as if the self-restraint of the crowd were rapidly becoming exhausted.

At last, about half-past one, a distant noise like thunder made itself heard above all the human din, and then the crowd seemed to go perfectly mad, yelling and shouting like Bedlam let loose. It was time to get ready to leave anyhow, so I rose from my sleepless bed and went to the window.

Then I saw what it all meant. It was the encierro, the bringing in of the bulls for the bull-fight next day. In this case they were not full grown bulls; only year-old bullocks, and of these there were but two, the rest of the future victims being heifers. For fighting bulls cost a good deal of money, and VillamartÍn is a small town and not particularly rich: so the sportsmen of the ring here have to content themselves with the inexpensive heifer and “yarlin’,” as they say in Devon.

To hear the yells of delight raised when they came in sight, one would have thought that all VillamartÍn was out to receive the bullocks and their decoy: but as a matter of fact all VillamartÍn except the dregs had long gone home to bed, and the howling mob consisted entirely of a few men of mature years, financially interested in the bull-ring, and a crowd of boys and lads, the rag-tag and bobtail of the working classes, for the respectable working men and their families do not approve of the “sport.” These two elements in the Spanish social system nowadays form the immense majority of those who still support what is called “the national sport.” Yet tourists seem to imagine that they represent the nation! So well is it recognised by the governing classes that the bull-fight has ceased to appeal to any save the riff-raff and those to whom, in one capacity or another, it is a source of income, that legislative attempts have been made to forbid the bull-fights on Sunday, because if they only took place on week-days the aforesaid dregs of the working classes would find it difficult to attend at the cost of a day’s wages, and the whole brutal concern would soon come to an end. But the vested interests are tremendously strong, and capital has great power in Spain; so the bull-fight still goes on, and the tourists go to see it, and Spanish social reformers shrug their shoulders when they are told by foreigners that the first step to social reform in Spain must be the suppression of the bull-ring, which the foreigners’ entrance money largely helps to keep going, and of which their mere presence is supposed by amateurs to express approval.

But this is another of the tragedies of Spain, and Rosario and her boy, who hate the very name of bull-fight, though they are mere peasants and never heard of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, did not talk about it that night with me as we watched the tumultuous passage of a particularly lively heifer across the square under my window. Setting aside humanitarian considerations, it was a picturesque sight enough, for the victims of the morrow, surrounded and steered by half a dozen stolid old cows with bells on their necks, were preceded and followed by the garrochistas, those herders of the wild cattle, with the high-peaked saddles and great square stirrups and long poles with iron points, which form so effective a group on post-cards purporting to represent the everyday life of Spain. Some of the rabble had gone out to meet the procession with torches, and these still flared as the crowd surged by, making curious yellow cross-lights when they fell on the glare of the arc lights of the town.

I have been told that it was once proposed to start a branch of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at Madrid, and that in order to obtain funds a great bull-fight was organised. I do not know whether Ben Trovato is responsible for this story, but I have myself met a member of that Society, an English lady of mature years, who refused to subscribe to an entertainment in Spain because it was to take place on a Sunday, and then quarrelled violently with her husband because he refused to take tickets for her for the bull-fight on Easter Day! This is a true story, though the well-known Italian raconteur might be proud to father it. I remember also a British curate of extreme evangelical opinions, who gave at a luncheon party a full, true, and particular account, with realistic details, of the disembowelling of a horse and the wounding of a torero that he had witnessed, embellished with the usual expressions of horror at the innate degradation of a nation which supported such barbarities. Some unkind person present remarked that it was believed that the Bishop of Gibraltar objected to his chaplains attending the bull-fight; to which the ingenuous curate replied: “Ah, but you see I went in without my clerical collar”—the fatuous immorality of which remark closed the conversation.

I was not altogether sorry when the time came to start for Algodonales. I had never heard such prolonged and uncontrolled noise made by human beings before, and much though the whole thing had amused me I do not care if I never hear such a noise again. When we made our way out into the brilliantly lighted square most of the crowd appeared to be drunk, but riff-raff though they might be, they were civil to the last, and good-naturedly lurched aside in a bunch to make room for us to pass into the comparative darkness of the street where the diligence awaited us, we, needless to say, being the only passengers who wished to leave the town just then.

A PREHISTORIC WEIR.

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CHAPTER VII

Mountain philosophy—A Rembrandt mother and child—Egyptian cotton fields—The Khalif and the caÑeria—My lodging in a bakery—Embarrassing hospitality—An Arabic banner—Subterranean reservoirs—The Way of the Cross.

It was pitch dark, and the sky was clouded when we started from VillamartÍn, and the creaking and jolting of the crazy vehicle down the sharp slope from the town to the bridge over the Guadalete would have brought my heart into my mouth had I not been too tired and sleepy to care what happened. Rosario smiled at my terrors. Being a Serrana (mountain woman) by birth, she was not in the least alarmed when the diligence seemed to be diving head-foremost to perdition. “Even if we upset,” she said, “we should come to no harm, for the road was so narrow and the banks so steep that we could not fall far.” She also told me that there was a much better road on the other side, but as we were starting late and were a light load, the driver, an old acquaintance of hers, had chosen a short cut which in winter is a water-course.

Protected by the Providence which looks after fools, we presently landed with a final bone-shaking jerk on the high road, and thence proceeded for several miles in comparative comfort, so much so indeed that we all three went to sleep, and the boy so soundly that he hardly woke till we got within hail of his native village: for this is the King’s highway, and well looked after, as are all of its class, by Government road-menders. I, however, was roused by a stop and voices at a wayside venta, a peasant drinking-place with a deep porch and vine-bowered poles set up in front to give shelter from the sun. Finding that we were to be there ten minutes, while the driver refreshed himself with aguardiente (his offer of which, as it is a fierce spirit largely made in its cheaper forms from potatoes, I politely declined), I got down to warm my chilled limbs by movement, for we were now pretty high up and the air was cold.

Behind us, already a long way off, the lights of VillamartÍn still twinkled as gaily as if the night were yet young. The black clouds had broken, and the young moon stuck one slender horn out from their midst, while near at hand a patch of burning weeds cast a Rembrandtesque glow on a handsome young woman seated before a choza built of bamboos and maize stalks, with an infant at her breast. One wondered why in the world she was awake and up at four in the morning, but a voice at my elbow explained it:—

“SeÑora, por Dios, una perilla pa’ pan!” [“Lady, for God’s sake a little dog (½d.) for bread!”]

The ubiquitous beggar, in this case a ragged child eight or nine years old, was on the watch for a possible penny from some weary traveller who might give the coin in order to be freed from the unmusical professional whine.

I weakly gave the perilla. No other beggars were near to see, and the picture was worth it. I continually regret as I travel in Spain that I was not born a painter.

It was another nuit blanche for me after that. Any one who knows the joy and the glory of daybreak and sunrise over the hills will understand that one would not willingly lose a moment of the glowing change from darkest shadow to glowing dawn. It is not fully light in these latitudes before six in September, and the beauty of the morning does not culminate till nearly eight. The boy slept dreamlessly, and poor tired Rosario dozed with her head on his shoulder, but I sat and gazed till my eyes were dazzled by the splendour of the sun on the everlasting hills.

About 7.30 we came to a venta by a fine new bridge with one arch spanning the river. It was only built a few years ago, when the high road was extended to Algodonales. Until then this thriving village, with some 7000 inhabitants and a large trade in fruit and vegetables and walnut wood, had no communication with the outer world save by a mule track. Now it is on one of the main roads from Ronda to Jerez, and I hear that since I was there it has been provided with a motor-service from Jerez. From the bridge to Algodonales is a shady climb, the scenery growing more beautiful at every turn; and Algodonales itself is one of the prettiest villages I have seen in Spain, all orchards and walnut groves, with the music of running waters wherever one goes.

It still retains its Arabic name, the meaning of which is “cotton-fields,” and the tradition of cotton grown there “en tiempos antiguos.” One can understand that cotton-growing might have been a staple industry among the Arabs who came here from Egypt, for the valleys around are well sheltered, and an inexhaustible supply of water is brought from the hills above and distributed through an Arabic fountain with fourteen mouths. In the hottest summer it never fails, and the town and the huertas are still supplied according to irrigation laws dating from Arabic times, in a strict order of precedence which no one ever dreams of disputing.

I was shown the tiny garden of a poor old man, rich with green vegetables and ripening fruit, and told how, when he brought a complaint against a flour mill recently erected by a rich man, for taking his water, the case was immediately decided in his favour, because his little huerta was on the old caÑeria (irrigation system), and therefore held rights inalienable for all time. It reminded me of the story of a poor man at Cordoba to whom the great Khalif Abderrahman III. paid an enormous price for a few feet of land alongside of the river, because the poor man showed that if he lost that land the water rights of his huerta would be interfered with.

All along the caÑerias, which everywhere except in the streets are open to the air, maidenhair fern grows in masses, and all the banks are green with wild vegetation. One sees here, as in many other places, that Spain needs nothing but irrigation to become one of the richest corn- and fruit-producing countries in Europe, for in this climate, once you have water, one crop succeeds another all the year round.

Rosario’s coming had been announced beforehand, and it seemed to me that the whole village was waiting to welcome her. It was pretty to see the care she and her friends took that I should not feel left out in the cold, and before I knew where I was I found myself installed as a guest in the house of the youngest but most prosperous of her sisters, and quite unable, without actual discourtesy, to seek as I had intended a couple of rooms in the main street, whence I should get a view of the walnut trees, the huertas, and the hills.

The sister’s husband was the leading baker of the place, and his ancient bakery of Arabic construction, with its vast dark granaries and cavernous ovens, seemed to cover about an acre of ground. They had arranged their own bedroom for me, with beautifully embroidered linen on their own handsome brass bedstead, and the only wash-basin in the house, a very small one of enamelled iron, planted on one of the numerous chairs which form the chief furniture of a Spanish bedroom, whether rich or poor. They apologised for not having cleared out the drawers for me, as they were full of the children’s clothes, and they had not ventured to assume that I would honour them by accepting their hospitality until I saw whether I could put up with so poor a house.

I only had two objections to it. The first was that the spacious entrance was the favourite meeting-place of all the women of the neighbourhood, with their babies, who cried a good deal; and the second was that the one little window of the bedroom opened on to a pigsty. This Rosario apologised for, saying that she knew English ladies did not like smells, but if I could otherwise be comfortable here, the pigsty should be cleaned out every day during my visit, instead of—as was customary—once a month.

I really did not like that pigsty, but it was impossible to wound the susceptibilities of an entire family so full of genuine hospitality by declining the room, and I knew that I should see more of peasant life as an inmate of the tahona[6] than I possibly could in a lodging apart from Rosario. So I graciously permitted pretty blue-eyed Dolores to make up beds for herself, her husband, and her children on the floor of the granary, and induced her as a favour not to clear out her one chest of drawers for me.

And there I slept for a week, with the pigs in front, the poultry behind, and a pony in a stable to my right, which got loose regularly every night and compelled me to call my hosts to catch him, lest he should break his knees over a stone feeding-trough and water-vessel left in the yard by a forgotten generation. For I knew that if they had not given me their room they would hear the noise for themselves, and I could not let their pony come to grief, because they were too hospitable to me. By closing my window and its shutters I was able to exclude most of the smell of the pigs, and there was no lack of air, because the heavy door had dragged itself half off its hinges with age, and would not close within six inches. It had to be fixed with a chair, but, as Rosario pointed out, I need not be in the least nervous if it opened of itself any time, “because I was among friends; not in a fonda, where one never knew who might come along and try one’s door at night.”

It is usual for whole families of Spaniards, even of a much richer class, to use one dressing-table and washstand in common. Indeed, at a furnished flat which we took at a high rent one summer at the seaside, we found only one small washstand supplied for our whole party, consisting of three adults and a servant. Thus it never occurred to Rosario or Dolores that I could mind washing with my door half open, and I got over the slight inconvenience by hanging my dressing-gown over the gap, while my host and his apprentices sat and smoked just outside.

The one thought of the family seemed to be how to secure me the most enjoyment possible, and each day expeditions were planned. The whole village used to turn out to see us start: I on my jamugas, with my host leading the donkey, Rosario on another donkey or a mule led by her son, seated on the top of the serÓn (panniers) containing our food for the day and my tools and photographic apparatus; for (although this is somewhat off the point) the primary object of my mountain expeditions is archÆological, and I am always on the look out for ruined castles or other interesting remains worth digging in. This makes one’s luggage rather heavy, but it is a solid satisfaction to pretend that one’s pleasure trips are undertaken in the cause of science.

One of our jaunts from Algodonales was to Zahara, the strong fortress of which I have already made mention. My host’s name was Salvador Malo (Wicked Saviour!), and he loved to be told that although wicked by name he was not so by nature. I pressed this brilliant jeu de mots on him at Zahara, where he pulled me up to the very top of the ruined castle by main force. It seems to have been destroyed by an earthquake, the masses of fallen masonry are so split up and tumbled about. The Christians are said to have surrendered Zahara through lack of water during the Granada war, and one can well believe it, for they never seemed to have grasped the necessity of keeping up the admirable Arabic systems either of storing water or irrigation; and once they let the great subterranean aljibes[7] get into disrepair, the garrison of Zahara must have been at the mercy of the enemy, since the only springs are outside the old town walls, two or three hundred feet below the fortress.

The view from the crumbling towers is superb, and the little town climbing up the precipitous hill is full of interesting remains, the most important of which is perhaps a square yard of red silk of Arabic manufacture called tafetÁn, with the remains of some Arabic characters in white. This was the banner of the Moslems, surrendered after the fall of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella. It is now regarded as a religious relic, and is carried once a year in procession through the streets after the image of the patron saint of Zahara. I must not forget to mention that the only access to Zahara, with its 1700 inhabitants, is a bridle-path. Very neat woodwork in walnut is done here, as also at Algodonales, but the Zahara style is more distinctly Arabic, and I saw some brackets and a spice box carved with “stalactite” ornamentation which might have come out of a mosque. They had been made by the village carpenter as a wedding gift to his wife.

Longer trips were planned for me, always to places inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, such as Grazalema, perched under the shadow of San CristÓbal, the highest peak in the Sierra de Ronda. Here admirable cloth is still woven by hand, and fetches a good price in all the country round, for it has the reputation of being indestructible. The once flourishing town has now dwindled to a village, and many of its fine houses are in ruins.

Most of my stay at Algodonales was, however, spent in the immediate neighbourhood, which is so richly wooded and so well watered as to present a most picturesque contrast to the grim mountain, which the natives say towers 700 metres above the village. I do not think it is as high as that—in fact, I should guess that the frowning cliff which springs straight up from the level of my pigsty into the blue sky above, does not really measure from the pigsty to the top more than 400 or 500 feet. But the villagers think they ought to know, for on that barren crag are perched three iron crosses, and every year the young men and maidens toil up a path which seems fit only for goats, in the performance of the religious exercise known as the Way of the Cross. The older people and the children are excused, for only active youth can safely surmount that stony way, and for them there is a humble altar set up half-way, whereat they worship while the priest says a Mass for the safe return of the adventurous pilgrims.

The street leading to this mountain path is called Calvary, and the whole ceremony is a survival of bygone days, when the Passion Play took place in every mountain town, with living actors instead of the images now carried in procession, and every penitent must walk on his bare and bleeding feet along the Way of the Cross before he could hope to be shriven of his sins.

“A SADDLE FOR FEMININITY.”

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CHAPTER VIII

Fancy bread and sun-worship—Prehistoric sandals—A bower of oleanders—An Andalucian St. John—Fashion and footpaths—The mauvais pas—The midday rest—A mountain storm—Thunder, lightning, and flood—Kind-hearted donkey-drivers—A welcome shelter.

All too soon my allotted time came to an end, and I found myself at seven o’clock of a glorious September morning bidding farewell to my kind friends, as I started for a ride of 30 kilometres over the mountains to the railway station at MorÓn de la Frontera. My host as a parting gift presented me with some curious bread of his own making, in what is called a caracÓl design—a primitive sun-symbol of Egyptian origin, had he only known it. I asked him where he got the design, and he said, “From his father: it was nothing, but as I liked cosas antiguas (old things) it had occurred to him to make it.” I have since found that this form of “little bread” is peculiar to Algodonales, and my parting gift is preserved in a glass case with other interesting survivals of sun-worship in the Tartessus of the Greeks, the Baetica of the Romans, and the Andalucia of to-day.

This was one of the longest and most beautiful rides I have ever taken, as also the most adventurous. I had indeed cut my visit short by a few days because there were indications that the weather was likely to break up, and this mountain path—often no more than a goat-track—is impassable after rain, when parts of it may be washed away into the river GuadÁlporcÓn hundreds of feet below.

We climbed up and up for a couple of hours, until vines and olive groves were left behind, and forests of evergreen oaks, covered with acorns, took their place. This oak, which grows almost up to the line where snow sometimes lies till June, is only second in value to the olive on mountain estates, for it costs very little in labour, and its acorns are the best food that can be given to the droves of brown long-haired pigs which haunt these lofty solitudes.

On we went, sometimes up the hill, sometimes down under the shade of the oaks, sometimes along a water-course through thickets of brambles and pink oleanders, which in this climate grow almost into trees when their roots can reach a stream. Over one such thicket a wild vine, growing from a rock above, had spread its tangled branches, and the goatherds had cut and trained it to form a shelter impervious to the sun. A flock of goats was browsing around, guarded by a man and a boy wearing wide straw hats, blue cotton jackets, and short trousers with striped socks and sandals made of twisted esparto grass, just like those in use three thousand years or more ago among their Tartessian progenitors. They lay half asleep under their bower of vine leaves and oleander blossom, but rose at our approach and insisted on my sitting down to rest in the shade, while they chatted outside in the sun with JosÉ. It was so cool and pretty that I would gladly have stopped there for the noonday siesta, but it was still too early for that, and we had many miles yet to travel.

A cry of distress from a nannygoat broke the sunny calm round us, and the boy ran up the hill like a hare to see what had happened to his charges. The last I saw as I rode away was the little goat-herd standing on a rock far above us, waving a hand in adieu, with an injured kid slung round his neck. One constantly meets with incidents of this kind, and of course one is inevitably reminded of the boy St. John with his lamb. In a recent country fair I saw two men taking turns to carry a full-sized goat in their arms, she having somehow hurt a leg on the journey into the town. It was less picturesque than a kid on the shoulders, but the spirit was the same; for the goat could still walk, so that not necessity but kindness dictated the action.

We met few people in those beautiful but desolate hills. JosÉ told me that in the course of a few weeks, when the acorns ripened, a number of families would come from the villages round and live in chozas during the harvest. The chozas of the Sierra are very different from those of the plains. They are built of stones laid dry one on the other, and roofed with esparto grass from the streams, and they almost always have some sort of a chimney, for the cold here on autumn nights and on wet days is considerable. But these stone-built huts can be made very snug and warm, by mortaring the walls within and roofing with something more durable than reed, and I can imagine no more delightful summer holiday than one spent in a well-made choza among these glorious mountains—provided that the choza lay within reach of a Tartessian castle or necropolis wherein to excavate in the intervals of enjoying the view.

