Part 10 (2/2)
It might have been Cortes who was offering that bowl of _puchero_, but no! Cortes would have mixed it in his plumy helmet and stirred it with that thin, keen sword one may see in the Madrid _Armeria_. This was a barefooted cabin boy, in blue linen blouse and patched blue trousers, with a scarlet cloth cap tied over his head by means of an orange-colored handkerchief. The dancing eyes that lit his shy brown face had sea blues in them. He was a winsome little fellow enough, but I did not incline to his cookery. While I was watching river, sh.o.r.es, and herds and chatting with the _simpatico_ sailor, who, taking his cue from my look, expressed the deepest abhorrence of the bull-fights, which, I make no doubt, he would sell his dinner, jacket, bed, even his guitar, to see, I had taken secret note of the cuisine. This child, who could not have counted his twelfth birthday, kindled the fire in a flimsy tin pail, lined with broken bricks. He cracked over his knee a few pieces of driftwood, mixed the fragments with bits of coal which he shook out of a sheepskin bottle, doused oil over the whole, and cheerfully applied the match, while the commercial traveller hastily drew up a bucket of water to have on hand for emergencies. Then the boy, with excellent intentions in the way of neatness, whisked his blackened hands across the rough end of a rope and plunged them into the pot of _garbanzos_, to which he added beans, cabbage, remnants of fried fish, and other sundries at his young discretion. And while the mess was simmering, he squatted down on the deck, with his grimy little feet in his fists, rocking himself back and forth to his own wild Malaga songs, and occasionally disengaging one hand or the other to plunge it into the pot after a tasty morsel.
”Will you eat?” he repeated manfully, reddening under the scrutiny of stranger eyes.
”Many thanks! May it profit yourself!”
I opened my luncheon, and again we exchanged these fixed phrases of Spanish etiquette, although after the refusals enjoined by code of courtesy, the boy was finally induced to relieve me of my more indigestible goodies.
”Did you ever hear of Columbus?” I asked, as we munched chestnut cakes together, leaning on the rail.
”No, senora,” he replied, with another blush, ”I have heard of nothing. I know little. I am of very small account. I cook and sing. I am good for nothing more.”
And is it to this those arrogant Spanish boasts, which rang like trumpets up and down the Guadalquivir, have come at last!
We were in the heart of a perfect sapphire day. The river, often turbulent and unruly, was on this April afternoon, the sailors said, _buen muchacho_, a good boy. The boat appeared to navigate herself.
The captain nodded on his lofty perch, and the engineer was curled up in his own tiny hatchway, trying to read a newspaper, which the fresh breeze blew into horns and balloons. The rough cabin bunks were full of sleeping forms, and the leather wine-bottles, flung down carelessly in the stern, had cuddled each to each in cozy shapes, and seemed to be sleeping, too. The two soldiers, who had been gambling with coppers over innumerable games of dominos, were listening grimly to the oratory of the commercial traveller.
”No fighting for me!” this hero was declaiming. ”In strenuous times like these a man ought to cherish his life for the sake of his country. Spain needs her sons right here at home. It is sweet, as the poet says, to die for the _patria_, but to live for the _patria_ is, in my opinion, just as glorious.”
”And more comfortable,” grunted one of the soldiers, while the other gave a hitch to those red infantry trousers which look as if they had been wading in blood, and walked forward to view from the bows the little white port of Bonanza.
As the boat went no farther, I had to stain my silver route by a prosaic parenthesis of land. It was some comfort to remember that Magellan waited here for that expedition from Seville which was the first to sail around the globe. I think I travelled the three miles from Bonanza, Good Weather, to San Lucar de Barrameda in Magellan's own carriage. It was certainly old enough. As I sat on a tipsy chair in the middle of a rude wagon frame mounted on two shrieking wooden wheels, and hooded with broken arches of bamboo, from which flapped shreds of russet oilcloth, I entered into poignant sympathy with Magellan's ups and downs of hope and fear. The jolting was such a torture that, to divert my attention, I questioned the driver as to the uses of this and that appliance in his rickety ark.
”And what are those ropes for, there in the corner?” was my final query.
