Now And Then Our Locomotive Whistled As If To
Scare The Wandering Engine Back To The Rails.
At moments the
station-master gloomily returned to the station from somewhere and
diligently despaired in front of it.
Then we backed as if to let our
locomotive run up the siding and try to butt the freight-train off the
track to keep its engine company.
About this time the restaurant-car bethought itself of some sort of
late-afternoon repast, and we went forward and ate it with an interest
which we prolonged as much as possible. We returned to our car which was
now pervaded by an extremely bad smell. The smell drove us out, and we
watched a public-spirited peasant beating the acorns from a live-oak
near the station with a long pole. He brought a great many down, and
first filled his sash-pocket with them; then he distributed them among
the children of the third-class passengers who left the train and
flocked about him. But nobody seemed to do anything with the acorns,
though they were more than an inch long, narrow, and very sharp-pointed.
As soon as he had discharged his self-assumed duty the peasant lay down
on the sloping bank under the tree, and with his face in the grass, went
to sleep for all our stay, and for what I know the whole night after.
It did not now seem likely that we should ever reach Gordova, though
people made repeated expeditions to the front of the train, and came
back reporting that in an hour we should start. We interested ourselves
as intensely as possible in a family from the next compartment,
London-tailored, and speaking either Spanish or English as they fancied,
who we somehow understood lived at Barcelona; but nothing came of our
interest. Then as the day waned we threw ourselves into the interest
taken by a fellow-passenger in a young Spanish girl of thirteen or
fourteen who had been in the care of a youngish middle-aged man when our
train stopped, and been then abandoned by him for hours, while he seemed
to be satisfying a vain curiosity at the head of the train. She owned
that the deserter was her father, and while we were still poignantly
concerned for her he came back and relieved the anxiety which the girl
herself had apparently not shared even under pressure of the whole
compartment's sympathy.
IV
The day waned more and more; the sun began to sink, and then it sank
with that sudden drop which the sun has at last. The sky flushed
crimson, turned mauve, turned gray, and the twilight thickened over the
summits billowing softly westward. There had been a good deal of
joking, both Spanish and English, among the passengers; I had found
particularly cheering the richness of a certain machinist's trousers of
bright golden corduroy; but as the shades of night began to embrown the
scene our spirits fell; and at the cry of a lonesome bird, far off where
the sunset had been, they followed the sun in its sudden drop. Against
the horizon a peasant boy leaned on his staff and darkled against the
darkening sky.
Nothing lacked now but the opportune recollection that this was the
region where the natives had been so wicked in times past that an
ingenious statesman, such as have seldom been wanting to Spain, imagined
bringing in a colony of German peasants to mix with them and reform
them. That is what some of the books say, but others say that the region
had remained unpeopled after the first exile of the conquered Moors. All
hold that the notion of mixing the colonists and the natives worked the
wrong way; the natives were not reformed, but the colonists were
depraved and stood in with the local brigands, ultimately, if not
immediately. This is the view suggested, if not taken, by that amusing
emissary, George Borrow, who seems in his _Bible in Spain_ to have been
equally employed in distributing the truths of the New Testament and
collecting material for the most dramatic study of Spanish civilization
known to literature. It is a delightful book, and not least delightful
in the moments of misgiving which it imparts to the reader, when he does
not know whether to prize more the author's observation or his
invention, whichever it may be. Borrow reports a conversation with an
innkeeper and his wife of the Colonial German descent, who gave a good
enough account of themselves, and then adds the dark intimation of an
Italian companion that they could not be honestly keeping a hotel in
that unfrequented place. It was not just in that place that our delay
had chosen to occur, but it was in the same colonized region, and I am
glad now that I had not remembered the incident from my first reading of
Borrow. It was sufficiently uncomfortable to have some vague association
with the failure of that excellent statesman's plan, blending creepily
with the feeling of desolation from the gathering dark, and I now recall
the distinct relief given by the unexpected appearance of two such
Guardias Civiles as travel with every Spanish train, in the space before
our lonely station.
These admirable friends were part of the system which has made travel as
safe throughout Spain as it is in Connecticut, where indeed I sometimes
wonder that road-agents do not stop my Boston express in the waste
expanse of those certain sand barrens just beyond New Haven. The last
time I came through that desert I could not help thinking how nice it
would be to have two Guardias Civiles in our Pullman car; but of course
at the summit of the Sierra Morena, where our _rapido_ was stalled in
the deepening twilight, it was still nicer to see that soldier pair,
pacing up and down, trim, straight, very gentle and polite-looking, but
firm, with their rifles lying on their shoulders which they kept exactly
together.
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