Spanish Highways and Byways Part 33

Whatever may be thought of such b.l.o.o.d.y prowess on the part of Christ's disciple, the fisherman of Galilee, he could not have taken, in that stormy age, a surer course to make himself respected. All Europe sprang to do honor to a saint who could fight like that. Charlemagne, guided by the Milky Way, visited the shrine, if the famous old Codex Calixtinus may be believed, with its convincing print of the Apostle sitting upright in his coffin and pointing the great Karl to the starry trail. In process of time the Gran Capitan came bustling from Granada. The king of Jerusalem did not find the road too long, nor did the Pope of Rome count it too arduous. England sent her first royal Edward, and France more than one royal Louis. Counts and dukes, lords and barons, rode hundreds of miles to Compostela, at the head of feudal bands which sometimes clashed by the way. Saints of every clime and temper made the glorious pilgrimage,--Gregory, Bridget, Bernard, Francis of a.s.sisi. To the shrine of St. James came the Cid in radiant youth to keep the vigil of arms and receive the honors of knighthood, and again, mounted on his peerless Bavieca, to give thanks for victory over the five Moorish kings. It was on this second journey that he succored the leper, inviting him, with heroic disdain of hygiene, to be his bedfellow "in a great couch with linen very clean and costly."

[Ill.u.s.tration: DANCING THE SEVILLANA]

Even in the ninth century such mult.i.tudes visited the sepulchre that a society of hidalgos was formed to guard the pilgrims from bandits along that savage route, serve them as money-changers in Compostela, and in all possible ways protect them from robbery and ill-usage. This brotherhood gave birth to the famous Order of Santiago, whose two vows were to defend the pilgrims and fight the Mussulmans. These red-cross knights were as devout as they were valiant, "lambs at the sound of the church-bells and lions at the call of the trumpet." Kings and popes gave liberally to aid their work. Roads were cut through Spain and France, even Italy and Germany, "to Santiago." Forests were cleared, mora.s.ses drained, bridges built, and rest-houses inst.i.tuted, as San Marcos at Leon and the celebrated hostelry of Roncesvalles.

Compostela had become a populous city, but a city of inns, hospitals, and all variety of conventual and religious establishments. Even to-day it can count nearly three hundred altars. In the ninth century the modest church of Alfonso II was replaced by an ornate edifice rich in treasures, but in the gloomy tenth century, when Christian energies were arrested by the dread expectation of the end of the world, the Moors overran Galicia and laid the holy city waste. The Moslem general, Almanzor, had meant to shatter the urn of Santiago, but when he entered Compostela with his triumphant troops, he found only one defender there, an aged monk sitting silent on the Apostle's tomb. The magnanimous Moor did not molest him, nor the ashes his feebleness guarded better than strength, but took abundant booty. When Almanzor marched to the south again, four thousand Galician captives bore on their shoulders the treasures of the Apostle, even the church-bells and sculptured doors, to adorn the mosque of Cordova. The fresh courage of the eleventh century began the great Romanesque cathedral of Santiago. Donations poured in from all over Europe. Pilgrims came bowed under the weight of marble and granite blocks for the fabric.

Young and old, men and women, beggars and peasants, princes and prelates, had a hand in the building, cutting short their prayers to mix mortar and hew stone. Artists from far-off lands, who had come on pilgrimage, lingered for years, often for lifetimes, in Compostela, making beautiful the dwelling of the saint.

The great epoch of Santiago was the twelfth century, when there succeeded to the bishopric the able and ambitious Diego Gelmirez, who resolved that Compostela should be recognized as the religious centre of Spain, and be joined with Jerusalem and Rome in a trinity of the supreme shrines of Christendom. He was a man of masterly resource, persistence, pluck. Not too scrupulous for success, he found all means good that made toward the accomplishment of his one splendid dream.

The clergy of Santiago, who had hitherto borne but dubious repute, he subjected to instruction and to discipline, calling learned priests from France to tutor them, and sending his own, as they developed promise, to sojourn in foreign monasteries. He zealously promoted the work on the cathedral, rearing arches proud as his aspiration, and watch-towers strong as his will. He invested the sacred ceremonies, especially the ecclesiastical processions, with extraordinary pomp, so that the figure of Alfonso VI, conqueror of Toledo, advancing through the basilica in such a solemn progress, appeared less imposing than the bishop himself, crowned with white mitre, sceptred with ivory staff, and treading in his gold-embroidered sandals upon the broad stones that pave the church as if on an imperial palace floor.

