Dagonet Abroad

by George R. Sims

When you enter the enormous rooms crowded with girls dressed in bright colours, the coup d'œil is striking in the extreme. In one immense low-vaulted room there are 1,500 girls. They sit in endless rows—about twenty girls to a row—on either side of the room, all at little tables, all rolling cigarettes. There is a blaze and blur of colour, a babel of tongues. Every girl has a gay handkerchief about her neck—every girl has a bright flower stuck in her hair. All along the walls hang the gay outdoor dresses of the little cigarette-makers. As I walk, blushing and nervous, down an endless avenue of flashing eyes, I grow almost giddy. It is a sea of women’s faces, an undulating ocean of flower-decked heads. One has to pick one’s way carefully down the central avenue, for it is blockaded all along the line with cradles. The married cigarette-makers are allowed to bring their babies with them to the factory. They rock the cradle with one foot, while their busy fingers roll the cigarette.

‘Silence!’ is called by the forewoman as the visitor passes down the lines, but there is a ‘chut-chut’ every second from some dark-eyed wench who points to a cradle and holds out her hand. It is the habit of visitors to bestow occasional coppers on the babies, and so all the young mothers are on the alert for the visitors’ charity.

The girls earn good wages. At many of the tables whole families are working together. But the hours are long, and the atmosphere awful. The damp, warm odour of the tobacco in the long, low-roofed rooms is in itself almost stupefying. But there is no ventilation, and the atmosphere is absolutely indescribable. Many of the girls smoke cigarettes at their work. I was very glad to light one myself long before I had done the round of the factory.

I have said that cigarette-smoking is universal in Spain. Nowhere does the habit strike the foreigner more forcibly than at a funeral. Funerals in Spain are conducted in a manner which is in the highest degree original. When you die you are got rid of as soon as possible. The Spaniards have the same horror of death surroundings as the Italians, but they go a great deal further. As quickly as possible—sometimes within an hour—the body is placed in an elaborate coffin made of metal, and painted to imitate marble. Some of these ‘caskets’ are smothered in gilt ornaments of a most elaborate character. All sizes are kept ready at the great funeral establishments. The coffins open lengthways. The lid is on hinges, and is locked with a key. The poorer people are buried in wooden coffins, covered with various designs in coloured ribbons. Children’s coffins are made in white and blue, and are decorated like a bon-bon box. Coffins of this description are sold almost everywhere in the South. You see them hanging up outside the shops by dozens.

I went over the premises of one of the biggest undertaking concerns in Spain. It is a public company, and is called ‘La Funeraria.’ I never saw such magnificence in my life. Some of the funeral cars are built in the style of the great gilt and glass cars which figure in a circus procession through a country town. The drivers and footmen are dressed in gorgeous liveries that make you blink to look at them. Some of the liveries that I was shown cost over £200 each. They positively blazed with gold. A grand first-class funeral, with a retinue of footmen and officials, is a perfect Lord Mayor’s show in itself.

As a rule, the corpse, even when so magnificently conducted to its last home, is unattended by any relatives. Spaniards finish with their dead when the church ceremony is over. Few corpses are accompanied to the cemetery except by the undertaker’s men. But in ordinary cases the coffin is placed in a yellow, open car, and driven up to the cemetery by a gentleman in a short jacket and peaked cap. The driver smokes his cigarette and cracks his whip as he hums his favourite tune. I have seen dozens of these ordinary funerals in Spain, and they have always filled me with amazement. The ridiculous always lives next door to the sublime. The grotesque and the horrible are first cousins. More than once I have with difficulty restrained myself from smiling at a Spanish interment, so utterly out of keeping with English notions of decorum has the final ceremony been.

I will describe two interments that I witnessed in one day at the great cemetery at Seville. Four little barefooted boys arrive at the cemetery gates. Between them they carry a little blue and white coffin. They jog along, chatting and laughing, up the long avenue of trees. Presently they see something which attracts their attention—a bird in a tree. Down they drop the coffin by the roadside, and off they scamper across the grass to the tree. They pick up stones and begin to throw them at the bird. In the process they quarrel about something, and two of the boys have a fight. In the meantime the coffin lies in the roadway. I walk up to it, and through the glass let into the lid I see the dead child’s face. It has been dead perhaps twelve hours, so the features are unchanged, and it appears to be calmly sleeping. Several people pass me; no one takes any notice of the coffin in the road. One old gentleman nearly tumbles over it, and swears. It is evidently nothing unusual.

Presently these ragged boys, having arranged their little difference, return, and pick up the coffin. Two of them have lighted cigarettes. They carry their burthen right across the cemetery to a little house, where two or three men with brass numbers on their caps are smoking cigarettes. Here they show a paper, and one of the men, picking up a spade, tells the boys to follow him. Off they go, jogging the coffin now this way and now that, and I follow them.

We come to a long line of brick vaults. Some are empty; some are filled up to the top with what I presume to be mould. The gravedigger turns over the loose earth with his spade, and strikes a coffin here and there. The vault is too full. He moves on to another bricked square, pushes his spade in, and says there is just room. He digs a little hole and lays the coffin flush with the top of the brickwork. Then he throws a few spadefuls of earth over it from a mound close by, and the ceremony is finished. There are thousands of these bricked squares in the cemetery, and each contains a score of coffins. There is no stone over the top, only the loose brown earth. Some of them are so full that the earth has to be piled up to cover the coffin, and thus the coffin is actually above ground.

This system of burying in bricked squares saves a lot of trouble. The graves are always ready, and the dead can be brought to the cemetery and put away at once. There is no necessity to order or select beforehand. To understand this system you must see a Spanish cemetery. No written words can convey a correct impression of its general peculiarities.