ESTREMADURA
"I have always felt that the two most precious things in life are faith and love. As I grow older I think so more and more. Ambition and achievement are out of the running; the disappointments are many and the prizes few, and by the time they are attained seem small. The whole thing is vanity and vexation of spirit without faith and love. I have come to see that cleverness, success, attainment, count for little; that goodness, 'character,' is the important factor in life."
GEORGE J. ROMANES.
LITERALLY worn out with the noise of Seville's Holy Week, we took the night train, that chill, rainy Good Friday, and left the Andalusian excitement behind. As carriages are forbidden in the city on both Holy Thursday and Good Friday, we had expected to walk to the station—they told us that the King, the year before, had walked to his train—but the regulation ceased at sunset on Friday and we were able to drive.
As usual we had the Reservado para Señoras compartment to ourselves, and so exhausted were we that we slept heavily with only an occasional waking to look out on the cold hills we were crossing. There was a moon which hurrying black clouds obscured fitfully. Under the somber sky the desolate hills seemed like the fantastic sepia drawing of a Turner: swift unforgettable memories one carries away from night journeys in Spain.
We left the train at Mérida, now a poor place with some few thousand inhabitants, but up to the fourth century a splendid Roman city, the capital of Lusitania. The castle built by Romans, Moors, Knights of Santiago, and bishops; the theater, the aqueduct, the bridge, the triumphal arch, and the baths show what it once was. We could not have visited this solitary province at a happier hour. Field flowers made the countryside as beautiful for the moment as Umbria or Devonshire; the wheat fields, always so articulate and lovely, had their own charm even after the magnificent outburst of roses and orange blossoms a month earlier in Seville.
Mérida is small,—frugal and neat, as are the larger number of Spanish towns. As we explored it, the people greeted us with kindly "Vayan Ustedes con Dios"; we had left behind the tourist-infested south with its insolent city loafers. It seemed too good to believe that we had come again among the grave, dignified Spaniards of the north. In order not to miss the Holy Saturday services, I hastened to the Cathedral. There was a cracked old organ and the singing was little better, but devout, heart-moving peasants rose and knelt, up and down, during the long Flectamus Genua! Levate! ceremony of that day, and the bells burst into the riotous clamor they seem to achieve so individually all over Spain. It may have been ungrateful, but it was without the slightest regret that I thought of the display going on at the same hour in Seville.
We had taken the trip into Estremadura to see the Roman remains, the best in the Peninsula. The ruins are more fortunate in their setting here than in many places, for there are none of the bustling cafés nor electric cars of Nîmes or Verona. Paestum is more poetic, Baalbec a hundred times more grandiose, but Mérida on a showery, sunshiny day in spring is an ideal spot for musing and rambling. In the city itself are some ancient remains, such as a temple of Mars, and the fluted columns of a temple of Diana built into a mediæval house, which, by the way, has a lovely Plateresque window, but most of the ruins lie completely outside the present town. The amphitheatre, when we saw it, had a comfortable troop of goats asleep in the warm shelter of its oval, and the remarkable theatre, known as Las Siete Sillas, from the seven divisions of its upper seats that crown it like a coronet, was gay with poppies and buttercups,—the national colors gleamed everywhere. Swallows in cool, metallic, blue-black coats, dipped and swept in their swift, graceful way. Looking out on the view which embraced Mérida on one side and a line of rugged hills on the other, we lingered for hours in that Theatre of the Seven Seats. Children, like gentle fawns, one by one crept out from the town suburbs and gathered in a smiling, lovable circle round the strangers. We talked to them tranquilly, our map of their city seemed a fascinating wonder to them. They came and went smiling; now one returned to the town to fetch his mother, now a shy little girl laid an armful of poppies beside us, with no thought of pennies, but just out of primitive human kindliness. The dear Don's age of gold seemed a reality. And a day before we had angrily scattered those diabolical little pests, the street children of Seville! Could these enchanting little people belong to the same race, and live only a hundred and fifty miles away? Journeys in unfrequented parts of Spain give one a truer picture than is possible for the hurried tourist on the beaten track; every time we turned aside into the unspoiled country we met the people and ways which Cervantes has described. Never were gentler human beings than those little girls of Mérida, those young mothers, those big half-awkward lads, whose gazelle eyes would gaze at us inquiringly, then turn to look at the scene we so obviously admired, then back to us with pleasure at our appreciation of what they too held most beautiful. We are told that peasants get no æsthetic pleasure from landscape, but I am sure romantic Roman ruins and perfect spring-time weather had much to do with giving those children faces of such pure outline.
Perhaps later, when the sun scorches the first freshness, Mérida may be a desolate enough spot; we probably knew her best hour, the lovely April of her prime. We were loath to tear ourselves away; we read to our interested audience accounts of their city's past, when Emperors' armies marched along the Roman road that led from Cadiz north, and alert to catch the meaning, they listened with that vividness of the eye that shows the imagination is roused. Then from the daily paper we read to them that in Madrid on Holy Thursday, two days before, the King had washed the feet of a dozen poor men, kissed them in humility, then waited on them at table, assisted by the grandees of Spain; that on Good Friday he had set free some criminals. When the bishop's words rang through the church: "Señor, human laws condemn these men to death," Don Alfonso answered with moved voice: "I pardon them, and may God pardon me!" And somehow, Alfonso XIII is not jarring or theatric among such ancient usages of Spanish Christianity. Very modern with his automobile, his polo, his careless ease, this charming king is one with his people in a radical sympathy with ways that symbolize soul and heart emotions.