Gelmirez was indefatigable, too, in building up the city. Eager to swell the flood of pilgrimage, he founded in Compostela, already a cl.u.s.ter of shrines and hostelries, still more churches, inns, asylums, hospitals, together with convents, libraries, schools, and all other recognized citadels of culture. He fought pestilence and dirt, introducing an excellent water supply, and promoting, so far as he knew how, decent and sanitary living. He was even a patron of agriculture, bringing home from his foreign journeys, which took him as far as Rome, packets of new seed slipped in among parcels of jewels and no less precious budgets of saintly molars and knuckle-bones. But these missions abroad, having always for chief object the pressing of his pet.i.tion upon the Holy See, involved costly presents to influential prelates, especially the red-capped cardinals. The revenue for such bribes he wrung from the Galician peasantry, who gave him a measure of hate with every measure of grain. Gelmirez had so many uses for money that no wonder his taxes cut down to the quick. The lavish offerings sent by sea to the shrine of Santiago, ruby-crusted crucifixes of pure gold, silver reliquaries sparkling with emeralds and jacinths, pontifical vestments of richest tissue and of rarest artistry, well-chased vessels of onyx, pearl, and jasper, all that constant influx of glistening tribute from the length and breadth of Christendom, had drawn Moorish pirates to the Galician waters. To guard the treasure-s.h.i.+ps, repel the infidels, and, incidentally, return t.i.t for tat by plundering their galleys, the warrior bishop equipped a formidable fleet, and kept it on patrol off the coast,--a strange development from the little fis.h.i.+ng-boat whence James and John trailed nets in the lake of Galilee.

The audacity of Gelmirez reached its height in his struggle with the Queen Regent, Urraca of unlovely memory, for the control of the child king, Alfonso VII. This boy was the grandson of Alfonso VI, "Emperor of Spain," who survived all his legitimate children except Urraca. The father of the little Alfonso, Count Raymond of Burgundy, was dead, and Urraca had taken a second husband, Alfonso the Battle-maker. The situation was complicated. The Battle-maker wore the crowns of Aragon and Navarre, Urraca was queen of Leon and Castile, while the child, by his grandfather's will, inherited the lords.h.i.+p of Galicia. The Bishop of Santiago, who baptized the baby, had strenuously opposed Urraca's second marriage. As that lady had, nevertheless, gone her own wilful way, setting at naught the bishop's remonstrance and inciting Galicia to revolt against his tyranny, Gelmirez had kidnapped the royal child, a puzzled little majesty of four summers, and solemnly crowned and anointed him before the High Altar of St. James, declaring himself the protector of the young sovereign. Urraca soon wearied of her Aragonese bridegroom, and, casting him off, took up arms to defend her territories against his invasion. The powerful bishop came to her aid with men and money, but exacted in exchange an oath of faithful friends.h.i.+p, which Urraca gave and broke and gave again. Meanwhile the popular hatred swelled so high against Gelmirez that an open insurrection, in which many of his own clergy took part, drove him and the Queen to seek refuge in one of the cathedral towers, while the rebels burned and pillaged in the church below. The bishop barely escaped with his life, fleeing in disguise from Compostela; but soon the baffled conspirators saw him at his post again, punis.h.i.+ng, pardoning, rebuilding--as indomitable as St. James himself. The election of Diego's friend, Calixtus II, to the papacy, gave him his supreme opportunity. Money was the prime requisite, and Gelmirez, not for the first nor second time, borrowed of the Apostle, selling treasures from the sacristy. The sums so raised were carried to the Pope, across the bandit-peopled mountains, by a canon of Santiago masquerading as a beggar, and by a trusty group of particularly ragged pilgrims. This proof of ecclesiastical ripeness overcame all papal scruples, and Calixtus, despite the clamor of enemies and rivals, raised Santiago to the coveted archbishopric.

The first half of his great purpose effected, Gelmirez strove with renewed energy to wrest from Toledo the primacy of Spain. He fortified Galicia, hurled his fleet against Moorish and English pirates, built himself an archiepiscopal palace worthy of his hard-won dignities, stole from Portugal the skeletons of four saints to enhance the potency of Santiago, and made much of the skull of the Apostle James the Less, which Urraca had presented in one of her fits of amity. But this time the reverend robber was not destined to success. The Archbishop of Toledo formed a powerful party against him, Calixtus died, even the king, whom Gelmirez had armed knight in the cathedral of Santiago and had crowned a second time at Leon, grew restive under the dictation of his old tutor. The smouldering hatred of Galicia again flamed out. The aged archbishop once more had to see his church polluted, its treasures plundered, its marvels of carved work, stained gla.s.s, and gold-threaded vestments spoiled and wasted by that senseless rabble which had twisted out from under his heavy foot.

