Four Months Afoot in Spain Part 10

It was Sunday morning, the market day of Valdepenas, when I returned alone to stock my knapsack. The plaza that had been so deserted and peaceful the evening before was packed from casa de comidas to cathedral steps with canvas booths in which the peasants of the encircling country were selling all the products of La Mancha, and among which circulated all the housewives of Valdepenas, basket on arm. The women of the smaller cities of Spain cling stoutly to their local costumes, aping not in the least the world of fas.h.i.+on. These of Valdepenas were strikingly different from the Andalusians, considering how slight the distance that separates them from that province. They were almost German in their slowness, with hardly a suggestion of "sal"; a solemn, bronze-tanned mult.i.tude who, parting their hair in the middle and combing it tight and smooth, much resembled Indian squaws.

From the northern edge of the city the highway ran straight as the flight of a crow to where it was lost in a flat, colorless horizon. The land was artificially irrigated. The first place I stopped for water was a field in which an old man was driving round and round a blind-folded burro hitched to a noria, a water-wheel that was an exact replica of the Egyptian _sakka_, even to its squawk, jars of Andujar being tied to the endless chain with leather thongs. The man, too, had that dreamy, listless air of the Egyptian _fellah_; had I had a kodak to turn upon him I should have expected him to run after me crying for "backsheesh."

Ahead stretched long vistas of low vineyards. The only buildings along the way were an occasional bare uniform stone dwelling of a _peon caminero_, or government road-tender. At one of these I halted to quench my thirst, and the occupant, smoking in Sabbath ease before it, instantly p.r.o.nounced me a "norte americano." I showed my astonishment, for hardly once before in the peninsula had I been taken for other than a Frenchman, or a Spaniard from some distant province.

The peon's unusual perspicacity was soon explained; he had been a soldier in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. I readily led him into reminiscences. Throughout the war, he stated, he had fought like a hero, not because he was of that rare breed but because every member of the troop had been filled with the belief that once captured by "los yanquis" he would be hanged on the spot.

"And are you still of the opinion?" I asked.

"Que barbaridad!" he laughed. "I was taken at Santiago and carried a prisoner to your country. What a people! A whole meal at breakfast! We lived as never before, or since.

"You were quite right, vosotros, to take the island. I do not blame you. It was competicion, just compet.i.tion, like two shop-keepers in the city. I am glad the miserable government lost their Cuba."

So often did I hear exactly this view from Spaniards of the laboring cla.s.s that it may be considered typical of their att.i.tude toward the late disagreement. The strange question has often been asked whether it is safe so soon after the war for a North American to travel alone in the interior of Spain. For answer we have only to ask ourselves whether a Spaniard traveling alone in the interior of the United States would be in any imminent danger of having his throat cut--even had we been defeated. In Spain there is vastly less, for not only is the Spaniard quicker to forgive and far less belligerent than he is commonly fancied, but there exists in the peninsula not one-tenth the rowdyism and hoodlum "patriotism" of our own country.

I stayed long and left with difficulty. Gregarious is man, and on Sunday, when all the world about him is at rest, even the pedestrian finds it hard to exert himself. A league beyond I came upon the Sevillians lolling in the shadow of another isolated peon dwelling in what seemed once to have been a village.

Jesus in his eleven-day beard hailed me from afar; moreover, the Sunday languor was still upon me. I stretched out with them in the shade of the building, but the flies prevented us from sleeping. We crawled into a peasant's cart under the shed--but the flies quickly found us out. We crossed the road to the ruin of a church, split almost exactly through the middle of tower and all, and one side fallen. Within it was a gra.s.sy corner where the sun never fell, and even a bit of breeze fanned us. But the flies had made this their Spanish headquarters. We decided to go on.

In that only were we unanimous, for the Sevillians wished to follow the railroad, a furlong away, and I the carretera. I had all but won them over when a freight train labored by.

"Ay! Ay! Los toros!" shouted the two in chorus.

"Where?" I asked, seeing no such animals in sight.

"En las jaulas, hombre! In the cages!" cried Jesus, pointing to a flat-car on which, set close together, were six tightly-closed boxes each just large enough to hold a bull.

"We go by the railroad!" shouted Gasparo, decisively. "Alma de Dios!

Who knows but we may be able to hide ourselves on a train that is carrying toros to the corrida!"

We separated, therefore, and struck northward, though we marched side by side within hailing distance until we were all three swallowed up in the city of Manzanares.

The bare-faced, truly Manchegan town was half-deserted, though the reason therefor was not hard to guess, for the bullring in the outskirts was howling as I pa.s.sed. For all its size the place did not seem to boast an eating-house of any description. At last I halted before an old man seated in a shaded corner of the plaza, to inquire:

"Senor, what does a stranger in your town do when he would eat?"

