The whole place is an incongruous mixture of Latin and Saxon. The strictly South-European effect of the houses and churches is a mute protest against the alien presence which keeps the streets so clean and maintains order by means of policemen showing under the helmets of the London bobby the faces of the native alguazil. In the shops the saleswomen speak English and look Spanish. Our driver, indeed, looked more Spanish than he spoke English.
His knowledge of our rude tongue extended hardly beyond the mention of certain conventional objects of interest, and did not suffice to explain why we could not see the old disused galleries of the fortifications. I do not know why we wished to see these; I doubt if we really did so, but we embittered life for that well-meaning boy by our insistence upon them, and we brought him under unjust suspicion of deceit by forcing him to a sort of time-limit in respect to them. We appealed from him to the blandest of black-mus-tached, olive-skinned bobby-alguazils, who directed us to a certain government office for a permit. There our application caused something like dismay, and we were directed to another office, but were saved from the shame of failure by incidentally learning that the galleries could not be seen till after three o’clock. As our ship sailed at that hour, we were probably saved a life-long disappointment.
Everywhere the rock of the Prudential beetles and towers over the town; but the fortifications are so far up in the sky that you can really distinguish nothing but the Marconi telegraphic apparatus at the top. Along the sea-level, which the town mostly keeps, the war-like harness of the stronghold shows through the civil dress of the town in barracks and specific forts and gray battle-ships lying at anchor in the docks. But all is simple and reserved, in the right English fashion. The strength of the place is not to be put forth till it is needed, which will be never, since it is hard to imagine how it can ever be even attempted by a hostile force. This is not saying, I hope, that an American fleet could not batter it down, nor leave one letter of the insurance advertisement after another on the face of the precipice.
There is a pretty public garden at Gibraltar in that part of the town which is farthest from the steamer’s landing, and this proved the end of our excursion in our state coach. We found other state coaches there, and joined their passengers in strolling over the pleasant paths and trying to make out what bird it was singing somewhere in the trees. We made out an almond-tree in bloom, after some dispute; and, in fact, the climate there was much softer than at the landing, so insidiously soft that it required great force of character to keep from buying the flowers which some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is a mild monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly failed to remember afterward; but as there are more military memories in the world than is good for it, and as these were undoubtedly military memories, I cannot much blame myself in the matter. After viewing them, there was nothing left to do but to get lunch, which we got extremely good at the hotel where a friend led us. There was at this hotel a head-waiter, in a silver-braided silk dress-coat of a mauve color, who imagined our wants so perfectly that I shall always regret not taking more of the omelette; the table-waiter urged it upon us twice with true friendliness. The eggs must have been laid for it in Africa that morning at daybreak, and brought over by a Moorish marketman, but we turned from the poetic experience of this omelette in the greedy hope of better things. Better things there could not be, but the fish was as good as the fish at Madeira, and the belief of the chops that they were lamb and not kid seemed better founded.
There had been an excellent bottle of Rioja Blanca, such as you may have as good at some Spanish restaurant in New York for as little money; and the lunch, when reckoned up in English shillings and Spanish undertones, was not cheap. Yet it was not dear, either, and there was no specific charge for that silver-braided dress-coat of a mauve color. An English dean in full clericals, and some English ladies talking in the waiting-room, added an agreeable confusion to our doubt of where and what we were, and we came away from the hotel as well content as if we had lunched in Plymouth or Bath. The table-waiter took an extra fee for confiding that he was a Milanese, and was almost the only Italian in Gibraltar; whether he was right or not I do not know, but it was certainly not his fault that we did not take twice of the omelette.
It is said that living is dear in Gibraltar, especially in the matter of house rent. The houses in the town are like all the houses of Latin Europe in their gray or yellowish walls of stone or stucco and their dark-green shutters. There is an English residential quarter at the east end of the town, where the houses may be different, for all I know; the English of our driver or the hire of our state coach did not enable us to visit that suburb, where the reader may imagine villas standing in grounds with lawns and gardens about them. The English have prevailed nothing against the local civilization in most things, while they have infected it with the costliness of the whole Anglo-Saxon life. We should not think seven hundred dollars in New York dear for even a quite small house, but it has come to that in Gibraltar, and there they think it dear, with other things proportionately so. Of course, it is an artificial place; the fortress makes the town, and the town in turn lives upon the fortress.
The English plant themselves nowhere without gathering English conveniences or conventions about them; Americans would not always think them comforts. There is at Gibraltar a club or clubs; there is a hunt, there is a lending library, there is tennis, there is golf, there is bridge, there is a cathedral, and I dare say there is gossip, but I do not know it. It was difficult to get land for the golf links, we heard, because of the Spanish jealousy of the English occupation, which they will not have extended any farther over Spanish soil, even in golf links. Gibraltar is fondly or whimsically known to the invaders as Gib, and I believe it is rather a favorite sojourn, though in summer it is frightfully hot, held out on the knees and insteps of the rock to the burning African sun, which comes up every morning over the sea after setting Sahara on fire.
All this foreign life must be exterior to the aboriginal Spanish life which has so long outlasted the Moorish, and is not without hope of outlasting the English. I do not know what the occupations and amusements of that life are, but I will suppose them unworthy enough. There must be a certain space of neutral life uniting or dividing the two, which would form a curious inquiry, but would probably not lend itself to literary study. Besides this middle ground there is another neutral territory at Gibraltar which we traversed after luncheon, in order to say that we had been in Spain. That was the country of many more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, it is in this. We used then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his Tales of the Alhambra, and his history of The Conquest of Granada, and we read Prescott’s histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world and the new. We read Don Quixote, which very few read now, and we read Gil Blas, which fewer still now read; and all these constituted Spain a realm of faery, where every sort of delightful things did or could happen. I for my part had always expected to go to Spain and live among the people I had known in those charming books, yet I had been often in Europe, and had spent whole years there without ever going near Spain. But now, I saw, was my chance, and when the friend who had been lunching with us asked if we would not like to drive across that neutral territory and go into Spain a bit, it seemed as if the dream of my youth had suddenly renewed itself with the purpose of coming immediately true. It was a charmingly characteristic foretaste of Spanish travel that the driver of the state coach which we first engaged should, when we presently came back, have replaced himself by another for no other reason than, perhaps, that he could so provide us with a worse horse. I am not sure of this theory, and I do not insist upon it, but it seems plausible.
As soon as we rounded the rock of Gibraltar and struck across a flatter country than I supposed could be found within fifty miles of Gibraltar, we were swept by a blast which must have come from the Pyrenees, it was so savagely rough and cold. It may be always blowing there as a Spanish protest
against the English treatment of the neutral territory; in fact, it does not seem quite the thing to build over that space as the English have done, though the structures are entirely peaceable, and it is not strange that the Spaniards have refused to meet them half-way with a good road over it, or to let them make one the whole way. They stand gravely opposed to any further incursion. Officially in all the Spanish documents the place is styled “Gibraltar, temporarily occupied by Great Britain,” and there is a little town which you see sparkling in the sun no great way off in Spain called San Roque, of which the mayor is also mayor of Gibraltar; he visits his province once a year, and many people living for generations over the Spanish line keep the keys of the houses that they personally or ancestrally own in Gibraltar. The case has its pathos, but as a selfish witness I wish they had let the English make that road through the neutral territory. The present road is so bad that our state coach, in bounding over its inequalities, sometimes almost flung us into the arms of the Spanish beggars always extended toward us. They were probably most of them serious, but some of the younger ones recognized the bouffe quality of their calling. One pleasant starveling of ten or twelve entreated us for bread with a cigarette in his mouth, and, being rewarded for his impudence, entered into the spirit of the affair and asked for more, just as if we had given nothing.
A squalid little town grew up out of the flying gravel as we approached, and we left our state coach at the custom-house, which seemed the chief public edifice. There the inspectors did not go through the form of examining our hand-bags, as they would have done at an American frontier; and they did not pierce our carriage cushions with the long javelins with which they are armed for the detection of smuggling among the natives who have been shopping in Gibraltar. As the gates of that town are closed every day at nightfall by a patrol with drum and fife, and everybody is shut either in or out, it may easily happen with shoppers in haste to get through that they bring dutiable goods into Spain; but the official javelins rectify the error.
We left our belongings in our state coach and started for that stroll in Spain which I have measured as two up-town blocks, by what I think a pretty accurate guess; two cross-town blocks I am sure it was not. It was a mean-looking street, unswept and otherwise unkempt, with the usual yellowish or grayish buildings, rather low and rather new, as if prompted by a mistaken modern enterprise. They were both shops and dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a fresh-looking cafe restaurant, and one dwelling all faced with bright-green tiles. An alguazil — I am certain he was an alguazil, though he looked like an Italian carabiniere and wore a cocked hat — loitered into a police station; but I remember no one else during our brief stay in that street except those bouffe boy beggars. Of course, they wished to sell us postal-cards, but they were willing to accept charity on any terms. Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time it was entirely lost. Whether it was secretly confiscated by the customs, or was accepted as a just tribute by the populace from a poetic admirer, I do not know, but I hope it is now in the keeping of some dark-eyed Spanish girl, who will wear it while murmuring through her lattice to her novio on the pavement outside. It was rather heavy to be worn as a veil, but I am sure she could manage it after dark, and could hold it under her chin, as she leaned forward to the grille, with one little olive hand, so that the novio would think it was a black silk mantilla. Or if it was a gift from him, it would be all right, anyway.
Our visit to Spain did not wholly realize my early dreams of that romantic land, and yet it had not been finally destitute of incident. Besides, we had not gone very far into the country; a third block might have teemed with adventure, but we had to be back on the steamer before three o’clock, and we dared not go beyond the second. Even within this limit a love of reality underlying all my love of romance was satisfied in the impression left by that dusty, empty, silent street. It seemed somehow like the street of a new, dreary, Western American town, so that I afterward could hardly believe that the shops and restaurants had not eked out their height with dashboard fronts. It was not a place that I would have chosen for a summer sojourn; the sense of a fly-blown past must have become a vivid part of future experience, and yet I could imagine that if one were born to it, and were young and hopeful, and had some one to share one’s youth and hope, that Spanish street, which was all there was of that Spanish town, might have had its charm. I do not say that even for age there was not a railway station by which one might have got away, though there was no sign of any trains arriving or departing — perhaps because it was not one o’clock in the morning, which is the favorite hour of departure for Spanish trains.
When we turned to drive back over the neutral territory the rock of Gibraltar suddenly bulked up before us, in a sheer ascent that left the familiar Prudential view in utterly inconspicuous unimpressive-ness. Till one has seen it from this point one has not truly seen it. The vast stone shows like a half from which the other half has been sharply cleft and removed, that the sense of its precipitous magnitude may unrelievedly strike the eye; and it seems to have in that moment the whole world to tower up in from the level at its feet. No dictionary, however unabridged, has language adequate to convey the notion of it.
III. ASHORE AT GENOA
The pride of Americans in their native scenery is brought down almost to the level of the South Shore of Long Island in arriving home from the Mediterranean voyage to Europe. The last thing one sees in Europe is the rock of Gibraltar, but before that there have been the snow-topped Maritime Alps of Italy and the gray-brown, softly rounded, velvety heights of Spain; and one has to think very hard of the Palisades above the point where they have been blasted away for road-making material if one wishes to keep up one’s spirits. The last time I came home the Mediterranean way I had a struggle with myself against excusing our sandy landscape, when we came in sight of it, with its summer cottages for the sole altitudes, to some Italian fellow-passengers who were not spellbound by its grandeur. I had to remember the Rocky Mountains, which I had never seen, and all the moral magnificence of our life before I could withhold the words of apology pressing to my lips. I was glad that I succeeded; but now, going back by the same route, I abandoned myself to transports in the beauty of the Mediterranean coast which I hope were not untrue to my country. Perhaps there is no country which can show anything like that beauty, and America is no worse off than the rest of the world; but I am not sure that I have a right to this consolation. Again there were those
“Silent pinnacles of aged snow,”
flushed with the Southern sun; in those sombre slopes of pine; again the olives climbing to their gloom; again the terraced vineyards and the white farmsteads, with villages nestling in the vast clefts of the hills, and all along the sea-level the blond towns and cities which broidei the hem of the land from Marseilles to Genoa. One is willing to brag; one must be a good American; but, honestly, have we anything like that to show the arriving foreigner? For some reason our ship was abating the speed with which she had crossed the Atlantic, and now she was swimming along the Mediterranean coasts so slowly and so closely that it seemed as if we could almost have cast an apple ashore, though probably we could not. We were at least far enough off to mistake Nice for Monte Carlo and then for San Remo, but that was partly because our course was so leisurely, and we thought we must have passed Nice long before we did. It did not matter; all those places were alike beautiful under the palms of their promenades, with their scattered villas and hotels stretching along their upper levels, and the ranks of shops and dwellings solidly forming the streets which left the shipping of their ports to climb to the gardens and farms beyond the villas. Cannes, Mentone, Ventimiglia, Ospedeletti, Bordighera, Taggia, Alassio: was that their fair succession, or
did they follow in another order? Once more it did not matter; what is certain is that the golden sun of the soft January afternoon turned to crimson and left the last of them suffused in dim rose before we drifted into Genoa and came to anchor at dusk beside a steamer which had left New York on the same day as ours. By her vast size we could measure our own and have an objective perception of our grandeur. We had crossed in one of the largest ships afloat, but you cannot be both spectacle and spectator; and you must match your magnificence with some rival magnificence before you can have a due sense of it. That was what we now got at Genoa, and we could not help pitying the people on that other ship, who must have suffered shame from our overwhelming magnitude; the fact that she was of nearly the same tonnage as our own ship had nothing to do with the case.
After the creamy and rosy tints of those daughters of climate along the Riviera, it was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce like Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether it looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her from the thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the harbor. Most European towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets rather tired of putting into one’s word paintings, but the roofs of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray are her serried house walls, and gray her many churches and bell-towers. The sober tone gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye has noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is something businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood if you are true to America, and recalls you to duty if you are not.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1301