Faint and bleeding from a wound in his head, too white a head, for all its pride, to be battered with stones, Gelmirez had almost fallen a victim to the mob, when two of his canons s.n.a.t.c.hed him back to the refuge of the High Altar, barring the iron-latticed doors of the _Capilla Major_ against those savage sheep of his pasture. The outrage was so flagrant that, for very shame, pope and king, though both had accepted the bribes of his enemies, responded to his appeal, and a.s.sisted him to resume that rigorous sway which lasted, all told, for something like forty years.

Such was the man and such the process that made the shrine of Santiago the third in rank of mediaeval Christendom. Under the rule of Gelmirez Compostela had become one of the princ.i.p.al cities of the Peninsula, a seat of arts and sciences where Spanish n.o.bles were proud to build them palaces and to educate their sons. The mighty influx of pilgrims, which went on without abatement century after century, nearly twenty-five hundred licenses being granted, in the single year 1434, to c.o.c.kle-hatted visitors from England alone, filled the place with business. Inn-keepers, physicians, money-changers, merchants were in flouris.h.i.+ng estate, and a number of special industries developed. One street was taken up by booths for the sale of polished sh.e.l.ls. Another bears still the name of the jet-workers, whose rosaries, crucifixes, stars, gourds, staffs, and amulets were in high demand. Souvenirs of Santiago, little crosses delicately cut and chased, mimic churches, towers, shrines gave employ to scores of artists in silver and mother-of-pearl. The enormous revenue from the sale of phials of healing oil and from the consecrated candles must needs go to the Apostle, but the cunning craftsmen who loaded their stalls with love-charms had a well-nigh equal patronage.

The finished cathedral was consecrated in 1211, and in 1236 the royal saint, Fernando III, sent to Compostela a train of Mohammedan captives, bringing back on their shoulders the bells Almanzor had taken. These had been hung, inverted, in the beautiful mosque of Cordova to serve as lamps for the infidel wors.h.i.+p, but at last St.

James had his own again. Thus Santiago trampled on the Moors, and his ashes, or what had pa.s.sed for his ashes, slept in peace, with nothing to do but work miracles on blind and crippled pilgrims, until, in 1589, an army of English heretics, led by the horrible Drake, landed in Galicia. These Lutheran dogs were not worthy of a miracle. The archbishop and his canons, with the enemy hammering on the gates of Compostela, hastily took up and reburied the three coffins of the original shrine, so secretly that they could not be found again. In 1879, however, a miscellany of brittle bits of bone was brought to light by a party of determined seekers, and these repulsive fragments, after scientific a.n.a.lysis conducted in an ecclesiastical spirit, were declared to be portions of three skeletons which might be ages old.

Leo XIII clenched the matter by "authenticating" one of them, apparently chosen at random, as the body of Santiago. But although for us of the perverse sects, the contents of that magnificent silver casket, the centre of the Santiago faith, could arouse no thrill of wors.h.i.+p, the Pilgrim City itself and its storied, strange cathedral were the most impressive sights of Spain.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WITHIN THE CLOISTER]

XXVI

THE SON OF THUNDER

"Thou s.h.i.+eld of that faith which in Spain we revere, Thou scourge of each foeman who dares to draw near, Whom the Son of that G.o.d who the elements tames Called child of the thunder, immortal Saint James."

--_Hymn to Santiago_, in George Borrow's translation.

Fatigues of the journey and discomforts of our lodging melted from memory like shadows of the night when we found ourselves, on the morning of July twenty-fourth, before that rich, dark ma.s.s of fretted granite, a majestic church standing solitary in the midst of spreading _plazas_. These are surrounded by stately buildings, the archiepiscopal palace with its memories of Gelmirez, the royal hospital founded by Ferdinand and Isabella for the succor of weary pilgrims, ancient colleges with sculptured facades, marvellous old convents whose holy fathers were long since driven out by royal decree into hungry, homesick exile, and the columned city hall with its frontal relief of the battle of Clavijo and its crowning statue of St.

James. The great, paved squares, the magnificent stairways and deeply recessed portals were aglow with all Galicia. Peasants in gala dress, bright as tropic birds, stood in deferential groups about the pilgrims, for there were actual pilgrims on the scene, men and women whose broad hats and round capes were sewn over with scallop-sh.e.l.ls, and whose long staffs showed little gourds fastened to the upper end.

They wore rosaries and crucifixes in profusion, and their habit was spangled with all manner of charms and amulets, especially the tinsel medals with their favorite device of St. James riding down the Moors.

We bought at one of the stalls set up before the doors for sale of holy wares a memento of the famous old jet-work, a tiny black hand, warranted, if hung about the neck, to cure disorders of the eyes. We fell to chatting with a pilgrim who was shod in genuine sandal shoon.

