To water these.
“I am no link of Thy great chain,
But all my company is as a weed.
Lord! place me in Thy concert, give one strain
To my poor reed.”
Soon Bordeaux was reached; then, as the afternoon drew on, the Pyrenees were passed, and at midnight he alighted at Burgos, to rest a day or two before going on. An old-world place, where the railway was a gross anomaly, and the telegraph poles a violation of the fitness of things. At least two hundred years behind the times, the great offence to the eye being smart French-looking soldiers where one looked for mailed knights with their esquires. Here was a market-place with its traffic much as it had been conducted any day this five hundred years. True, by ferreting amongst the stalls you could find some nineteenth-century novelties in the shape of wax matches and paper collars; there were books, too, in secluded corners, “printed on scrofulous grey paper with blunt type,” which evidenced some demand for modern literature; but, these indications of our advanced civilization excepted, the rest of the dealing was in things which cannot have much changed their form or their use for many generations. A sleepy, quiet, leisurely place, with plenty of time to be wicked in, but also with much opportunity to be good. In such a place, indeed in the whole peninsula, there is every inducement to lead the devout life; there is so little else to do. One’s activities have small outlets, except towards the other world. Yet for a busy Londoner, a blasé Parisian, what a blessed sense of peace comes over the soul resting in such a becalmed water-way on one’s voyage!
But a terrible sense of loneliness possessed Elsworth. The day after his arrival here it was Sunday. The wind was bitterly cold. His Spanish was not quite Castilian in its perfection, though he could make himself understood; and when he had spent some hours in the cathedral, visited what a young fruit-seller called the Mercado de la Llendre, which is not quite literally rendered as Rag Fair, and wandered round and round the quaint old market-place half a dozen times, his questioning spirit disturbed him as to why he had ever left London, and how was a nineteenth-century life to be supported long under such conditions? St. Simeon Stylites, on the top of his pillar, must have had some such misgivings for the first few days at least, and St. Francis could not have found all at once the birds and the fishes supply the place of familiar friends, nor their sentiments, if they expressed any, a sufficient substitute for his human interests of former days. The dinner table did not mend matters. The company at the hotel consisted of some half a dozen priests, as many young officers of the army from the barracks opposite, and some of the towns-people, who evidently were quite at home in their surroundings and particularly provincial in their breeding. No one took the least notice of him, and his attempts at conversation, like sparks of damp wood, went out dismally. The truth was, the Castilians had paid for a good Sunday dinner, and the matter of making the most of it was of too serious importance to every one of them to permit of their being beguiled in their work by any such trivial considerations as the young Englishman’s conversation could offer. So everybody ate as became good hearty Burgolese, and poor Elsworth was left to his meditations.
He knew the only remedy for this depression was to get out of cities into the country. There is no such loneliness as that experienced in a crowd where one knows nobody; so he determined henceforth to live chiefly in villages, roadside inns, and places where he might hope to make friends with the less sophisticated of the people. Sending therefore, his luggage on to Madrid, he packed a small knapsack, took his stout walking-stick, and set off for a good spell of pedestrian work. He resolved to purchase a bicycle when he reached the capital. He was an ardent cyclist, but had not brought his machine with him, and now missed it sadly. He loved his steel roadster as men love a favourite horse, and felt shorn of his strength without it. His Spanish stood him in good stead, not only at the posadas, but with the people he met on the roads. Spain is so little known from the play-ground point of view, that he felt sure of the retirement he sought, and had been but a few days on the tramp ere he found his healthy life invite healthy thoughts; and as the London smoke got out of his lungs, a clearer spirit entered him in its place. The smoke of the great city had penetrated deeper even than his lungs: it had begun to pollute his mind. It was time he broke with it. Thank God, he was not out of tune for Nature altogether, and as he sat beside a mountain stream could lift up his heart and meditate, and say with old Isaac Walton:—
“Here we may think and pray, before death stop our breath.
Other joys are but toys, and to be lamented.”