The few people we did meet always appeared at inconvenient moments. A fat young lady riding a very small donkey with very wide jamugas, and carrying a beautiful flounced silk parasol, suddenly came into the picture half-way down a precipitous hill, so steep and so strewn with boulders that I, feeling discretion to be the better part of valour, had got off my donkey to walk. Indeed I very often did get off to walk downhill on that journey, for in many places I felt that the only way to avoid diving over the donkey’s head would be to hold on to his tail, and it seemed on the whole safer as well as more dignified to trust to my own feet. The young lady with the parasol was coming up as I went down, but I am sure she would have held on to the donkey’s tail any number of times rather than get off once had our situations been reversed, for I never saw a more confirmed expression of bland laziness than hers. She was too sleepy even to respond to the “Go with God” with which we greeted her, and that is a breach of good manners that nothing but the torpor of extreme fatness could condone. I am not very clear how we managed to pass her and her convoy of servants and baggage donkeys: I only remember that I had to climb on to the top of the nearest boulder and stand there for a long time to be out of the way while the train went by.

She was the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, who lived in a fine house built on the ruins of a castle round the spur of a hill to our left, as JosÉ informed me. He could not remember the name either of the family or the castle, and I was not particularly anxious to know either. What interested me was the notion of a rich landowner building himself a fine house on the slope of a hill to which no road could be made. It was for the olives and the cork trees, said JosÉ: that caballero owned thousands and thousands of them, and came out to the Sierra from Arcos with all his family to “take the mountain air” when the crops were coming in.

Our next rencontre was a more exciting one. We had to cross the side of a steep hill sloping sharply down to the river far below, by a path just wide enough for the donkey and the mule to put one foot before the other, and no more. This in itself would have been nothing, had the slope been clothed with vegetation like the rest of the mountain. But it was the “bad step” of the pass, JosÉ said, the place which after a storm even of summer rain is not only dangerous but impossible, for the hillside here is of a shaly sort of slate, and a very little water is enough to send the whole path slithering down to the river. It was perfectly safe now, said JosÉ, for there had been no rain for three months, and everything was dust-dry. But my honour would well understand, seeing the bad step with her own eyes, why he could not have attempted to take her the journey to MorÓn, much as he delighted in pleasing her, had the dreaded thunderstorm come up last night, as he had been a little afraid it might.

“My honour” did indeed understand, and looked back rather anxiously at the hills behind, where a lovely but ominous background of purple-blue clouds threw the gorgeous sunshine around us into strong relief. Did JosÉ think the storm would come up during the day? Had we not better press on towards some house where we could shelter if we were caught in the rain?

My honour must free herself from anxiety. In no case could we hasten here, where a false step would be fatal, and there was no house within many miles. And the storm was still distant, on the other side of San CristÓbal: may be, if God pleased, it would not overtake us; and at the worst we should be well over the pass before it came.

As a rule I tie the halter round my donkey’s neck and let it pick its own way, but here JosÉ led it, leaving the pack mule to follow as best it could. It was clear that he felt a little anxious, and he explained that some heavily loaded animal must have had a slip at one spot, where the path disappeared altogether, and we had to make a detour above. For some minutes we had heard a voice singing, and just at this point a lad riding a donkey appeared. That boy proceeded with the utmost nonchalance to make a new path across the loose shale, rather than take the trouble to go off the direct line as we had done. He shouted to his donkey, kicked it hard with his heels, encased in the usual esparto sandals with soles an inch thick, and took the dangerous bit at a trot! It was not done for effect, as one might have imagined, for he paid no attention at all to us, and we heard him gaily singing as he rode on, apparently unaware that he had risked a sudden and terrible death by his foolhardy performance.

After this our way led downwards, and at one o’clock, as the clouds seemed to have dispersed, we ventured to stop for a rest under two fine walnut trees which had sown themselves above the bank of the river, now beginning to assume respectable proportions, but still a good way below us. JosÉ unharnessed his animals, fixed up a sort of tent with the blanket from under my jamugas and the cloth from his mule, to give us shade, and after we had lunched he lay down with his head on my hold-all and I with mine on my riding-cushion, and we both slept soundly for over an hour. More than that we could not allow, he had said, if I was to catch the five o’clock train at MorÓn, for we were already behindhand owing to my frequent pauses to enjoy the scenery, and we still had a very long way to go.

While we slept the clouds came up, and I awoke to find a thundery suffocating heat in the air, the sun obscured, and not a breath of wind anywhere. JosÉ looked grave, and devoutly thanked God that we were over the pass. Had we been caught by this weather on the other side we should have had no alternative but to return to Algodonales, and the SeÑora would not have crossed this pass before next summer.

As he talked he was hurriedly saddling the animals and packing the lunch basket, etc., into the panniers, while I unstrapped my hold-all and got out umbrella and mackintosh, which undoubtedly I should very soon need.

“There is no alternative,” said JosÉ, “I must take your honour to shelter in the Venta del AlbercÓn. It is only half a league out of the way, but if we do not find shelter we shall be drowned. What a fool I was to allow your honour to leave Algodonales, but I did it for the best, and Salvador agreed that the storm would not come up before to-morrow.”

Long before we got to the venta we were wet to the skin. The rain fell in one unbroken sheet, through which streaks of lightning dazzled us at appallingly frequent intervals, accompanied by peals of thunder which sounded perfectly terrific in their reverberations among the hills.

As soon as possible JosÉ led the way down to the banks of the stream, and dragged the animals across at the risk of breaking their legs among the rough stones that filled the bed. Already the biggest stones were almost covered, and JosÉ said that if we delayed to cross till we got to the ford the river would be up to our necks. Thence we made our way, I hardly know how, through the oleanders and brambles to what was really only a goat-track some twenty feet or so up the bank, and by this time the situation was so critical that JosÉ ceased to apologise, for all his energies were devoted to urging on the terrified beasts. Fortunately they knew and loved him, and his caressing voice soothed even the mule, which was young and got half wild with terror when the lightning flashed in its eyes.

We passed the ford where the Algodonales track crossed a by-road from Olvera to VillamartÍn, leaving it on our left. It was already a raging torrent eight to ten feet deep and rising higher every minute, and all the little tributary water-courses which had been stony wastes when we started were now turbid streams, rushing down to swell the flood. I have never seen anything to equal the rapidity with which the waters gathered, and I really began to wonder whether JosÉ and I would ever be seen again by our respective families, for it seemed as if at any moment we might be overwhelmed by an avalanche of stones and shale tumbled down from the peaks above us by those nightmare torrents which had suddenly sprung into being where an hour ago all was dust-dry. It also crossed my mind that my family, who were away in England, had not the remotest idea where I was, my trip having been a sudden inspiration of which I had not informed them; and I pictured my friend Rosario distractedly seeking my corpse in company with the widow and children of JosÉ (I learnt afterwards that he was a bachelor) and wildly telegraphing to break the news, hampered by having no notion of my family’s address.

Fortunately these gloomy forebodings were not fulfilled. A peal of thunder that seemed to shake the whole world, and a flash of lightning so close over our heads that we were almost blinded, heralded our arrival at the venta, and in a moment I found myself lifted off the donkey and half carried into the cottage by the kindly people within, while JosÉ slipped the panniers—which would not pass through the door—off his mule, and led the two poor, frightened, half-drowned beasts through a clean white-washed kitchen into a roomy stable beyond, where he patted and soothed them until they were quite quiet and happy, before he gave a thought to his own comfort. The storm had come up so suddenly that although he had dragged out an extra wrap for me, he had been unable or unwilling to stop and put on his own blanket, which was in the panniers under my luggage, and all my persuasions had failed to induce him to take mine, which had been thrown over the luggage, when we started, to protect my camera from the sun.

There is an impression abroad that Spaniards are not kind to their animals, but this is a great mistake.

“How should we not do the best we can for our donkeys, when we depend on them for our livelihood?” one of my arrieros remarked on my praising his tender care of an injured mule.

True one often sees even quite young and active mules and donkeys in the villages of the Sierra with their knees badly broken; but when one realises that most of their work has to be done on tracks such as I have endeavoured to describe—for, thanks to the neglect of the governing classes, there are thousands of villages in Spain which can only be reached by such paths—one has to admit that it is a wonder that the condition of the beasts of burden is no worse. And indeed I know for a fact that many poor men working on the land never let their donkeys go hungry while they have a bite of bread for themselves, so that my heart often aches to see the animals thin and out of condition, knowing it means there is want in the home.

Having all my luggage with me (a further advantage of travelling on donkey-back) I was able to get out of my wet clothes at once, and while I changed in a roomy loft over the kitchen, where the family slept and kept their corn, beans, winter melons, and other stores, the pretty daughter of the ventera told me that although autumn and winter storms were frequent enough on these hills, they had never known one come up so suddenly or with such rapidity so early in the season. We learnt afterwards that it was indeed rather a cyclone than an ordinary thunderstorm, and that it did terrible damage on the other side of the range of mountains, flooding an entire village on a river bank, and drowning an unfortunate gipsy family encamped under a bridge in the bed of the stream, which no one expected any water to reach until at least a month later.

