I let my femme de chambre chatter on. She tells me stories of the Empress Eugénie in the old Biarritz days, and tears come into her eyes as she speaks of the dead Prince Imperial. They worship the memory of the imperial family of France all round this district, and have many a pleasant tale to tell of the young lady who lived so much among them in the days before the love of an emperor raised her to the throne. When she has quite finished her royal and imperial anecdotes, I cross-question her as to Basque habits and customs and superstitions. My head is full of the beautiful Basque legends and ghost stories which I have lately picked up, and I ask her if it is true that the people still believe in them. Then she informs me that her venerable father and mother are Basque peasants, and that they themselves believe in witchcraft and sorcery, and all the spells of the Evil One, and all the bad spirits that haunt the mountains and the woods. Her papa has, in fact, just moved out of his house on account of sorcery. He lost last year six cows, and he was so convinced that they had been bewitched, and that a spell had been worked upon his house, that he quitted it, and built another close by. He then sent for the priest to come and bless it, and after that he painted up a big white cross on the front door to keep the evil spirits from entering therein. ‘Superstitious!’ she says. ‘Ah, mon cher monsieur, I have travelled and seen the world, and I know better; but when I go to my native village and say I do not believe in witches and charms and the evil spirits of the night, the peasants cross themselves, and my old father and mother weep and curse themselves for allowing me to leave home and become “une fille perdue.”’
Wandering about the Basque villages, I have gleaned a few of their superstitions. No man, woman, or child among them will be out of doors after midnight, for they all believe that wicked spirits are abroad, and that terrible misfortune will befall anyone who meets them. On certain feast days they light a great fire, and the whole family kneels and prays round the burning wood until it is all reduced to ashes. These ashes are then carefully collected and scattered on the fields to make them fruitful. If any man neglects to propitiate the spirits by strewing these ashes, his crops will fail.
One afternoon I come to a little auberge on the slope of a lonely mountain on the Spanish side. A great white cross is roughly chalked on the door, and outside sits an old woman talking with the landlord and his wife. They are listening with rapt attention, and cross themselves again and again. Presently the old crone goes away, and I sit on the bench and call for something ‘for the good of the house,’ and gradually get the landlord to tell us what the old lady was talking to him about. Then he tells us that last night the old crone saw the ‘arguiduna’ in the village graveyard—the ‘arguiduna’ of her son whom she buried a month since. The ‘arguiduna’ is the soul of a dead person when it takes the shape of a will-o'-the-wisp. This strange light came from her son’s grave, and stopped close to her. As she moved away it followed her, and accompanied her to the old home. On the threshold she stood still, and her son’s soul in its fiery form circled three times round her, and then slowly went up, up, up into the skies till it was lost among the stars. ‘And now,’ says the innkeeper, ‘the old mother is happy, for she has been in great trouble about her boy, for he had been wild and had done many evil things, and she feared it might not be well with his soul. Now that she has seen the “arguiduna” go up like that to the skies, she knows that his sins have been forgiven him, and that he is with the blessed. She will weep for him no more.’
People who live in great cities, where ideas rush at railway speed, and where the bustle and noise of modern life destroy romance and drive fancy from the field, find it difficult to believe that such a superstition as this can be implicitly believed by a whole race of people living in civilized countries in the nineteenth century; but these Basque people believe to this day in all the legends and fables which their ancestors believed a thousand years ago. With them nothing has changed, and to-day they have their Arguiduna; their Maitgarri, or Fairy of the Lakes; the Lamia, a weird being inhabiting the wave-washed coasts; the Jauna, or Spirits of the Wood; and the Sorguinas, the Spirits of the Plains. In these and a hundred other spirits, evil and good, in witches, sorcerers, and devils, the Basque people of to-day believe as firmly and as devoutly as they did in the dark ages. Their daily life, their habits and customs, are all shaped by these superstitions, and their priests, unable to combat them, now tacitly admit them, and even bless many of the charms which they use against the spirits of darkness. And these people live many of them within walking distance of a railway-station, and Liberal candidates address them and canvass for their votes at election time.
