Spanish Highways and Byways Part 29

There were strange jostlings of ideas in that cloistered cell, especially when the dusk had stolen in between our bending faces and the Spanish page.

Once we talked of suicide. That morning it had been a wealthy young Parisian who had paid its daily tribute to the Seine.

"What a horror!" gasped the little sister, clasping her slender hands against her breast. "It is a mortal sin. And how foolis.h.!.+ For if life is hard to bear, surely perdition is harder."

"It does not seem to me so strange in case of the poor," I responded, waiving theology. "But a rich man, though his own happiness fails, has still the power of making others happy."

"Ah, but I understand!" cried Little Manila, her eyes like stars in the dimness. "The devil does not see truth as the blessed spirits do, but sees falsehoods even as the world. And so in his blindness he believes the soul of a rich man more precious than the souls of the poor, and tempts the rich man more than others. Yet when the devil has that soul, will he find it made of gold?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: MADRID ROYAL PALACE]

One chilly November afternoon, gray with a fog that had utterly swallowed the Eiffel Tower above its first huge uprights, which straddled disconsolately like legs forsaken of their giant, she explained in a sudden rush of words why Spain had been worsted in the war with America.

"Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth. As with persons, so with nations. Those that are not of His fold He gives over to their fill of vainglory and greed and power, but the Catholic nations He cleanses again and again in the bitter waters of defeat--ah, in fire and blood!

Yet the end is not yet. The rod of His correction is upon Spain at this hour, and the Faithful are glad in the very heart of sorrow, for even so shall her sins be purged away, even so shall her coldness be quickened, even so shall she be made ready for her everlasting recompense."

"And the poor Protestant nations?" I asked, between a smile and a sigh.

The little sister smiled back, but the Catholic eyes, for all their courtly graciousness, were implacable.

She was of a t.i.tled family and had pa.s.sed a petted childhood in Madrid. There she had been taken, on her seventh birthday, to a _corrida de toros_, but remembered it unpleasantly, not because of the torture inflicted on the horses and bulls, but because she had been frightened by the great beasts, with their tossing horns and furious bellowing. Horns always made her think of the devil, she said. From her babyhood she had been afraid of horns.

One day a mischievous impulse led me to inquire, in connection with a chat about the Escorial, "And how do you like Philip II?"

The black eyes shot one ray of sympathetic merriment, but the Spaniard and the nun were on their guard.

"He was a very good Catholic," she replied demurely.

"So was _Isabel la Catolica_," I responded. "But don't you think she may have been a trifle more agreeable?"

"Perhaps she was a little more _simpatica_," admitted the _hermanita_, but that was her utmost concession. She would not even allow that Philip had a sorry end.

"If his body groaned, his soul was communing with the Blessed Saints and paid no heed."

At the corner of the street which led under the great garden wall to the heavily barred gate of the convent was a flower-stand. The shrewd, swift-tongued Madame in charge well knew the look of the unwary, and usually succeeded in selling me a cl.u.s.ter of drooping blossoms at twice the value of the fresh, throwing in an extra leaf or stem at the close of the bargain with an air of prodigal benevolence. The handful of flowers would be smilingly accepted by the little sister, but instantly laid aside nor favored with glance or touch until the close of the visit, when they would be lifted again with a winsome word of acknowledgment and carried away, probably to spend their sweetness at the marble feet of the Virgin. In vain I tried to coax from this scorner of G.o.d's earth some sign of pleasure in the flowers themselves.

"Don't you care for tea-roses?" "_Ah, el mundo pasa._ But their color is exquisite."

Yet her eyes did not turn to the poor posy for the two hours following.

"This mignonette has only the grace of sweetness."

"It is a delicate scent, but it will not last. _El mundo pasa._"

She held the sprays at arm's length for a moment, and then laid them down on a mantel at the farther end of the room.

"I am sorry these violets are not fresher."

"But no! The touch of Time has not yet found them. Still, it is only a question of to-morrow. _El mundo pasa._"

"Yes, the world pa.s.ses. But is it not good while it lasts?"