"Vaya, senor!" he replied, with the placid deliberation of age, and pointing with his cane to the shops that bordered the square. "He buys a perrito of bread in the bakery there, dos perros of ham in the butchery beyond, fruit of the market-woman--"

"And eats it where?" I interrupted.

"Hi jo de mi alma!" responded the patriarch with extreme slowness and almost a touch of sarcasm in his voice. "Here is the broad plaza, all but empty. In all that is there not room to sit down and eat?"

I continued my quest and entered two posadas. But for the only time during the summer the proprietors demanded my _cedula personal_. I explained that Americans are not supplied with these government licenses to live, and showed instead my pa.s.sport. Both landlords protested that it was not in Spanish and refused to admit me. One might have fancied one's self in Germany. It was some time after dark that I was directed to a private boarding-house that almost rewarded my long search. For the supper set before me was equal to a five-course repast in the Casa Robledo of Granada, and for the first time since leaving Seville I slept in a bed, and not in my clothes.

In the morning an absolutely straight road lay before me across a land treeless but for a few stunted shrubs, a face of desolation and aridity and solitude as of Asia Minor. From the eastward swept a hot, dry wind across the baked plains of La Mancha that recalled all too forcibly the derivation of its name from the Arabic _manxa_--a moistureless land.

At fifteen kilometers the highway swerved slightly and lost from view for the first time the immense cathedral of Manzanares behind. On either hand, miles visible in every direction, huddled stone towns on bare hillsides and in rocky vales, each inconspicuous but for its vast overtowering church. "Si la demeure des hommes est pauvre, celle de Dieu est riche," charges colorful Gautier; which, if the church of Spain is truly the "demeure de Dieu," is sternly true. City, town, village, hamlet, a church always bulks vast above it like a hen among her chicks--rather like some violent overpowering tyrant with a club. To the right of the turn one might, but for a slight rise of ground, have espied a bare twelve kilometers away immortal Argamasilla itself.

During the day there developed a hole in my shoe, through a sole of those very "custom-made" oxfords warranted by all the eloquent Broadway salesman held sacred--whatever that may have been--to endure at least six months of the hardest possible wear. Sand and pebbles drifted in, as sand and pebbles will the world over under such circ.u.mstances, and for some days to come walking was not of the smoothest.

Almost exactly at noonday I caught sight of the first windmills of La Mancha, three of them slowly toiling together on a curving hillside, too distinctly visible at this hour to be mistaken by the most romance-mad for giants. The few peasants I fell in with now and then were a more placid, somber people than the Andaluz and, as is commonly the case in villages reached by no railway, more courteous to the roadster than their fellows more directly in touch with the wide world.

It was that hour when the sun halts lingering above the edge of the earth, as if loath to leave it, that I entered the noiseless little hamlet of Puerto Lapiche. It contained no public hostelry, but the woman who kept its single shop cooked me a supper, chiefly of fried eggs, which I ate sitting on a stool before the building. The fried eggs of Spain! Wherein their preparation differs from that in other lands I know not, but he who has never eaten them after a long day's tramp cannot guess to what Epicurean heights fried eggs may rise. How, knowing of them, could Sancho have named cow-heel for his choice?

The evening was of that soft and gentle texture that invites openly to a night out-of-doors. On the edge of the open country beyond, too, was a thres.h.i.+ng-floor heaped with new straw that would certainly have been my choice, had not the village guardia been watching my every movement from across the way. When I had returned the porcelain frying-pan to its owner, I strolled boldly across to the officer and inquired for a lodging.

"With regret, senor," he replied, raising his hat and offering me the stool on which he had been seated, "I am forced to say that we are a small village so rarely honored by the presence of travelers that we have no public house. But--" he hesitated a moment, then went on "--the weather is fine, senor; the night is warm, the pure air hurts no one; why do you not make your bed on the soft, clean straw of the thres.h.i.+ng-floor yonder?"

"Caballero," I responded, with my most Spanish salute, "a thousand thanks--and may your grace remain with G.o.d."

For the first time during my journey the heat was tempered next morning, though by no means routed, by a slightly overcast sky. The wind continued. The highway led on through a seared brown country, for the most part a silent, smokeless, unpeopled land. The windmills of La Mancha were numerous now on either hand as the road sank slowly down to a gap in the low, gaunt mountains of Ciudad Real. At last it reached them and, picking its way through the narrow pa.s.s of Lapiche, strode off again across a still hotter, drier region, unmitigated even by the wind, which had stopped short at the mountain barrier--a land flowing not even with ditch-water. I halted but briefly at the large village of Madridejos, peopled by a slow, dreamy-eyed, yet toil-calloused peasantry, as if their world of fancy and the hard stony life of reality never quite joined hands.

