Читать книгу In Quest of El Dorado - Stephen Graham - Страница 11

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Travelling by way of Rouen and Chartres to Burgos and Toledo, and by way of Bordeaux to Cordoba and Cadiz prompts certain comparisons—Spain is grander than France; France has more life.

The note of the Gothic is aspiration out of stone, but that of the Moorish is barbaric splendor within stone. The asceticism of stone reigns at Durham, at Rouen, and is somehow transfigured into the loveliness of doves' plumage at Chartres, but in the Spanish cathedrals speaks chiefly gold. It is the same at Burgos, gilded with some of the first gold of Mexico, as it is at the cathedral of Toledo; architecturally unremarkable but interiorly oppressed with riches. As you enter by the old doors it is not so much into the presence of God as into the power of the Church.

Spain is the most faithful son of the Church and France the most reprobate. France, like the prodigal, may nevertheless be nearer to salvation. France is germinative, and, if cynical, yet eternally curious, whereas Spain is incurious. Spain does not want to know. She is the last of the democracies of Europe to rebel. Probably the state of society in Spain could not be defined as a democracy.

The great ports of Spain are, however, different in temperament from the cities of the interior. Boisterous Bilbao in the north and Barcelona in the south are insurgently democratic. In these is a revolutionary movement pointing against Church and Monarchy. In these there is an energy, a commercial hustle, a will to power, which reminds one of the cities of Northern Italy.

Geographers, map-makers of Europe, seem very much at fault in the way they print the names of Spanish towns. The faint print usually reserved for villages is used for Santander and Bilbao. But these are great and stirring cities with modern buildings which for beauty and strength of design can be compared only with the architecture of the greater cities of the United States. Again, how absurd it is to print Bayonne and Biarritz in large type and indicate San Sebastian, their neighbor across the Spanish frontier, in faint italics. San Sebastian is a magnificent city and a most beautiful resort. You can see Spain there, in the season, at its grandest.

But one would not have been surprised to find Toledo printed fine, for there truly, famous though it be in history, we have an obscure, unchanging seat of the past. Toledo is more truly Spain than is Bilbao or Barcelona. It is the Spain that was. Toledo is a close-packed, mountain-built city of winding, narrow, shady ways and high, overhanging, ancient houses. It reminds one of the Saracen villages high up on the cliffs above the sun-bathed Riviera. It was Moorish and Jewish before it was Spanish, famous throughout the Middle Ages for its steel. They try to sell you Toledo swords in a score of little shops to-day. And, in the past, has not Toledo steel pushed its way through the vitals of innumerable duelists? And Spanish mail, Spanish armor, Spanish shields and Spanish swords have had an immense repute. It was the southern counterpart of Swedish steel. But Solingen has gone on and made domestic cutlery for the teeming populations of industrialism whilst Toledo still makes swords. Toledo has no street-cars. Toledo has no cinema. It has no Cable office. Its hotels, spacious and quaint, have no rooms with bath, no room telephones. There are barber shops, but the poles do not revolve. Nothing revolves.

There is a pack of some of the most persistent beggars I have seen. Blasco Ibañez says they live on the English and American tourists who visit the Cathedral, and he sneers at the tourists' stupidity and credulity. But if the tourists ceased to come the beggars would not cease to be. This beggary is a disgrace to a rich country like Spain. That small boys should rush in to beg the sugar you have left over from your morning cup of coffee is unseemly and out of keeping with the otherwise stately ways of the people. In Spain thousands beg who could quite well be earning a living, and the mendicancy of these defeats the case of the paralyzed, the blind, the aged, from whom few would otherwise turn away.

In Toledo, however, lurks the great Cathedral, like some strange, rare monster of the past. It is horribly cramped, and seems to be trying to hide its vast, aged form from modern gaze. There lies the dust of kings, emperors, archbishops; undisturbed, unprovoked. It seems the low notes of the organ should never swell to anything clamorous and new. All is hushed as you walk around; gloom of unlighted centuries is upon you.

From this to the blue sea, what a change! From this to the fresh and breezy harbor of Cadiz. To Spain's window on to the New World, her most romantic starting point in all her history.