”Those are to tie the coffins down when I have a fare for the cemetery,” he replied, cracking his whip over the incredibly lean mule that was sulkily jerking us along.
”Please let me get out and walk,” I entreated. ”You may keep the valise and show me the way to the inn, and I can go quite as fast as that mule.”
”Now, don't!” he begged, with even intenser pathos. ”Strangers always want to walk before they get to the inn, and then the people laugh at me. I know my carriage isn't very handsome, but it's the only one in Bonanza. Just do me the favor to keep your seat a little longer.”
I had been lurched out of it only a minute before, but I could not refuse to sacrifice mere bodily ease to the pride of Spanish spirit.
Notwithstanding Don Jose's dark predictions, this was the only trial of the trip. To realize to the full the honesty, kindliness, and dignity of the everyday Spaniard, one needs to turn off from the sight-seer's route. On the beaten tourist track are exorbitant hotels, greedy guides, cheating merchants, troops of beggars--everywhere ”the itching palm.” But here in San Lucar, for instance, where I had to spend twenty-four hours at a genuine Spanish _fonda_, the proprietor took no advantage of the facts that I was a foreigner, a woman, and practically a prisoner in the place until the Sat.u.r.day afternoon train went out, but gave me excellent accommodations, most respectful and considerate treatment, and the lowest hotel bill that I had seen in Spain.
San Lucar has, in early Spanish literature, a very ill name for roguery, but, so far as my brief experience went, Boston could not have been safer and would not have been so genial. I strayed, for instance, into a modest little shop to buy a cake of soap, which its owner declined to sell, insisting that I ought to have a choicer variety than his, and sending his son, a lad of sixteen, to point me out more fas.h.i.+onable counters. This youth showed me the sights of the pleasant seash.o.r.e town, with its tiers of closely grated windows standing out from the white fronts of the houses, and its st.u.r.dy packhorses and orange-laden donkeys streaming along the rough stone streets, and when, at the inn door, I hesitatingly offered him a piece of silver, doffed his cap with smiling ease, and said he did not take pay for a pleasure.
Once off the regular lines of travel, however, speed is out of the question. I might have gone from Seville to Cadiz in three hours; thanks to historic enthusiasms, it took me nearer three days. After escaping from San Lucar, I had to pa.s.s four hours in Jerez, another whitewashed, palm-planted town, whose famous sherry has made it the third city in Spain for wealth. The thing to do at Jerez is to visit the great _bodegas_ and taste the rich white liquors treasured in those monster casks, which bear all manner of names, from Christ and His twelve disciples to Napoleon the Great; but mindful, in the light of Don Jose's admonitions, that the weak feminine estate is ”as water unto wine,” I contented myself with seeing the strange storage basin of the mountain aqueduct--an immense, immaculate cellar, where endless vistas of low stone arches stretch away in the silent dusk above the glimmer of a ghostly lake.
The train for Cadiz must needs be two hours late this particular evening, but my cabman drove me to approved shops for the purchase of bread and fruit, and then, of his own motion, drew up our modest equipage in a shady nook opposite the villa of the English consul, that I might enjoy my Arcadian repast with a secure mind. Jehu accepted, after due protestations, a share of the viands, and reciprocated the attention by buying me a gla.s.s of water at the nearest stand, much amused at my continued preference for Jerez water over Jerez wine.
One of the Jerez wine merchants, German by birth, shared the railway carriage with me for a while, and after the social wont of Continental travel fell to discussing the war. ”The Spaniards deserved to be beaten,” he declared, ”but the Yankees didn't deserve to beat. They were conceited enough before, heaven knows, and now they expect all Europe to black their shoddy shoes. Your own country was a bit to blame in blocking every effort to keep them in their place.”
I felt it time to explain that I was not English, but American. Much disconcerted, he did his best to make amends.
”I wouldn't have said that for the world if I had known you were an American--but it's every syllable true.”
He thought over this remark in silence for a moment, his Teutonic spirit sorely strained between kindliness and honesty, and tried again.
”I would like to say something good about the United States, I would indeed,--if there was anything to say.”
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