Besides This Convention Of The French Cuisine There Is Almost Everywhere
A Convention Of The English Language In Some One Of The Waiters.
You
must not stray far from the beaten path of your immediate wants, but in
this you are safe.
At San Sebastian we had even a wider range with the
English of the little intellectual-looking, pale Spanish waiter, with a
fine Napoleonic head, who came to my help when I began to flounder in
the language which I had read so much and spoken so little or none. He
had been a year in London, he said, and he took us for English, though,
now he came to notice it, he perceived we were Americans because we
spoke "quicklier" than the English. We did not protest; it was the
mildest criticism of our national accent which we were destined to get
from English-speaking Spaniards before they found we were not the
English we did not wish to be taken for. After dinner we asked for a
fire in one of our grates, but the maid declared there was no fuel; and,
though the hostess denied this and promised us a fire the next night,
she forgot it till nine o'clock, and then we would not have it. The cold
abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian, but the storm (which
had hummed and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke during the
first night, and the day followed with several intervals of sunshine,
which bathed us in a glowing-expectation of overtaking the fugitive
summer farther south.
IV
In the mean time we hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red Basque
cap and high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at something above the
legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San Sebastian
unseen. He took us, naturally, to several churches, old and new, with
their Gothic and rococo interiors, which I still find glooming and
glinting among my evermore thickening impressions of like things. We got
from them the sense of that architectural and sculptural richness which
the interior of no Spanish church ever failed measurably to give; but
what their historical associations were I will not offer to say. The
associations of San Sebastian with the past are in all things vague, at
least for me. She was indeed taken from the French by the English under
Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of older, if not unhappier
farther-off days and battles longer ago her history as I know it seems
to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles between the
partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella so few decades since
as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink
the fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong side, when they
need not have fought at all. Why they were Carlists they could perhaps
no more say than I could. The monumental historic fact is that the
Basques have been where they are immeasurably beyond the memories of
other men; what the scope of their own memories is one could perhaps
confidently say only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course, in
the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the
Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules;
the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then
Christianized the province. It is next neighbor to that province of
Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed to conquer the Goths, and from
which Spain was to live and grow again and recover all her losses from
the Moors; but what the share of San Sebastian was in this heroic fate,
again I must leave the Basques to say. They would doubtless say it with
sufficient self-respect, for wherever we came in contact that day with
the Basque nature we could not help imagining in it a sense of racial
merit equaling that of the Welsh themselves, who are indeed another
branch of the same immemorial Iberian stock, if the Basques are
Iberians. Like the Welsh, they have the devout tradition that they never
were conquered, but yielded to circumstances when these became too
strong for them.
Among the ancient Spanish liberties which were restricted by the
consolidating monarchy from age to age, the Basque _fueros,_ or rights,
were the oldest; they lasted quite to our own day; and although it is
known to more ignorant men that these privileges (including immunity
from conscription) have now been abrogated, the custodian of the House
of Provincial Deputies, whom our driver took us to visit, was such a
glowing Basque patriot that he treated them as in full force. His pride
in the seat of the local government spared us no detail of the whole
electric-lighting system, or even the hose-bibs for guarding the edifice
against fire, let alone every picture and photograph on the wall of
every chamber of greater or less dignity, with every notable table and
chair. He certainly earned the peseta I gave him, but he would have done
far more for it if we had suffered him to take us up another flight of
stairs; and he followed us in our descent with bows and adieux that
ought to have left no doubt in our minds of the persistence of the
Basque _fueros._
V
It was to such a powerful embodiment of the local patriotism that our
driver had brought us from another civic palace overlooking the Plaza de
la Constitution, chiefly notable now for having been the old theater of
the bull-fights. The windows in the houses round still bear the numbers
by which they were sold to spectators as boxes; but now the municipality
has built a beautiful brand-new bull-ring in San Sebastian; and I do not
know just why we were required to inspect the interior of the edifice
overlooking this square.
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