XXVII
VIGO AND AWAY
Hasta la Vista!
Our plan for the summer included a return trip across Spain, via Valladolid, Salamanca, and Saragossa to Barcelona and the Balearic Isles; but the bad food and worse lodging of Galicia, the blazing heat and the incessant, exhausting warfare against vermin, had begun to tell. That Spanish fever with which so many foreigners make too intimate acquaintance was at our doors, and we found ourselves forced at last to sacrifice enthusiasm to hygiene. The most eccentric train which it was ever my fortune to encounter shunted and switched us across country to Vigo in about the time it would have taken to make the journey donkeyback. Here we tarried for a week or so, gathering strength from the Atlantic breezes, and when, one sunny August day, a stately steamboat called for an hour at Vigo harbor on her way from Buenos Ayres to Southampton, we went up over the side. Our shock of astonishment at the cleanliness around us could not, however, divert our attention long from the receding shores of Spain, toward which one of us, at least, still felt a stubborn longing.
They lay bright in the midday sunshine, those green uplands of Galicia, mysterious with that patient peasant life of which we had caught fleeting, baffling glimpses. Still we seemed to see the brown-legged women washing in the brook and spreading their coarse-spun, gay-bordered garments on the heather; children, with the faces of little Pats and little Biddies, tugging a bleating sheep across the stepping-stones, or boosting an indignant goat over the wall; lean pigs poking their noses out of the low, stone doorways, where babies slept on wisps of hay; girls in cream-colored kerchiefs, starred with gold, bearing loads of fragrant brush or corded fagots on their heads. As the evening should come on, and the sea-breeze stir the tassels of the maize, we knew how the fields would be dotted with impromptu groups of dancers, leaping higher and higher and waving their arms in ever wilder merriment,—a scene pastoral down to the pigs, and poetic up to those gushes of song that delight the listener.
"I went to the meadow
Day after day,
To gather the blossoms
Of April and May,