Spanish Highways and Byways

He often reappeared. His wiry arm, reached through the Moorish bars of the outer door, would give its own peculiarly energetic twitch to the bell chain looped within. A maid, leaning over the railing of an upper story, would call down the challenge inherited from good old fighting times, "Who comes here?" And his thin voice would chirp the Andalusian answer, "Peace."

On his second visit he fairly gurgled with pleasure as he placed another volume with his name on the title-page before me. Since I did not incline to solid reading, behold him equally ready to supply me with the sweets of literature! This, too, was a school book, a somewhat haphazard collection of Castilian poems, with brief biographies of the authors represented. Its novel educational feature was the printing of each poem in a different type. The result was a little startling to the eye, but the editor was doubtless right in claiming that it made the reading harder for the children, and so developed their powers through exercise. Here, again, he was ashamed of the fact that fully two-thirds of the poems were religious.

"But what can one do in this country?" he asked testily. "All the reading books have to be like that. Bah! But we will not read these pious verses. The others are much more entertaining."

Determined not to wound him again by any lack of interest in books of his own shaping, we sat patiently through page after page of that juvenile school reader; but when, with a pamphlet on spelling and punctuation, we had completed the list of his works, I once more called his attention to Calderon.

This struck him as a capital joke. He had never read Calderon himself, he had hardly heard of Calderon, and that a foreigner, a woman at that, should insist on reading Calderon, was funny enough to make his old sides ache. There were modern authors in plenty who must certainly write much better than an out-of-date fellow like that. He had books that he could lend me. He had friends from whom he could borrow. But nothing would please me but Calderon! Why under the fanciful moon should I set my heart on Calderon?

"Bueno!" he cried at last, whisking the mirthful tears from his eyes. "Vamos á ver! Let us go on and see!"

We opened the classic volume at the Catholic Faust-drama, El Mágico Prodigioso, and began to read, soon passing into the great argument between Cipriano and Lucifer as to the nature of God. Our guest, sensitive to all impressions as he was, became immediately amazed and delighted.

"But this is lofty!" he exclaimed. "This is sublime! Good, Cipriano, good! Now you have him! What will the devil say to that? Vamos á ver!"

At the close of that tremendous scene he shut the book, fairly panting with excitement. But nevertheless there was a twinkle in his eye. He knew now why I craved this Calderon. He was evidently a religious writer, and women were all religious. It was an amiable feminine weakness, like the aversion to geography and arithmetic. But his indulgent chivalry rose to the occasion. Having learned my taste, such as it was, he would gratify it to the utmost.

"If you would only come and see my library!" he proposed. "I have exactly the book there that will please you. I have not read it myself, but it is very large, with most beautiful pictures, and it tells these old stories about Lucifer and all that. I am sure it is just what you would like. Will you not do your humble servant the honor of coming to-morrow afternoon?"

I ran over in my mind our engagements for the morrow. He mistook the cause of my hesitation.

"Indeed you need not be afraid to come," he urged. "My house is as safe as a convent. That old wife of mine, too, will be sure to be somewhere about. And you can bring the silent señorita with you."

I was aware of a slight convulsion in "the silent señorita." She could speak all the Spanish she chose, but she found the eccentricities of this visitor so disconcerting that she affected ignorance, and he supposed her mute presence at our interviews to be purely in deference to the Spanish proprieties.

My youthful chaperon, much elated by this reversal of our natural positions, duly attended me the next day to our friend's surprisingly elegant home. He was forever crying poverty and telling us, with the tears that came to his old age as easily as the laughter, how the hardships of life had beaten out of him every ambition save hope to "gain the bread" until his death, but we found him luxuriously housed, and I was afterward informed that he was one of the richest men in the city.

He ran with that wonderful sprightliness of his across the marbled court to meet us, and ceremoniously conducted us up the handsome staircase. He led us through all "our house," typically Andalusian, with statues and urns of blossoming trees set in the open patios, with Moorish arches and bright-hued tiles, shaded balconies, tapestried and curtained beds, braseros, and rocking-chairs, and in every room images and paintings of the saints, at which he made irreverent grimaces.

There were family portraits, too, before three of which he broke down into weeping – the son who had died in the prime of manhood, the daughter lost in her fair maidenhood, and, where the stormy sobs shook him from head to foot, the Benjamin of his heart, a clear-eyed young officer who had fallen in the Cuban war. The tears were still streaming down the quivering old face when we turned silently away – for what word of comfort would Americans dare to speak? – and followed him to his study.

He was of extravagant repute in his locality as a scholar and a man of letters, and his study was what a study ought to be, – well furnished with desk, pigeon-holes, all the tools of literary labor, and walled with books. Among these was an encyclopædia in which, to his frank astonishment, he found an article of fifteen pages on Calderon. The great volume we had come to see lay open on a reading stand. It was a Spanish Bible, with the Doré illustrations. I wanted to look at the title-page, but our eager host, proud to exhibit and explain, tossed over the leaves so fast that I had no opportunity.

