Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

Two men of forty-five or fifty, in resplendent uniforms and tall red caps, their swords clinking along the pavement, were sauntering down upon us. I stepped quickly to the opposite side of my companion, being taller--and likewise curious.

"Hombre!" he protested sharply, stepping back again. "No tenga V. cuidado. It is not our way to hide from our officers."

With head erect and military stride he marched straight on before him. Luckily the officers were so engrossed in conversation that neither glanced up as they passed.

We drifted into a café and ordered "helado," that Spanish imitation of ice-cream the calling of which in the streets had so frequently caused me to whirl about in astonishment, so much does it sound like our "hello." Over it we fell to discussing things American, in which we were gradually joined by several well-dressed men at the adjoining marble tables. In the course of the evening I chanced to remark that one of the surprises of my summer's trip had been to find so little resentment against the United States.

"Señor," said the youth, while each and all of our companions gave signs of agreement, "nothing more fortunate has befallen our country in a century than the loss of Cuba and the Philippines. Not only has it taken a load off the Spanish people; it has brought more relief than you can guess to us of the army. The colonies were the dumping-ground of our profession. Once let an officer show ability and he was forthwith shipped off to the islands to die. Now they are taken away, Spain has already begun to regain her lost place among the nations. No, señor; we of the army at least think nothing but kindness to your people for the relief."

Returned to the casa de huéspedes, the student and I were given adjoining rooms and saw much of Valladolid together before I took train the second morning after to Burgos. There, were regulation "sights" in abundance; on every hand memories of the Cid Campeador, even the spot where stood his dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks of Jerusalem. Two miles or more out along the shallow mill-race that Burgos calls a river I visited the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims for its distinction never in its centuries of existence to have admitted to the veil less than a daughter of the nobility. The stroll is pleasant, but the place, noble though it be, unexciting--at least outwardly. Of the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be said--that has been often said before.

It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what I might have seen earlier and frequently had my tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery. More exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside in which hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed for future reference, with the name and a charitably indulgent characterization of the deceased on the end of his coffin. The Spaniard, with his superstitions, prefers this style of tomb for much the same reason, it seems, that the Arab seals his graves with cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular regions may not bear away the departed before the agents of the better and hence slower realm put in an appearance.

The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was the view from the summit of the hot, dry Cerro de San Miguel. Not merely does it offer a mighty and comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of Castilla Vieja, but a bird's-eye view as it were of all Spain and her history. Of the city spread out at one's feet fully three-fourths the space is taken up by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas de misericordia, the vast bulk of the castle, the barracks, the bullring,--all the countless buildings of non-producers; while between them in the nooks and corners wherever a crack offers are packed and huddled the hovels of the mere inhabitants. There, in plain sight, is Spain's malady. She is a land of non-producers. Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by the omnivorous priesthood that mendicancy is an honorable profession, make up almost the bulk of her population of productive age. Not without reason does nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail against "Batuschca."

There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that she shoot her priests and set her soldiers to work. As isolated individuals the merry, dissolute fellows of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they have, and suffer the natural end of such living. But as a class they are beyond reform; their point of view is so utterly warped and incorrigible, they have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft" that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro remedio" as the Spaniard himself would say could his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of superstition and cant for one clear thought. Let him who protests that they are teachers of the youth go once and see what they teach,--the vapid, senseless lies about "saints" so far from truth as to be an abomination, so far above the possible aspirations and attainments of real humanity as to force the rising generations from very hopelessness of imitation to lose heart and sink to iniquity as the priesthood has done before them. Or are there some who still credit them with feeding the poor? A high praise, indeed, exactly equal to that due the footpad who refunds his victim carfare that he may be the more quickly rid of him.

Therein lies the chief weakness of Spain. It is not because she is ruled by a slender youth chosen by the accident of birth rather than by a more portly man chosen more or less by his fellow-citizens; not because her religion happens to be that of Rome rather than the austerities of Calvin or the fatalism of Mohammed; not because her national sport is a bit more dramatically brutal than that of other lands; not because her soil is dry and stony and her rains and rivers slight; not because her people are decadent, her human stock run down--I have plowed in the sea in the foregoing pages if I have not made it clear that her real manhood, the workman, the peasant, the arriero, the muscle and sinew of the nation, are as hardy, toilsome and all-enduring as the world harbors. But in the long centuries of warfare her attention was drawn away from internal affairs, she fell among thieves within, and the force of example, the helplessness of the individual drove her people in the line of least resistance,--to become thieves too, nationally, officially, until mad grab-what-you-can-and-the-devil-grab-the-ungrabbing has her by the throat gasping for life. If she is not to sink down for the vultures of the nations to pick clean of her meager scraps of flesh there must arise within her boundaries a man, a movement, a sweeping change that shall cast off the burden of precedent and turn her officials to doing honestly with all their might what now they do with all their might dishonestly. She must regain confidence in the necessity and prevalence of honesty. She must learn that patent yet rarely comprehended truth that work and work only is the real source of life; she must cease to be the sworn enemy of the innovator, thinking her ways best and those of the rest of the world abnormal, unable to see a yard beyond her national boundaries, scorning all ideas and arguments from the outside like the most hide-bound of Orientals.