Spanish Highways and Byways

XXIII

IN OLD CASTILE

The journey from Bilbao to Santander is a continuous glory of mountain views. The train runs saucily along under beetling crags, whence the gods of the hills may well look down in wonder and displeasure on this noisy invasion of their solitude. We almost saw those ancient majesties folding themselves grandly in mantles of purple shadow, but hardly less royal in bearing were the muffled figures of the lonely shepherds tending their flocks on the very summits.

The modern Province of Santander is the renowned Montaña, the mountain lair which nourished the chivalry of Old Castile, and from which they made wild sallies to the south, troop after troop, generation after generation, until the Moorish standards were beaten back from the plains about Toledo to the Sierras of Andalusia. Its capital city, Santander, named from St. Andrew, was one of the four coast towns which rendered signal service to Fernando in the conquest of Seville. These towns, lying as they did over against the Cinque Ports of England, came into so frequent conflict with British mariners as to be made in the days of Edward III the subject of a special treaty.

A summer resort, however, is a summer resort the world over, and we found the historic city, which has gracefully fitted itself to the curve of its beautiful bay, crowded with idle people, elaborately dressed, who sat long at the noonday breakfast, and longer yet at the evening dinner, and then longest of all on the benches in the park, where bands clashed and fireworks flared, until the very stars began to blink for sleepiness.

Spaniards have a veritable passion for pyrotechnics, and our dreams until the dawn would be punctuated by the airy report of rockets, as if, so Galdós suggests, "the angels were cracking nuts in the sky." Every now and then in those soft warm nights there rose a shout of song from the street, and peeping down from the balcony, we would see half a dozen lads and lasses leaping along through the middle of the road, all abreast and hand in hand, in one of their boisterous peasant dances.

There are no fewer dangers and sorrows for girls in Spain than in the other Latin lands. In the low-vaulted, mighty-pillared, deep-shadowed crypt under the old cathedral, a crypt that is the very haunt of religious mystery and dread, we came upon a penitent kneeling before the altar, a bit of written paper pinned to her back. In a stir of the chill air this fluttered to the ground, and as she, unconscious of its loss, bowed herself before another shrine, we picked up the paper with a half thought of restoring it; but seeing in the first glance that it was a rudely written prayer, entreating the Virgin's pity and pardon for her lover and herself, we let it fall again at Mary's feet. All manner of thank-offerings, waxen limbs, eyes, and ears, were hung in these candle-lit recesses, little spaces of gold amid the gloom. We had grown accustomed to such fragments of anatomy in the shop-windows, where even votive stomachs are displayed for sale.

Although Santander is a dawdler's paradise, the residents of the city to whom we had letters were no holiday makers, but Spaniards of the earnest, thoughtful, liberal type, busy with large tasks of their own, but never too busy, being Spaniards, to show unstinted kindness to the strangers within their gates. Our brief stay did not admit of a tithe of the excursions they had in mind for us, but my comrade achieved a trip to Santillana del Mar, birthplace of the doughty Gil Blas.

In the latest version of her adventures, she set forth from Santander under the bluest of skies, in company with the most bewitching of señoritas. They left the train at Torrelavega, where the shade of Garci Laso, one of King Pedro's victims, would doubtless have welcomed them, had not their attention been taken up with a picturesque coachman, who was standing dreamily on the station platform. This Adonis proved a complete paragon, who, as they took their romantic course over the hills, delightedly pointed out ivied tower, broken portcullis, and the like, as tidbits for the kodak.

Santillana is the shrine of Santa Juliana, a Roman martyr, whose body is said to have been carried thither in the ninth century. Her devotees among the mountain wilds built her in this green valley, overhung by a rude old fortress, a precious church, a jewel of the early Romanesque, about whose walls a thriving community soon gathered. Santillana was throughout the Middle Ages the most important place between Burgos and Oviedo, and gave name to all that part of the Montaña. The successive Marquises of Santillana were then great personages in Spain, playing a leading part at Court. One of the proudest families of Old Castile, they claimed descent from the Cid, and cherished the memory of another heroic ancestor, who, in 1385, sacrificed his life to save his king.

