The railway man was one of nature's satisfactions, a short solid fellow of thirty-five, overflowing with contagious cheerfulness. The libation incidental to our introduction being drained, the landlord led the way, chair in hand, to the bit of level flagging before the shop. As we sat "al fresco" drinking into our lungs the refreshing air of evening, we were joined by a well-dressed man whom I recalled having seen somewhere during the day. He was a lawyer, speaking a pure Castilian with scarcely a trace of the local patois, in short, one whom the caste rules of any other land of Europe would have forbidden to spend an evening in company with a tavern-keeper, a switchman, and a wandering unknown.
"How does it happen, señor," I asked, when our acquaintance had advanced somewhat, "that I saw you in the cathedral this morning?"
"The domain of women, priests and tourists?" he laughed. "Because, señor, it is the one place in town where I can get cool."
Truly the heat of a summer day in Jaen calls for some such drastic measure, for it grows estival, gigantic, weighing down alike on mind and body until one feels imperative necessity of escaping from it somehow, of running away from it somewhere; and there is no surer refuge than the cavernous cathedral.
This as well as the fact that the edifice contains considerable that is artistic led me back to it the next morning. But this time it was in the turmoil of a personally conducted party. When I had taken refuge in a shaded seat across the way, the flock poured out upon the broad stone steps and, falling upon a beggar, checked their flight long enough to bestow upon him a shower of pity and copper coins.
The mendicant was blind and crippled, outwardly a personification of gratitude and humility, and attended by a gaunt-bellied urchin to whom might fittingly have been applied the Spanish appellation "child of misery." Long after the hubbub of the passing tourists had died away in the tortuous city his meekly cadenced voice drifted on after them:
"Benditos sean, caballeros. Que Dios se lo pagará mil veces al cielo!"
A curiosity to know whether such gentleness were genuine held me for a time in my place across the way. Silence had settled down. Only a shopkeeper wandering by to a day of drowsing passed now and then; within the great cathedral stillness reigned. The urchin ran after each passerby, wailing the familiar formula, only to be as often ordered off. At length he ascended the steps stealthily and, creeping within a few feet of his master, lay down and was instantly lost in sleep, a luxury he had evidently not tasted for a fortnight.
The beggar rocked to and fro on his worthless stumps, now and again uttering as mournful a wail as if his soul had lost not one but all save a scattered half-dozen of its strings. Gradually the surrounding silence drew his attention. He thrust a hand behind one of his unhuman ears and listened intently. Not a sound stirred. He groped with his left hand along the stones, then with the right and, suddenly touching the sleeping child, a tremor of rage shivered through his misshapen carcass. Feeling with his finger tips until he had located the boy's face, he raised his fist, which was massive as that of a horseshoer, high above his head and brought it down three times in quick succession. They were blows to have shattered the panel of a door; but the boy uttered only a little stifled whine and, springing to his feet, took up again his task, now and then wiping away with a sleeve the blood that dripped from his face down along his tattered knees.
Before the sun had reached its full strength, I struck off to explore the barren bluff that overlooks Jaen on the south and east. Barely had I gained the first crest, however, before the inexorable leaden heat was again upon me, and the rest of the day was a perspiring labor. Only the reflection that real travel and sight-seeing is as truly work as any life's vocation lent starch to my wilted spirits.