The Fortunate Isles: Life and Travel in Majorca, Minorca and Iviza

Catalina explained that these rooms were usually allotted to foreigners such as ourselves, the less attractively situated being reserved for natives of the island, who were at liberty to share the Archduke's hospitality, although the Hospederia was originally intended for the use of other travellers. A handsome new dining-room in process of construction, though during our stay no one was actually working at it, was also planned for the accommodation of those from far countries, but to us the appointments of the older building seemed peculiarly in keeping with the quaint idea of the Hospederia.

The bedrooms were simply but sufficiently furnished. Each had two single beds, half-a-dozen chairs, a plain wooden table, and a tripod washstand holding the smallest basin and ewer we had seen outside France. The roofs were raftered. All was the perfection of austere cleanliness.

Before our inspection was ended Fernando, the host, a good-looking man with the gracious deportment of an operatic tenor, had returned. His grandmother had been the original housekeeper of the Hospederia. On her death, at the age of ninety-nine, her office had descended upon Fernando and his young wife Netta.

We spent the all too short November afternoon and evening in exploring the slopes about Miramar, looking at the glorious views that perpetually presented some yet more glorious aspect. The Hospederia was over a thousand feet above the sea, to which the ground fell precipitously. Above the house the land rose up and up until it ended in towering crags. Northward stretched the Mediterranean. Elsewhere the eye met nothing but range upon range of mountains.

The extensive grounds of Miramar are well shaded with olive and carob trees, but at every point that affords a specially good view of some part of the exquisite scenery the Archduke has caused to be erected a mirador, or walled enclosure, where one can sit in safety and glory in the beauty of the surroundings.

From one of these we watched the after-glow of the setting sun illumine distant peaks, bringing into prominence heights whose existence we had scarcely realized.

The darkness, falling swiftly, surprised us while a good distance from the Hospederia, and we had to find our way back by untried paths. But the fascination of the place held us captive, and when the moon began to peep out from among the clouds we could not remain indoors, as more sensible folks would have done. Wrapping up a little, for it was colder on the northern coast of the island than at Palma, we went out, determined to reach a headland by the sea, on which from above we had caught tantalizing glimpses of a shining white temple.

Except from a mirador the temple was not visible, and we wandered by many devious ways before we again came in sight of it, perched above the sea on a high rock that is reached by a stone bridge thrown over a deep gully.

As we felt our way along, for the elusive moon was again behind a cloud, all was silent, mysterious. Surely Miramar at nightfall in winter is one of the most silent places on the earth. We felt as though there was not a human being alive but ourselves.

Crossing the bridge timorously, we found ourselves confronting the ghostly white chapel. When we had told Catalina of our desire to visit it, she had given us keys, but they did not fit. And as we proceeded to fumble with the lock, the silence was so intense that I could almost have imagined that someone within was holding his breath to listen. Had we knocked upon that closed door I had an eerie conviction that the spectre of some long-dead monk would have opened it.

But we did not knock. And the moon favouring us with a glimpse of her illumining power, we walked round the base of the temple, which is securely railed in, and watched the moon outline with silver finger-tips each point and pinnacle of the hills and shimmer softly on the sea.

When we returned to the Hospederia, Fernando had gone to fetch his wife; and Catalina, who had been left in charge, bustled into the dining-room to tell us that two carabineros had come, and were resting in the kitchen.

"Have they come after us?" cried the Man; and Catalina, who enjoyed even the mildest of humour, wrinkled her brown face in delight.

The dining-room where we sat was large and dimly lit by oil lamps. After the silence of those wooded slopes the prospect of even the company of two carabineros was alluring. So when I went into the kitchen to cook the lamb cutlets and tomatoes that comprised our modest supper, my men followed me.

The kitchen, which was the most picturesque part of the Hospederia, was looking particularly snug and cosy. A fire of logs burned on the open hearth, below the shining tin pans and the strings of red peppers, and lit up the fine bronzed faces of the carabineros, who sat close to its warmth.

