"There were worse places than Gib—singing-birds were raysonable here, and some of them had rayl beautiful plumage."
My countryman, like the Duke of Argyll, had a weakness for ornithology.
"That spread of land beyant was where the races were held, and small-arm parties from the fleet sometimes kem ashore and practised there. They used to play cricket there, too. The symmetry wasn't a gay place, but there were worse. There were some beautiful tombs—now there was a parable ov wan; 'twas put up by their frinds to some officers who were dhrownded while they were crossing a flooded sthrame on their way back from a shooting excursion. The car-drivers, who were dhrownded wid them, had no monument. 'Twas a quare world; a poor man had the chance of dying wid a rich man, but was not to be berrid in his company. Well, he supposed it was for the best," and here he hammered the heel-tap out of his pipe on the side of his shoe; "when the last bugle sounded a field-officer would feel uncomfortable like if he had to be looking for his bones in the same plot wid a lance-corporal."
Truly, a queer world. Death with impartial summons knocks at the cabin of the poor and the palace of the wealthy; but in the undertaker's interest the equality of the grave must not be conceded. The plebeian who commits felo de se is served properly if he is hidden at the cross-roads by night and a stake driven through his body. The lunatic King who drowns himself, and drags his doctor to the same fate—who is a suicide duplicated with the suspicion of murder—is embalmed and laid to rest in consecrated ground amid incense and music, lights and flowers, the tolling of bells, and the chanting of dirges.
The funeral was over; they were just finishing the De Profundis. My countryman had to quit me. "Oyeh! that fellow who was making such a lamentation might be married agin in a twelvemonth. The army plan was the best; after the 'Dead March' in Saul came 'Tow-row-row.'—another so'jer was to be had for a shilling. He did not drink; he thanked me all the same—had taken the pledge from Father Mathew whin he was a boy, and meant to stick by it; but he would accept the price of a singing-bird he had set his mind upon, since it was pressed upon him."
Gibraltar is but a huge garrison. In the moat by the gate, as I re-entered, a big drummer and a tiny mannikin-soldier with cymbals were practising how to lead off a marching-past tune. The "Fortune of War" tavern elbows "Horse-Barrack Lane;" a print of "The Siege of Kars" is side by side in a shop-window with Dr. Bennett's "Songs for Soldiers." The Plazas and Calles of the mainland of Spain have been parted with. The names of streets, hostelries, and stores are English. Instead of tiendas and almacenes and fondas, you have fancy repositories, regimental shoe-shops, and porter-houses. There, for example, is the celebrated "Cock and Bottle," and farther on "The Calfs Head Hotel." If you traverse Cathedral Square, no larger than an ordinary-sized skittle-alley, you arrive by Sunnyside Steps to the Europa Pass. Notices are posted by the roadside cautioning against plucking flowers or treading on the beds under pain of prosecution. But the bazaar bewilders you with its alien figures, its confusion of tongues, and its eccentric contrasts of dress. In five minutes you meet Spanish officers; nuns in broad-leaved white bonnets; a bearded sergeant nursing a baby; bare-legged, sun-burnished Moors; pink-and-white cheeked ladies'-maids from Kent; local mashers in such outrageously garish tweeds; stiff brass-buttoned turnkeys; Jews in skull-cap and Moslems in fez; and while you are lost in admiration of a burly negro, turbaned and in grass-green robe, with face black and shiny as a newly-polished stove, you are hustled by a sailor on cordial terms with himself who is vigorously attempting to whistle "Garry Owen."
But above and before all, the sights and sounds are military. Sappers and linesmen and artillerists pullulate at every corner; fatigue-parties are confronted at every turn; the bayonet of the sentinel flashes in every angle of the fortress from the minute the sun, bursting into instantaneous radiance from behind the great barrier of craggy hill, lights up the town and bastions and moles, until the boom of the sunset-gun gives signal for the gates to be closed. Every tavern looks like a canteen; the gossip is of things martial; the music is that of the reveille or tattoo—the blare of brass, the rub-a-dub of parchment, or the shrill sound-revel of Highland pipes (for there is usually a Scotch regiment here). The ladies one meets all have husbands, or fathers, or uncles in the Service; even the children—those of English parents well understood—keep step as they walk, and the boys amongst them compliment any well-dressed stranger with a home face by rendering him the regulation salute. This is highly gratifying to the civilian sojourning in the place; for he insensibly succumbs to the genius loci, squares his shoulders, expands his chest, and feels that if he is not an officer he ought to be one.
Except the enterprising gentry who devote themselves to cheating the Spanish excise by smuggling cigars and English goods across the border, the Scorpions live by and on the garrison, and therefore do I name their habitat Sutlersville. "Scorpion," I should add, for the benefit of the uninitiated, is the sobriquet conferred by Tommy Atkins on the natives of the Rock, as that of "Smiches" is merrily applied by him to the Maltese, and of "Yamplants" to the denizens of St. Helena. There is a tolerable infusion of English blood among the Scorpions, but it is hardly of the healthiest or most respectable.
Gib is familiar to thousands of Englishmen, but it must be unfamiliar to many thousands more. This is my excuse for exhuming some notes of my stay there. Don't be afraid, I am not going to pester you with guide-book erudition. Let others take you to the galleries and caves, lead you up the ascent to the Moorish tower, inform you that the one spot in Europe where there is an indigenous colony of monkeys (the patriarch of which is styled the "town major") is here, and enlighten you as to the interesting fact that this is the only locality out of Ireland where the Irish jaunting-car is to be objurgated. Mine be a humbler task.
Society in Gib is select, but limited. It is uniform, like the clothes of the influential portion of the inhabitants. Gib is the wrong place to bring out a young lady, though Major Dalrymple's daughters, immortalized in Lever's novel, could not well have found a better hunting-ground. But then Major Dalrymple's daughters were regular garrison hacks—so the irreverent subs of the Rovers used to call them—and never stood a chance beside the daughters of the county families. There are racing and chasing at the station, and theatricals and balls. I arrived at the wrong season. The three days' local racing, for horses of every breed but English, was over, and most of the men were going to Cadiz by special boat next day, en route for the Jerez races, which are the best—indeed, I might almost say the solitary—meeting in Spain.