CHAPTER IX

Rustic humour—The haunted venta—Prehistoric graves—A deferred journey—More mountain hospitality—The end of my ride—A lost train—A night in a posada—Chivalrous JosÉ—Mixed company—Good-bye to the hills.

The rain poured in torrents, and the clouds were so black that at three in the afternoon we sat in semi-darkness; but the time did not hang heavy on our hands, for I was entertained by watching the amenities of my pretty girl and her lover, a shy youth with an odd lock of white hair over his forehead. And there was a wizened old fellow picturesquely clad in a short brown jacket strengthened in the decorative style of the province at the elbows, wrists, collar, and seams, with black cloth cut in a design, and wearing really handsome embroidered leather overalls reaching from his waist to his knees, who had a sly humour that brought forth peals of laughter from the company. He sharpened his wits upon Mariquita and her Rafael, but I took care not to understand these jokes, knowing that they are apt to embarrass a modest British matron; and as soon as I could I turned the conversation by asking if it was true that there was a susto (fright), miedo (fear), or duende (ghost) haunting the river, as I had heard tell in Algodonales. It was not strictly true that I had heard such a tale, but I know by experience that an inquiry of the kind, if made sympathetically, often brings forth some interesting folk-lore.

It did so in this case, and the story proved so strange that I must tell it in full.

I learnt that the venta is haunted by the ghost of a white cat, which appears outside the door and vanishes up the gully in the direction of a place called Las Cuevas.

How did they know it was a ghost, and not a real cat?

Because there was no white cat on the premises, and because it answered when spoken to. Many people had seen it, and if they said

The cat would answer

which is the peasant pronunciation of “estamos listos.” The correct meaning of this is “Because we are ready,” or “clever” (listo has both meanings), but they here gave “listo” the meaning of “finished” or “done with.”

But why did the cat go up to the Cuevas (caves)? And what caves did it go to? And who were referred to as “finished”?

Well, it went there because there were other ghosts there, many of them animals in all sorts of shapes; but the cat was the only one that spoke. There always had been a susto in that gully. The cuevas? Well, they were just caves, like any other caves in the Sierra. The gipsies slept in them on their way from one fair to another, and shepherds too were glad enough to take shelter there from storms like the present one. Would my honour like to see them? The storm was passing over now, and they could take me up there in a moment, before I continued my journey.

JosÉ was quite willing to accompany me to Las Cuevas, but pointed out that it was already so late that we could not hope to catch the five o’clock train at MorÓn, as the road, although quite safe for the rest of the way, would be muddy in places and make our progress slow. The SeÑora must understand that it would be night before we arrived, and SeÑoras seldom liked riding at night, although he had observed that day that English SeÑoras, if they were all like me—the first specimen of the race that he had come across—were much more valiant than those of his own country.

The ventera’s family, now quite determined to overcome all difficulties in the way of a visit which would “give importance” to their ghosts, flung themselves into the breach. Why should I not stay the night in their house? True, it was only a house of poor people, but I should have a catre in the kitchen, and the mattress of Mariquita, and the bed-linen from her chest, all quite new for her approaching wedding. And then I could go on next day at my ease for the afternoon train, for certainly it would be fine to-morrow after the storm, and the mud would have dried up; while as for food, if I would condescend to share the family puchero, it would be very rich to-day, for they had killed a fowl to put in it, and there were fresh eggs and goat cheese, and plenty of wine.

Who could resist such an offer? Certainly no archÆologist on the track of caves and ghosts.

And now comes the really strange part of my story. I found the Cuevas to be a series of chambered tombs, more or less destroyed by the wind and the rain of ages, but unmistakably sepulchral, the necropolis of a race which still used implements of stone, as many remains of such lying in the dÉbris around testified. And on the morrow, with the aid of JosÉ and the sons of the widowed ventera, I set to work to open one as yet untouched, and found, as I expected, a human skeleton extended full length on the ground, and with it sherds of broken pottery which enabled me to astonish my peasant friends by making a vague guess at the tens of centuries that had elapsed since “those dead men” were buried here.

I saw at a glance that the Cuevas had a scientific importance, for close at hand I found the relics of a remarkable temple to the sun, with its stone altar for, I fear, human sacrifices, and a stone seat for the priests. It was beyond my power to neglect such a chance for research, and I sent JosÉ back to his own village while I lingered on for a week at the venta, digging at the tombs all day. And I slept, attended by Mariquita, in a tiny two-roomed cottage built near her mother’s house for her to live in when she married, and shared the simple but excellent meals of the family, who most considerately suppressed the garlic as long as I stayed with them.

And now for the point of my long story. Until the tombs were opened and the skeletons discovered, no one in the neighbourhood had the remotest idea that there had ever been burials in Las Cuevas. How then did the place get the reputation of being haunted? The susto was of old standing, for the ventera was far from young, and she remembered hearing her grandfather say that his grandfather, like himself, had seen the white cat in the doorway of the venta, which the same family had owned for generations.

Upon examination I found that the present house, rebuilt when the actual owner was married some twenty-five years ago, stood on the ruins of a Tartessian construction, the walls of which, over a yard thick, were still visible, forming the boundary of a paved floor on which tables and benches were set out for the wayfarers frequenting the place. Previous to the rebuilding, the ruined walls had enclosed a tank or reservoir for winter rains, about ten feet deep. It had been filled up with stones from the hillside, because the stagnant water proved unhealthy; but the place retained its ancient name, the Venta of the AlbercÓn or tank. There was no doubt about it, those ruined walls were pre-Roman, for I had to work for days to get through the fellow to them which sealed the entrance to one of my chamber tombs; and the mortar was crystallised with age.

Why, I ask again—for I am quite unable to answer the question myself—do these unlettered Andalucian peasants think they see the ghost of a white cat come out of a modern house and disappear into a burial-place, which may have dated from somewhere near the period when the people of ancient Egypt worshipped a cat, among other animal deities? The only thing I can certainly say is that the legend is one of which no one can tell the origin, and that no one would be more astonished than these ghost-seers to learn that a cat was something more than a cat when those tombs were first dug out of the rock. From a certain jealousy concerning my discovery, with which any archÆologist will sympathise, I have slightly misdescribed the locale of the haunted caves. But every word of the story is strictly true, and I am quite willing to give full particulars to any one who takes a scientific interest in the matter. He will not, however, hear anything about the cat ghost unless he speaks Spanish freely and adopts an attitude of awed credulity, for no Spanish peasant will talk of ghosts if he thinks he is being laughed at.

When I finally left the venta I had to charter an extra donkey to carry the load of sherds of pottery, bricks, stones, and mortar that I had gathered in the neighbourhood of Las Cuevas, to say nothing of skulls, jaw-bones, and teeth, which Mariquita shuddered at and refused to touch when I was packing them. But the rest of the journey to MorÓn was accomplished in perfect weather, and nothing worthy of note happened on the way.

I missed my train, owing to my inveterate habit of stopping to study stones on the road. And the result was that I had to spend the night in a tiny and far-from-clean room over the posada where JosÉ stabled his beasts, because the only houses of call were full of viajantes and I could find nowhere else to sleep. JosÉ himself waited on me, for a posada provides no service, although a modest tip produced a pair of nice clean sheets from the landlady of the stable. He brought me hot strong coffee from the cafÉ which is always to be found even in small Spanish villages, coaxed hot water from some unknown place, for there is never a kettle in a posada, and slept with his head on my baggage at the foot of the stairs leading up to my room.

“It was no place for a lady,” he said, “but at least he knew the people to be honest, and I could feel quite safe (as indeed I did) with himself close at hand.”

I only caught three fleas in my bed, which I thought a moderate allowance for a room over a stable, and when I was awakened by the chumping and stamping of the numerous animals below me I smiled to think of my family’s horror could they have seen my quarters that night. They have accustomed themselves, by force of circumstances, to the idea of my sleeping on straw mattresses in country cottages, but this was my first introduction to a posada.

I do not know that I yearn to repeat the experiment, but it was worth while for once. The discomfort was atoned for by the picturesqueness of the stable through which I had to pass to get in and out of my room, with the animals and their owners dimly outlined in the light of two or three ancient olive-oil lamps hung here and there on the walls. A Madonna-like young mother with a baby at her breast, resting against a pair of panniers which her husband had backed up with a load of straw and covered with a gay striped rug, formed a pretty contrast to a grey-haired old man who was cooking his supper on a blackened brick stove in a corner near by. And the people of the house, fat and comely and pleasant-looking, sat on a queer little landing half-way upstairs, sewing and chatting under a two-candle-power electric bulb hanging from a wire so thick with flies that it looked like a hempen rope. They seemed quite indifferent to those around, but I saw that they were keeping a watchful eye on the comings and goings below, ready to secure their money at any moment from the customer whose movements indicated an early departure with his donkey. The gallery gave on to a tiny kitchen, where they cooked their own meals, although declining, as the law permits, to cook mine. It was hung with brightly polished brass utensils, and a few bits of coarse pottery adorned the chimney shelf. Among these was a curious old plate of local manufacture, which they sold to me for a few pence when I took my leave in the morning.

And so ended that trip in the Sierra. A chill in the air told me that winter was approaching as I rode down to the station, escorted to the very carriage door by the faithful JosÉ; and with a sigh of regret I saw my jamugas consigned to the luggage van, knowing that they would now have to lie idle at home for many weeks to come.

CHAPTER X

Mourning customs—“Keening” the dead—The night before the funeral—Sympathetic friends—“Accompanying” the mourners—A verbal error—Black masks at a dance—A black-draped house—The locked piano—Three years’ seclusion—The mourning of the poor—Black shirts but laughing faces—“Killed in action”—The heroism of Rosa—“My Papa”—Why Paz will be an old maid.

