Outside the courtyard Paris roared, chattered, and yelped, cycles and automobiles made the poor piéton’s life a misery, and set one thinking how inferior after all the Mind which thought out Eden was to our own.
Upon the asphalt the horizontales lounged along, pushing against the likely-looking passer-by like cats against a chair.
Cabs rattled, and the whole clinquant town wore its best air of unreality, which it puts off alone upon the morning of a revolution.
Through boulevards, parvis, cités, along the quays, in the vast open spaces which, like Saharas of grey stone, make the town desolate, in cafés, brothels, theatres, in church and studio, and wherever men most congregate, groups stood about reading the news, gesticulating, weeping, perspiring, and agog with a half-impotent enthusiastic orgasm of wildest admiration for Spain, Cervera, and the men who without bunkum or illusion steamed to certain death. And, curiously enough, the execration fell not so much upon Chicago as on “ces cochons d’Anglais,” who by their base connivance had wrought the ruin of the Spanish cause.
Yankees themselves read and remarked with sneers that England’s turn was coming next, and after “Kewby,” that they reckoned to drag the British flag through every dunghill in New York; then one winked furtively and said, “We need them now, but afterwards we’ll show Victoria in a cage for a picayune a peep, and teach the Britishers what to do with their old Union Jack,” thinking no doubt of the ten-cent paper which is sold in every city of the States, stamped with the Spanish flag.
And as I sat, musing on things and others—thinking, for instance, that when you scratch a man and see his blood you know his nature by the way he bears his wound, and that the Spaniards, wounded to the death, were dying game (after the fashion of the English in times gone by, before Imperialism, before the Nonconformist snuffle, the sweating system, and the rest had changed our nature), and that the Yankees at the first touch cried out like curs, though they had money, numbers, and everything upon their side—I fell a-thinking on the Spain of old. Inigo Lopez de Mendoza, el Gran Capitan, Cortes (not at the siege of Mexico, but in the rout before Algiers) came up before me, and I thought on the long warfare, extending over seven hundred years, by which Spain saved the southern half of Europe from the Moors; upon Gerona, Zaragoza, and, most of all, upon Cervera, last of the Quixotes, Vara de Rey, Linares, and the poor peasants from Galician hills, thyme-scented wastes in Lower Aragon, Asturian mountains, and Estremenian oak-woods, who, battling against superior numbers, short of food, of ammunition, and bereft of hope, were proving their descent from the grim soldiers of the Spanish “Tercios” of the Middle Ages, and making the invaders of their country pay for their piracy in blood.
Blood is the conqueror’s coin the whole world over, and if the island which Columbus found for Spain pass into other hands, let those who take it pour out their blood like water to inaugurate their reign of peace.
Where the connection between the senses and the brain comes in, which influences first, and how, or whether a wise Providence, always upon His guard (after the fashion of an operator in a Punch and Judy show), influences each man directly, as by celestial thought suggestion, I cannot tell.
All that I know is, that once walking on the rampart gardens which in Cadiz overhang the sea and form the outside rim of the “Taza de Plata,” as the Spaniards call the town, I on a sudden saw the River Plate. The Gauchos, plains, wild horses, the stony wastes, the ostriches (the “Alegria del Desierto”), came up before me, and in especial a certain pass over a little river called the Gualiyan; the sandy dip, the metallic-looking trees, the greenish river with the flamingoes and white herons and the black-headed swans; the vultures sitting motionless on the dead trees, and most of all the penetrating scent of the mimosa, known to the natives as the “espinillo de olor.”
Turning and wondering why, I saw a stunted tree with yellow blossoms duly ticketed with its description “Mimosa” this or that, and with its “habitat” the warmer district of the River Plate.