A Midsummer Drive Through the Pyrenees

THE CITY OF THE ARROW-PIERCED SAINT;

We glide smoothly away from St. Jean de Luz and its legends, by the unlegendary railroad. The track curves southward, with frequent views of the coast, and it will be but a few minutes before we shall be in Spain. We instinctively feel for the reassuring rustle of our passports, duly viséd at Bordeaux. The low mountain that overhangs Fuenterrabia, one of the nearest Spanish towns, comes closer, and soon the train whistles shrilly into the long station at Hendaye, the last French village, in great repute for its delicious cordial. It is on the edge of the Bidassoa, a placid, shallow river which here lazily acts as the international boundary. Irun, the first town of the peninsula, is across the bridge, and after a short delay the train crosses,—and we instantly feel a hundred miles nearer to the Escorial, a hundred years nearer to Philip and the auto-da-fé.

The change of nationality at these frontier towns is always distinct and surprising, and more so than elsewhere here in Irun. Within three minutes we have in every sense passed from France into Spain. Language not only, but the type of face and dress, have altered in a flash. We are not conscious, however, of any increased governmental surveillance; passports are not asked for at all, and the customs-official gives but a light inspection to trunk and satchels.

But he is in considerable perplexity over the camera. This he is scrutinizing very suspiciously. We assume that a true Greek compound should pass current everywhere, if given a proper local termination, and so confidently hazard, "photo-grafia."

I still believe that the word was skilfully and philologically evolved, but it seems to fail of its effect. We repeat it, with appropriate gestures; the official looks puzzled but not enlightened. He inspects the lens, the bellows, the slides. We fear for the negatives and the unexposed plates. Prompt action is needed, for already his hand is approaching them; and boldly withdrawing the closed plate-holders from the camera we defiantly pocket them before his eyes.

A short, clicking sound caused by the act of withdrawal gives the inspector an idea. He looks up hopefully.

"Telegrafo?" he asks.

We nod with vigor and even more hopefully, and are inspired to add:

"Si, señor, telegrafo! Americano; caramba!"

This has the desired effect. The mystery is explained. The government's hand is stayed, its doubt vanishes; the precious scroll of chalk is made, and the plates are saved to darkness and to good works.

It is necessary to change cars at Irun. Trains cannot possibly go through, owing to a difference in gauge,—a difference purposely devised by moody Spain, in order to impede hostile invasion. There is also a wait of an hour. The Spaniard does not assent to the equation between time and money. The lunch at the buffet in the station is ceremonious and calm; the successive courses are gravely served at its naperied tables with the same deliberation, the same care and attention to detail, as at a hotel. It is but a short journey to San Sebastian, and in half an hour after leaving Irun we are at our destination.

II.

San Sebastian is both a city unto itself, and a summer resort unto others. As to the latter, it is among the most popular watering-places in Spain, and is styled "the Brighton of Madrid." As to the former, it is a home for twenty thousand human beings of its own; it earns a sufficing competence, chiefly in exchanges with its surrounding province; and it has a monopoly of centralization over a wide region, for no other important Spanish city lies nearer than Pampeluna or Burgos. Burgos is not actually so very remote,—only a short hundred and fifty miles beyond; and we had spoken of a visit to its renowned cathedral. But we had not reckoned with Spanish railway speed; it was found that the time required solely to go and come would be nearly fifteen hours! Unvisited, we saw, must remain the cathedral within which the hot-headed Protestant missionary blew out the sacred light that had burned for three hundred years. Owing to the Hispanian misconception of horological values, Burgos is practically, if not actually, exceedingly remote from San Sebastian.

The latter, however, is so fortunately close to the edge of France that those who come as near as Biarritz or Pau should assuredly make this brief dip over the border.

San Sebastian is strictly new; its predecessors have been burned five times, one upon the other, the last being brought to ashes by the soldiers of Wellington; and it is liable to be burned again whenever France and Spain begin to fight again across it. It is an excellent model for that worthy fowl, the phoenix, for it has risen with undismayed cheerfulness from each holocaust. The present representative is in three segments. The city itself is composed of two, and the citadel makes a fairly important third. From a military point of view, the citadel was once counted first, and the city itself made an unimportant third,—with no second. But modern gunnery has changed that estimate.

