Puerto has a wide-spread reputation as the nursery-ground for bull-fighters. To the arena it is what Newmarket is to the British turf. Everybody there walks about armed, but murder is not more rife in proportion than in London. As it happened, a fellow was shot while I was there, but that would not justify one in coming to the conclusion that homicide was a flourishing indigenous product. Still, the natives did not escape the contagion of unrest of their countrymen. For example, the last news I heard before leaving my English friends was that the men in the vineyards had struck work. These lazy scoundrels had the impudence to demand that they should have half an hour after arrival on the ground, and before beginning work, to smoke cigarettes, the same grace after the breakfast hour, two hours for a siesta in the middle of the day, another interval for a bout of smoking in the afternoon, and finally that each should be entitled to an arroba (more than three and a half gallons English) of wine per acre at the end of the season. They go on the same basis as some trades' unions we are acquainted with—reduction of hours of labour and increase of wages. "Will you give in to them?" I asked of an English settler, in the wine trade. "Give in———" but it is unnecessary to repeat the expletive; "I'll quietly shut up my bodega."
CHAPTER II.
The Charms of Cadiz—Seville-by-the-Sea—Cervantes-Daughters of Eve—The Ladies who Prayed and the Women who Didn't—Fasting Monks—Notice to Quit on the Nuns—The Rival Processions—Gutting a Church—A Disorganized Garrison—Taking it Easy—The Mysterious "Mr. Crabapple"—The Steamer Murillo—An Unsentimental Navvy—Bandaged Justice—Tricky Ship-Owning—Painting Black White.
The man who pitched on Cadiz as the site of a city knew what he was about. Without exception it is the most charmingly-located place I ever set foot in. Its white terraces, crowded with white pinnacles, belvederes, and turrets, glistening ninety-nine days out of the hundred in clear sunlight, rise gently out of a green sea necked with foam; the harbour is busy with commerce, crowded with steamers and sailing ships coming and going from the Mediterranean shores, from France, from England, or from the distant countries beyond the Atlantic; the waters around (for Cadiz is built on a peninsula, and peeps of water make the horizon of almost every street) are dotted with fishing craft or scudding curlews; the public squares are everlastingly verdant with the tall fern-palm, the feathery mimosa, the myrtle, and the silvery ash, which only recalls the summer the better for its suggestive appearance of having been recently blown over with dust; the gaze inland is repaid with the sight of hills brown by distance, of sheets of pasture, and pyramidal salt-mounds of creamy grey; and the gaze upwards—to lend a glow to the ravishing picture—is delighted by such a cope of dreamy blue, deep and pure, and unstained by a single cloudlet, as one seldom has the happiness of looking upon in England outside the doors of an exhibition of paintings. The climate is dry and genial, and not so hot as Seville. The Sevillanos know that, and come to Cadiz when the heats make residence in their own city insupportable. Winter is unknown; skating has never been witnessed by Gaditanos, except when exhibited by foreign professors, clad in furs, who glide on rollers over polished floors; and small British boys who are fond of snowballing when they come out here are obliged to pelt each other with oranges to keep their hands in. One enthusiastic traveller compares it to a pearl set in sapphires and emeralds, but adds—lest we should all be running to hug the jewel—there is little art here and less society.
"Letters of exchange are the only belles-lettres." Indeed. Now this is one of those wiseacres who are in a community, but not of it, who materially are present, but can never mentally, so to speak, get themselves inside the skins of the inhabitants. That city cannot be said to be without letters which has its poetic brotherhood, limited though it be, and which reveres the memory of Cervantes, as the memory of Shakespeare is revered in no English seaport. Wiseacre should hie him to Cadiz on the 23rd of April, when the birth of Cervantes is celebrated, for in spite of intestine broils, Spaniards are true to the worship of the author of "Don Quixote," and his no less immortal attendant, whom Gandalin, friend to Amadis of Gaul, affectionately apostrophizes thus:
"Salve! Sancho with the paunch,
Thou most famous squire,
Fortune smiled as Escudero she did dub thee
Tho' Fate insisted 'gainst the world to rub thee.
Fortune gave wit and common-sense,
Philosophy, ambition to aspire;
While Chivalry thy wallet stored,
And led thee harmless through the fire."
With the respect he deserves for this wandering critic and no more, I will take the liberty of saying that there is art, and a great deal of art, in the site of the clean town; and that there is society, and good society, in that forest of spars in the roadstead, and in the fishing and shooting in the neighbourhood. When the Tauchnitz editions have been exhausted, and when the stranger has mastered Cervantes and Lope de Vega, Espronceda, Larra, and Rivas, there is always that book which Dr. Johnson loved, the street, or that lighter literature which Moore sings, "woman's looks," to fall back upon. I am afraid some prudes may be misjudging my character on account of the frequency of my allusions to the sex lately; but I beg them to recollect that this is Andalusia, and that woman is a very important element in the population of Cadiz. She rules the roost, and the courtly Spaniard of the south forgets that there was ever such an undutiful person as Eve. Woman played a remarkable part in the events of the couple of months after the Royal crown was punched out of the middle of the national flag. She is political here, and is not shy of declaring her opinions. Ladies of the better classes of Cadiz are attentive to the duties of their religion; kneeling figures gracefully draped in black may be seen at all hours of the day in the churches during this Lenten season, telling their beads or turning over their missals. Those ladies are Carlist to a man, as Paddy would say; they naturally exert an influence over their husbands, though the influence falls short of making their husbands accompany them to church except on great festivals such as Easter Sunday, or on what may be called occasions of social rendezvous, such as a Requiem service for a deceased friend. The men seem to be of one mind with the French freethinker, who abjured religion himself, or put off thoughts of it till his dying day, but pronounced it necessary for peasants and wholesome for women and children. But les femmes du peuple, the fishwives, the labourers' daughters, the bouncing young fruit-sellers, and the like, are not religious in Cadiz. They have been bitten with the revolutionary mania; they are staunch Red Republicans, and have the bump of veneration as flat as the furies that went in procession to Versailles at the period of the Great Revolution, or their great granddaughters who fought on the barricades of the Commune. The nymphs of the pavement sympathize strongly with the Republic likewise; but their ideal of a Republic is not that of Señores Castelar and Figueras. They want bull-fights and distribution of property, and object to all religious confraternities unless based on the principles of "the Monks of the Screw," whose charter-song, written by that wit in wig and gown, Philpot Curran, was of the least ascetic:
"My children, be chaste—till you're tempted;
While sober, be wise and discreet,
And humble your bodies with—fasting,
Whene'er you have nothing to eat."
So long ago as 1834 a sequestration of convents was ordered in Spain, but the Gaditanos never had the courage to enforce the decree till after the revolution that sent Queen Isabella into exile. A few years ago the convent of Barefooted Carmelites on the Plaza de los Descalzados was pulled down; the decree that legalized the act provided an indemnity, but the unfortunate monks who were turned bag and baggage out of their house never got a penny. They have had to humble their bodies with fasting since. For those amongst them who were old or infirm that was a grievance; but for the lusty young fellows who could handle a spade there need not be much pity, for Spain had more of their sort than was good for her. Even at that date the revolutionists of Cadiz had some respect left for the nunneries. But they progressed; the example of Paris was not lost upon them. The ayuntamiento which came into power with the Republic was Federal. Barcelona and Malaga were stirring; the ayuntamiento made up its mind that Cadiz should be as good as its neighbours and show vigour too. The cheapest way to show vigour was to make war on the weak and defenceless, and that was what this enlightened and courageous municipality did. The nuns in the convent of the Candelaria were told that their house and the church adjoining were in a bad state, that they must clear out, and that both should be razed in the interests of public safety. It was not that the presence of ladies devoted to God after their own wishes and the traditions of their creed was offensive to the Republic; no, not by any means. The nuns protested that if their convent and church were in a dangerous condition the proper measure to take was to prop them up, not pull them down. But the blustering heroes of the municipality would not listen to this reasoning; they were too careful of the lives of the citizens, the nuns included; down the edifices must come. The Commune of Paris over again. The ladies of Cadiz, those who pass to and fro, prayer-book in hand, in the streets, and startle the flashing sunshine with their solemn mantillas, were wroth with the municipality. They saw through its designs, and they resolved to defeat them. To the number of some five hundred they formed a procession, and marched four deep to the Town-house to beg of their worships, the civic tyrants, to revoke their order. If the convent and church were in ruins, the ladies were prepared to pay out of their own pockets the expense of all repairs. That procession was a sight to see; there was the beauty, the rank, the fashion, and the worth of the city, in "linked sweetness long drawn out," coiling through the thoroughfares on pious errand. The fair petitioners were dressed as for a fete; diamonds sparkled in their hair, and the potent fan, never deserted by the Andalusians, was agitated by five hundred of the smallest of hands in the softest of gloves. But the civic tyrants were more severe than Coriolanus. They were not to be mollified by woman's entreaties, but rightly fearing her charms they fled. When the procession arrived at the Town-house, there was but a solitary intrepid bailie to receive it. They told him their tale. He paid them the usual compliments, kissed their feet in the grand Oriental way individually and collectively, said he would lay their wishes before his colleagues, but that he could give no promise to recall the mandate of the municipality—it was more than he dare undertake to do, and so forth. The long and short of it was, he politely sent them about their business. They came away, working the fans more pettishly than ever, and liquid voices were heard to hiss scornfully that the Republic, which proclaimed respect for all religions and rights, was a lie, for its first thought was to trample on the national religion, and to dispossess an inoffensive corporation of cloistered ladies of their right to then property. Here the first act of the drama ended.
The second was, if anything, more sensational, though infinitely less attractive. The Federals bit their thumbs, and cried: