It Is Part Of The System That They May Use Those Rifles Upon
Any Evil-Doer Whom They Discover In
A deed of violence, acting at once
as police, court of law, and executioners; and satisfying public
curiosity by pinning
To the offender's coat their official certificate
that he was shot by such and such a civil guard for such and such a
reason, and then notifying the nearest authorities. It is perhaps too
positive, too peremptory, too precise; and the responsibility could not
be intrusted to men who had not satisfied the government of their
fitness by two years' service in the army without arrest for any
offense, or even any question of misbehavior. But these conditions once
satisfied, and their temperament and character approved, they are
intrusted with what seem plenary powers till they are retired for old
age; then their sons may serve after them as Civil Guards with the same
prospect of pensions in the end. I suppose they do not always travel
first class, but once their silent, soldierly presence honored our
compartment between stations; and once an officer of their corps
conversed for long with a fellow-passenger in that courteous ease and
self-respect which is so Spanish between persons of all ranks.
It was not very long after the guards appeared so reassuringly before
the station, when a series of warning bells and whistles sounded, and
our locomotive with an impatient scream began to tug at our train. We
were really off, starting from Santa Elena at the very time when we
ought to have been stopping at Oordova, with a good stretch of four
hours still before us. As our fellow-travelers quitted us at one station
and another we were finally left alone with the kindly-looking old man
who had seemed interested in us from the first, and who now made some
advances in broken English. Presently he told us in Spanish, to account
for the English accent on which we complimented him, that he had two
sons studying some manufacturing business in Manchester, where he had
visited them, and acquired so much of our tongue as we had heard. He was
very proud and glad to speak of his sons, and he valued us for our
English and the strangeness which commends people to one another in
travel. When he got out at a station obscured past identification by its
flaring lamps, he would not suffer me to help him with his hand-baggage;
while he deplored my offered civility, he reassured me by patting my
back at parting. Yet I myself had to endure the kindness which he would
not when we arrived at Cordova, where two young fellows, who had got in
at a suburban station, helped me with our bags and bundles quite as if
they had been two young Americans.
V
Somewhere at a junction our train had been divided and our car, left the
last of what remained, had bumped and threatened to beat itself to
pieces during its remaining run of fifteen miles. This, with our long
retard at Santa Elena, and our opportune defense from the depraved
descendants of the reforming German colonists by the Guardias Civiles,
had given us a day of so much excitement that we were anxious to have it
end tranquilly at midnight in the hotel which we had chosen from, our
Baedeker. I would not have any reader of mine choose it again from my
experience of it, though it was helplessly rather wilfully bad;
certainly the fault was not the hotel's that it seemed as far from the
station as Cordova was from Madrid. It might, under the circumstances,
have, been _a_ merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of
the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the _patio_ which had
formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter
welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the
young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their
location. When we refused them because they were over that loud-echoing
alley, the interpreter made himself still more our friend and called
mandatorially down the speaking-tube that we wished _interiores_ and
would take nothing else, though he must have known that no such rooms
were to be had. He even abetted us in visiting the rooms on the _patio_
and satisfying ourselves that they were all dismantled; when the waiter
brought up the hot soup which was the only hot thing in the house beside
our tempers, he joined with that poor fellow in reconciling us to the
inevitable. They declared that the people whom we heard uninterruptedly
clattering and chattering by in the street below, and the occasional
tempest of wheels and bells and hoofs that clashed up to us would be the
very last to pass through there that night, and they gave such good and
sufficient reasons for their opinion that we yielded as we needs must.
Of course, they were wrong; and perhaps they even knew that they were
wrong; but I think we were the only people in that neighborhood who got
any sleep that night or the next. We slept the sleep of exhaustion, but
I believe those Cordovese preferred waking outdoors to trying to sleep
within. It was apparently their custom to walk and talk the night away
in the streets, not our street alone, but all the other streets of
Cordova; the laughing which I heard may have expressed the popular
despair of getting any sleep. The next day we experimented in listening
from rooms offered us over another street, and then we remained
measurably contented to bear the ills we had. This was after an
exhaustive search for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but there
remained in the Paseo del Gran Capitan one house unvisited which has
ever since grown upon my belief as embracing every comfort and advantage
lacking to our hotel.
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