Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

Delighted boys from a peasant camp beyond the walls ran up to jeer at our predicament. Our coachman, reverting to his dolorous chant, appealed to all the saints. The top fares shrilled in on the chorus; the Spanish gentlemen lighted cigarettes, and after some twenty minutes of dramatic altercation, a soldier sprang on our top step and mounted guard, while the coach rattled through the gates and on to the aduana. Here we were deposited, bag and baggage, on the pavement, and a drowsy, half-clad old dignitary was brought forth to look at us. The coachman, all his social graces restored, imaginatively presented the three Anglo-Saxons as a French party travelling for pleasure. "But what am I to do with them?" groaned the dignitary, and went back to bed. An appalling group of serenos, in slouch hats and long black capes, with lanterns and with staffs topped by steel axes, escorted us into a sort of luggage room, and told us to sit down on benches. We sat on them for half an hour, which seemed to satisfy the ends of justice, for then the serenos gave place to porters, who said they would bring us our property, which nobody had examined or noticed in the slightest, after daybreak, and would now show us the way to our hotel. Our farewell to the coachman, who came beaming up to shake hands and receive thanks, was cold.

We had engaged rooms by letter a week in advance, but they had been surrendered to earlier arrivals, and we were conducted to a private house next door to the hotel. After the delays incident to waking an entire family, we were taken into a large, untidy room, furnished with dining table, sewing machine, and a half dozen decrepit chairs. There was no water and no sign of toilet apparatus, but in an adjoining dark closet were two narrow cots, from which the four daughters of the house had just been routed. Of those beds which these sleepy children were then, with unruffled sweetness and cheeriness, making ready for us, the less said the better. Our indoor hours in Compostela, an incessant battle against dirt, bad smells, and a most instructive variety of vermin, were a penance that must have met all pilgrim requirements. And yet these people spared no pains to make us comfortable, so far as they understood comfort. At our slightest call, were it only for a match, in would troop the mother, four daughters, maid, dog, and cat, with any of the neighbors who might be visiting, all eager to be of service. The girls were little models of sunny courtesy, and would have been as pretty of face as they were charming in manner, had not skin diseases and eye diseases told the tale of the hideously unsanitary conditions in which their young lives had been passed.

But we had come to the festival of Santiago, and it was worth its price.

XXV

THE BUILDING OF A SHRINE

(A historical chapter, which should be skipped.)

That most Spanish of Spaniards, Alarcón, is pleased in one of his roguish sketches to depict the waywardness of a certain poetaster. "Alonso Alonso was happy because he was thinking of many sad things,—of the past centuries, vanished like smoke, ... of the little span of life and of the absurdities with which it is filled, of the folly of wisdom, of the nothingness of ambition, of all this comedy, in short, which is played upon the earth."

Alonso Alonso would be in his very element in Santiago de Compostela. The "unsubstantial pageant faded" of the mediæval world is more than memory there. It is a ghost that walks at certain seasons, notably from the twentieth to the twenty-eighth of July. The story of the birth, growth, and passing of that once so potent shrine, the Jerusalem of the West, is too significant for oblivion.

The corner-stone of the strange history is priestly legend. The Apostle James the Greater, so runs the tale, after preaching in Damascus and along the Mediterranean coast, came in a Greek ship to Galicia, then under Roman rule, and proclaimed the gospel in its capital city, Iria-Flavia. Here the Virgin appeared to him, veiled, like the mother of Æneas, in a cloud, and bade him build a church. This he did, putting a bishop in charge, and then pursued his mission, not only in the remote parts of Galicia, but in Aragon, Castile, and Andalusia. At Saragossa the Virgin again flashed upon his sight. She was poised, this time, on a marble pillar, which she left behind her to become, what it is to-day, the most sacred object in all Spain. A chip of this columna immobilis is one of the treasures of Toledo. The cathedral of the Virgen del Pilar,—affectionately known as Pilarica,—which James then founded at Saragossa, is still a popular goal of pilgrimage, the marble of the holy column being hollowed, at one unshielded spot, by countless millions of kisses. The Apostle, on his return to Jerusalem after seven years in Spain, was beheaded by Herod. Loyal disciples recovered the body and set sail with it for the Spanish coast. Off Portugal occurred the pointless "miracle of the shells." A gentleman was riding on the shore, when all at once his horse, refusing to obey the bit, leapt into the sea, walking on the crests of the waves toward the boat. Steed and rider suddenly sank, but promptly rose again, all crusted over with shells, which have been ever since regarded as the emblem of St. James in particular, and of pilgrim folk in general.