A large gourd was tied to his belt, the rim of his hat was turned up at one side and caught there with a rosy-tinted sh.e.l.l, and his long, black ringlets fell loose upon his shoulders, framing a romantic Durer face. He talked with us in German, saying that he was of Wittemberg, and once a Lutheran, but had been converted to the true faith on a previous visit to Spain. Since then he had footed his penitential way to Jerusalem and other distant shrines. As his simple speech ran on, we seemed to see the mountains round about Santiago crossed by those converging streams of mediaeval pilgrims, all dropping on their knees at the first glimpse of the cathedral towers. With that sight the fainting were refreshed, the lame ran, and jubilant songs of praise to Santiago rolled out in many languages upon the air.

"Primus ex apostolis, Martir Jerusolinus, Jacobus egregio, Sacer est martirio."

In those Ages of Faith all the gates of the city were choked with the incoming tide, the hostels and cure-houses overflowed, and the broad _plazas_ about the cathedral were filled with dense throngs of pilgrims, ma.s.sed nation by nation, flying their national colors, singing their national hymns to the strangely blended music of their national instruments, and watching for the acolyte who summoned them, company by company, into the august presence-chamber of St. James. His shrine they approached only in posture of lowliest reverence. Even now, at the end of the nineteenth century, our first glance, as we entered the lofty, dim, and incense-perfumed nave, fell on a woman-pilgrim dragging herself painfully on her knees up the aisle toward the High Altar, and often falling prostrate to kiss the pavement with groans and tears.

Mediaeval pilgrims, when they had thus won their way to the entrance of the _Capilla Mayor_, and there received three light blows from a priestly rod in token of chastis.e.m.e.nt, were granted the due indulgences and, in turn, laid their offerings before the great white altar. Still there sits, in a niche above, the thirteenth-century image of St. James, a colossal figure wrought of red granite, with stiffly flowing vestments of elaborately figured gilt. His left hand grasps a silver staff, with gilded gourd atop, and his right, whose index finger points downward to the burial vault, holds a scroll inscribed, "Hic est corpus divi Jacobi Apostoli ac Hispaniarum Patroni." Once he wore a broad-brimmed hat all of pure gold, but this was melted down by Marshal Ney in the French invasion. At that time the sacred vessels were heaped like market produce into great ox-carts, until the cathedral had been plundered of ten hundredweight of treasure. It was "the end of the pilgrimage" to climb the steps behind this statue and kiss its resplendent silver cape, studded with c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls and besprinkled with gems. But the pilgrims of the past had much more to see and wors.h.i.+p,--the jewelled crown of the Apostle set upon the altar, his very hat and staff, the very axe that beheaded him, and other relics to which the attention of the modern tourist, at least, is not invited. Yet even we were conducted to the Romanesque crypt beneath the High Altar, where stands another altar of red marble, decorated by a relief of two peac.o.c.ks drinking from a cup.

This altar is surmounted by a bronze pedestal, which bears the sumptuous ark-shaped casket with its enshrined handfuls of dubious dust.

Our latter-day pilgrims seemed well content with the measure of wealth and sanct.i.ty which Moorish sack and English piracy, French invasion and Carlist wars, had spared to the cathedral. In the matter of general relics, nevertheless, Santiago suffers by comparison with the neighbor cathedral of Oviedo, which proudly shows a silver-plated old reliquary, believed by the devout to have been brought in the earliest Christian times from Rome. This chest contains, in addition to the usual pieces of the true cross and thorns from the crown, such remarkable mementos as St. Peter's leathern wallet, crumbs left over from the Feeding of the Five Thousand, bits of roast fish and honeycomb from Emmaus, bread from the Last Supper, manna from the wilderness, a portion of Moses' rod and the mantle of Elijah. Oviedo possesses, too, that famous cross which the angels made for Alfonso II, and one of the six water-jars of Cana. But the relic chapel of Santiago makes up in quant.i.ty whatever it may lack in quality, holding bones, garments, hair-tresses, and like memorials of a veritable army of martyrs, even to what Ford disrespectfully calls "sundry parcels of the eleven thousand Virgins." Special stress is laid on a Calvary thorn which turns blood-red every Good Friday, and a drop, forever fresh, of the Madonna's milk. If pilgrims are not satisfied with these, they can walk out to Los Angeles, an adjacent village, whose church was built by the angels. Eccentric architects they were in choosing to connect their edifice with the cathedral of Santiago by an underground beam of pure gold, formerly one of the rafters in G.o.d's own house.

