The broken straw and chaff is stored in large stacks, to form the staple food for horses and cattle during the winter: and is indeed of good quality, affording as much nutriment as the best hay, of which none is grown in this southern land.[47]
The corn goes to the owner's granary, the wine to his bodega, and all is soon safely housed within the city walls. Nothing, beyond actual necessaries, is left in the country.
The antipathy evinced by Spaniards towards the country is a curious feature of this southern life. No Spaniard, rich or poor, will remain in the country for a single night, even in the green and glorious spring-time when the Andalucian vegas revel in richest charm to eye and ear. The labourers whose work takes them into the campo do their best to get back by night: even the poorest prefer a walk of several miles, morning and evening, rather than remain overnight amidst rustic scenes. Centuries of former insecurity may explain this: but now no present cause can be assigned beyond the force of habit, and perhaps the fear of being overtaken by sudden illness or death beyond the reach of priest—in which case the last rites of religion might not be available.
Whatever be the cause, the country gentleman, the country parson and doctor, Hodge and rural population generally, are unknown in Spain. The landowner hies him townwards at night to his gossip, his paséo and his favourite game of tresillo at the casino—the workman to his village, his wife and bairns in the humble tenement he proudly calls his casa. Spain is a land of customs and accepted traditions—be they good or bad. For centuries no one has sought to introduce a novelty—say a taste for rural life, though the conditions for its enjoyment exist here as favourably, at least, as elsewhere. So far as we can judge, the vesper-bell will continue for all time to gather in the natives to the cities as rookeries unite their flocks when every sun goes down.
This, of course, does not apply to farmsteads remote from town or village, where labourers and herdsmen perforce live as in a rural fortress. It is not surprising that, with the gregarious instincts of the Spanish people, the lot of such men should be despised; and that there should arise in these unhappy groups, isolated for weeks from kith and kin, and with the barest means of subsistence, that spirit of discontent which resulted in 1883 in the mano negra, and this year in that anarchical furor which, on both occasions, was expiated on the scaffold.
Agriculture in Spain is thus deprived of that gracia which in other lands distinguishes it from other commercial pursuits. It is devoid of that loving, homely interest that in England attaches to it, making the cultivation of the soil—at least when conducted (willingly) by the landowner—something of a recreation or "labour of love." Here, nothing beyond elementary and imperative operations are carried on—those which a rule-of-thumb experience has shown to give fairly good results with a minimum of trouble. Experiments are things unknown. There is a settled conviction among the agricultural class that improvement is impossible, that their patriarchal system represents perfection. Reward is looked for rather in a twenty or thirty-fold return once in every four or five years by luck of favouring climatic conditions, than sought to be assured by skill and the adoption of modern modes of tillage.
Corn-growing nevertheless does pay in Spain, owing to the import-duty on foreign grain, which ensures a profit to the home-producer. But fortunes realized on the cortijo are always ascribed rather to a run of good luck than to any other specific cause.
He would be a bold man who departed from the traditional systems in vogue since time began, in this land where "whatever is is best." And a strange fatality does await experimental changes. The very soil seems to repel innovation. A firm of practical English agriculturists failed signally some thirty years ago, and one still hears it satirically told how the deep-searching iron ploughshares from Inglaterra left offended fields which for years afterwards refused to yield a crop.