Читать книгу The Travelling Thirds - Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton - Страница 4

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“Let us get out and race it,” suggested Catalina; but she spoke with the accent of indolent content, and hung over the door of the leisurely train, giving no heed beyond a polite nod to the nervous protests of Mrs. Moulton. That good lady, surrounded by air-cushions, which the various members of her attentive family distended at stated intervals, had propped herself in a corner, determined to let no expression of fatigue escape her, and enjoying herself in her own fashion. The material discomforts of travel certainly overbalanced the æsthetic delights, but, at least, she was seeing the Europe she had dreamed of so ardently in her youth. Jane sat in another corner reading a volume of Pater. It was impossible to turn her back on the scenery, for the seats ran from east to west and they were travelling due south, but she could ignore it, and that she did.

They were in a large, open car furnished with wooden seats and a door for each aisle. The carriage was not dirty, and all the windows were open; moreover, it harbored, so far, no natives beyond two nuns and a priest, who ate cherries continually and talked all at once with the rapidity of ignited fire-crackers and with no falling inflection. The Moultons had taken possession of the last compartment and sat with their backs to the wall, but Catalina, disdaining such poor apology for comfort, had the next to herself, and when not hanging over the door rambled back and forth. Mr. Moulton and Lydia alternately read Baedeker and leaned forward with exclamations of approval.

But although Catalina had responded amiably to Lydia’s expression of contempt for Spanish methods of transit, the ambling train suited her less energetic nature and enabled her to study the country that had mothered her own. She stared hard at the blue and tumbled masses of the Pyrenees with their lofty fields of snow glittering in a delicate mist, the same frozen solitude through which Hannibal marched two thousand years ago, longing, perhaps, for the hot, brown plain of Ampurdan below and the familiar murmur of the bright waters that rimmed it. The sun was hot, and all that quivering world of blue shimmered and sparkled and coquetted as if life and not death were its bridegroom. But the Mediterranean, like other seas, is a virago at heart and only dances and sways like a Spanish beauty when out where there is naught to oppose her; for centuries she has been snarling and clawing the rocky head-lands, her white fangs never failing to capture their daily morsel, and never content.

Catalina loved the sea and hated it. To-day she was in no mood to give it anything and turned her back upon it, her eyes travelling from the remote, disdainful beauty of the mountains down over the vineyards and villages, leaning far out to catch a last glimpse of that most characteristic object in a Spanish landscape—a huge and almost circular mass of rock rising abruptly from the plain, brown, barren, its apex set with a fortified castle, an old brown town clinging desperately to the inhospitable sides. The castle may be in ruins, but men and women still crawl lazily up and down the perpendicular streets, too idle or too poor to get away from the soil, with its dust of ancestral blood. The descendants of warriors slept and loafed and begged in the sun, thankful for a tortilla a day and dreading nothing this side of Judgment but the visit of the tax-gatherer. To escape the calls of the remorseless one, many who owned not even a little vineyard on the plain slept in the hollowed side of a hill and made the earth their pillow.

“Brutes!” said Catalina, meaning the government.

“Why don’t they come to America?” asked Lydia, wonderingly. “Look at that old woman out in the field. That is the most shocking thing you see in Europe—women in the fields everywhere.”

Catalina, indolent in some respects, waged eternal war with the one-sided. “Your factories are far worse,” she asserted. “They are really horrible, for the women stand on their feet all day with a ceaseless din tearing at their nerves and never a breath of decent air in their lungs. They are the most ghastly lot I ever saw in my life. These women are always in the fresh air, with the quiet of nature about them, and they rest when they like. I think we are the barbarians—we and the Spanish government.”

“Well, well, don’t argue,” said Mr. Moulton, soothingly. “It is too hot. We have our defects, but don’t forget our many redeeming virtues. And as for Spain, backward, tax-ridden, oppressed as she is, one sees nothing to compare with the horrors that Arthur Young saw in France just before 1789. Spain, no doubt, will have her own revolution in her own time; I am told the peasants are very virile and independent. My love, shall I blow up that bag behind your head?”