It is a long journey! I prefer to go third class. It makes a tremendous difference, for the carriages are always full, always emptying, changing, filling again with Spanish humanity. The second- and first-class coaches are more or less empty; empty also that curious apartment called a "Berlin." There is a train de luxe from Madrid to Cadiz. In that, of course, you can travel in comfort and sleep at night, sleep also by day, and pass the scenery and Spain as rapidly as a millionaire could wish.

This train is called a "mixto," like the smeshanny in Russia. When it comes to a halt the engine-driver gets out. A man on an ass starts off to tell the village that the train has come and that if any one wants to catch it he had better begin packing. It doesn't matter where you get to or when you get there. I took my first day's ticket to a name of a place at random—Vadollano. The booking clerk bade me repeat it, and then sold me the ticket. I occupied myself trying to imagine what sort of a hotel I'd find there. The train commenced its uneasy retardation onward, crawling upward over Spain. Dark but gentle-looking folk filled the carriage, always saluting with a buenos dias when they entered and an adios when they got out, and never starting to eat or drink anything without offering all around to do the same. My wife and I kept a nicely filled basket and a bottle of sherry, and we joined very happily in the children's game of offering our food, knowing it would be declined. We found, however, that two invitations to a glass of sherry usually overcame the modesty of the peasants who, surprised and pleasantly shocked at finding the wine to be of Xeres, seemed, upon drinking it, to become our friends for life.

The men wore close-fitting black caps or those broad-brimmed, box-topped hats that one associates with pictures of West Indian planters. The women wore long earrings, commonly of tortoise-shell; the men and the children wore many rings; they traveled with birds, frequently bringing their canaries, of which they seemed very fond, into the train with them. In came beggars, in came singers. A blind boy sang folk-songs in a strange, wild tone, rather harsh at first hearing, but growing on the ear. His melodies went from the guttural into the minor, and touched one's heartstrings truly enough. Girls are wearing flowers in their hair, and here comes a sight that reminds me well of the Caucasus—a tight pig of wine. From out the little window we look upon many vineyards, brown, stubbly, scarce shooting green though the season is advanced. It is high land and bracing and yet also a wine country. Men come in with wooden boxes and in these boxes are bungs which they withdraw to drink from the hole.

How the people talk, as if there were springs in their mouths, and each sentence was rapidly and mechanically let loose from the lips. No one has any interest in the view from the window; the only interest is human interest. However, we pass at points through bull farms, herds of Andalusian bulls waiting for their testing for the bull ring or, having been tested, waiting for that gory last half hour of torment and red flags. The bulls always take the eyes of the people. They have an enormous interest in them. One might almost say that the Spaniard had got a reflection of the bull in his countenance now. The bull is his national animal.

It was very dark by the time Vadollano was reached, for the train was late. I got out and was followed by a half-naked beggar boy who answered no questions, being so intent on begging. Outside the station there seemed to be nobody and no town. I sought a shelter and could find none. In dismay I returned to the station and found the ticket checker of the train, and he advised me to take another ticket to Baeza. The old train was waiting, had not budged, and would wait half an hour more.

And so to Baeza and a mosquito cage bed in a hotel which smelt as hotels smell when they are the worst. Next day we went on to beautiful Cordoba. Here was a new vision of Spain, one less ascetic and fierce than that of the North. The sun had driven out the somber. In Cordoba with its white houses and fresh-blooming flowers, its beautiful gates and doors and interior courts with palms and fountains, we had a vision of beautiful living. The whole of Cordoba is like a precious work of art. I suppose every one who learns to love it must be loath to leave it.

But we are making for that window on to the New World, longing for that new way to India—the new Spain. The train goes on along the Guadalquiver valley through all the sherry vineyards growing green for miles, the town of Xeres itself, and onward to Gibraltar and the end of the world. And there at the end, far out on a loop of land on the loveliness of the sea, was Cadiz, the city of Armadas and the going and coming of the Plate Fleet, a city now of white houses, Spaniards, cats of all kinds, and innumerable parrots who out-talk humanity on its streets—of all that, but of few ships. I walk along the sea front on that street that bears the proud name Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, and I see three ships, and among them the one that is waiting for me.