Mourning in Spain is a serious feature of family and social life. Even in the larger towns one sees but a slight tendency to move with the times, and away from Madrid, Seville, or Barcelona the rigid observance of ancient customs is, like the customs themselves, quite Oriental.

I remember being kept awake almost all one night in a large town by an extraordinary concert of lamentable sounds which issued from a tenement house next door. First came a long tenor wail, rising and falling in a minor key, then a precisely similar wail in a deep contralto, and then in a shrill treble, evidently from a child. I learnt next morning that an infant had died in the house in question, and that the father, the mother, and a small brother had been “keening” the dead all night long. This demonstration of grief is not so common now as it was a few years ago, even among the least educated classes, but other peculiarities hardly more in accordance with modern ideas are to be observed among mourners of all ranks.

Of these one of the strangest, to our ideas, is the custom of holding what might be called a wake over the corpse the night after death. The funeral has to take place within twenty-four hours, an excellent sanitary regulation which we English might adopt with advantage. But, as a young lady in deep mourning for her adored mother calmly remarked to me, “It is true that in the cold climate of England dead persons do not decompose so rapidly as here.” It is also true that twenty-four hours amply suffice to put the family into mourning in a country where every woman has, as a matter of course, a suit of black in her wardrobe all the year round, so that no time is lost in making clothes for the funeral, and on the night after a death has taken place all the most intimate friends are ready to sit round in token of sympathy.

A great deal of very real kindness is shown in cases of severe illness. Trained nurses are seldom or never called in, but the friends take turns to sit up with the family and the patient, and, if they are not rich, keep them supplied with chickens, eggs, and whatever else may be of use in the sick-room. The custom of “accompanying” the sufferer is, however, sometimes embarrassing to foreigners. On one occasion, when a member of my family was supposed to be in articulo mortis, his most intimate Spanish friend almost insisted on sharing my night-watches; and when at length I persuaded him that even his sympathetic presence might prove injurious to one for whom absolute quiet was the only chance, he said with intense conviction—

“At least you must promise to send for me at any moment of the day or night when you know the last hour is at hand, that I may witness the ascent of so noble a soul to heaven!”

My appreciation of what I knew was meant for the truest kindness hardly mitigated my repugnance to the mere suggestion of such an intrusion on one’s privacy at such a time. Happily for Don Antonio’s feelings as well as for mine, the illness took a favourable turn, and our friend’s tears of delight at the good news quickly obliterated the jar he had all unconsciously inflicted on one’s susceptibilities at the time of crisis. Another friend, out of sheer courtesy and goodness of heart, contrived to shock still more our British ideas: he came post-haste, on hearing that the patient was given up, to offer his services in the arrangements for the funeral!

Our ideas of keeping the sick-room free from movement or noise, and our refusal to receive at the bedside all the kind Spanish friends who came to inquire, struck them as very strange indeed, for with them sympathy is necessarily expressed by providing plenty of company “to cheer the sufferer” and those near and dear to him. I remember on one occasion being pressed by a friend to go and call on the mother of a girl who was desperately ill with meningitis—a complaint which (if correctly diagnosed) seems curiously common among the well-to-do in this country. I demurred, on the ground that my very slight acquaintance with the lady hardly justified my intruding on her grief and anxiety.

“But she is my cousin, and you are my friend, and she will certainly notice your absence if you do not go.”

I went. I counted twelve women and girls in the patient’s room, for I was obliged to go upstairs and look at the poor girl through the open door, or be regarded as cruelly unkind by the mother.

She died, as was to be expected, a few days later, and I had to appear at the house of mourning on the evening of the funeral, accompanied by the one member of our family belonging to the dead girl’s generation. I had a black dress, but my girl had only a white one, and we had hoped that this might be accepted as an excuse for her non-appearance. By no means. The cousin and her two daughters came in person, swathed in black silk shawls from head to foot, to insist on our both going with them to “dar el pÉsame,” to express sympathy with the mourner.

It was one of the most distressing experiences I have had in Spain. We elder people all sat round the room on chairs, sofas, and settees too heavy to move an inch from their appointed places, and one by one we were led into a small inner room where the mother, blind with crying, sat hunched up with her elbows on her knees and her head on her hands, giving loud utterance to her unrestrained grief.

“Oh, my daughter, my dear companion! Oh, my daughter, my dear companion!” she moaned over and over again in a voice hoarse with sobbing, and not in the least knowing what she was saying.

We had to sit down and kiss her tear-drenched cheek and say what a beautiful and charming girl her BelÉn had been, and offer a conventional prayer for divine consolation, and then some one else came in to take our place, amid a fresh burst of sobs and moans. The poor soul had worked herself into a state of hysterics, but through it all was conscious that she was fulfilling her friends’ expectations and doing the right thing by her daughter in thus proving herself helplessly broken down by her trouble. Self-restraint on such an occasion is considered to show coldness of heart and a lack of respect and affection for the dead.

When I came out after my painful interview with the mother, I found all the young cousins and companions of poor BelÉn in shrieks of laughter, and they all turned on me exclaiming—

“Oh DoÑa Elena, how funny your Olivita is! What amusing things she says! And what strange customs you have in your country!”

It appeared that my “Olivita” had been trying to explain in her still imperfect Spanish that in England young men and maidens were allowed to go out walking together, unchaperoned as here by “Mamma” on one side and “my aunt” on the other. And in mistake for pasear, to go out walking, she had used the word besar, which means to kiss. So that our mourners took her to say that it was the custom in England for the men and girls to kiss each other whenever they met in the street, and their amusement at the idea had completely blotted out of their minds for the time being the melancholy reason for their meeting.

The elder ladies took it all as a matter of course.

“Poor children,” they remarked; “they are very tired, and they laugh easily. It is quite natural, and generally happens on these sad occasions.”

As may be imagined, such vociferous grief does not long endure; but well as I thought I understood the Spanish temperament, I was rather shocked when on one occasion two girls in black masks and dominoes accosted me at a Carnival dance, and revealed themselves as the sisters of a youthful bride who had died, with her baby, less than a month before.

They threw themselves on my mercy, fearing that I might recognise them, and begged me not to betray their escapade to their mother, who believed them to be spending the evening with a sick friend, and whose consent had been with difficulty obtained for them to go out even on that errand, so soon after their sister’s death. I think this was an exceptional instance of “quick frost, long thaw,” but one often finds women in deep mourning speaking bitterly of the restrictions imposed by custom on their social and even their home life when a near relative dies.

I have heard of the whole house, from the street door to the ladies’ boudoir, being hung with black draperies for the nine days of rigorous mourning after the sudden death of the master of the house, and during all that time the women had to sit in semi-darkness, morning, noon, and night. The daughters were not allowed to touch the piano for three full years after their father’s death. A friend of theirs and mine told me that the girls, who were very fond of music, and good pianists, moped themselves into actual illness, so keenly did they feel the loss of their favourite occupation after their first grief had worn off, but nothing would induce the mother to have the piano unlocked. They were fresh young girls in their teens when the father died, full of life, of good social position, and with plenty of money to gratify every whim. When I saw them after their three years’ seclusion they were pale, thin, and melancholy, and looked like women nearer thirty than twenty in their enveloping chiffon veils, for although they had left off crape they were still clad in black from head to foot.

The friend in question, a young married woman with a devoted husband and two pretty little girls, had herself just emerged from a year’s strict retirement after losing her mother. She told me she was looked on by the older generation as an unnatural creature, because she had now begun to play her beloved piano again.

“You cannot tell how I have longed for music sometimes, as I grew accustomed to my loss,” she said, “but I could not bring myself to play. It would have seemed so dreadful to my friends and relations. I have often been terribly sad. I have sometimes almost gone mad with depression. My husband has begged me to travel with him, to play the piano, to do anything in the world that would tend to lessen my sadness. But as I never obey him when I am happy, you may guess how little attention I paid to his wishes when I was mourning for my mother. Now it is a year since she died, and I cannot help it if my neighbours criticise me. I must begin to live again.”

The strange thing about this shocking exaggeration of the outward semblance of grief is that while almost every woman one meets complains of its absurdity, its evil effects on the health, its cruel inroads on youth and happiness, none of them have the courage actively to rebel.

Poor people, while of necessity rousing themselves speedily to go out in search of the day’s wage, are just as strict as the rich in their mourning garb. When a parent dies, everything has to be black: black facings are stitched on to the men’s shirt fronts and cuffs, black cotton coats are worn, black neckties in place of collars, and black felt hats, even in the height of summer. The women for their part wear black underclothes beneath their black dresses, and tie up their heads in black handkerchiefs, sometimes pawning all their coloured clothes to pay for the conventional garments of woe. Beneath these gloomy trappings one often sees beaming smiles and eyes full of life and fun; for the workers are nothing if not sincere, and when they feel happy they show it. But when the country is in trouble whole towns and villages seem to feel it; as, for instance, during the Moroccan War of 1909. The massacre of some two thousand soldiers in the death-trap of the GurugÚ at Melilla threw a great number of poor families into mourning; and again in 1913, during the campaign of Larache, as it was here called, mourning was widespread. Every day brought news that one or two or ten or twenty men had fallen in the guerilla war carried on against Spain by the arch-bandit El Raisuli: and here not only the immediate family of the dead man wears black for him, but mourning is de rigueur among all the collateral relations even to second and third cousins.