As he was racing through the Psalms, impatient because of their dearth of pictures, my eye was caught by the familiar passage, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God."

With prompt curiosity, he popped down his white head, in its close-fitting skullcap, to see what I was noting, and instantly went off into an immoderate gust of laughter.

"Muy bien!" he wheezed, as soon as he could recover anything like a voice. "But that is very cleverly put. He was a witty fellow who wrote that. Just so! Just so! The deer goes to the water because he means to get something for himself, and that is why the young men go into the priesthood, and why the women go to mass. It's all selfishness, is religion. But how well he says it!"

"No, no!" I exclaimed, for once startled into protest. "He is saying that religion is the impulse of thirst."

The incorrigible old worldling took this for another jest, and, as in gallantry bound, laughed harder at my sally than at poor King David's.

"Excellent! Perfect! So it is! So it is! Religion is the impulse to fill one's own stomach. Just what I have always said! 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks' – ho, ho! I must try to remember that."

His enthusiasm for Calderon soon kindled to a flame. As the plot thickened he ceased to be of the slightest help in any difficulties that the text might offer. In vain I would beseech him to clear up some troublesome passage.

"Oh, never mind!" he would say, vexed at the interruption. "They didn't write very well in those old days. And I want to know which of her three suitors Justina took. Three at once! What a situation! Vamos á ver! I hope it will be Cipriano."

As the spell of Calderon's imagination passed more and more strongly upon him, this most sympathetic of readers quite accepted, for the time being, the poet's Catholic point of view, trembling for Cipriano and almost choking with agitated joy when Justina, calling in her extremity upon the name of God, put Lucifer to flight. But after we had read the drama to the end, through its final scene of triumphant martyrdom, he sat silent for several minutes, and then shook his head.

"Not true; it is not true. There is no devil but the evil passions of humanity. And as for Cipriano's definition of God – it is good, yes; it is great, yes; but who can shut God into a definition? One might as well try to scoop up the ocean in a cocoanut shell. No! All religions are human fictions. We have come, nobody knows whence or why, into this paltry, foolish, sordid life, for most of us only a fight to gain the bread, and afterward —Bueno! I am on the brink of the jump, and the priests have not frightened me yet. Afterward? Vamos á ver!"

This man had heard of Protestantism simply as an ignorant notion of the lower classes. For the typical Spanish Protestant of to-day presents a striking contrast to the typical Spanish Protestant of the Reformation. When heresy first entered the Peninsula, it gained almost no footing among the common people, who supposed Luther to be another sort of devil and the Protestants a new variety of Jews or Moors; but the rank and learning of Spain, the youthful nobility, illustrious preachers and writers, officers and favorites of the Court, even men and women in whose veins flowed the blood royal, welcomed with ardor the wave that was surging over Europe. The very eminence of these heretics sealed their doom. The Inquisition could not miss such shining marks. The Holy Office did its work with abominable thoroughness. Apart from the countless multitudes whom it did to death in dungeon and torture-chamber, it burned more than thirty thousand of the most valuable citizens of Spain and drove forth from the Peninsula some three millions of Jews and Moors. The autos de fe were festivals. Among the wedding pomps for the French bride of Philip II, a girl thirteen years old, was one of these horrible spectacles at Toledo. The holiday fires of Seville and Valladolid drank the most precious blood of Andalusia and Castile. Though Saragossa had a mind to Huguenot fuel; though Pamplona, on one festal day, heaped up a holocaust of ten thousand Jews; though Granada, Murcia, and Valencia whetted their cruel piety on the Moors who had made the southern provinces a garden of delight; yet in all these cities, as in Toledo, Logroño, and the rest, the Spanish stock itself was drained of its finest and most highly cultivated intelligence, its sincerest conscience, purest valor, its most original and independent thought. Spain has been paying the penalty ever since. Her history from Philip II has been a judgment day.

No root of the Lutheran heresy survived in the Peninsula. The new Protestantism does not spring from the old. The blood of the Spanish martyrs was not the seed of the Spanish church. The Protestant of to-day is far removed, socially and politically, from the courtiers, marquises, knights of Santiago – those gallant cavaliers who were stripped upon the scaffold of their honorable decorations and clad in the yellow robe of infamy. This nineteenth-century Protestant may be a lawyer or a journalist, but by exception. Ordinarily he is a petty farmer, a small shop-keeper, mechanic, miner, day-laborer, of humble calling and of lowly life. In politics he is almost surely a republican. When the monarchy was overthrown, in '68, Protestantism was, for the moment, in favor, and hundreds of the triumphant party hastened to profess the reformed faith. With the return of a Roman Catholic court and perhaps upon the discovery that the new Christianity, too, has its burden and its yoke, many fell away.