Of the two parts of the city proper, one is national, the other international; they do not unite, but adjoin, welded by a central promenade, the Alameda. Each is distinct, and has little to do with the life of the other. The native population centres wholly in the west half; we drift first over to this, in our afternoon walk, and scan its appearance and people with inquisitive though decorous interest. This section, comprising much of what was the old town, has evidently aimed to reproduce it; it has been rebuilt with persistent regard to the former municipal type, and shows to-day a curious combination of bright, new and well constructed tenements, built on a dark, old and ill instructed plan. The streets are left narrow,—very narrow. The black doorways and halls, as we peer in, in passing, are cramped and forbidding; the projecting balconies approach each other overhead, and the oblong yellow buildings themselves rise to overshadowing height. Like soldiers on dress parade they stand, relentlessly regular and uniform, block after block, and their walled lanes, straight and similar and uncharacteristic, cross and weave themselves into a stiff, right-angled check, exasperating and profitless, unrelieved by a hint at variation of outline, by a picturesque eave or gable, or a single artistic "bit;"

The cathedral does indeed possess some interest, particularly its carved front of light-colored stone; and here and there about it are a few old houses, unsutteed relicts, that have not bowed to the new régime. The shops in this part of the town are less individual than one would expect, though we find them not devoid of a certain variety. The specialty of the place is the enameling of gold and silver upon iron. Jewelry and small articles are made of this ware in elaborate designs and with great daintiness and skill. Outside of this, San Sebastian does not seem to have invented any new wants for humanity, and its shops do not seek to supply any but the old.

The other half of the town I have called international. This is the section of the hotels, of wide streets and flagged walks, of massy squares of business buildings, of villas and a park and the bathing circle. The sea swings around the projecting cape of the citadel into a deeply notched bay, small and still, and on its edge which meets the town you find pavilions and beach-chairs and their usual accompaniment of idling humanity. The Casino stands boldly up, a little to the right, and in front of it, on the Alameda, the band will play in the coming summer evenings for all the élite of Madrid.

The fine Hôtel de Londres is large and well kept, and, like all Spanish hotels, charges on the good American plan of so much per day. One gratefully appreciates this, after juggling every few days with disheartening lists of accumulated coffees and eggs and dinners and rooms and mineral waters and service and bougies, and the others. The infinitude of microscopic book-keeping made necessary by the Continental system is a thought to shudder at. For the rest, the hotel is only unsatisfying because it seems in nowise distinctively Spanish. We almost wish we had chosen a certain other hostelry equally well spoken of, which, instead of Hotel, had alluringly styled itself a Fonda. Probably we might have found as little there as here that was pure Castilian. Save in language and location, San Sebastian is not of Spain, Spanish. And as with Biarritz, it is not to be sought for its reminiscences of old age. It is trim and "kempt" and modern, and lives strictly in the present. We soon come to realize this, cease longing for the unattainable, and enjoy the place for what it is. Perhaps we shall recoup the vanished patina to-morrow, when we visit an older and far different town,—Fuenterrabia.

III.

The Sebastian season is coëxtensive with the summer season at Biarritz; perhaps rather tardier in its beginnings. Consequently we are still somewhat in advance of the tide. This is distinctly a disadvantage, as it was in part at Biarritz. There are places whose very reason for existence is society. Only in this costume are they rightly themselves; only in full dress, so to say, should they be called upon. In a true "sentimental journey," art and nature and history should take but equal turn with the life of the present. The ideal traveler courts solitude in a ruin and society in a resort. The spirit of each is differently divined.

And San Sebastian out of season is a casket without its jewels,—modern-made casket at that, costly but uncharacteristic, and with nothing of an heirloom's charm; a casket neither encased in time's antique leather nor encrusted with true Spanish enamel.