Hot, thirsty and hungry, I came in mid-afternoon to an isolated ramshackle venta in a rocky wilderness. An enormous s.h.a.ggy man of a zoological cast of countenance, and a male-limbed girl were harnessing mules in the yard. No other living thing showed itself. I offered a peseta for food. The man glared at me for a time in silence, then growled that he sold nothing, but that I should find a posada not far beyond. He was evidently the champion prevaricator of that region, for not the suggestion of a hovel appeared during the rest of the afternoon.

But he would be a fellow with Sancho indeed, who could not overrule a few hour's appet.i.te in thinking of higher things, and no fit traveler in this hard, toilsome land where overeating is not numbered among the vices.

The setting of the sun was perhaps an hour off when the highway, swinging a bit to the left and surmounting a barren, rocky ridge, laid suddenly before me an enthralling prospect. Below, far down on a distinctly lower level, a flat, ruffled country still misty with rising waves of heat, stretched away to the uttermost endless distance. The whole, glinting in the oblique rays of the setting sun, was scored in every direction with dull rock villages huddled compactly together, while on every hand, like signal fires on a western prairie, rose from a hundred thres.h.i.+ng-floors columns of chaff straight and slender into the motionless air to an incredible height before breaking up. The road descended with decision, yet in no unseemly haste and, marching for an hour across a country traveled only by an occasional donkey loaded with chopped straw, led me at nightfall into the scene of Sancho's labors in the wheat-piles--the village of Tembleque.

In its immense fonda, but for the underground stables one single, vast, cobble-paved room, a vacant-eyed old man, a girl, and a leviathan of a woman sat among the carts, wine-casks, and heaps of harnesses, the latter knitting. In strictest Castilian the establishment was no fonda, but a _parador_, from _parar_, to stop; and certainly it could not with honesty have laid claim to any more inviting name, for a.s.suredly no man in his senses would have dreamed of choosing it as a _staying_-place.

When I asked if lodging was to be had, the woman replied with a caustic sneer that she had always been able thus far to accommodate any who were able and willing to pay.

"And can one also get supper?" I inquired timorously.

"How on earth do I know?" snapped the woman.

I stared with a puzzled air at the old man and he in like manner at the knitter, who turned out to be his wife, espoused in budding maidenhood when his march in life had well begun.

"How can I cook him supper if he has none with him?" snarled the no longer maidenly.

"Er--what have you brought to eat?" asked the preadamite in a quavering voice.

"Nothing to be sure. What is a fonda for?"

"Ah, then how can la senora mia get you supper? Over the way is the butcher, beyond, the green-grocer, further still the panadero--"

I returned some time later with meat, bread, potatoes, garbanzos, and a variety of vegetables, supplied with which the senora duly prepared me a supper--by sitting tight in her chair and issuing a volley of commands to the girl and the old man. For this service she demanded two "fat dogs," and collected at the same time an equal amount for my lodging.

When I had eaten, the mistress of the house mumbled a word to the dotard. He lighted with trembling hand a sort of miner's lamp and led the way downward into the subterranean stable and for what seemed little short of a half-mile through great stone vaults musty with time, close by the cruppers of an army of mules and burros. Opening at last a door some three feet square and as many above the floor, he motioned to me to climb through it into a bin filled with chaff. This was to all appearances clean, yet I hesitated. For in these endless vaults, to which the outer air seemed not to have penetrated for a century, it was cold as a November evening. I glanced at the old man in protest. He blinked back at me, shook his ever-quaking head a bit more forcibly, and turning, shuffled away through the resounding cavern, the torch casting at first weird, dancing shadows behind his wavering legs, then gradually dying out entirely. I stood in blackest darkness, undecided. Before, however, the last faint sound of his going had wholly pa.s.sed away, the sc.r.a.pe of the veteran's faltering feet grew louder again and in another moment he reappeared, clutching under one thin arm a heavy blanket.

When I had taken it, he put a finger to his lips, cast his sunken eyes about him, whispered "s.h.!.+" with a labored wink, and tottered once more away. I climbed into the bin and slept soundly until the cursing of arrieros harnessing their mules aroused me shortly before dawn.

CHAPTER IX

THE TRAIL OF THE PRIEST

The people of Tembleque had been just certain enough that none but an arriero could follow the intricate route thither, and that no man could cover the distance on foot in one day, to cause me to awaken determined to leave the Madrid highway and strike cross-country to Toledo. The first stage of the journey was the road to the village of Mora, which I was long in finding because at its entrance to--which chanced also to be its exit from--Tembleque it split up like an unraveled shoe-string. I got beyond the loose ends at last, however, and set a sharp pace--even though the hole in my shoe had enlarged to the size of a peseta--across a scarred and weather-beaten landscape that seemed constantly reminding how aged is the world.