"The world good! No, no, and a thousand times no. Behold it now at the end of the nineteenth century,--wars and sorrows and bitter discontents, evil deeds and evil pa.s.sions everywhere. Do you see the peace of Christ in the faces on the Paris streets? The blossoms of this earth, the pleasures of this world, the affections of this life, all have the taste of death. But here in G.o.d's own garden we live even now His everlasting life."

"You are always glad of your choice? You never miss the friends of your childhood?"

"Glad, glad, glad. Glad of my choice. Glad to see no more the faces of father and mother. And for them, too, it is great joy. For Catholic parents it is supreme delight to give up their children to the Holy Church. The ways of the world are full of slippery places, but when they leave us here, they know that our feet are set on the very threshold of heaven."

Sometimes the slight form s.h.i.+vered in the violet habit, and the dark foreign face looked out with touching weariness from its frame of soft white folds.

"You are cold? You are tired? Will you take my cloak? Were the children troublesome to-day?"

It was always the same answer: "_No importa. No importa._ It matters not. Our life is not the life of flesh and blood."

And indeed, as I saw her in the Christmas service among the other Spanish sisters, those lovely figures in white and violet making obeisance before the altar until their veiled foreheads almost touched the pavement, bowing and rising again with the music like a field of lilies swaying in the breeze, I felt that she was already a being of another world, before she had known this. Over her had been chanted the prayers for the dead. The strange ceremony of taking the veil had been her burial rite. The convent seemed a ghost land between earth and heaven.

My _hermanita_ belonged to one of the teaching orders, and despite the strange blanks in her knowledge, for secular lore had been, so far as possible, excluded from her education, she was representative of the finer and more intelligent cla.s.s of Spanish nuns. In Granada I heard of the nuns chiefly as the makers of those delicious _dulces_, sugared fruits, which were indispensable to a child's saint-day, and there I was taught the scoffing epitaph:--

"Here lies Sister Claribel, Who made sweetmeats very well, And pa.s.sed her life in pious follies, Such as dressing waxen dollies."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ROYAL FAMILY]

To the spinster outside the nunnery Spain has little to offer. Small heed is paid to her except by St. Elias, who, on one day of Holy Week, walks about all Seville with a pen in his hand, peering up at the balconies and making note of the old maids. Since Andalusia expresses the theory of counterparts by saying, "Every one has somewhere in the world his half orange," the spinster can hardly hope for a well-rounded life. Careers are not open to her. There are "advanced women" in Spain, the most eminent being Emelia Pardo Bazan, novelist, lecturer, editor, who advocates for women equal educational and political privileges with men, but who has not yet succeeded in opening the doors. The voice of Spanish women, nevertheless, is sometimes heard by Spanish statesmen, as when delegation after delegation of senoras who had relatives held as prisoners by the Filipinos invaded the senate-house with pet.i.tions until they could no longer be ignored.

A more thorough and liberal education for Spanish women is the pressing need to-day. There is, of course, great lack of primary schooling. A girl in her late teens, wearing the prettiest of embroidered ap.r.o.ns and with the reddest of roses in her hair, once appealed to me in Toledo for help. She had been sent from a confectioner's to deliver a tray of wheaten rolls at a given address, and she could read neither the names of streets nor the numbers of houses. But the higher education will carry the lower with it. Spain is degenerate in this regard. The Moors used to have at Cordova an academy for girls, where science, mathematics, and history were taught. Schools for Spanish girls at present impart little more than reading and writing, needle-work, the catechism, the four rules of arithmetic, and some slight notion of geography. French and music, recognized accomplishments, are learned by daughters of the privileged cla.s.s from their governesses or in the convents. Missionary work in Spain has largely concerned itself with the educational question, and Mrs. Gulick's project for the establishment of a woman's college in Madrid, a college without distinction of creed, is the fruit of long experience. Little by little she has proven the intellectual ability of Spanish girls. She established the International Inst.i.tute at San Sebastian, secured State examination for her _ninas_ and State recognition of their eminent success, and even won for a few of them admission to the University of Madrid, where they maintained the highest rank throughout the course. All that Spanish girls need is opportunity.

But if the senoritas are so charming now, with their roses and their graces and their fans, why not leave them as they are, a page of mediaeval poetry in this strenuous modern world? If only they were dolls outright and did not suffer so! When life goes hard with these high-spirited, incapable creatures, it goes terribly hard. I can see yet the tears scorch in the proud eyes of three undowered sisters, slaving at their one art of embroidery from early till late for the miserable pittance that it brought them. "We shall rest when we are dead," said the youngest. The absolute lack of future for these brave, sensitive girls, well-born, well-bred, naturally as keen as the keenest, but more ignorant, in matters of common education, than the children of our lowest grammar grade, is heart-breaking. If such girls were stupid, shallow, coa.r.s.e, it would be easier; but the Spanish type is finely strung. Once I saw an impulsive beauty fly into that gust of angry pa.s.sion which Spaniards term the _rabia espanola_. A clumsy, well-intentioned young Austrian had said a teasing word, and in the fraction of a second the girl, overwrought with secret toils and anxieties, was in a tempest of tears; but the wrath that blazed across them burned the offender crimson. The poor fellow sent for his case of choice Asturian cider, cooling in the balcony, read the evening news aloud and discoursed on the value of self-control, but not even these tactful attentions could undo, for that evening at least, the work of his blundering jest. The girl flashed away to her chamber, her handkerchief bitten through and through, and the quick fierce sound of her sobs came to me across the hall deep into the night.

Wandering over Spain I found everywhere these winning, vivid, helpless girls, versed in needlework and social graces, but knowing next to nothing of history, literature, science, all that pertains to intellectual culture. Some were hungry to learn. More did not dream of the world of thought as a possible world for them. Among these it was delightful to meet, scattered like precious seed throughout the Peninsula, the graduates of the International Inst.i.tute. So far as a stranger could see, education had enhanced in them the Spanish radiance and charm, while arming these with wisdom, power, and resource.

XXII

ACROSS THE BASQUE PROVINCES

"The Oak Tree of Guernica Within its foliage green Embraces the bright honor Of all the Basque demesne.

For this we count thee holy, Our ancient seal and sign; The fibres of our freedom Are interlaced with thine.

"Castile's most haughty tyrants Beneath thy solemn shade Have sworn to keep the charter Our fearless fathers made; For n.o.ble on our mountains Is he who yokes the ox, And equal to a monarch The shepherd of the flocks."

--_National Song of the Basques._

It did not seem to me historically respectful to take leave of Spain without having made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Santiago. A dauntless friend crossed the sea to bear me company. Hygienic pilgrim that she is, she came equipped not with c.o.c.kle sh.e.l.ls and sandal shoon, but with sleeping bags, coffee, and cereals. Many a morning, in traversing those northern provinces, where the scenery was better than the breakfast, we blessed her boxes of "grape nuts," and many a night, doomed to penitential beds, we were thankful to intrench ourselves against the stings and arrows of outrageous insects in those s.p.a.cious linen bags, that gather close about the neck, or, when dangers thicken, above the head, leaving only a loophole for the breath.

Our point of departure was that city of nature's fancy-work, San Sebastian. Then, in the early half of July, it was all alive with expectancy, looking every day for the coming of the Court. It is reputed to be the cleanest town of the Peninsula, and is, in truth, as bright as a wave-washed pebble. Nevertheless, it is a favorite waltz hall of the fleas, which shamelessly obtrude themselves even into conversation.

The chief summer industry of San Sebastian is sea-bathing. The soldiers begin it at six o'clock in the morning, marching by regiments down to the Concha, clearing for action, and striking out into the gentle surf, all in simultaneous obedience to successive words of command. Some two hours later teams of oxen draw scores of jaunty bathing cars down near the white lip of this opalescent sh.e.l.l of water, and there the long day through all ages, sizes, and ranks of humanity sport in the curling foam or swim far out into the sparkling bay.