When the supper hour arrived, the landlord stepped across to me to ask whether I would eat as a guest or as a member of the family. I inquired what the distinction might be.
"No difference," he answered, "except that as a member of the family you pay a peseta upon leaving, and as a guest you pay two."
It was of course en famille that I supped, and right royally, at a board merry with good-humored peasants and arrieros rather than in the silent, gloomy company of a half-dozen convention-ridden travelers in an adjoining room.
Roncesvalles would have been an unequaled spot in which to pass an autumn week, roaming in the forest glens of the mountains, dreaming of the heroic days of Roland. But the hour of reckoning and of New York was near at hand. Of all sensations I most abhor the feeling that I must be in a given place at a given time.
A short climb through wooded hillsides strewn with gigantic rocks and I found myself all at once and unexpectedly on the very summit of the Pyrenees. In no sense had the ascent been toilsome, vastly less so than several scrambles of two or three hours' duration between Lugo and Oviedo. From the French side, no doubt, it would have been far more of a task. Gazing northward I recognized for the first time that I stood high indeed above the common level of the earth. Miles below, blue as the sea, lay France, the forested mountains at my feet rolling themselves out into hills, the hills growing lower and lower and spreading away into the far, far distance like another world. The modern world--and I was all at once assailed with a desire to ask what it had been doing in all the days I had been gone. Then the highway seized me in its grasp and hurried me away down, racing, rushing, almost stumbling, so fast I was forced to break away from it and clamber down at my own pace through dense unpeopled forests, to fall upon it again far below and stalk with it at lunch-time into the village of Val Carlos. Yet another hour's descent and I crossed a small stream into the little hamlet of Arneguy; the long-forgotten figure of a French gendarme slouched forth from a hut to shout as I passed, "Anything dutiable, monsieur?" and my Spanish journey was among the things that have been.
CHAPTER XV
EMIGRATING HOMEWARD
In reality almost as much as in fancy I had entered another world. It is chiefly in retrospect that a journey through Spain, as through Palestine, brings home to the traveler the full difference between those gaunt regions of the earth and the world to which he is accustomed. Here the change was like that from a squatter's cabin, a bachelor's quarters to a residence of opulence.
Arrived while the day was still in its prime at St. Jean Pied de Port, I found myself undecided how to continue. The rescuing forty dollars awaited me--postal errors precluded--in Bordeaux; but Baedeker having now become mere lumber, I had no means of knowing which of two routes to follow to that city. I halted to make inquiries of an old Spaniard drowsing before his shop--so like one of mine own people he seemed amid this babble of French. But though he received me with Castilian courtesy he could give me no real information. Under the awning of a café a hundred paces beyond, two well-dressed men were sipping cooling drinks. Their touring-car stood before the building, and not far away, in the shade of an overhanging shoulder of the Pyrenees, loitered a chauffeur, in all the accustomed accoutrements of that genus. He had the appearance of an obliging fellow. I strolled across to him, hastily summoning up my dormant French.
"Monsieur," I began, "vous me pardonnerez, mais pour aller d'ici à Bordeaux vaut il mieux passer par Bayonne ou bien par Mont de--"