We had speech of several pilgrims that first morning. One was a middle-aged, sun-browned, stubby little man, whom during the ensuing week we saw again and again in the cathedral, but never begging, with the most of the pilgrims, at the portals, nor taking his ease in the cloisters,--a social promenade where the laity came to gossip and the clergy to puff their cigarettes. This humble wors.h.i.+pper seemed to pa.s.s all the days of the festival in enraptured adoration, on his knees now before one shrine, now before another. We found him first facing the supreme architectural feature of the cathedral, that sublime and yet most lovely _Portico de la Gloria_. He was gazing up at its paradise of sculptured saints and angels, whose plumes and flowing robes still show traces of azure, rose, and gold, with an expression of naive ecstasy. He told us that he came from Astorga, and had been nine days on the way. He spent most of his time upon the road, he added, visiting especially the shrines of the Virgin. "Greatly it pleases me to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d," he said, with sparkling eyes, and ran on eagerly, as long as we would listen, about the riches and splendors of different cathedrals, and especially the robes and jewels of the _Virgen del Pilar_. He seemed in his devout affection to make her wealth his own.

One of the most touching effects of the scene was the childlike simplicity with which the poor of Galicia, coming from such vile hovels, felt themselves at home in the dwelling of their saint. Not even their sins marred their sense of welcome. In the cloisters we encountered an old woman in the pilgrim dress, her staff wound with gay ribbons, limping from her long jaunt. She told us frankly that she was "only a beggar" in her own village, and had come for the outing as well as to please the priest, who, objecting to certain misdemeanors which she had the discretion not to specify, had prescribed this excursion as penance. She was a lively old soul, and was amusing herself mightily with the Goya tapestries, and others, that adorned the cloisters in honor of the time. "You have a book and can read,"

she said, "and you will understand it all, but what can I understand?

I can see that this is a queen, and she is very fine, and that those are butchers who are killing a fat pig. But we who are poor may understand little in this world except the love of G.o.d." Others of the pilgrims were village folk of Portugal, and, taken all together, these modern wearers of the sh.e.l.l were but a sorry handful as representing those n.o.ble mult.i.tudes who came, in ages past, to bow before the shrine. The fourteen doors of the cathedral then stood open night and day, and the grotesque lions leaning out over the lintels could boast that there was no tongue of Europe which their stone ears had not heard. Three open doors suffice in the feast days now, but with the new flood of faith that has set toward Lourdes, pilgrimages to Santiago, as to other Latin shrines, are beginning to revive.

Ma.s.s was over at the late hour of our arrival, but nave and aisles, transepts and cloisters, hummed with greetings of friends, laughter of children, who sported unrebuked about those stately columns, and the admiring exclamations of strangers. We were often accosted in Spanish and in French and asked from what country we came, and if we "loved the beautiful church of the Apostle." When we were occasionally cornered, and driven in truthfulness to say that we were Yankees, our more intelligent interlocutors looked us over with roguish scrutiny, but increased rather than abated their courtesies. As for the peasants, their geography is safely limited. Noticing that our Spanish differed from theirs, they said we must be from Castile, or, at the most, from Portugal. At all events we were strangers to Santiago, and they merrily vied with one another in showing us about and giving us much graphic information not to be found in guide-books.

Much of their lore appears to be of their own invention. The superb _Puerta de la Gloria_, wrought by a then famous architect sent from the king of Leon, but known to us to-day only as Master Mateo, was the fruit of twenty years' labor. This triple porch, which runs across the west end of the nave, being finally completed, Master Mateo seems to have symbolized the dedication of his service to the Apostle in a kneeling statue of himself, facing the east, with back to the richly sculptured pillar of the chief portal. The head of this figure is worn almost as round and expressionless as a stone ball by the caresses of generations of childish hands. The little girls whom we watched that morning as they patted and smoothed the much-enduring pate told us, kissing the marble eyes, that this was a statue of St. Lucia, which it certainly is not. In another moment these restless midgets were a.s.saulting, with fluent phrases of insult, the carven faces of certain fantastic images which form the bases of the cl.u.s.tered columns. The children derisively thrust their feet down the yawning throats, kicked the grotesque ears and noses, and in general so maltreated their Gothic victims that we were moved to remonstrate.

"But why should you abuse them? What are these creatures, to be punished so?"

"_They are Jews_," hissed our little Christians with an emphasis that threw new light on the Dreyfus _affaire_. But an instant more, and these vivacious, capricious bits of Spanish womanhood were all absorbed in aiding a blind old peasant who had groped her way to the sacred Portico for its especial privilege of prayer. The central shaft, dividing into two the chief of the three doorways, represents the Tree of Jesse, the patriarchal figures half-enveloped in exquisitely sculptured foliage. The chiselled capital shows the Trinity, Dove and Son and Father, with adoring angels. Above sits a benignant St. James, whose throne is guarded by lions, and over all, in the central tympanum of the sublime doorway, is a colossal figure of our Lord, uplifting His wounded hands. About Him are grouped the four Evangelists, radiant with eternal youth, and eight angels bearing the instruments of the Pa.s.sion, the pillar of the scourging, whips, the crown of thorns, the nails, the scroll, the sponge, the spear, the cross. Other angels burn incense before Him, and the archivolt above is wrought with an ecstatic mult.i.tude of elders, martyrs, and saints, so vivid after all these centuries that one can almost hear the blithe music of their harps. It is the Christ of Paradise, enthroned amid the blest, to whom His presence gives fulness of joy forevermore. Above the lesser doors on either side are figured Purgatory and h.e.l.l. The fresh and glowing beauty, so piquant and yet so spiritual, the truly celestial charm of this marvellous Portico which Street did not fear to call "one of the greatest glories of Christian art," was never, during this festal week, without its throng of reverent beholders, the most waiting their turn, like our old blind peasant, to fit thumb and finger into certain curious little hollows on the central shaft, and thus offer prayer which was sure of answer. Minute after minute for unbroken hours, the hands succeeded one another there,--old, knotted, toilworn hands, the small, brown hands of children, jewelled hands of delicate ladies, and often, as now, the groping hand of blindness, with childish fingers helping it to find those mystical depressions in the agate. Some of the bystanders told us that St. James had descended from his seat above the capital, and laid his hand against the column, leaving these traces, but more would have it that the Christ Himself had come down by night from the great tympanum to place His wounded hand upon the shaft. Street records that he observed several such pet.i.tioners, after removing the hand, spit into the mouths of the winged dragons that serve as base to the pillar; but that literally dare-devil form of amen must now have gone out of fas.h.i.+on, for we did not see it once.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TRAMPLER OF THE MOORS]

Toward noon we strolled out into the grand _plaza_ before the west facade and found it a mult.i.tudinous jam of expectant merrymakers. Even nuns were peeping down from a leaf-veiled balcony. We seemed to have been precipitated out of the Middle Ages into an exaggerated Fourth of July. All the city bells were pealing, rockets and Roman candles were sputtering, and grotesque fire-balloons, let off from a parapet of the cathedral, flourished bandy legs and "Sagasta noses" in the resigned old faces of the carven images. And then, amid the acclamations of all the small boys in the square, sallied forth the Santiago giants. These wickerwork monsters, eight all told, are supposed to represent wors.h.i.+ppers from foreign lands. They go by couples, two being conventional pilgrims with "c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l and sandal shoon"; two apparently Moors, with black complexions, feather crowns, and much barbaric finery; two nondescripts, possibly the French of feudal date; and two, the leaders and prime favorites, regular Punch caricatures of modern English tourists. John Bull is a stout old gentleman with gray side-whiskers, a vast expanse of broadcloth back, and a single eye-gla.s.s secured by a lavender ribbon. The British Matron, in a smart Dolly Varden frock, glares with a shocked expression from under flaxen puffs and an ostrich-feathered hat. The popular att.i.tude of mind toward these absurdities is past all finding out. Not the children alone, but the entire a.s.semblage greeted them with affectionate hilarity. The giants, propelled by men who walked inside them and grinned out on the world from a slit in the enormous waistbands, trundled about the square, followed by the antics of a rival group of dwarfs from the city hall, and then made the round of the princ.i.p.al streets, executing clumsy gambols before the public buildings.