He examined the other bags, readjusted them, and there being nothing to claim the eye at the moment, read Baedeker aloud, to the intense but respectful annoyance of his eldest daughter and the barely concealed resentment of Catalina, who hung still farther over the creaking door.

The train walked into a little station of Tordera and stopped.

“Cinco minutos!” said the guard, raising his voice.

“Five!” said Catalina. “That means fifteen. Let us get out and exercise and buy something.”

“Pray be careful!” exclaimed Mrs. Moulton. “I know you will be left. Mr. Moulton, please—please don’t get out.”

Mr. Moulton patted her amiably and descended in the wake of Catalina and Lydia. They were surrounded at once by beggars, even the babies in arms extending their hands. There were few men among them, but the women, picturesque enough in their closely pinned kerchiefs of red or yellow, were more pertinacious than man ever dared to be. Lydia, fastidious and economical, retreated into the train and closed the door; but Catalina disbursed coppers and gave one dirty little Murillo a peseta. She had spoken almost as much Spanish in her life as English, and exchanged so many elaborate compliments with her retinue, in a manner so acceptable to their democratic taste, that they forgot to beg and pressed close at her heels as she strode up and down, her hands in her pockets, wondering what manner of fallen princess was this who travelled third class and knew how to treat a haughty peasant of Spain as her equal. She was buying an inflammable-looking novel with which to insult Jane, and a package of sweets for Lydia and herself, when she heard a shrill note of anguish:

“Mr. Moulton! Catalina!”

Mingling with it was the drone of the guard: “Viajeros al tren!”

The train was moving, the guard having been occupied at the cantina until the last moment. He was singing his song unconsciously on the step of an open door. Catalina saw the frantic whir of Mr. Moulton’s coat-tails as he flew by and leaped into the car. She flung two pesetas at the anxious vender, dropped her purchase into her pockets, and, running swiftly alongside the moving train, made the door easily.

“I could have caught the old thing if it had been half a mile off!” she exclaimed, indignantly, as three pairs of hands jerked her within, and Mrs. Moulton sniffed hysterically at her salts. “And if ever I do get left, just remember that I speak the language and am not afraid of anything.”

“Well,” said Mr. Moulton, tactfully, “just remember that we do not speak the language and have need of your services. Suppose we have our afternoon meal? The lunch at the frontier was not all that could be desired.”

He produced the hamper and neatly arrayed the top of two portmanteaus with jam and bread and cake. Catalina placed a generous share of these delicacies on a tin plate, and, omitting to explain to her astonished relatives, climbed over the seats and made offering to each of the other occupants of the car. It had half filled at the station, and besides the nuns and priests there were now several Catalan peasants in red caps and black velvet breeches, fine, independent men, prepared to ignore these eccentric Americans, ready to take offence at the slightest suggestion of superiority, but enchanted at the act of this unsmiling girl, who spoke their language and understood their customs. They refused, as a matter of course, politely, without servility, and in a moment she returned to her party.

“You must always do that,” she informed them, as she set her teeth hungrily into the bread, “and when they offer of theirs you must look pleased with the attention.”

Mrs. Moulton sighed, and when, a few moments later, a peasant vaulted over the seats and proudly offered of his store of black bread and garlic, she buried a frozen smile in her smelling-salts. Jane refused to notice him, but the other three declined with such professions of gratitude that he told his comrades the Americans were not altogether a contemptible race, and that the one who spoke their language looked like a devil with a white soul and was worthy to have been born in Spain. He took out his guitar in a moment and swept the keys with superb grace while the others sang, the nuns in high, quavering voices that wandered aimlessly through the rich tones of the men. After that they talked politics and became so excited that Mr. Moulton was relieved when they all fell out together at Mataro. He could then take notes and enjoy the groves of olives and oranges, the castles and watch-towers on the heights, eloquent and Iberian and Roman, Goth and Moor, the turquoise surface of the Mediterranean—never so blue as the Adriatic or the Caribbean—the bold, harsh sweep of the coast. Then, as even Catalina began to change her position frequently on the hard seats, and they were all so covered with dust that even the spinster visage of Jane looked like a study in grotesque, the horizon gave up the palaces and palms of Barcelona.