The city of Santillana, whose lords once laid claim to the sovereignty of Santander, has shrunk to a forgotten village, and the neglected church is dropping into ruins; but the inhabitants have abated not a jot of that fierce local patriotism which blinds the provincial Spaniard to all defects of his birthplace and to all excellences of rival towns. A graybeard told the stranger ladies that Santillana was the oldest city in Spain and its cathedral the most beautiful. This latter statement they were almost ready to accept, so richly carven was the yellow stone and so harmonious the proportions of nave and aisle. When they arrived at this miniature Durham they found it closed and silent, with three little boys sleeping on the steps. Through the benevolence of the ever present Spanish loafers, the sacristan was sought out and a ragged escort formed for their progress from chapel to chapel, where rare old pictures and frescos glowed across the dusk. Best of all were the venerable cloisters, weed-grown and tumble-down, but lovely as a mediæval dream with mellow-tinted arch and column, and with capitals of marvellous device. This crumbling church still keeps a dazzling hoard of treasures. All the front of the high altar is wrought of solid silver, the reredos is a miracle of art, and the paintings of old masters that moulder here unseen would long since in any other land than Catholic Spain have been the spoils of gallery and museum.

The cathedral stands just outside the town, whose narrow, crooked streets daunted the carriage; but these enthusiastic sightseers were all the better pleased to foot the flagging that many a clinking tread had worn and to touch on either side, with their extended hands, the fortresslike houses built of heavy stone and dimly emblazoned with fierce armorial bearings. These grim dwellings were gladdened by the grace of vine-clad balconies, where children frolicked and women crooned quaint melodies over their needlework.

The inn was merely the customary Spanish venta, rough and poor, the darkness of whose long, low room clouds of tobacco smoke from clumps of gambling muleteers were making blacker yet; but lemonade was served to the ladies in the open porch with a charm of cordial courtesy far beyond Delmonico's.

As they quaffed this modest refreshment and watched the shifting groups about the venta, which seemed the centre of the social life, there suddenly appeared upon the scene a ghost from the modern world, an everyday gentleman in a straw hat, as citified and up to date as if he had that moment stepped out of a Madrid café. All the loungers within and without the venta sprang to their feet, bared their heads, and bowed low to this anachronism with so profound a deference that the tourists began to wonder if the irrepressible Gil Blas had come alive again. Not he! This was the Marquis of Santillana, bearing under his arm instead of a sword a bundle of newspapers. The first Marquis of Santillana had been a famous warrior and troubadour. This latest "inheritor of old renown," seating himself in the midst of his thronging vassals, graciously proceeded, much like a University Extension lecturer, to read aloud, with simple explanations, the news of the day. Such is the final form of noblesse oblige in the feudal valley of Santillana.

We were tempted to hunt out other nooks and eyries in the mountains of Santander, to see something of the famous sardine fisheries, to drive along the many-storied coast all the way to Gijon, paying our respects in passing to a noble oak of Asturias, one of the three largest trees of Europe; but always the uplifted sword of St. James drove us on. If we would reach Compostela in season for the annual fiesta de Santiago, there was no time to lose. So, in default of a nearer railway connection, we started due south for Palencia. Our route ran at first through a land of hills, maize, and stone walls that might have been New England, except for the women scratching away in the hay-fields, and politely saluting the train with a flourish of their pitchforks.

Then more and more the landscape became Spanish. Little stone hamlets dozed in ever shallower valleys, mule trains and solitary horsemen moved slowly down poplar-bordered highways, white as chalk; there was a slumbering peasant for every speck of shade. But while the men took their siestas, often sleeping where the drowsiness had befallen them, with arm thrown about the wooden plough or with head pillowed on the thrashing roller, there were always women at work – figures clad in the very colors of the harvest, red and gold and purple, binding sheaves, sweeping the fields with stout brush brooms, tending flocks and herds by the rivers, following stray sheep over the hills, with only a handkerchief at the most to protect their heads from the terrible noonday sun. As the afternoon wore on, we found ourselves in the melancholy reaches of brown Castilian plain, with the adobe towns, the miserable mud villages, open-air threshing floors, and arid, silent, Oriental look.