On the morning after, July twenty-fifth, the great day of the feast, anniversary of the Apostle's martyrdom, these same overgrown dolls played a prominent part in the solemn cathedral service. The Chapter pa.s.sed in stately progress to the archbishop's palace to fetch his Eminence, and later to the ancient portals where the silver-workers once displayed their wares, to greet the Royal Delegate. At their head strutted this absurd array of giants. The High Ma.s.s was superb with orchestral music and the most sumptuous robes of the vestiary. The "King of Censers," the splendid _botafumeiro_ of fourteenth-century date, made so large, six feet high, with the view of purifying the cathedral air vitiated by the hordes of pilgrims who were wont to pa.s.s the night sleeping and praying on the holy pavements, flashed its majestic curves, a mighty fire bird, from roof to floor and from transept to transept. It is swung from the ceiling by an ingenious iron mechanism, and the leaping, roaring flames, as the huge censer sweeps with ever augmenting speed from vault to vault, tracing its path by a chain of perfumed wreaths, make the spectacle uniquely beautiful. Knights of Santiago, their white raiment marked by crimson sword and dagger, received from the Royal Delegate "a thousand crowns of gold," the annual state donation, inst.i.tuted by Rameiro, to the patron saint. The Delegate, kneeling before the image of Santiago, prayed fervently that the Apostle would accept this offering of the regent, a queen no less devout than the famous mother of San Fernando, and would raise up Alfonso XIII to be another Fernando, winning back for Spain her ocean isles which the heretics had wrested away, even as Fernando restored to Compostela the cathedral doors and bell which the infidel Moors had stolen. His Eminence, who is said to have acc.u.mulated a fortune during his previous archbishopric in Cuba, in turn besought St. James to protect Catholic Spain against "those who invoke no right save brute force, and adore no deity except the golden calf." In most magnificent procession the silver casket was borne around the nave among the kneeling mult.i.tudes. And then, to crown these august ceremonies, forth trotted our friends, the giants, into the open s.p.a.ce before the _Capilla Mayor_. Here the six subordinate b.o.o.bies paused, grouping themselves in a ludicrous semicircle, while pompous John Bull and his ever scandalized British Matron went up into the Holy of Holies and danced, to the music of guitars and tambourines, in front of the High Altar.

Every day of that festal week the cathedral services were attended by devout throngs, yet there was something blithe and social, well-nigh domestic, in the atmosphere of the scene even at the most impressive moments. Kneeling groups of peasant women caught the suns.h.i.+ne on their orange kerchiefs and scarlet-broidered shawls. Here a praying father would gather his little boy, sobbing with weariness, up against his breast; there a tired pilgrim woman slumbered in a corner, her broad hat with its c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls lying on her knees. Rows of kneeling figures waited at the wooden confessionals which were thick set along both aisles and ambulatory. Several times we saw a priest asleep in the confessional, those who would pour out their hearts to him kneeling on in humble patience, not venturing to arouse the holy father. Young officers, leaning against the pillars, smiled upon a school of Spanish girls, who, guarded by veiled nuns, knelt far along the transept. Pilgrims, standing outside the door to gather alms, vied with one another in stories of their travels and the marvels they had seen.

But at night, walking in the illuminated _alameda_, where thousands of j.a.panese lanterns and colored cups of flame made a fantastic fairyland, or dancing their country dances, singing their country songs, practising their country sports, and gazing with tireless delight at the fireworks in the s.p.a.cious _Plaza de Alfonso Doce_, the wors.h.i.+ppers gave themselves up to frankest merriment. Through the days, indeed, there was never any lack of noisy jollity. From dawn to dawn again cannon were booming, drums beating, bagpipes skirling, tambourines clattering, songs and cries resounding through the streets. Four patients in the hospital died the year before, we were told, from the direct effects of this continuous uproar. But the thunder height of the _fiesta_ is attained toward midnight on the twenty-fourth, the "Eve of Santiago," when rockets and fire-balloons are supplemented by such elaborate devices as the burning of "capricious trees" and the destruction of a Moorish facade built for the occasion out from the west front of the cathedral. At the first ignition of the powder there come such terrific crashes and reverberating detonations, such leaps and bursts of flame, that the peasant host sways back and the children scream. An Arabic doorway with ornate columns, flanked on either side by a wall of many arches and surmounted by a blood-red cross, dazzles out into overwhelming brilliancy, all in greens and purples, a glowing, scintillating, ever changing vision. Soon it is l.u.s.trous white and then, in peris.h.i.+ng, sends up a swift succession of giant rockets. The facade itself is a very Alhambra of fret and arabesque. This, too, with thunder bursts reveals itself as a flame-colored, sky-colored, sea-colored miracle, which pales to gleaming silver and, while we read above it the resplendent words "The Patron of Spain," is blown to atoms as a symbol of Santiago's victory over the Moors. This makes an ideal Spanish holiday, but the cost, borne by the city, is heavy, there is distinct and increasing injury to the cathedral fabric, and all this jubilee for archaic victories over the Moslem seems to be mocked by the hard facts of to-day.

The Santiago festivities, of which the half has not been told, closed on Thursday afternoon, July twenty-seventh, with a procession through the streets. We waited a weary while for it before the doors where the old jet-workers used to set their booths, amusing ourselves meantime by watching the house maids drawing water from the fountain in the square below. These st.u.r.dy Galicians were armed with long tin tubes which they dextrously applied to the spouting mouths of the fountain griffins, so directing the stream into the straight, iron-bound pails.

