A. Brandram.
Mrs. Borrow, Norwich.
A brilliant letter from Seville followed soon after, and then he went on to Madrid, not without many adventures. 'The cold nearly killed me,' he said. 'I swallowed nearly two bottles of brandy; it affected me no more than warm water.' This to kindly Mr. Brandram, who clearly had no teetotaller proclivities, for the letter, as he said, 'filled his heart with joy and gladness.' Meanwhile those five thousand copies of the New Testament were a-printing, Borrow superintending the work with the assistance of a new friend, Dr. Usóz. 'As soon as the book is printed and issued,' he tells Mr. Brandram, 'I will ride forth from Madrid into the wildest parts of Spain, ...' and so, after some correspondence with the Society which is quite entertaining, he did. The reader of The Bible in Spain will note some seventy separate towns and villages that Borrow visited, not without countless remarkable adventures on the way. 'I felt some desire,' he says in The Romany Rye, 'to meet with one of those adventures which upon the roads of England are generally as plentiful as blackberries in autumn.' Assuredly in this tour of Spanish villages Borrow met with no lack of adventures. The committee of the Bible Society authorised this tour in March 1837, and in May Borrow started off on horseback attended by his faithful servant, Antonio. This tour was to last five months, and 'if I am spared,' he writes to his friend Hasfeld, 'and have not fallen a prey to sickness, Carlists, banditti, or wild beasts, I shall return to Madrid.' He hopes a little later, he tells Hasfeld, to be sent to China. We have then a glimpse of his servant, the excellent Antonio, which supplements that contained in The Bible of Spain. 'He is inordinately given to drink, and is of so quarrelsome a disposition that he is almost constantly involved in some broil.'[121] Not all his weird experiences were conveyed in his letters to the Bible Society's secretary. Some of these letters, however—the more highly coloured ones—were used in The Bible in Spain, word for word, and wonderful reading they must have made for the secretary, who indeed asked for more, although, with a view to keeping Borrow humble—an impossible task—Mr. Brandram takes occasion to say 'Mr. Graydon's letters, as well as yours, are deeply interesting,' Graydon being a hated rival, as we shall see. The question of L.S.D. was also not forgotten by the assiduous secretary. 'I know you are no accountant,' he writes, 'but do not forget there are some who are,' and a financial document was forwarded to Borrow about this time which we reproduce in facsimile.
FACSIMILE OF AN ACCOUNT OF GEORGE BORROW'S EXPENSES IN SPAIN MADE OUT BY THE BIBLE SOCIETY
But now Borrow was happy, for next to the adventures of five glorious months in the villages between Madrid and Coruña nothing could be more to the taste of Borrow than a good wholesome quarrel. He was imprisoned by order of the Spanish Government and released on the intervention of the British Embassy.[122] He tells the story so graphically in The Bible in Spain that it is superfluous to repeat it; but here he does not tell of the great quarrel with regard to Lieutenant Graydon that led him to attack that worthy zealot in a letter to the Bible Society. This attack did indeed cause the Society to recall Graydon, whose zealous proclamation of anti-Romanism must however have been more to the taste of some of its subscribers than Borrow's trimming methods. Moreover, Graydon worked for love of the cause and required no salary, which must always have been in his favour. Borrow was ten days in a Madrid prison, and there, as ever, he had extraordinary adventures if we may believe his own narrative, but they are much too good to be torn from their context. Suffice to say here that in the actual correspondence we find breezy controversy between Borrow and the Society. Borrow thought that the secretary had called the accuracy of his statements in question as to this or that particular in his conduct. Ever a fighter, he appealed to the British Embassy for confirmation of his word, and finally Mr. Brandram suggested he should come back to England for a time and talk matters over with the members of the committee. In the beginning of September 1838 Borrow was again in England, when he issued a lengthy and eloquent defence of his conduct and a report on 'Past and Future Operations in Spain.'[123] In December of the same year Borrow was again on his way to Cadiz upon his third and last visit to Spain.
Borrow reached Cadiz on this his last visit on 31st December 1838, and went straight to Seville, where he arrived on 2nd January 1839. Here he took a beautiful little house, 'a paradise in its way,' in the Plazuela de la Pila Seca, and furnished it—clearly at the expense of his friend Mrs. Clarke of Oulton, who must have sent him a cheque for the purpose. He had been corresponding regularly with Mrs. Clarke, who had told him of her difficulties with lawyers and relatives, and Borrow had advised her to cut the Gordian knot and come to Spain. But Mrs. Clarke and her daughter, Henrietta, did not arrive from England until June.
In the intervening months Borrow had been working more in his own interests than in those of the patient Bible Society, for he started to gather material for his Gypsies of Spain, and this book was for the most part actually written in Seville. It was at this period that he had the many interviews with Colonel Elers Napier that we quote at length in our next chapter.
A little later he is telling Mr. Brandram of his adventure with the blind girl of Manzanares who could talk in the Latin tongue, which she had been taught by a Jesuit priest, an episode which he retold in The Bible in Spain. 'When shall we hear,' he asks, 'of an English rector instructing a beggar girl in the language of Cicero?' To which Mr. Brandram, who was rector of Beckenham, replied 'Cui bono?' The letters of this period are the best that he ever wrote, and are incorporated more exactly than the earlier ones in The Bible in Spain.