The only cloud in sight was that which rested for a moment on my comrade's face. She had so newly come from our clean and wholesome fatherland that certain features of the Spanish inns still shook her high serenity of soul, and she had suddenly discovered that Baedeker significantly characterized the Palencia hotel as "an indifferent Spanish house." In the discreet language of our excellent guidebook this was no less than a note of warning, a signal of alarm. But even Baedeker is fallible, and on arriving at the Gran Hotel Continental, we were met by all the Castilian dignity and grave kindliness of greeting, and led to rooms whose floors shone with oil and scrubbing, whose curtains, towels, and sheeting were white as mountain snow, and whose furnishings were resplendent with two dozen chairs upholstered in orange satin. We seated ourselves in rapture on one saffron throne after another, drank fresh milk from polished glasses, and slept, for this only night of all our Santiago pilgrimage, the sleep of the unbitten. A sweet-voiced sereno intoning the hours set our dreams to music.

The following morning we spent in the cathedral, which, though of plain exterior, except for the many-imaged "Door of the Bishop," is all lightness, grace, and symmetry within. The organ was pealing and women were kneeling for the mass as we went softly down the high-vaulted nave, our spirits played upon now by the dignity of pointed arches and of clustered columns and now by delicate beauties in tracery and carving. Only here and there were we aware of a jarring note, as in chancing upon a great crucifix whose Christ was decked out in two elegant lace petticoats and a white silk crinoline embroidered over with silver thread.

When the chant had died away, an affectionate old sacristan, in a curious red and black coat, delivered us with sundry farewell pats and pinches over to the charge of a subordinate, who proceeded to display the hidden treasures. These are far from overwhelming, after the glittering hoards of Burgos, Seville, and Toledo, but they are as odd an assortment as sacristy ever sheltered. There was an absurd portrait of Charles I, a freak of foreshortening. At first sight it seemed to be the skeleton of a fish, but on viewing it through a peephole the creature had become a human face. Even so, it was hardly a flattering likeness of the founder of the Austrian line; but as it was Charles I who stripped Palencia of her original powers and dignities, one would not expect to find him complimented here.

We turned our attention to the vestments, which, though few, are peculiarly artistic, with devices, stitched in gold thread and in jewel reds and greens, of pomegranates, roses, ecclesiastical coats of arms, angels, Maries, Nativities, and Adorations. These were appropriate enough, but even our reserved conductor, a monastic youth who wore a white, openwork tunic over his black suit, smiled disdainfully as he put before us a time-yellowed ivory box arabesqued with men and lions, the jewel casket of some pet sultana. "But why should it be here?" He shrugged his shoulders. "In truth, it is not holy – a woman's thing! Nor do I know how it came to us, but what we have we keep."

The sacristy certainly seems to have kept more than its share of custodias. Our guide first brought out a dainty structure, where grieving angels uplift the cross, and the Sufferer's halo is wrought of pearls and gems. This was replaced by another, a marvel of goldsmith's craft, turreted and crocketed with fine gold, while all about the base are figured Annunciations, Visitations, and other mysteries. Rich as they were, neither of these could compare with that famous pyx of the Escorial, inlaid with ten thousand precious stones. Then our conductor took us with a mighty turning of monster keys, pulling of rusty bolts, and fall of clanging chains, to see the supreme custodia of all, one great dazzle of silver from fretted base to dome and pinnacle, save as among the Corinthian columns of the first stage glisten golden forms of the Apostles, and of the second, winged shapes of cherubim and seraphim. This shining tower, some three or four centuries old, is beheld by Palencia only on Corpus Christi Day, when, holding at its heart the golden monstrance which holds the Host, it passes as a triumphal car throughout the city. Priests walking on either side make a feint of drawing it by tasselled cords, but "little would it budge for that," said our guide, in high disdain, opening a door in the frame beneath to reveal the benches where strong men sit concealed and toil at a motor crank. He had much more to show us, including precious old tapestries of the Netherlands, and a St. Katharine by Zurbarán, with a light on the kneeling figure as pure and bright as a moonbeam; but we had to press the fee on his Castilian pride, when at last the vulgarity of luncheon summoned us away.