This was brought home to me one day when I wanted to photograph a stream where women and girls were washing, for every one of them that day wore black. We finally gave up the attempt, and waited for another occasion, for, as I remarked to my photographer, we ought to introduce in the brilliant sunshine at least one girl dressed in colours.

“Very true,” was his answer, “but there is a great deal of mourning about. You see there are so many soldiers dying in Morocco just now.”

And many officers too, was my mental addition, for his words sent my thoughts with a painful rebound to a scene of domestic tragedy which I had witnessed not long before.

A lad of twenty-one, fresh from the Military Academy at Toledo, had been killed in his first action, within a week of landing in Africa. His younger brother and sister were driving to attend the Jura de la Bandera (oath to the colours) of the new recruits on the parade-ground outside the town where they lived. They bought a morning paper and read in it the news of their brother’s death, “which he gloriously met in the endeavour to save a wounded private.” Their father, who was an army doctor, was away from home; their mother, an invalid suffering from heart trouble, never read a paper. The two poor children, for they were nothing more, determined to conceal from her what had happened until their father’s return. He meanwhile, to break the blow, telegraphed to her that their Antonito was wounded, and she jumped to the conclusion that he was bringing the young man home to be nursed, and for three mortal days Julian and Adelita kept their secret and watched their mother preparing the bedroom and making cooling drinks and strengthening broths for the boy who was already in his grave.

My girl, who was a great friend of theirs, told me that Adela and her brother broke down completely when they were with her and out of their mother’s sight, but they contrived somehow or other to pull themselves together and bear brave faces before her, even when she called them straight from the condolences of sympathetic friends in the cancela to ask their opinion of this or that arrangement she had made for the comfort of their lost brother. They thought that their father, being a doctor, would know how to tell her what had happened without danger to her health, when he came home, and that gave them strength to play their parts.

Poor children and poor mother! When on the third day the cab drove up and the father got out alone, DoÑa Ramona needed no telling of the truth. She cried out, “My son is dead! I knew it all the time,” and fell fainting on the floor. And even then Adela and Julian subdued their own grief, while they helped to carry her upstairs and lay her on the bed which she did not leave again for many weeks.

And here I should like to tell another little story, also of brave self-restraint in the face of death, though of a different character.

Whatever may be the attitude of certain classes of Spaniards towards their religion and their priests, it is certain that most ladies of gentle birth believe implicitly in the dogmas and teaching of their Church. And of these one tenet of the truth of which they are absolutely convinced is that a soul which leaves the body unshriven will suffer doubly in purgatory, unless Supreme Unction is omitted owing to wilful obstruction on some one else’s part. In such a case the one who interferes with the last rites must bear the penalty, which here, in the belief of a strict Catholic, amounts to little less than eternal damnation.

A girl friend of mine saw her mother suddenly struck down with pneumonia, and the doctors told her that the case was quite hopeless, and that death must supervene within three days. None of the family had had the slightest idea that there was any danger, and when Rosa returned to the sick-room after hearing the verdict, her mother reproached her for being so long away.

“I heard you talking,” she said; “who were you with, and what was all the conversation about?”

“It was the—the—laundress,” said Rosa, “you know how careless she is.”

Her great-aunt, a stern old lady who ruled Rosa and her sister with a rod of iron, here called the girl out of the room.

“Not a moment must be lost,” she said. “We must immediately send for the priest, lest your mother should suddenly die without the Holy Oils.”

And now Rosa, a plump, placid, and hitherto seemingly characterless person, showed what filial love is capable of. I will finish the story in her own words, as she related it to me a few months later.

“I knew that if the priest came it would frighten my mother terribly. She was not at all frightened then, and was she to spend her last days on earth in a state of panic? ‘I will not send for the priest,’ I told my great-aunt, for it was my duty to send in the absence of my father, because I was the elder of the children and a nearer relation than my great-aunt. She was very angry. ‘You know what this means?’ she asked, and I said ‘Yes.’ I knew what my punishment would be, and I was willing to remain for ever in purgatory to spare my mother the fear and pain of knowing that she must leave us all. I was very frightened, but I would not give way, and my father is a free-thinker, so when he came home he said I had done well. But after my mother was dead (she died quite peacefully, thinking she was only falling asleep) my conscience troubled me very much, and I went and told what I had done to our confessor. And he was very gentle to me. He said: ‘Child, there are moments when what seems a mortal sin is only a lesser sin.’ And he gave me only a little penance, for he said he knew I had suffered very much.”

I am generally very careful to refrain from expressing any sort of opinion regarding the rites and rules of a religion which is not my own; but on this occasion I forgot myself. I told Rosa she had behaved nobly, and kissed her on both cheeks as heartily as if I had been a Spanish lady. With immense difficulty I had induced the father and the terrible great-aunt to let Rosa come with me to the seaside, for she had been ailing ever since her mother’s death, and it was considered impossible for her to leave the house in her own town, even for the walks which the doctor had recommended as necessary exercise.

“Dear DoÑa Elena, you are too good to me,” she said, returning my embrace with effusion; “how glad I am Papa let me come to stay with you. Paz and I were both getting so dreadfully fat sitting indoors all day, and oh! so triste. My mother liked society and amusement, as you know, and she took us out every day to the Promenade or to pay visits, and now we can never go out at all, except to Mass, and we were getting fatter and fatter. Paz has her novio, but I had nothing to distract me till you brought me here. If it were not for my dear Papa I should like to stop with you all the summer.”

Her “dear Papa” was a distinguished-looking man who earned a good income in a Government office, but having perpetrated a poem or two when younger, went through life posing as a soul astray in a desert of uninteresting fact. He wore rather long hair thrown back from his forehead in picturesque disarray. The picturesqueness was, however, somewhat discounted by my simple Rosa, who, seeing a bottle of a favourite Spanish hair-wash on my table, naÏvely observed—

“My Papa is using this. His hair has got thin on the top of his head, and he is so worried about it! Do you think this stuff is any good? Paz and I take turns to rub it on his scalp every night for half an hour before he goes to bed, but I don’t see much difference.”

“My Papa” was by no means a disconsolate widower. While the women of the family carry their mourning to the exaggerated lengths I have described, the men resume their usual habits a very short time after the funeral. Thus Papa’s daughters would often have to sit up very late at night to attend to his hyacinthine locks before he went to bed, but they took it all as a matter of course, and would have been extremely surprised had I hinted that Rosa’s delicate health and over-strained nerves might be a sufficient excuse for her release from these nocturnal duties. This is another aspect of the Oriental tradition—the inability of both men and women to realise that the husband or the father has not the right, simply because he is the husband or the father, to demand from his women-folk the service of slaves at all hours of the day or night, regardless of their convenience, happiness, or health.

When their mother had been dead a year, and Rosa and Paz had recovered their natural spirits and were ready to enjoy life again, their father had an attack of influenza, and both the girls got into a panic lest they were to be left doubly orphaned. He was not seriously ill, but very sorry for himself, and for months afterwards, whenever he caught the slightest cold or felt the least little indigestion, he would come home from his office and go straight to bed, and then he expected both his daughters to be ready to wait upon him. Paz always had to prepare his meals, because she knew better than the cook how he liked them flavoured; and Rosa had to be on hand to sit with him, read to him, and generally anticipate his every requirement. And as they never knew when he might feel unwell and come home to bed, and as he, of course, never dreamed of sending them notice beforehand from his office, it ended in his daughters literally never daring to go out at all after lunch.

I was shocked when I discovered the life they were leading. The novio of Paz had broken off the engagement, nominally because she could not pay her weekly duty calls on his mother, who was a stickler for etiquette and had no sympathy with “my Papa’s” hypochondria, and the only gleam of brightness on the poor girls’ horizon was the appearance of a lover for Rosa, the quiet one of the sisters, who had never attracted attention like handsome Paz. It was quite useless to ask them out, to suggest their taking turns in keeping Papa company, to make impromptu calls on the way to cinematographs or theatres on the chance of finding them free. Papa always either had just gone to bed or was just expected home to dinner; their duty to him had become an obsession, and the obsession was encouraged by him from purely selfish motives, and by the old aunt because in her view the girls would be committing a grave breach of decorum in going into society so soon (well over a year!) after their mother’s death. And worst of all, papa, from pure jealousy, objected to Rosa’s lover and forbade him the house, professing to have discovered that his means were uncertain, and announcing that he had no intention of spending his own hard-earned money on the support of an idle son-in-law.

But for once Papa met his match. The lover was neither idle nor impecunious, but a man of strong character and good position, and he was genuinely attached to our placid Rosa. So one fine morning the lovers met at Mass, and got married after a fashion peculiar, I believe, to Spain.

Just before the Mass ended they stepped forward, declared themselves man and wife, and asked for a blessing on their union. The priest may object, but he cannot refuse, for he must pronounce the benediction after saying Mass, and that serves as the blessing which sanctions these stolen marriages.

So Rosa went away with her husband and was happy, and soon fined down to her normal soft but shapely plumpness, while poor Paz stayed at home and pandered to her father until she came to weigh something like two hundredweight.

I met her quondam novio shortly after Rosa’s marriage, and gently reproached him for deserting the girl whom he had “pretended to” for so long.

“Don’t blame me,” he said; “it’s all her father’s fault for not letting her take enough exercise to keep her fat down. I am not tall (he was about five feet high, a slim little pocket Adonis), and I haven’t the courage to make myself ridiculous by marrying a woman who will make two of me before she is thirty.”

