[29] Betrothed.
[CHAPTER XXVI]
LORCA
We still had money for another three weeks, although we had been four months in Spain. The weather in Murcia was very cold; damp, chilling winds blew down the valley. We decided to go westwards, to explore Lorca, which we had heard was both fine pictorially and also which was called "the City of the Sun." On suggesting the idea to some of our Murcian friends, they advised us not to go. "It is a town of bad people," they said; "they are all gipsies." We had heard before of these towns of bad people. One lay on the far side of the Murcian valley; a village which clustered round the foot of the peak of rock on the top of which was a ruined castle. These people had the reputation of chasing out intruding strangers with sticks and stones. Antonio, fishing in the vicinity of this village, had once been maltreated. The villagers were proud of this brutality.
"Yes," they would say, "we are brutes. We are uncultivated. We are the biggest brutes for fifty miles around, and we mean to remain so."
Other people had said that Lorca was charming. So we decided to find out for ourselves. We hoped to find rooms in a posada, and we reduced our luggage to moderate dimensions; most of it we put in the van, leaving ourselves only the guitar and the laud to look after.
The train left early in the morning, and stopped at the first station, where we had to change. We rushed across the line, having to clamber under a long train of waggons which blocked the way, and won corner seats. A lanky boy of eighteen, dressed in a long white travelling ulster, with a béret on his head, took most of the other seats in the carriage, filling them with packages. The young man seemed very familiar with railway travelling: he called all the porters by name, and exchanged smokes with the engine-driver.
But the train did not move. Presently the youth came back and said: