Otherwise, The Journey Was Without Those Incidents Which Have So Often
Rendered These Pages Thrilling.
Just before we left Ronda a couple,
self-evidently the domestics of a good family, got into our first-class
carriage though they had unquestionably only third-class tickets.
They
had the good family's dog with them, and after an unintelligible appeal
to us and to the young English couple in the other corner, they remained
and banished any misgivings they had by cheerful dialogue. The dog
coiled himself down at my feet and put his nose close to my ankles, so
that without rousing his resentment I could not express in Spanish my
indignation at what I felt to be an outrageous intrusion: servants, we
all are, but in traveling first class one must draw the line at dogs, I
said as much to the English couple, but they silently refused any part
in the demonstration. Presently the conductor came out to the window for
our fares, and he made the Spanish pair observe that they had
third-class tickets and their dog had none. He told them they must get
out, but they noted to him the fact that none of us had objected to
their company, or their dog's, and they all remained, referring
themselves to us for sympathy when the conductor left. After the next
station the same thing happened with little change; the conductor was
perhaps firmer and they rather more yielding in their disobedience. Once
more after a stop the conductor appeared and told them that when the
train halted again, they and their dog must certainly get out. Then
something surprising happened: they really got out, and very amiably;
perhaps it was the place where they had always meant to get out; but it
was a great triumph for the railway company, which owed nothing in the
way of countenance to the young English couple; they had done nothing
but lunch from their basket and bottle. We ourselves arrived safely soon
after nightfall at Algeciras, just in time for dinner in the comfortable
mother-hotel whose pretty daughter had made us so much at home in Ronda.
XIII
ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA
When we walked out on the terrace of our hotel at Algeciras after
breakfast, the first morning, we were greeted by the familiar form of
the Rock of Gibraltar still advertising, as we had seen it three years
before, a well-known American insurance company. It rose beyond five
miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every other day for
three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at
last for New York.
Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not only because of our
Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened
ground, with walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses,
beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all
in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to meet the
stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away
with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it urged day
after day more winningly upon us as the last place where we should feel
the charm of Spain unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern
fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it beyond the
historic clue, for I think the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing
that the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the
thirteen hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured it and
their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and
remain so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these
kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the inimical
English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again, haunted only by "a
deep dream of peace" till the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly
assisted by an American envoy, made it the scene of their famous
conference for settling the Morocco question in. 1906.
I think this is my whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras,
and until I come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself
altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of history.
I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city again from the
Christians, after twenty-five years, and demolished it, for I prefer to
remember it as it has been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series
of red-tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping them. It is
a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with
a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who
live in agreeable little houses, with _patios_ open to the passer, and
with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring, enviously
closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas and
the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in the
afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas
bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he
sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane
trees dropping round them in the still air.
The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next
our hotel, but with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and
faced by summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train
usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not
know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about,
empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they
were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently
attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine
and military leisure of Gibraltar, "The Picnic Restaurant," and "The
Cabin Tea Room," where no doubt there is something to be had beside
sandwiches and tea.
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