But it was at the Puerta del Rio that I found my entourage of most practical utility. It had been snowing overnight in the mountains, and the Sierra de Grédos was draped from base to summit in a mantle of dazzling white. In spite of the brilliant sunshine the wind was incredibly bitter, and the miserable sketcher would have been frozen without his human screen. Truly “Winter is not over till the fortieth of May” within reach of those icy summits. The Duke of Wellington asserted that the coldest thing in his recollection was the wind at Salamanca in July!{171}
CHAPTER IX
BÉJAR, ÁVILA, AND ESCORIAL
THERE were “Bulls at Salamanca” (so ran the placards) on the day when we were to resume our journey towards the south; and the Señor Patron seemed quite crestfallen at realising that we had no intention of deferring our departure in order to witness the fun. Bull-fighting was not cruel, he protested. That was all our inexplicable British prejudice. And as patrons of prize-fights and football we ought to be the last to throw stones. We were rather expected to sympathise with the national sport of Spain.
His conclusion was truer than his reasoning. There are certain thrilling forms of playing with death amiably tolerated by the British public which are logically no whit better than bull-fighting: and it is not humanity but fashion that dictates to us which to condemn. Only a few days earlier an unfortunate woman had been killed at Madrid{172} while “looping the loop” on a motor; and the Spanish papers (those eager reporters of bull-fights) were all most properly indignant at the dangerous and degrading character of this new-fangled foreign show. Our British high-toned repugnance is distinctly less moral than squeamish. But we did not want our feelings harrowed in the midst of a holiday tour.
Bull-fighting is one of the many sports that have been ruined by professionalism. In the days when the young gallants of the court encountered the bull themselves, on their own horses, before the eyes of their lady-loves in the Plaza Mayor, there was a spice of chivalry about the proceeding that half redeemed its brutality. It was truly a sport then, albeit a savage one; but now it is merely a show.
Moreover, even our host admitted that this time the Corrida would be shorn of its foremost attraction. It was to have been inaugurated by a bull-fighting Pierrot who was wont to await the first rush of the monster motionless upon a tub in the centre of the arena. The bull would charge headlong upon him,—check, sniff, and turn away. No doubt he owed his immunity to his apparent lifelessness; but it was billed as the “power of the{173} human eye.” Alas! on the last occasion his programme had miscarried. Just at the critical moment a fly had settled on his nose; and for one infinitesimal fraction of a second the entire voltage of the human eye was switched upon that miserable insect. The effect on the fly was not stated, but it markedly reassured the bull. Poor Pierrot had been tossed as high as a rocket, and apparently was not expected down again in time for the performance to-day.
The two English visitors to Salamanca also failed to figure at the function. They had crossed the bridge very early in the morning, and were heading for the mountains of Grédos by the highway leading to Béjar. The actual battlefield was passed upon the left, about four miles distant from Salamanca, subtending the angle formed by the roads to Alba and Béjar; and the olive woods which so hampered Clausel spread wide around us over the hills behind. It was a just Nemesis which overtook the invaders on this occasion, for the destruction of olive trees for fuel had been one of their most gratuitous outrages during the war. The olive is a slow grower, and a few hours’ reckless cutting might take half a century to repair.
At first the road rises gradually and the country{174} is open and undulating; but soon it gets deeply involved in a labyrinth of mountains, and tacks despairingly backwards and forwards in vain endeavours to twist itself free from the toils. Finally it extricates itself by a frantic rush up a long steep hill, and resumes its journey at first-floor level along the shoulders of the range. Some distance further west it manages to discover a passage across the main ridge into the province of Estremadura; but the town of Béjar itself lies four or five miles upon the hither side.