Not far away the market women covered the flags with red and golden fruit. A saucy beggar-wench, with the blackest eyes in Spain, demanded alms, and when we had yielded up the usual toll of coppers, loudly prayed to Santiago to pardon us for not having given her more on this his holy festival. At last out sallied the band, followed by those inevitable giants, and amid mad ringing of bells and fizzing of invisible rockets, forth from the venerable portals issued standards, crosses, tapers, priests in white and gold, and platformed effigies of pilgrims, saints, and deities. Then came bishops, cardinals, and archbishop, ranks of military bearing tapers, the alcalde and his a.s.sociates in the city government with antique escort of bedizened mace-bearers, a sparkling statue of St. James on horseback busily beheading his legions of Moors, a bodyguard of all the pilgrims in attendance on his saints.h.i.+p, and finally the _Virgen del Pilar_, at whose pa.s.sing all the concourse fell upon their knees. Churches in the line of march had their own images decked and ready, waiting in the colonnaded porches to fall into the procession. The market women and the maids at the fountain threw kisses to the Christ Child, leaning in blue silk frock and white lace tucker against a cross of roses, but the boys waved their caps for St. Michael, debonair that he was with blowing crimson robe, real feather wings fluttering in the breeze, and his gold foot set on the greenest of dragons.

The procession came home by way of the great west doors, opened only this once in the round year. The setting sun, bringing out all the carven beauty of that dark gray facade, glittered on the golden b.a.l.l.s and crosses that tip the n.o.ble towers, and on the golden staff of St.

James and the golden quill of St. John, where the two sons of thunder stand colossal in their lofty niches. A baby, in yellow kerchief and cherry skirt, toddling alone across the centre of the square, pointed with adoring little hand at the mounted image of Santiago, which halted at the foot of the grand stairway, his lifted sword a line of golden light, while the deep-voiced choir chanted his old triumphal hymn. John Bull and the British Matron, stationing themselves on either side as a guard of honor, stared at him with insular contempt.

As the chant ceased, St. James chivalrously made way for the _Virgen del Pilar_, a slender figure of pure gold poised on an azure tabernacle, to mount the steps before him. The bells pealed out to welcome her as she neared the portals, and an ear-splitting explosion of a monster rocket, with a tempest-rain of sparks, announced the instant of her entrance beneath the chiselled arch. Behind her went the penitents, arduously climbing the long stone flights of that quadruple stairway upon their knees. These, too, were but shadows of those mediaeval penitents who of old staggered after this procession, bowed under the weight of crosses, or scourging themselves until they fainted in their own trail of blood. Yet it is still strange and touching to see, long after the inner s.p.a.ces of the cathedral are dim with evening, those kneeling figures making their painful progress about aisles and ambulatory, sobbing as they go, and falling forward on their faces to kiss the pavement that is bruising them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTIAGO CATHEDRAL]

XXVII

VIGO AND AWAY

Hasta la Vista!

Our plan for the summer included a return trip across Spain, _via_ Valladolid, Salamanca, and Saragossa to Barcelona and the Balearic Isles; but the bad food and worse lodging of Galicia, the blazing heat and the incessant, exhausting warfare against vermin, had begun to tell. That Spanish fever with which so many foreigners make too intimate acquaintance was at our doors, and we found ourselves forced at last to sacrifice enthusiasm to hygiene. The most eccentric train which it was ever my fortune to encounter shunted and switched us across country to Vigo in about the time it would have taken to make the journey donkeyback. Here we tarried for a week or so, gathering strength from the Atlantic breezes, and when, one sunny August day, a stately steamboat called for an hour at Vigo harbor on her way from Buenos Ayres to Southampton, we went up over the side. Our shock of astonishment at the cleanliness around us could not, however, divert our attention long from the receding sh.o.r.es of Spain, toward which one of us, at least, still felt a stubborn longing.

They lay bright in the midday suns.h.i.+ne, those green uplands of Galicia, mysterious with that patient peasant life of which we had caught fleeting, baffling glimpses. Still we seemed to see the brown-legged women was.h.i.+ng in the brook and spreading their coa.r.s.e-spun, gay-bordered garments on the heather; children, with the faces of little Pats and little Biddies, tugging a bleating sheep across the stepping-stones, or boosting an indignant goat over the wall; lean pigs poking their noses out of the low, stone doorways, where babies slept on wisps of hay; girls in cream-colored kerchiefs, starred with gold, bearing loads of fragrant brush or corded f.a.gots on their heads. As the evening should come on, and the sea-breeze stir the ta.s.sels of the maize, we knew how the fields would be dotted with impromptu groups of dancers, leaping higher and higher and waving their arms in ever wilder merriment,--a scene pastoral down to the pigs, and poetic up to those gushes of song that delight the listener.

"I went to the meadow Day after day, To gather the blossoms Of April and May, And there was Mercedes, Always there, Sweetest white lily That breathes the air."