I could not help feeling that there was something to be said on his side; but once again the cruel results of this branch of Spanish etiquette became apparent. If Paz had been able to lead a natural life, walking by day and dancing by night, as she did while her mother was living, she would not have lost either her figure or her lover, for before they went into mourning she and Rosa were among the merriest and most active of all the girls in their set. And now one can anticipate for her no brighter future than to be the maiden aunt to Rosa’s children, a sort of household drudge and mother’s help for life;—beloved, it is true, by the nephews and nieces, who will regard her with an affection almost if not quite equal to that bestowed on their mother herself, but always just “my aunt,” a woman in a subordinate position, given a home for the sake of her services as nurse while the children are young, and as duenna when the girls grow up. She will always be cheerful and philosophical, for Paz is made that way, and she will always be practical and helpful in the house. But she will be an old maid, a good wife spoiled, and she will feel it to the end. And all because when she was yet in her teens she was compelled to sit indoors for a year after her mother’s death, and therefore grew so fat that her lover was frightened away. Poor Paz! She is one of many victims to a ridiculous and indefensible custom and a mistaken sense of duty.

CHAPTER XI

Entertaining in town and country—Critical guests—A subscription ball—Le dernier cri from London—Dancing in a bog—Why the ladies went home—The search for Spanish gaiety—A disappointed artist—Afternoon calls—Arab hospitality—Ladies at work—Spanish unpunctuality—A new winter coat—Maria’s compliment—Open house to old servants—Carmen the cigarrera.

It does not cost much to entertain in Spain, at any rate in the smaller towns. In the large towns things are otherwise, and it may be as well to begin by relating an incident that I heard of in connection with some very pleasant friends who lived in one of the “capitals,” which means the chief town of the great provinces into which Spain is divided. Here there is a great deal of cursileria—a slang term best translated as “snobbishness”—and as every lady who gives a party wishes to spend more than any other lady, and as pride is everywhere more plentiful than pesetas, little hospitality is shown to or by people who are not rich.

An heiress had married the head of an old and noble family who himself possessed hardly anything beyond the family estate in Castile. Just when her eldest girl put on her first long frock and was about to be presented at Court, my friend lost almost all her money through some unfortunate speculation on the part of her husband—for the husband, be it observed, is absolute master of his wife’s property in Spain. After the first shock the Condesa removed to a smaller house, and arranged her mode of life to suit her altered circumstances, while the Conde, a Colonel in the King’s Guard, went to Madrid as usual to fulfil his duty at Court.

One of the things saved from the wreck was a grand piano, for the Condesa was a first-rate musician, and on Salud’s eighteenth “name-day” a party was arranged with the double object of “offering the new house” to their large circle of acquaintance, and giving the girl a little amusement at home, since it was now out of the question for her to have a season at Madrid. The three daughters set to work and made paper flowers—a pretty accomplishment in which Spanish ladies excel—and garlands of leaves to adorn the patio. The Condesa herself superintended the preparation of various dainty little refreshments for her guests, and everything on the eventful night was as bright and attractive as good taste and willing hands could make it.

But there were no ices, no champagne, no set supper, and no band, the girls of the house taking turns to play endless seguidillas, rigodones, and valses for their guests. And when the dance was over and the Condesa and her daughters stood in the patio saying good-bye to those whom they had done their best to entertain, they heard one aristocratic dame remark to another of her kind—

“Were you ever before invited to anything quite so shabby? Really, if Maria de las Nieves could not afford something better than that, she had no business to invite us at all!”

But this specimen of aristocratic courtesy was displayed in a “capital,” and things fortunately are very different in more out-of-the-way places.

In these I have seen young people meet together to talk and laugh and dance for hours, quite satisfied with no more costly refreshment than a bottle of water with a single glass from which they all drank in turn; while a lady who held weekly receptions to which we were invited once for the whole year, was regarded as quite a liberal hostess because she provided weak coffee and biscuits ad lib.

It was in a country town that I had the pleasure of attending my first and only subscription ball in Spain. The King’s approaching marriage had brought everything English very much into fashion, and we were received on entering the theatre, where the ball was held, by the young gentleman who had got us the tickets, dressed as a Pierrot but wearing a bowler hat from Christie’s, whose label was displayed by an ingenious turn of the hand as he led me into the dancing-room, otherwise the auditorium of the theatre.

It was Carnival, and most of the dancers were in fancy dress. The place was prettily decorated, and the boxes and dress circle were crowded with spectators. All the elder ladies were wearing black or white mantillas or Manila shawls, and one ought to have received an impression of smartness or even of elegance. But something was wrong somewhere to our English eyes, and instead of admiring the coup d’oeil one cast about to see why one felt as if one had accidentally intruded upon a festivity in Whitechapel.

“Will you dance with me?” asked the Pierrot of a girl of our party, who, by the way, wore a realistic beggar’s dress, all red and yellow rags, which her Spanish friends thought very absurd because it had cost only a few pesetas. And as the couple moved off together I suddenly discovered why the scene reminded me of a London coster dance. Every young man and many of the old ones wore a hat—generally a bowler—and even if he took it off to valse, which not many of them did, he carried it carefully under his arm as he danced, regardless of the inconvenience to his partner.

“What do you think of our ball?” asked an acquaintance, who was smoking a cigarette as well as wearing his hat.

I was tactless enough to say that it looked odd to us to see so many hats about, and I noticed that the young man’s face fell. I learnt afterwards that the bowler from Christie’s was believed to be absolutely the dernier cri in England, and that being so, it was considered as appropriate to the ballroom as to the street.

The entertainment was got up by the rank and fashion of the town, so everybody behaved with great dignity, and there was none of the rollicking fun we expected to see at a Carnival ball. The ladies in the boxes continually threw serpentinas and confetti at the dancers, until the floor was inches deep in them, and an Irish girl in our party said she felt as if she was dancing in one of her native bogs. But no one got excited, and an English artist on the look out for local colour began to bewail the absence of the light and life that he had believed inseparable from Spanish society.

A little before 1 a.m. there was a universal move towards the centre of the theatre, and at a given signal the heavens seemed to open and a mass of paper flowers, confetti, and bonbons concealed behind the garlands draping the ceiling, showered down on our heads, while a number of white pigeons were let loose and flew about in terror; but still nobody got excited. When this was over the Pierrot in charge of our party called the eldest of the Englishmen aside and asked him to take his ladies home, “because other ladies would be coming now”—a gentle hint, on which all the English and most of the Spanish dames hastily took their departure. The artist was the only one of us who stayed, hoping that with the advent of the “other ladies” he might see something of the celebrated animation which he wanted to introduce into his pictures of Spanish life. He told us next day that he had stopped till 4 a.m., and then came home escorted by half the Spanish army and all the Spanish navy—as represented at the ball—most of them rather and some of them very drunk, but solemn to the last.

“Spanish gaiety is a fraud,” he indignantly declared, and departed in dudgeon, shaking the dust of our town off his feet.

But when I came to know more of Spanish society I understood why all the ladies and many of the men were so solemn on that occasion. Being at a subscription and thus a semi-public ball, they considered that it would be infra dig. to show that they were amused. I never went to another such dance, for I prefer natural fun among young people at a party, but I would not have missed that one for the world; it was so delightfully unlike anything else of the kind one had ever seen.

Afternoon calling in Spain is very different from the quarter-of-an-hour duty visit or the formal leaving of cards which is customary in England—or was when I left my native country ten years or so ago.

Here it is a serious matter for those who have any sort of occupation, for one is expected to stay never less than an hour, and indeed your intimate friends are hurt if you don’t remain the whole afternoon.

It is absolutely contrary to etiquette to go out when you have visitors, no matter how important an engagement you may have made before the uninvited guests appeared. I have known friends fail to arrive when expected to a ceremonious dinner at our house, and the all-sufficient reply to my reproaches has been, “I was very sorry, but what was I to do? We had visitors.”

This exaggerated regard for the duties of hospitality in your own house, coupled with a calm disregard of any obligation imposed by an engagement to visit your neighbours, is another of the innumerable survivals of Arabic tradition, and as such must be respected by all who would enjoy the friendship of Spaniards. It is stronger in the south than in the north, where the Oriental influence was comparatively ephemeral and made no lasting impression on the natives. And it is even said that in Barcelona the Catalans sometimes turn up punctually when they have made a business engagement. This, I am credibly informed, is one of the causes, as well as an effect, of CataluÑan prosperity. But the Catalans are reputed to make a boast of their virtues, and this ridiculous regard for punctuality and the rest is one of their many offences in the eyes of e.g. the Andalucians, who are to the Catalans as oil to water, and never will agree with them on any single question to the crack of doom.

The extraordinary indifference of Spaniards to fixed hours and previously made engagements caused me no little trouble in connection with the photograph facing the head of this chapter. I wanted to take a pretty group formed day after day by the friends with whom I was staying, as they sat at work in their charming old patio, with some small nieces playing about them, and a typically Spanish air of ease and comfortable nÉgligÉ pervading the whole scene. So I asked them to be in their usual rocking-chairs on a certain day, fixed by themselves, and arranged with the photographer to come at three o’clock on that afternoon, this being the time when my friends were always sitting there with their needlework, and the one hour in the whole day when the light in the patio, which was shadowed by a large orange tree, admitted of successful photography.

At three o’clock the patio was empty, save for a baby niece and her nurse. The girls, I was told, were dressing for the occasion. At three-thirty the photographer came. By that time the baby niece, badly bored, had begun to cry, and she continued to cry until at last she had to be taken away. She was a pretty baby, and I did not want to lose her from the picture. At four o’clock, when the light in the patio was already bad, the girls at last appeared, not, as had been arranged, in their everyday dresses prepared to sit down for a couple of hours’ needlework, but in the costume of peasant girls got up for the fair, and quite obviously ladies in fancy dress. Nor was this the only disappointment to a writer who wanted a picture of Spanish ladies at home, for the sight of the camera had attracted all the children of my friends’ friends within range, and I was told by my hostess that great offence would be given if they were not allowed to figure in the photograph.