Yet Protestantism has now an assured footing in Spain. Protestant churches may be found in most of the important cities. There are some fifty foreign preachers and teachers in the field, aided by nearly eighty Spanish pastors and colporteurs. The number of Spanish communicants is between three and four thousand, the church attendance is reckoned at nine thousand, and there are five thousand Spanish children in the Protestant schools. Several centres have been established for the sale of Bibles and Protestant books, and six or seven Protestant periodicals are published and circulated. In answer to the continual Romish taunt that Protestantism is a war of sects, a house divided against itself, a Protestant Union was organized at Madrid in the spring of 1899. All, save two, of the fifteen missions, supported by various societies of Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, and America, joined hands in this. Only the Plymouth Brethren and the Church of England held aloof.

The Inquisition exists no longer. Religious liberty, even in Spain, has the support of law. Yet still the Spanish Protestant, this poor, plain Protestant of to-day, as obscure as those Galilean fishermen whom the Master called, is harassed by petty persecutions. Children sing insulting verses after him in the street, especially that pious ditty: —

"Get away with you, Protestants,Out of our Catholic Spain,That the Sacred Heart, the Sacred Heart,May love our land again."

He is jealously watched on the passing of "His Majesty the Wafer" and pursued with mud and spittings if he fails to do it homage. College boys rub charcoal over the front of his chapel and stone his schoolroom windows; work is refused him; promotion denied him; his rent is higher than his neighbor's, yet not his neighbor's family nor his landlord's cross his threshold. If scorn can burn, he feels the auto de fe.

VIII

AN ANDALUSIAN TYPE

"'True,' quoth Sancho: 'but I have heard say there are more friars in heaven than knights-errant.' 'It may be so,' replied Don Quixote, 'because their number is much greater than that of knights-errant.' 'And yet,' quoth Sancho, 'there are abundance of the errant sort.' 'Abundance indeed,' answered Don Quixote, 'but few who deserve the name of knights.'" – Cervantes: Don Quixote.

It might have been in Seville, though it was not, that I met my most simpático example of the Andalusian. He was of old Sierra stock, merry as the sunshine and gracious as the shadows. Huge of build and black as the blackest, he was as gentle as a great Newfoundland dog, until some flying spark of a word set the dark fires blazing in his eyes. This was no infrequent occurrence, for the travelling Englishman, as frank as he is patriotic, cannot comprehend the zest with which well-to-do Spaniards, even in time of war, escape military service by a money payment. Not the height and girth of our young giant, nor his cordial courtesy and winning playfulness, shielded him from the blunt question, "Why didn't you go over to Cuba, a great fellow like you, and fight for your flag?" His usual rejoinder was the eloquent Southern shrug of the shoulder, twist of the eyebrow, and waving lift of the hand, with the not easily answerable words, "And to what good?" But now and then the query came from such a source or was delivered with so keen a thrust that his guarded feeling outleaped reserve. The sarcasms and mockeries that then surged from him in a bitter torrent were directed chiefly against Spain, although the American eagle rarely went scot-free. "Ah, yes, it is a fine fowl, that! He has the far-seeing eye; he has the philanthropic beak and claw!" But it was the golden lion of Spain against which his harshest gibes were hurled – "un animal doméstico, that does not bite."

No one of the party was a tithe as outspoken as our Spaniard himself in condemning the errors of the Spanish campaign or censuring the methods of the Spanish Government. If he turned angrily toward a criticism from a foreigner, it was only, in the second instant, to catch it up like a ball and toss it himself from one hand to the other – like a ball that burns the fingers.

Such wrath can easily be the seamy side of love, and, in a way, the man's national pride was measured by his national shame; but always over these outbursts there brooded that something hopelessly resigned, drearily fatalistic, which seems to vitiate the Spanish indignation for any purposes of practical reform. To suggestions of sympathy he responded with a pathetic weariness of manner, this handsome young Hercules, so radiant with the joy of life, who, in his normal mood, sprinkled mirth and mischief from him as a big dog shakes off water drops.

"What can one do? I am a Spaniard. I say it to myself a hundred times a day. I am a Spaniard, and I wish my country were worth the fighting for, worth the dying for. But is it? Is it worth the toothache? God knows the truth, and let it rest there. Oh, you need not tell me of its past. It was once the most glorious of nations. Spaniards were lords of the West. But – ah, I know, I know – Spain has never learned how to rule her colonies. He who sows brambles reaps thorns. The Church, too, has done much harm in Spain – not more harm than another. I am a Catholic, but as I see it, priests differ from other men only in this – in the café sit some bad men and many good, and in the choir kneel some good priests and many bad. The devil lurks behind the cross. But Spain will never give up her Church. It is burned in. You are a heretic, and like my figure, do you not? It is burned in. There is no hope for Spain but to sink her deep under the earth, and build a new Spain on top. And why do I not work for that new Spain? How may a man work? There is talk enough in Spain as it is. Most Spaniards talk and do no more. They go to the cafés and, when they have emptied their cups, they draw figures on the tables and they talk. That is all. The new Spain will never come. What should it be? Oh, I know better what it should not be. It should have no king. A republic – that is right. Perhaps not a republic precisely like America. It may be," and the melancholy sarcasm of the tone deepened, "there could be found something even better. But Spain will not find it. Spain will find nothing.

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