However, we are not wholly out of the season. We are in the van of it, but day breaks before the sun rises. San Sebastian is partially awake already and rubbing its eyes. The season's contingent is arriving in daily portions. The Queen Regent is coming soon, to spend the summer; this draws an additional number in advance, thus influenced to summer here themselves. The beach is already mildly popular, and the cabmen mildly independent. We drive out from the town around the bend of the little bay, and see opening villas and other marks of awakening life. But we sigh for music on the quiet plaza; hope in vain for a concert or ball in the Casino; and, above all, mourn and refuse to be comforted, for there is no bull-fight. After Wellington, whose way to Waterloo left here its fiery track, we exclaim: "O for August or Madrid!" In Madrid, they are holding bull-fights even now in June; in August, they will be holding them here.

IV.

As to the citadel, sight-seers are not solicitously catered to by the authorities. I stroll up there in the afternoon. The citadel hill is known as the Monte Orgullo. The spirals of the road lead out to and around the edge of the promontory to its ocean side, and curve steadily upward during a rise of four hundred feet. There are pleasant views of the sea,—the Spanish main in literal fact,—and of the hills across the little notch of water that turns in at the left toward the town. I near the summit, pass under an untended gateway, work upward still by a narrow lane shut in with high stone walls, and finally reach the foot of a long flight of stone steps and see the citadel looming above. It is Spain, and my passport is at the hotel. They are said to be very suspicious in Spain; to act first and investigate afterward. My whole vocabulary has already been employed at the custom-house, and consists of "Americano," "caramba," and "Si, Señor." It won the day at Irun. Will it win the day here?

Boldly I begin ascending the steps. They are many and wide, confined by the same high walls, and commanded from above by the battlements of the fort. There is commotion on the parapet at the unmuffled sound of the foreigner's foot-fall, and armed figures at once appear at the edge.

I pause half-way, and look expectantly upward.

"Caramba?" I inquire.

A soldier shakes, his head.

"Americano," I insinuate, sweetly.

Another shake, more decided.

I grieve for a somewhat fuller technical familiarity with the Spanish military idiom. Undismayed, however, I resort to the sign language, and make gestures to signify that I want to ascend.

Either the proposal is rejected or it is not comprehended, and I act it out again, with a cajoling "Si, Señor." Then, to make the idea clearer, I move on up the steps.

But now there is a vigorous negative. More armed figures, appear at the parapet, and, while I pause again, one of them explains his position in a few well-chosen and emphatic phrases, and illustrates his views by a pointed gesture toward his gun. The illustration at least is definite and unmistakable.

International complications are never to be recklessly brought on. But shall the assailing traveler quail before a gesture? My store of Spanish passwords is exhausted, but there is one solvent yet remaining,—the universal countersign. With undiminished cheerfulness, I select from my pocket a stamped silver disk of well-known design, hold it significantly a moment in full view, and then confidently proceed up the staircase.

The armed figures vanish from view. There is a foreboding silence as I near the heavy entrance-way at the top. But before I can pound for admittance, the great door swings deferentially open, a guard within salutes still more deferentially, I advance, friend, and proffer the countersign,—and the Monte Orgullo is won!

The view from this hill of Mars well merits the climb and any attendant risk to the home State Department. The air is warm and still. In front, the sea stretches to the horizon, smooth as the fair Glimmerglass loved by Deerslayer. To the right flows a clear, quiet river, the Urumea, to meet it,—a river on whose nearer bank below us lies buried many a brave English soldier, their graves marked by white headstones; and from the farther shore of which once flew leaden rain and iron hail from conquering English guns. Behind us lies the city, asleep in the warm afternoon haze, and in the distance are the forms of purplish Pyrenees hills; while farther around opens the bright little bay,—the Concha or Shell, happily so called,—with villas fringing it's curve, and an islet-pearl in its centre. A wistful touch of peace and sunshine is over all the scene, as one views it, in the irony of fact, from this storm-centre of war.

There are barracks within the walls, and monster guns and other usual martial furnishings, and the fortifications themselves have, to some extent, been put in touch with modern requirements. The garrison's life is not hard, and they live contentedly through drill and evolution, ration and routine, and stroll down to the Alameda and Casino in hours of leave. But theirs is a post of honor and danger, nevertheless. San Sebastian lies foremost in the route of possible invasion. It could not be ignored nor left untaken. And the very isolation of this fortress, once its strength, is now its weakness. It might serve to delay an onrushing army for a saving moment,—a dog thrown out to check the wolves. It could accomplish little more against the terrific artillery of to-day; and,—as with the dog,—the interval would prove a period of marked unrest to the fated garrison.