They rose when we entered, to offer us their seats. One, spreading his striped blanket on the low settle, invited the Man to share it; and while I grilled the cutlets and Catalina washed dishes at the sink, the men chatted as freely as their difference of language would allow, the carabineros talking of their long hours of duty – for their patrol begins at five or six o'clock in the evening and does not end until seven next morning – and of the constant watch that has to be kept for smugglers on that lonely and seemingly scarce accessible coast.

Leaving them to resume their night watch, we supped and went to bed, to be roused in the early morning by voices. Netta, the house-mistress, had returned, and thenceforward the lively Catalina would relapse into the position of merely an obliging neighbour.

VIII

MIRAMAR

When we went downstairs to breakfast Netta was setting the table; setting it, too, after a fashion of her own which never varied, were the meal breakfast, luncheon or dinner.

First she spread the cloth, whose lack at luncheon on the previous day had so offended Catalina's sense of what was neat and proper. Then she put before each place a big tumbler, a little tumbler, two soup-plates, and a wooden spoon and fork.

Netta proved to be tall and nice-looking, with tragic dark eyes, and a gravity of manner that was in striking contrast to her husband's smiling bonhomie. She was an admirable housewife. We never caught her at work; yet, without the slightest appearance of fuss and flurry, she managed to keep everything the pink of perfection.

The weather was hardly promising. Rain had fallen in the night; veils of mist smothered the crests of the near hills and completely obliterated the more distant. But we were resolved to let nothing short of an actual downpour keep us indoors. And as the Man wished to sketch at Valldemosa, which had captivated us all on the previous day, the Boy and I accompanied him thither. Perhaps it is unwise to attempt to renew first impressions. Possibly the charm of Miramar clouded our eyes to the undoubted beauty of Valldemosa. More likely the fact that the sun only peeped out fitfully, and that the wind was damp and the sky sullen, influenced our view: but somehow Valldemosa seemed to have lost the glamour it cast over us when we first saw it basking in the warm sunlight. Everybody seemed chilly, and all the children looked as if they had colds in their noses.

Leaving the Man working at a water-colour of the old Carthusian monastery from rising ground above a covered well, we set off with the intention of augmenting our little stock of provisions from the shops of the town.

The store we chanced upon sold every likely and unlikely commodity, from green and orange boots to radishes. When we inquired where we might find a butcher, the shop-mistress, with a majestic wave of her hand, signed to us to follow her. And, walking in her footsteps, we threaded our way through an apartment, which was partly kitchen and partly an overflow stock chamber, into an inner room, where hung garlands of black and yellow sausages and the carcasses of two lambs.

This was the butcher's shop, she announced, and there was no beef, only lamb. So perforce we added yet more cutlets to our diet, and humbly craved bread. But the only loaves she had were so large that, rejecting them, we went in search of a baker.

In the less important Majorcan towns, shops are difficult to find. The fact that a tax is levied upon signs keeps all but the most prominent vendors from exhibiting one. The room of an ordinary house that opens directly to the street usually acts as the place of business; and a cabbage, or a basket of striped haricot beans, set casually on the doorstep, often serves to indicate the existence of a general shop.

After a little searching we succeeded in finding a panaderia, but the loaves of the baker, in place of being smaller than those of the grocer (which sounds Ollendorffian), were so huge that they resembled cartwheels, or, to be more exact, perambulator wheels, baked of rye.

For a moment the choice lay between possible starvation and the prospect of trundling the mammoth rye loaf up and down the three miles of highway that lay between us and the Hospederia.

While we hesitated, the baker lady, and the half dozen or so of her intimate friends who had followed us into the shop to see what the foreigners would buy, regarded us interestedly. Then a compromise suggested itself.

"Would it be possible to ask the señora to divide the loaf?"

"Yes – without doubt."