As it was evidently useless now to attempt to get the sort of group I wanted, I gave way with such grace as I could command. The weeping baby was brought back, still weeping and refusing to be comforted even by some artificial flowers offered by its mother, who had put on a beautiful Manila shawl as an appropriate garment for sewing in the patio. The children from over the way planted themselves as seemed good to them, and the grown ladies settled themselves as the photographer recommended. When all was ready half an hour or so later, the sun went behind a cloud, the baby gave an extra howl, my particular friend stepped out of focus, and the photograph was of course hopelessly spoiled.

When the superfluous children had run away thinking it was all over, and most of the ladies had taken their leave, the sun reappeared, and the photographer hastily snapped the two prettiest girls, with the baby’s mother pretending to be the nurse of the elder nieces, who yawned violently and informed us that their dolls had gone to sleep.

All things considered, I think the result was fairly good, but it is not a picture of Spanish ladies sitting at home with their sewing in the reposeful attitudes characteristic of the land where one hour is as good as another. I gave that up after wasting a whole afternoon and a certain amount of money in the manner here described. Neither the ladies nor the photographer seemed at all concerned at the fiasco, nor were the former at all contrite at having caused it by their unpunctuality. Indeed one of them, adding insult to injury, informed me that if I had had SeÑor Fulano instead of Don Mengano to take those photographs I should have obtained better results. And I think it should be counted to me for righteousness that I refrained from pointing out what admirable pictures my photographer produced when he had not to deal with society ladies.

The subjects of conversation at these friendly sewing parties are apt to be somewhat limited in scope, but one that never fails to please is dress in all shapes and forms.

The day after the photograph fiasco was the saint’s day, or name-day, of Maria de las MercÉdÉs, one of the two seÑoritas pretending to be a peasant at the well in the patio. And in the afternoon I was invited to eat cakes and drink wine, and be introduced to various callers who had come to offer the usual congratulations. MercÉdÉs had received, as a name-day present from her brother, a new winter coat of the latest fashion, and first she had to put it on to exhibit to every woman and girl who called, and then every girl who called had to take the coat and try it on for herself. How they could do this I can’t imagine, for it was a blazing hot day of St. Martin’s summer, and in deference to a lady who had a cold we were all together in a small sitting-room with the windows shut. But one after the other of MercÉdÉs’ young friends slipped into the garment, studied her appearance in the mirrors with which every Spanish sala is plentifully provided, suggested improvements in this or that detail, and invariably ended by asking how much the coat cost and telling the owner that it was a wonderful bargain.

If the seÑoritas had brought gifts themselves, there might have been some excuse for their insatiable curiosity as to the price of the brother’s present; but no: on Spanish name-days (which are equivalent to our birthdays) it is the heroine of the day who makes offerings, represented by cakes and wine, instead of receiving them. I trust that my readers will not cry “enough of King Charles’s head” if I again remark that this is an Oriental tradition, just as many of the cakes themselves are made after Oriental recipes.

The custom of asking the price of whatever they admire is universal here, and is not in the least considered bad manners. The first Spanish lady whose acquaintance we made in Spain asked us what we were paying at the hotel we were staying at. When we took a house we were always asked what rent we paid, and when finally we bought the house in which we hope to end our days, all our Spanish friends asked us what the price was, and held up their hands in congratulatory amazement, exclaiming, “How cheap!” It is always a compliment to say you have made a good bargain, and if you wish to annoy, you have only to remark, “How they have cheated you!”

An old servant who lived with us for a good many years hoarded all her wages and spent nothing beyond the “tips” she received from visitors. To my certain knowledge she never bought a new dress for herself all the time she was with us, but wore my cast-off clothes when doing her work, and a brown, or as she called it, “Carmelite” cloth skirt, given her by a visitor, for Mass and the street, year in year out, until some one else gave her a blue serge which she turned and made to look like new. She was under a vow from her childhood never to wear any colour out of doors but brown, in honour of Our Lady of Carmel; but the vow somehow slipped into the background when she received the blue serge, and this will probably last her till she dies, for she is well over seventy.

This old lady, the first time she saw me in a new (and rather expensive) dress, came up and fingered the silk very carefully, and walked round and round me with expressions of enthusiastic admiration, such as—

“SeÑora, how beautiful! How handsome you are in your new costume! Never have I seen you look so well and so fat!” (As in the East, stout women are greatly admired here.)

And to finish up with, she said—

“SeÑora, the material is excellent. What did you pay for the dress, and where did you get it? To-morrow I shall go to the shop and buy myself just such another!”

I am afraid I did not receive this proposal with enthusiasm; but after a while I became used to talk of the kind, for I discovered that old Maria had no more idea of copying my clothes than she had of making a trip to England, and merely intended to suggest that sincerest form of flattery which is found in imitation.

I have met with many odd incidents showing how in certain ways the most complete familiarity prevails between master and servant, although in others there is a gulf fixed which seems to be impassable.

Servants, male and female, who have been engaged in a house even for a short time, especially in the country, are made more or less free of it for the rest of their lives. They may go away to other situations, or marry and set up their own homes, but always when they come to see their former mistress they walk in as if the house belonged to them, and are treated as if they had a perfect right to be there. A laundress or charwoman will arrive with three or four small children at her heels, and these will sit about in the laundry or the patio all day, while the mother does her work. I am bound to say that the little things generally behave very well, being trained in the hard school of necessity, and as soon as they can walk and talk they begin to run errands for the household. They soon become useful in this way, for errands are innumerable here. Save in big country houses which depend largely on their own farms and fruit gardens for provisions, it is the exception to have a storeroom, and every pennyworth of household sundries, down to salt, pepper, and spices, is bought from day to day. As no attempt is made to furnish a list of requirements for the day’s meals when the cook goes to market, every item used in the cooking has to be got when it is found to be wanted—a system which accounts for much of the unpunctuality of meals in Spanish houses, and for the resultant national tendency to various forms of dyspepsia.

This of course does not apply to the poor, whose food is of the simplest. They eat bread and morcilla or chorizo (varieties of dried sausage highly flavoured with garlic) for their lunch, and puchero or cocido—of which more later on—for their dinner. In the towns they buy everything by the day, like their employers. But in the country they largely live on what they grow themselves, unless the whole family is engaged on the farm at a wage which includes food. And they thrive on bread, morcilla, and water, not even coffee being drunk by country cottagers, as I have discovered when accepting their hospitality on my archÆological excursions. Thus they have no need to be continually running to the comestibles shop, like their town friends, which is just as well when the nearest town may be anything from two to ten miles away.

To return to the manners of Spanish servants. I was sitting one evening with friends over the after-dinner coffee when a picturesque creature in a purple garment of penitence, with a white handkerchief on her head, and a pair of twins in her arms, strolled in to tell the family that she had had a letter from her brother, a soldier in Morocco. They were all obviously interested, and while I listened to their sympathetic inquiries about the young man’s health and happiness, I finished my coffee and handed my cup for a fresh supply. The bearer of the twins broke off short in her talk on noticing that I refused sugar.

“Is it possible that the SeÑora drinks coffee without sugar? Never have I heard of such a thing. Is it not very unpleasant to the taste?”

And then and there she shifted both babies on to one arm, took the unused spoon from my saucer, dipped it into my cup, and proceeded to try for herself what coffee without sugar tasted like.

I had much ado to refrain from laughing, the woman’s simple unconsciousness of offence was so funny. One of my friends asked me in English—

“What do you think of Spanish impudence?” but no one else took any notice.

This particular act was unusual, because everybody takes sugar in their coffee, so that few opportunities arise for a servant to sample the unsweetened coffee in her master’s cup. But the licensed familiarity that underlay it is widespread.

Sometimes, however, an excess of familiarity brings about condign punishment, as in a case that occurred in the hotel in which we stayed on our first arrival in Spain.

I was alone in our little sitting-room one day, strumming on a guitar, when the door suddenly opened and in marched a large blowsy woman with big black eyes, a wilted rose in her hair, and a cigarette in her mouth. She plumped herself down on the only easy-chair in the place, took the guitar from my unresisting hands, remarked “I can play better than that at any rate!” and struck up the twanging chords which preface every south-Spanish song.

It was perfectly true that she played better than I did, though that was not saying much, for she could hardly have played worse. And I was so much amused at her calm assurance that I just sat and laughed, while she twanged the guitar and beat on the floor with her slippered foot preparatory to bursting into song. But the concert was quickly brought to an end by the entrance of an indignant chambermaid, who seized the guitar and soundly cuffed the guitarist with an Anda! Vete tu!(“Go! Get out!”) full of wrath and indignation.

“She seems fond of music,” said I deprecatingly, for the whole scene had been as good as a play to me.

“Fond of music! Ca!” retorted the chambermaid. “She’s the washerwoman, and she’s drunk!”

Further inquiry elicited that the washerwoman was a cigarrera by profession—hence the cigarette, for respectable women in Spain do not smoke. And her name was Carmen! Shades of Bizet and his “toreador”! Alas! The landlady dismissed her next morning, and I never had another scene from that play enacted before me. Incidentally I may remark that drunkenness among women is extremely rare in Spain, and I can only remember coming into direct contact with one other old lady the worse for aguardiente in all the years I have lived here.