However, war is now at last, if never hitherto, extinct for all time, so trusts the world at peace. And barrack-life is dreamy and easy, and the stroll down to the Alameda very pleasant, these fair days of summer.

But the white headstones on the river slope come out into view again, for a time, as I wander back down the spiral road toward the town and think on these things; a cloud drifts across the sun and dims their brightness; then the light pours down as before.

V.

AN OLD SPANISH MINIATURE.

The next day an indolent morning train draws us back to the frontier. The landscape is rather shadeless; "a Spaniard hates a tree." It should be but a twenty-minute ride, and so, it being short at the longest, we do not have time to grudge the additional twenty consumed in "indolencing." The time-table allowed for that, and so prepared us. It is when larger times are involved,—when a four-hour ride is inflated to eight, and an eight-hour trip to fifteen, as in going to Burgos,—that the corporate deliberateness of the Spanish railways ceases to be a curiosity, and becomes a crime.

We are soon in Irun once more, and after change of cars, cross to Hendaye, and baggage is inspected for France. The train goes on its way north, but we stay in Hendaye, to lunch, and to make our projected excursion to Fuenterrabia.

In terms of logic, San Sebastian the modern has in Fuenterrabia the ancient its full "contradictory." The one, the resort, is affirmative and universal; the other, the old, strange town, is negative and individual. The one has told us little of old Spain; we turn hopefully to the other.

Fuenterrabia lies near the mouth of the Bidassoa, on the Spanish side of the stream, below Irun. It is but two miles, from Irun, and readily reached from that place by carriage; from Hendaye, on the French side, one reaches it by row-boat in about the same time, with the additional zest and boast of recrossing the river and of entering and leaving Spain once more.

II.

Luncheon past, we walk up the long, easy incline that leads from Hendaye station into its town; and with a turn to the left find our way through its streets down again to the river bank. Here are boats and boatmen, and we have to run the customary gauntlet of competition, as vociferous at Hendaye as at Killarney or the Crossmon. We elect two of the competitors as allies, and the rest become our sworn enemies forthwith.

The tide is low, the water still and shallow; and we are sculled smoothly out into the stream, restful in the soft sunshine, the full blue of the afternoon sky. The voices of our hundred enemies recede; the sounds from the town yield to the dripping oars; soon the stream stretches its silent width about us. Close-grouped on the opposite shore we see the dark walls of Fuenterrabia, domineered by the castle. The railway whistle begins to seem a memory of another existence, the bustle of travel a thing remote. The quiet of the river, unlike Lethe, turns us to the past, and clouds the present in a dreamy haze.

"In that sunny corner where the waves of the Bay of Biscay wash over a sandy barrier and mingle with the waters of the Bidassoa stream,"—thus runs the legend so charmingly recounted in The Sun-Maid,—"they tell the ancient story that a favored mortal won from the gods permission to ask three blessings for Spain.

"He asked that her daughters might be beautiful, that her sons might be brave, and that her government might be good.

"The first two requests were granted,—the beauty of a Spanish woman is of world-wide renown; and if the men are rash, passionate, and revengeful, at least they are brave; but the last request was refused.

"'Impossible!' was the answer; 'impossible! Already she is an earthly paradise, and were this last blessing hers, the very gods themselves would desert Elysium and come down to dwell in Spain.'"

Of this we think, winding among the shallows, as the Spanish bank comes nearer, and the boat at last grounds lightly on its soil. Before us is the old town we are seeking,—a type perhaps of the nation itself, in its courtly unthrift, its proud misgovernance.

III.

There is a little custom-house on the bank, but our impedimenta are safe in Hendaye. I think our passports are there as-well, so bold does one grow upon familiarity.