Cambo is a lovely Basque village, about twelve miles from Bayonne. Imagine a sweet Swiss valley shut in by an amphitheatre of olive-green and purple hills! Through the valley winds a broad stream of silver water. Fair white houses, and châlets with bright red roofs, throw back the rays of a glorious sun that bathes the scene in golden light. Above is a sky of cloudless blue. Far as the eye can reach all is luxuriance and beauty. As one gazes upon the perfect landscape from the broad stone terrace of the Hôtel St. Martin, a great peace steals into one’s soul, and the cares and troubles of the outer world are for a time forgotten. On the slope of the hill which faces this glorious scene stands a quaint Basque village. The people live by the land, which yields a bounteous harvest. They keep the simple manners and customs of bygone centuries; they have been here, undisturbed by the rattle of traffic and the snort of the railway engine, ever since the place came into existence; and now, if you please, the French are going to desecrate their village with a railway. There is to be a station at Cambo. The inhabitants are furious; the landowners have refused to sell their land, and the Government replies that if they persist it will be taken from them by force.
My sympathies are with Cambo. A railway will destroy the poetry of the place. All the Basque people ask is to be allowed to live quietly in their homes. They don’t want to be hustled by a crowd of townsfolk, whose ways are not their ways, and who speak a foreign language. Even the rich ‘Americans,’ whose splendid châteaux dot the hills, are crying out. They are Basque to the backbone, and they don’t want excursionists gaping about their grounds, and driving over them in their winding, tree-shaded roadways.
But I must not go Basque-mad, and imagine everyone is as interested in the people as I am. Let us return to modern civilization, and go to Biarritz. My coachman drives me there from Bayonne. He is a beautiful creature, my coachman. He wears the old postilion jacket and hat. He is trimmed with scarlet and silver lace, and my arithmetic stops short in an attempt to add up his buttons. His little jacket alone costs £5; his waistcoat costs £1; his hat costs 15s.; and his horses have bells all over them, so that we make merry music as we dash along the roads, and the whip cracks joyously, and the dogs bark a concert in our rear, and the children pursue us at full speed, yelling for coppers; and that’s how we go to Biarritz.
CHAPTER III.
FROM BIARRITZ TO BURGOS.
Biarritz disappoints one at first, and then grows upon one. It is like a jumble of Ilfracombe, Westgate-on-Sea, the Land’s End, Ostend, and Broadstairs. The sea dashes in gloriously, and makes tremendous breaches in coast and cliff. The hotels are as grand as money can make them, and on the Parade, in all their glory, I came suddenly upon Mary Ann and Susan, two English nursemaids, in the usual hats and feathers, and the usual imitation fur-trimmed jackets, and the usual fingers through the gloves, wheeling unmistakable English perambulators, full of unmistakable English babies; and when, later on, I came upon Eliza Jane sitting down and reading the London Journal while her perambulator was gently working itself, baby and all, over the parade on to the beach, I actually looked up and down and round about for the Life Guardsman.
The French bonnes and the Basque nurses, so clean, so neatly dressed, must have been considerably astonished when Mary Ann and Eliza Jane first came from Clapham to the Bay of Biscay. Even now they eye their ostrich feathers, their brooches, and their fur-trimmed jackets with awe. I earnestly trust the awe is not mixed with admiration. It would be a very terrible thing if the neat and picturesque French bonne, corrupted by the English example, suddenly broke out into hats and feathers, and bad boots and rusty finger-twisted gloves. The downfall of France would then be assured. Whichever way I turn, the British nursemaid meets me and defies me. I sit down to contemplate a grand effect of wave-washed rock, and a female voice behind me shouts to Master Tommy not to go too near the edge; I climb the cliffs and gaze at the distant coast of Spain, and a little imp in a sailor costume, with a broken spade and a sand-grimed bucket, assaults me with, ‘Please, sir, can you tell me the time?’ I find a lovely romantic spot right out on the extreme ledge of an overhanging rock, and, on turning round to look back at the town, I see a young woman behind me nursing a baby and reading the Family Herald. When I rise and fly to the streets for refuge, when I gaze into the shop windows at the fans and tambourines of Spain, the English nursemaid still pursues me. A perambulator is wheeled across my heels, and the wheeleress says, ‘Beg yer pardon, sir; I ‘ope I didn’t ‘urt you!’