The complacent señora already had the large knife in her hand. So, clutching the half of the still steaming rye loaf, we returned to the Man, with whom we had arranged to share an open-air luncheon.

Before we had reached him, the mist that had been threatening to swoop down upon us resolved itself into a shower. Taking advantage of the near vicinity of the covered well, we boiled our tea-kettle under the archway, and drank tea, to the surprise of the people who were constantly coming to fill their water-jars.

Then, the sun consenting, rather sulkily, to peep out again, the Man returned to his work, while the Boy and I, feeling no further temptation to linger at Valldemosa, took up our section of the cartwheel and set off for Miramar.

On the way, not far beyond the outskirts of the town, we caught sight of a notice-board, which stated that a Museum of Mallorquin antiquities might be seen in a house on the side of the road nearest to the mountains. Following the path indicated, we found ourselves, after a few minutes walking, in the courtyard of what had evidently been a fine old country seat.

The doors stood open to the world. Except for a beautiful flock of cream-coloured turkeys, the place seemed utterly untenanted. There was no sign of humanity until the Boy woke the echoes by smiting lustily on a cow-bell that hung outside the kitchen door.

Then a little sun-dried old woman popped her head out, and with a scared face fled up a broad flight of steps that led from the courtyard to the floor above.

She had gone to warn the custodian of the Museum; and that dame, quickly appearing, invited us upstairs to see the collection.

The house, Son Moragues, she told us, was one of the many owned by the Archduke on the different estates he had bought. He had never used it as a residence, and merely kept it as a receptacle for the specimens of typical Mallorquin manufactures, such as pottery, models of baskets, furniture, etc., he was collecting.

The object that interested us perhaps more than any other exhibit was a jar that had been salved from the sea in Palma Harbour. Although a genuine antique it was of the shape in use to-day; and its unrecorded period of immersion had left it encrusted with a marvellous decoration of barnacles and shells.

What really delighted us most in the Museum were the views from the balconies; especially those obtained from a great old terras with a sloping floor, where we stood in the brilliant sunshine and watched the showers sweeping along the mountain tops and up the valley.

Down below us was a thick hedge of prickly pear, the edges of the fleshy leaves ruched with scarlet fruit. And beside us, as we leant on the edge of the balcony, was a wire tray on which a quantity of figs, gathered presumably from the trees in the field beneath, were drying in the sun.

The quaint old garden, which we saw on the way out, had tall box hedges and a spreading magnolia, and crumbling stone seats surrounded the fountain, whose waters have long run dry.

In the evening I had gone to bed early, leaving the others to follow their own devices, and was sleeping the sleep of the woman who had been all day in the open air, when an insistent calling of my name aroused me back to semi-consciousness, and I gradually gathered that I must descend to open the door. The men, who had gone out walking in the moonlight, had returned to find that, inadvertently, the house door had been locked and barred against them.

Had my room been less accessible, or my sleep more profound, they might have knocked and called in vain, for although it was hardly nine o'clock, Fernando and Netta were deep in the slumber of the agriculturist in some unknown roof-chamber of the tall old house.

Although so isolated in position, Miramar is intimately connected with the romantic life-history of Ramon Lull – rake, recluse, scholar, fanatic, martyr, saint – what you will.

The father of Ramon Lull – the name is variously spelt: Raymund Lully in the English; Ramundo Lulio in the Spanish; and Ramon Lull in the Mallorquin, which has a bad habit of chipping the ends off words – was one of those brave young knights of Aragon who fought with their King during his invasion and conquest of Majorca. When that war had ended happily for all but the Moors, the parent Lull, in company with the other nobles who had supported King Jaime the Conquistador, was rewarded with an estate in Majorca. And there, about six years later, his son Ramon was born.

During his earlier manhood Ramon gave little hint of what he was ultimately to become. His behaviour was by no means sedate. Nay, more, it is on record that his love affairs were so numerous as to become a public scandal, which reached a climax on his riding on horseback into church in pursuit of a devout lady whom he madly adored.

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