Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

I sped away at once along a macadamed highway at the base of the Pyrenees beside a clear river--a mere "rivière" to the French, but one that would have been a mighty stream in Spain. Its banks were thickly grown with willows. On the other hand the mountain wall, no less green, rose sheer above me, bringing an unusually early sunset. Along the way I met several old men, all Basques, who noting that I also wore the boína greeted me in their native "Eúscarra." Not a word of any other tongue could they speak; and when I shook my head hopelessly at their hermetical language, they halted to gaze after me with expressions of deep perplexity. So, too, in the mountain-top village of Bidarry to which I climbed long after dark after a dip in the river, all speech was Basque; though some of the younger inhabitants, finding I was of their race only from the cap upward, fell to talking to me in fluent French or Spanish.

The first hours of the following clay were in the highest degree pleasant. Thereafter the country grew hilly, the sun torrid, and as I was forced to set the sharpest pace to reach the bullring by four. I put in as dripping a half-day as at any time during the summer; and I have yet to be more nearly incinerated in this life than in the sol of the great "Place des Taureaux" of Bayonne, crushed between a workman in corduroys and a Zouave in the thickest woolen uniform the loom weaves.

The fight, like the ring, was Spanish in every particular, though the programmes were printed in French. It was by all odds the greatest córrida I was privileged to attend during the summer, for the three matadores stand in the front rank of their profession. Yet it was somehow far less exhilarating than those I had seen in Spain. One had a feeling that these past masters were running far less risk than their younger colleagues; one enjoyed their dexterity as one enjoys a seasoned public speaker, yet the performance lacked just the thrill of amateurishness.

Here, too, I saw Spain's greatest picador, the only one indeed I ever saw accomplish what the picador is supposed to do,--to hold off the bull with his garrocha. This he did repeatedly, placing his lance so unerringly that he stopped the animal's most furious charges and forced him to retire bellowing with rage and with blood trickling down over his shoulders. In all the afternoon this king of the pike-pole had but one horse killed under him. It was in connection with this one fall that Quinito, the boldest of the matadores, won by his daring such applause as seemed to shake the Pyrenees behind us. Moreno lay half buried under his dead horse, in more than imminent danger of being gored to death by the bull raging above him. In vain the anxious caudrilla flaunted their cloaks. All at once Quinito stepped empty handed into the ring and caught the animal by the tail. Away the brute dashed across the plaza, twisting this way and that, but unable to bring his horns nearer than an inch or two of his tormentor who, biding his time, let go and vaulted lightly over the barrier.

I quitted Bayonne with the dawn and for four days following marched steadily on across the great Landes of France. Miles upon miles the broad highway stretched unswerving before me through an ultra-flat country between endless forests of pine. On the trunk of every tree hung a sort of flowerpot to catch the dripping pitch. There was almost no agriculture, nothing but pine-trees stretching away in regular rows in every direction, a solitude broken only by the sighing of the wind sweeping across the flatlands, where one could shout to the full capacity of one's lungs without awakening other response than long rolling echoes. Once in a while a pitch-gatherer flitted among the trees; less often the highway crossed a rusty and apparently trainless railroad at the solitary stations of which were tumbled hundreds of barrels of pitch.

My shoes wore out, those very oxfords "custom-made" in America and honestly tapped in Toledo, and I was forced to continue the tramp in alpargatas, or what had here changed their name to sandales. As my twenty-franc piece melted away a wondering began to grow upon me whether I was really homeward bound after all; so myriad are the mishaps that may befall a mere letter.

Still the unswerving road continued, the endless forests stretched ahead. Such few persons as I met scowled at me in the approved French fashion, never once imitating the cheery greeting of the Spaniard. Now and again a man-slaughtering automobile tore by like some messenger to or from, the infernal regions, recalling by contrast one of the chief charms of the land I had left behind. Hardly one of those destroyers of peace and tranquillity had I seen or heard in all Spain.

Four months afoot had not improved my outward appearance. It was not strange that the post-office officials of Bordeaux stared at me long and suspiciously when I arrived at length one afternoon with a single franc in my pocket. The letter was there. When I had, after the unwinding of endless red tape, collected the amount of the order, my journey seemed over indeed.

The "Agents Maritimes" to whom I applied accepted me readily enough as an emigrant to America, agreeing to pick me up in Bordeaux and set me down unstarved in New York for the net sum of two hundred and three francs. But there came a hitch in the proceedings. The agent was firing at me with Gaelic speed the questions prescribed by our exacting government--"Name?" "Age?" "Profession?"--and setting down the answers almost before I gave them, when:

"Have you contracted to work in the United States?"