We have scarcely traversed a hundred yards before we come upon the middle centuries. There will be no caviling at the satisfying antiquity of Fuenterrabia. We have passed in between the lichened walls which still guard the city, and a few steps bring us into the town and to the foot of the main street. We pause to look, and the sight is certainly striking. Beyond a doubt Fuenterrabia is old. It has a true Spanish tint, and one dyed in the wool; one might probably travel far in Spain before meeting a truer. This street seems utterly unmodified by modern formulæ. Wavering and narrow and sombre, it stretches upward on a gradual incline until it meets the cathedral stepping out from the line of the old houses and closing the vista. Even in the short perspective, the huge, blackened eaves of the opposite roofs seem almost to meet. Balconies, associated with moonlight and mandolins, serenades and señoritas, jut out from every window; dark bosses of escutcheons mark the fronts; and below, along the edging of sidewalk, are the dim little shops, curtained by yellow canvas, intensely and delightfully local, and wholly unknowing of outside demand or competition. One of these places does indeed cater to visitors with a humble supply of photographs and of clicking sets of varnished wooden castanets paired by colored worsteds; but the others of the store-keepers and the inhabitants in the streets are clearly unhardened to foreigners, and regard us solely with a deep and artless curiosity,—tempered, I hope, by admiration. As the town has been, so it is. It is an epitome of Spain and her past.

IV.

At the head of the street we enter the cool cathedral, and find, as always, wealth created by poverty. In places such as these one realizes the hold of the Romish system on mediæval Europe. One realizes its power also. No matter what the size of a town, it boasts its costly church; oftener, as here, its cathedral. Villages, houses, people, may be poor, their church stands rich; they may be unlearned in art and in culture, their church stands a model of both. There was their shrine, their finality,—in religion not merely, but in art and wisdom and authority.

At least, the Catholic system held its followers firmly in leash. Condemn its errors and excesses, yet, these apart, it was marvelously adapted to its mission. As an engine of unification it was almost omnipotent. Through the ups and downs of restless migrations and invasions,—of feudalisms and governments and the soberer commercial spirit,—it has kept its hold unbroken upon the mass of European humanity. Its priests and popes might sink out of respect; the Church did not sink. In the fiercest civil feuds, its abbeys were held inviolate. To the most brutal, the Church had an odor of sanctity. Its threats terrified; its mandates were obeyed; it was the one persistent, binding principle; it held men in check from a relapse into tribalism.

And its hold is firm to-day. Go into a Romish church, you shall find worshipers at every hour. Worn housewives, seamed and aged market-women, a chance workingman, an awed and tiptoeing child,—they are there in their silence. They kneel, they pray, their eyes are fixed on the altar. Formalism or not, a sincerity underlies it,—a belief and obedience absorbed from centuries of environment; implicit and unquestioning, and making for good.

V.

Beyond the cathedral is the broad square or plaza, and the half-alive streets wandering from this are even more Fuenterrabian than the one just past, for they are less well-to-do. The poorer houses may reveal the traits and traditions of a town far more faithfully than the richer. The latter can draw their models from a wider field. The former copy only the local and long-followed pattern.

Here at our right stands the castle. It is stern in its decrepitude; its very aspect is historic. It was built by a king of Navarre, Sancho Abarca, known as the Strong, so long ago as the tenth century; the façade facing the square is somewhat later, and the other façade was rebuilt by Charles V. We pass through the entrance-way and across a murky, earthen-floored atrium, and stand in silence in the roofless central hall.

It is at this point that our nascent impressions are brusquely shocked. Fuenterrabia is not all steeped in dreams of the past. It has waked for once into the business present as well. Its proud reserve has been broken. There is a rift in the lute. Here by the mossy courtyard, enclosed by historic walls and the spirit of an unworldly past, we are met by a sign-board, with the following English inscription:

AN ERA IN TWILIGHT.

Returning to Hendaye, a train takes us again to Bayonne, connecting there for Orthez and Pau. The ride to Bayonne needs an hour or less, and from thence to Orthez calls for two. It is not many decades since much of this journey had to be made by the diligence. Railways and highways have pushed rapidly toward the Pyrenees. When in the approaching fortnight we shall come to traverse the Route Thermale, the great carriage-way along the chain, we shall see modern road-making in its perfection; and the rail will keep anxious watch, over the road, running parallel along the distant plain and reaching helpful arms up the valleys to uphold it.